Variety has an actually non-excruciating article, about the results of the WGA Strike:

The Writers Guild of America called a strike one year ago today, declaring that the streaming boom had created an existential crisis for writers.

The WGA got most of what it wanted from the strike, though it took almost five months for the studios and streamers to come around. But as the boom has gone bust, writers now face a different kind of crisis.

For most, it’s harder to find work.

“WGA Strike: One Year Later, Writers Face a Different Sort of Crisis“, Gene Maddaus, Variety.com

Obviously, a strike is going to create a production crisis. That’s the whole point of a strike. But the production slowdown was already going on before the strike hit. Measuring by quarterly shoot days (The internet tells me that shoot days are days of principal photography for production), there was a production decline in film and television starting sometime around 2021-2022.

And the earliest, steepest decline? TV Drama. From well above 1,400 QSD in Q2 2021, to 1,155 in Q4 2022, to 762 in Q1 2023. And that’s before the strike hit. They’ve recovered their pre-strike numbers since, but that’s still only half of the peak. Something more structural is underfoot.

The aesthete in me would like to chalk it up to “prestige drama fatigue”, which is something that an AI will automatically write a script for because apparently that’s what search engines do. The New Yorker analogizes it to the Decline of New Hollywood, because The New Yorker hasn’t had an original thought since the 80’s. For myself, I got bored with the whole exercise sometime around the 4th season of Boardwalk Empire. It got to the part where I started picking out the tropes, and the whole point of “Prestige Drama” was that anything could happen, it wasn’t beholden to the status quo ante bellum like a sitcom was.

And yet, certain characters have to have Plot Armor, if the show is to continue. Breaking Bad can’t go on once Walter White becomes dead. See also, Don Draper, Tony Soprano, etc., etc. So all threats have real limits, until the story has worked itself out.

So if you pay attention well enough, you start seeing the limits. And where the limits exist, they create rules, they create tropes. And once that occurs, you can only do it so many times.

But that’s me. There are probably other reasons: the shrinking attention span of younger generations, for one. In any case, I suspect a shifting TV market going forward. It’s an easy prediction to make, but I’ll make it anyway. This decade never goes where it’s expected.