For two decades, the television industry convinced us that peak TV was a form of high culture. The correction is now underway, and it turns out that peak TV was something rarer and stranger: a convergence of circumstances that will not repeat.
The prestige TV era produced some of the greatest drama in the medium's history. Then the economics that made it possible collapsed, and we're only beginning to understand what we've lost.
For two centuries, Western museums presented themselves as stewards of humanity's heritage. The reckoning now underway reveals how selective that humanity always was.
The studios didn't kill the mid-budget film by accident. They killed it on purpose — and the consequences for American cinema are now visible everywhere.