But what if it had worked?

What if the brief streaming gold rush hadn't been brief? What if it had stabilised instead of stalled?

The recent streaming era was genuinely a spending boom. That was real.

But it wasn't necessarily a show/film/content volume boom. Or maybe even a sustainable employment boom.

What it brought us was higher budgets and prestige production values. TV became so polished the line between it and film almost disappeared. We have some incredible shows as a result. Anyone remember that show Renegade from the '90s? Can you imagine that show standing up in the modern streaming era?

So yeah, a lot of good stuff but it did change a few things along the way.

Episode orders plummeted. Shows used to run 22-25 episodes a season once a year regular as clockwork for seven years or more. Now? 6-8 episodes once every two to three years and that's if you get past season 1. And that's a big IF. We seem to have far fewer long term shows and franchises than we used to.

We got production values but lost volume.

Essentially, more money got concentrated into less output.

And that resulted in money going into the stars and above the line talent, into cinematic visuals and VFX, global shoots and probably (I'm guessing, you tell me) some pretty healthy executive paychecks.

Employment rose, but perhaps less than the spending implied. And it often came with less continuity. Fewer 22+ episode seasons. More gaps. Smaller rooms. Shorter contracts.

Renegade may not have looked as pretty as some of our modern shows but it ran for 5 seasons, each season having 22 episodes, each and every year. Five years dependable employment for a whole lot of people. And maybe it was a good show, I don't even know. It lasted five years so someone was watching it. And you know what? I think maybe a lot of viewers were probably happier than the people getting 8 episodes of an admittedly incredible prestige show, burning through them over a weekend, and having to wait until after the apocalypse to get the next episodes, if they come at all.

So I wonder, what if it had worked? It really did expand the industry. But maybe in a less durable state. And the reason I want us to consider that is that there is almost a grieving process happening now, I feel, across the industry and there are certain things we now have to make our peace with.

Only then can we really look forward and ask, what's next?

So... what's next?