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Emmy mainstays like “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Better Call Saul” and “Succession” have all ended their runs, and the newer Emmy parvenus, such as the comedies “Abbott Elementary” and “Jury Duty,” while excellent, harken back to an earlier, mass-market era of television that was dominated by sitcoms and hourlong procedurals.

There’s a fatal near-sightedness to the script: It may be possible to puzzle out the characters’ motivations in any given scene, but there’s no guarantee those motives will continue into the next one, and in fact they probably won’t. This lends the show an overall incoherence. There are sharp, funny, and even poignant moments, and it’s certainly beautifully shot, but it’s so impressed with the sheer abundance of its own ideas that it fails to commit to a genuine artistic perspective. Instead, it’s pure provocation. The show wants to shock viewers with its violent imagery and moral ambiguity, but provocation without perspective is just spectacle.

we have And Just Like That, a show whose first failure is its name. While the second season is currently dropping week by week without too much fanfare, the first season garnered almost as much attention as The Idol. Everyone was wondering how HBO could possibly reanimate the glittering albeit “problematic“ New York of Sex and the City in 2021, and they were right to wonder. The overly self-conscious reboot has been ridiculed mercilessly for trying to right the wrongs of the original series with a heavy hand—and at huge narrative costs: jammed-in “diversity” in the style of high-school science textbook covers, story lines that seem constructed solely to demonstrate the characters’ awareness of social issues. A friend recently described it to me as “Sesame Street for adults,” which made me laugh. (Of course I continue to watch.)

To describe the plot of And Just Like That would be impossible, because there are anywhere between six and 10 subplots happening at any given time. This is an almost poetic consequence of the creators trying to say too much—and please too many people—at once. A peek: Carrie’s husband has died (trauma plot), she’s navigating the world of podcasts (age plot) and pronouns (pride plot), grappling with her willingness to say vagina on air (sex plot), developing a friendship with Seema, her girlboss Indian real estate agent (new friend-of-color plot—each original cast member gets one), whose Birkin was just stolen (tough-on-crime plot?). This covers about 1% of it and leaves me with no time to introduce the other eight main characters. Whatever sense of curiosity and spirit propelled the original series is revived here only in rare glimpses. The rest is reheated Twitter discourse.

Both The Idol and And Just Like That are fueled by internet-sourced neuroticism. Each is overly focused on audience reception as it manifests online, only with different aims: one hopes to shock, the other to appease. These goals aren’t surprising—they merely demonstrate the inevitable result of mistaking a marketing strategy for an artistic one.

The race for the streamers to configure themselves as full-service production, distribution, and exhibition outlets has intensified the need for each to articulate a more specific brand identity.

What we are seeing with the streaming wars is not the emergence of a cluster of copy-cat services, with everyone trying to do everything, but the beginnings of a legible strategy to carve up the mediascape and compete for peoples’ waking hours.

Netflix’s penchant for character-centered stories with a three-act structure, as well as high production values (an average of $20–$50-plus million for award contenders), resonates with the “quality” features of the Classical era.

rom early on, Netflix cultivated a liberal public image, which has propelled its investment in social documentary and also driven some of its inclusivity initiatives and collaborations with global auteurs and showrunners of color, such as Alfonso Cuarón, Ava DuVernay, Spike Lee, and Justin Simien.

Quibi as short for “Quick Bites.” In turn, the promos wouldn’t so much emphasize “the what” of the programming as the interest and convenience of being able to watch it while waiting, commuting, or just taking a break. However, this unit of prospective viewing time lies uncomfortably between the ultra-brief TikTok video and the half-hour sitcom.

Peacock’s central obstacle moving forward will be convincing would-be subscribers that the things they loved about linear broadcast and cable TV are worth the investment.

One of the most intriguing and revealing of metaphors, however, isn’t so much related to war as celestial coexistence of streamer-planets within the “universe.” Certainly, the term resonates with key franchises, such as the “Marvel Cinematic Universe,” and the bevvy of intricate stories that such an expansive environment makes possible. This language stakes a claim for the totality of media — that there are no other kinds of moving images beyond what exists on, or what can be imagined for, these select platforms.

Again, this is just another example of the U.S.’ harmful obsession with megamergers, consolidation, purposeless (outside of stock fluffing) deal making, and growth for growth’s sake. All of these deals make perfect sense to the executives, lawyers, and accounting magicians exploiting them for tax breaks and various financial benefits, but that doesn’t make this whole saga any less preposterously pointless.