What we have now is a profusion of well-cast, sleekly produced competence. We have tasteful remakes of familiar titles. We have the evidence of healthy budgets spent on impressive locations. We have good-enough new shows that resemble great old ones.

Put these two forces together — a rising level of talent and production competence on the one hand, the pressure to deliver versions of something viewers already like on the other hand — and what do you get? You get a whole lot of Mid.

MID IS NOT the mediocre TV of the past. It’s more upscale. It is the aesthetic equivalent of an Airbnb “modern farmhouse” renovation, or the identical hipster cafe found in medium-sized cities all over the planet. It’s nice! The furniture is tasteful, they’re playing Khruangbin on the speakers, the shade-grown coffee is an improvement on the steaming mug of motor oil you’d have settled for a few decades ago.

Mid is fine, though. It’s good enough.

Mid TV, on the other hand, almost can’t be bad for some of the same reasons that keep it from being great. It’s often an echo of the last generation of breakthrough TV (so the highs and lows of “Game of Thrones” are succeeded by the faithful adequacy of “House of the Dragon”).

As more people drop cable TV for streaming, their incentives change. With cable you bought a package of channels, many of which you would never watch, but any of which you might.

So where HBO used to boast that it was “not TV,” modern streamers send the message, “We’ll give you a whole lot of TV.” It can seem like their chief goal is less to produce standout shows than to produce a lot of good-looking thumbnails.

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.

both Netflix and Shein realised that you can make far more SKUs if you’re not constrained by physical inventory - the time slots on linear TV and the store rooms of physical retail.

If you don’t need thousands of physical stores, then you can turn over the product range much faster and reach new customers much more quickly - and so Shein is now bigger than H&M and on track to pass Inditex.

Of course, the fundamental TV question is ‘what’s your budget?’ There’s a circular relationship: a given budget means a given quality and quantity of content, which, combined with your CAC, means a given audience, which means a given level of revenue and a given budget. There is no network effect in TV, and going to Hollywood with the world’s best software and $5 will get you a latte.

YouTube doesn’t buy LA stuff from LA people - it runs a network, and the questions are Silicon Valley questions. YouTube, in both the network and the kinds of content, is a much bigger change to ‘TV’ than Netflix. It’s ‘video’, but it’s also ‘time spent’ and it competes with Netflix and TV but also with Instagram and TikTok (it does puzzle me that people focus on competition between Instagram and TikTok when the form overlaps at least as much with YouTube). And YouTube doesn’t really buy shows or buy users - it pays a revenue share.

Netflix can indeed make TV shows as well as any legacy TV company, but did Disney make software that’s as good as Netflix? It didn’t have to. It just had to make software that’s good enough, because ‘software’ questions are not the point of leverage. But I don’t see any media companies competing with YouTube or TikTok, where software is the point of leverage - at least, not recently.