[nottathrowaway3]

The article talks about how great the HBO gritty depressing character dramas like The Wire, The Last of Us, etc., were. That kind of content was interesting and fresh in the 90s and 00s.

Personally though, whose life is so great today that they need to escape by watching something depressing? Most people I know (and knew) were generally feeling beat down, afraid for the future, tired of not being able to say what they feel, etc.

The HBO content thesis of "just make it more fucked up" is not going to sell as well as it did.

I liked GOT because it was fun escapism into a simpler world, with dragons and wars instead of [insert tiresome/pretentious thing about Western society]. (Also because it was written in the 90s.) If they want to recapture their lost market they should try producing more optimistic/escapist programming. Adapt something that people want to watch. I'd pay for it if there was something like GOT.

Doubt that it will happen in the current cultural/political climate though.

[barkerja]

Isn’t The Last of Us currently one of the most popular shows on television right now? Its live viewership has continued to grow with each episode.

Episode 1: 0.588 million

Episode 7: 1.083 million

For comparison, House of the Dragon ended the season with 1.855 million.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/03/03/the-last-o...

The ratings are also worth looking at: https://www.ratingraph.com/tv-shows/the-last-of-us-ratings-1...

So I don’t think your assessment necessarily holds water.

[majormajor]

Live viewership for everything is way down ("spread out" is probably much more accurate, there's just more options).

The Sopranos started with 2+M 18-49 viewers per episode in season 1 and was doing 4+M by its second season, and then went up to 6-7 for a few. http://www.ratingsryan.com/2020/12/the-sopranos-hbo-ratings-...

Looks like their newer shows do a lot of cumulative views over time with streaming, but a lot less live (that's that 1M/ep number you linked, it seems like).

5+M live viewers weekly 20-25 years ago was a LOT for a premium-premium-cable network. Friends was in the 20Ms, broadcast, for comparison.

But in the streaming model era, the cumulative viewership is probably more important to the total revenue and sustainability, with one big caveat: if people sign up one or two months at a time to binge (like I do!) you're spending a LOT to make a show to get just 20 bucks or so.

[pcthrowaway]

Wait, so you're comparing live viewership today with live viewership when the Sopranos airs? Unless live viewership includes people who watch the episode within 2 weeks of airing, I don't see how this makes sense.

People watched the shows live 20 years ago because they usually didn't have another option. If they missed an episode, and weren't lucky enough to have a friend that taped it, it frequently meant they were just going to have to have a friend summarize it for them while they waited for the next one.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I suspect that fiction tends to be opposite of reality.

In the 1950s and 1960s, even though the economy was doing great, there was a lot of darkness in the world. There was the cold war, which was terrifying (you kids think it’s bad now?), we still had World War 2, Korea, and even World War 1 veterans around. We were still coming to grips with The Holocaust, and counterculture was just starting up with The Beats (not the Liverpool moptops). We had mass starvation, race riots, and a lot of fear.

Fiction, in those days, was pretty fluffy and optimistic.

The last couple of decades, before the current one, had seen a lot less of that kind of darkness, and escapism became fairly dark. Dystopian fantasy became en vogue, etc.

Things are getting dark again. I suspect fiction may lighten up.

We’ll see…