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Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto. His latest novel, Dante’s Indiana, has yet to become a television series.

Whether on campus or at the dog park or at a dinner party, after a little pandemic chit-chat, the topic inevitably turns to television. The conversation doesn’t feel as tired or tiresome as it can with the pandemic, but it’s getting there. The question is no longer, did you see X last night? Instead, it’s, have you seen X or Y or Z?

And the answer is, reliably, no, I haven’t seen the new version of Interview with the Vampire, or the latest Star Wars origins story, Andor, or the just-dropped third season of Ramy, but, I counter, have you seen The Bear (amazing), or We Are Lady Parts (amazing), or the latest season of Atlanta (amazingly uneven)? And the answer is, again, reliably, no.

At best, if we do find a show in common – probably Stranger Things – the conversation turns to begging and threats: Please don’t say anything! I’m two seasons behind! Don’t you ruin it for me! And so, instead of the modest, assured, long-taken-for-granted pleasure of talking about a television show with someone else – comparing favourite and hated characters, trading theories and predictions of what’s going to happen next – we share what I suspect is an increasingly widespread lament: There’s just too much great television to watch these days.

Indeed, Rolling Stone’s recently updated list of the top 100 television shows of all time, with The Sopranos ranked first, as it was in the original 2016 list, was exhausting just to read, never mind marking down all the recent, no doubt remarkable series I can’t imagine ever having enough time to watch. Welcome to the Age of Exhausting Television.

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This fall represents a striking moment of unprecedented quantity and quality in television offerings: Approximately 350 scripted and unscripted series were broadcast in 2002, compared to nearly 3,000 in 2021 based on year-over-year findings from market research firm Statista, with far more than proportionate increases in the amounts of money involved in producing the content. This reflects an overwrought, industry-wide competition for audience that has, ironically, led to big-spending, commercial-free Netflix trimming back production budgets and planning the release of an ad-supported, cheaper service to increase faltering subscriptions and revenues.

Meanwhile, HBO has reportedly spent close to US$20-million an episode of the first season of House of the Dragon, which ends Sunday, while Amazon’s investment in the recently concluded first season of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is estimated to reach half a billion dollars (and yet they couldn’t come up with a less repetitive title, somehow). The results are undeniably impressive, attested to by dazzling, lengthy opening credits that rival their equivalent in James Bond movies, and more substantively by generally lavish production values, the depth and complexity of scripts, the quality of the acting, and the gravitas-conferring involvement of prominent actors otherwise best known for their film work.

Indeed, as scholars such as Alexander Beecroft have observed, in how it does what it does, contemporary television is less an alternative or rival to written modes of storytelling than a peer, a descendent, and, I add, increasingly a successor: Television now engages a great many of us in a way that literary novels used to, by making extended entertainment out of imaginative, story-based variations on the dramas of human difficulty.

In so doing, television now has, and confers on its viewers, a sense of prestige and relevance unprecedented for this medium. By letting others know you watch Mare of Easttown, or The Handmaid’s Tale, or The Underground Railroad, or Severance, you signal that you take The Situation We’re In Right Now Seriously, the way reading certain novels at certain times would have done so, in the past. But while I’ve always been happily surprised to discover someone reading the same novel that I’m reading, I’m increasingly shocked to come across someone watching the same television series that I’m watching.

This is especially felt in fall 2022; beyond debuting two of the most expensively made television shows in history – a fact that has generated more attention than either actual series has, aside from inevitable debates about the demographic politics of casting choices – this year also marks the 50th anniversary of the debut of M*A*S*H. This is a show whose confident and varied treatment of Vietnam-era controversial subjects (although set during the Korean War), in retrospect, might have inaugurated the era of Great Television simply by being, comparatively speaking in its time, intelligent and artful and well-made. Eleven seasons later, in 1983, an estimated 106 million Americans watched the series finale, “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” which remained a viewership record until Super Bowl XLIV in 2010, while still holding the record for a scripted show.

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You probably recall the excitement associated with season or series finales, based as much on the quality of the show as on a shared viewing experience that no current television show, however well done, can sustain, no matter how far TV has otherwise come in terms of sophistication and range. Granted, online platforms provide access to far greater numbers of fellow viewers to interact with, in theory, but the hyper-assortative nature of algorithm-driven online experience means you’re encouraged and validated for finding ever-more specific subject areas and simpatico communities. This makes possible intensely felt interactions with people who track very well against your particular interests in a show and its concerns, but at the expense of a wider, more graduated shared experience, in an age where having an uncomplicated shared experience with people outside your home – who might disagree with you about religion, politics or mask-wearing – would be welcome.

Beyond the serious attention it has long received in review culture and academic settings, television has enjoyed an unrivalled capacity to relieve ordinary people from the daily demands of work and study, and in turn serve as a dependable source for shared conversations. To be sure, all of that is still possible, but far more difficult. Television has become unmanageably expansive in its offerings, increasingly exempt from conventional scheduling and overdetermined by algorithm-driven preferences, leading to increasingly self-selective choices of what we watch and whom we talk to about it.

I know exactly one person who will be watching the season finale of House of the Dragon this weekend at the same time that I am. We’ll trade sarcastic texts about the show during and after its run because we’re in agreement that it has less in common with its exceptional predecessor, Game of Thrones, than with our respective ethnic gatherings – in my case, a group of Sri Lankans with similar-sounding names and long hair and convoluted connections sitting in dark rooms, glaring at each other, nursing multigenerational grudges for hours on end. Do you know what I mean? Or wait, sorry, have you not seen it yet? What are you watching, instead? Actually, it doesn’t matter. I probably haven’t seen it, and never will. Want to talk about the pandemic instead?

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