TV's gerontocracy vs. streaming's eternal youth movement

I had a whole thing planned about how network TV and streaming have very different approaches to the problem of keeping viewers around. There were going to be charts and analysis and all kinds of cool stuff.

And then Sterling K. Brown just put it on Instagram.

Brown, who has seen most sides of the TV business as an actor — in This Is Us, The People v. O.J. Simpson and now Paradise on Hulu — said this:

There are some nuances — most streamers sell ads now too, and the time is coming where they might make more money off subscribers who buy a cheaper plan with ads — but in terms of how the business has worked in the decade and change of the streaming era, Brown is pretty much right.

The thing I’m most interested in, though, is how the network model of longer seasons that happen every year has both helped keep streaming services afloat, while at the same time the explosion in streaming has made broadcast networks much more likely to keep running out a set of very long-running shows each season instead of a more regular refresh.

So let’s look at that data — there will in fact be tables! You can’t stop me, Emmy-winning actor Sterling K. Brown!

From 2012-22, the broadcast networks (including The CW) canceled or otherwise ended (allowing for pre-planned series finales) 37 percent of their scripted shows each year — about 38 of 102 shows across all five networks. In the past few years, however, those numbers have fallen off substantially — driven mostly by the fact that there aren’t as many scripted series as there used to be. Since 2022-23 (and not including The CW, which basically stopped its homegrown scripted series production then), ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC have aired an average of just 56.5 scripted shows a year.

At the same time, networks have cut back development significantly, shrinking the pool of potential replacements for underperforming shows. The canceled/ended show rate has fallen to a bit under 29 percent in the past three years.

Put together, those trends leave networks little choice to but leave their lineups mostly intact year to year. It also explains why there are so many network shows that have been on the air for a really long time.

That’s not an entirely new phenomenon: I wrote about it in The Hollywood Reporter in 2018, when there were 18 shows that had been on the air for at least 10 years. There are now … 17 decade-plus shows. Of those, 11 were already at least 10 years old when I did that 2018 story. About a third of the U.S. population has never known a world without Mariska Hargitay playing Olivia Benson on Law & Order: SVU.

Put another way, there have been eight network or comedies and dramas that have lasted 20 or more seasons in American TV history. Seven of them — all but Gunsmoke — are airing now.

Diving even deeper into the data:

When I wrote that 2018 THR story, the average network show (not including sports and news programming) had been on the air for a little under five years. I’m using “years” here instead of “seasons” so I can group scripted and unscripted shows together: Survivor, The Voice and some other reality shows have often aired two separate installments within the larger, nine-month TV season, so to equalize those numbers with dramas and comedies, I count the number of years they’ve been on.

In the 2025-26 season, the average network show has been running for seven years — a pretty sizable increase over a not very long time, which correlates to lower cancellation rates. Here’s how the average lifespan breaks down by network.

To (finally) circle back to Sterling K. Brown’s point above, here’s what the average lifespan of current and recently ended shows on some of the biggest streaming services look like. I limited myself to just U.S.-based, original scripted shows here — if I tried to count every reality or doc series and import, I wouldn’t get this out until Tuesday.

*The fifth seasons of The Boys and Hacks (the final ones for both) premiere next week.

It is exceedingly rare for a streaming show — or even one on a premium cable channel like HBO or (formerly) Showtime — to run for more than five seasons. There are a few outliers, like Virgin River (a relatively inexpensive small-town drama that does quite well for Netflix) and Slow Horses, which has been renewed through a seventh season but only makes six episodes for each run. Only Murders and For All Mankind have also been renewed for sixth seasons; it’ll be the last one for FOM.

What streaming services also have, though, is a huge number of licensed shows from traditional TV. The new and original shows might drive people to sign up, but the libraries keep them there.

Take a look at the 10 most streamed shows in the U.S. in 2025, according to Nielsen:

All but Stranger Things, which was an absolute phenomenon in its final season, are shows that originated somewhere else and have a lot of episodes. At any given time, there might not be more than, say, 50,000 people watching a single episode of Grey’s Anatomy on Netflix or Hulu. But there are more than 450 of them to choose from, so all those small audiences add up to a huge amount of time spent over a year.

Aside from Netflix, all the other streaming services on that list are owned by the companies that either produced or aired (sometimes both) the shows. The Big Bang Theory aired on CBS but was made by Warner Bros. TV, which is a corporate sibling of HBO Max. Bob’s Burgers and Family Guy are produced by 20th Television Animation, which is part of Disney — as is Hulu. So the parent companies get a benefit at both ends of the pipeline. Fox pays Disney for new episodes of Family Guy and Bob’s Burgers, and Disney then gets subscriber retention on Hulu from subscribers sitting down to binge a few episodes on a random Thursday.

A few shows from the earlier days of streaming originals, including Orange Is the New Black, Grace and Frankie and Big Mouth, also went for more than six seasons (and sometimes had seasons of more than 10 episodes). But those days seem pretty much gone, unless — wait for it — the network-like model of The Pitt starts to really take hold more.

That show produces 15 episodes a season, and HBO Max has already renewed it for a third season. It’s also the biggest show HBO Max (as opposed to HBO the cable network) has ever released, so even if it doesn’t run for a decade, it’s not hard to see at least a five- or six-season run and therefore 75 or 90 episodes.

HBO Max is also developing a family drama and a cop show with the idea of producing them in a similar way to The Pitt: a nearly broadcast-length season, shot mostly on standing sets, in familiar genres (the trick here, obviously, is to do it as well as The Pitt does). Other streamers aren’t necessarily looking to do that specific thing, but everyone seems to have come (back) around to the idea that releasing shows on a consistent schedule is a good idea. (It’s also good for the people who do the work of making those shows; short seasons with long delays has put a big strain on crew members, working actors and writers who haven’t yet advanced to the creator/showrunner level.)

Streaming has pretty well eclipsed traditional TV in terms of the way people want to watch. It’s a better user experience to watch on your own time, no question. But that’s a technology question more than a programming one. It feels like the companies behind all this are realizing that the way TV is made — a model that worked for, oh, 60 or 70 years — doesn’t need to be completely thrown out just for the sake of change.

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