No one born after October 1998 has ever known a world without Olivia Benson. Photo by Virginia Sherwood/NBC
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:
Cable and streamers don’t make money on more episodes, but network does. Network is all about advertisers. The more shows you have, the more ads you can run, the more money you make. Premium cable and streamers make their money off subscribers. So it’s not about how many shows do you have. It’s about how many new shows do you have that make people wanna subscribe to your platform. So if they did more episodes, they don’t [necessarily] get new subscribers. But if they come with something that’s new and shiny that makes people say “ooooo I wanna see that,” then they’re building their subscriber base. The only thing that could change it is if fans actually stop subscribing and mandate that these platforms make longer seasons, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen.
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:
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