The Death of Peak TV: A Special Report

After the dramatic dropoff in scripted series output in 2023, one thing is clear: Peak TV, after a decade-long run, is dead. But what killed it?

Was it last year’s guild strikes, which froze content pipelines as scripted TV production was halted for months? Maybe it was Warner Bros. Discovery, which pioneered a ruthless content-axing strategy now being imitated across the industry? Can the demise be traced back to Netflix’s first quarterly subscriber loss in 2022, which sparked the great streaming stock crash that kicked off a new era of austerity in entertainment?

Or was the real culprit peak TV itself, which produced an unsustainable glut of content that far exceeded consumers’ demand for new titles to watch?

Spoiler alert for the murder mystery at the center of Variety Intelligence Platform’s latest special report: It was all of the above.

While the strikes certainly hammered the nails into peak TV’s proverbial coffin, a complex web of dynamics was at work behind the demise. With “The Death of Peak TV,” VIP+ has partnered with entertainment data company Luminate for an autopsy on this unprecedented prolific era for television.

One key takeaway becomes readily apparent when looking at the data: TV production was already dipping before the strikes began. The number of series shoot days in Los Angeles were down year-over-year in the last three quarters of 2022, with pilot filming diminished throughout the year, according to production tracker FilmLA.

Furthermore, the peak TV decline began years previously for linear networks. By 2023, per Luminate’s count, the number of original series on cable had already plummeted 40% from its all-time high a decade ago.

What truly sealed the death of peak TV last year, then, was the first-ever drop in series released by U.S.-based SVOD platforms, as even COVID-plagued 2020 saw an uptick from the previous year. Streamers may not reach peak levels of output again for some time, with the legacy media players continuing to manage costs more aggressively and push their direct-to-consumer units toward profitability.

With the end of the peak TV era actively reshaping the industry, VIP+ and Luminate’s post-mortem not only looks back on that era but looks ahead to the next (TV’s Ozempic era, perhaps?), as this ever-evolving medium transforms once again for the future.

Also in this report…