When I was in college, I went to see a seven-hour black-and-white Hungarian art house film, as one does. The movie, Satantango, included a 45-minute single-shot scene of a morbidly obese doctor in a rural village injecting himself with opium and passing out. Some of the movie was beautiful, and some of it was deadly boring. But I remember the mood in the theater, where people brought pillows, as giddy. We weren't necessarily there for the movie itself, but the experience of seeing something that so aggressively broke the commercial norms of the genre. This wasn't a movie in any traditional sense. It was something else.
>The half-hour sitcom? The hour-long drama? These are conventions that came into existence for reasons that don't matter anymore.
The same thing is about to happen with television. Streaming video as offered by Netflix and Amazon Instant Video are not constrained by any of the commercial or technical boundaries of traditional broadcast television or cable. There aren't schedules. There aren't channels. The only limitations are how much bandwidth their data centers and the internet itself can support. The half-hour sitcom? The hour-long drama? These are conventions that came into existence for reasons that don't matter anymore. Soon, the conventions themselves won't matter anymore, either. Welcome to the real new golden age of television -- television without limits.
"I don’t know how much longer the idea of a 'season' will be something that we feel like we need to adhere to in television. Even the idea of an episode," House of Cards creator Beau Willamon told The Atlantic.
In some ways, Willamon's political drama on Netflix is the flagship of this new way of thinking about TV, a show created entirely outside the confines of broadcast and cable that became a must-watch part of the national conversation. Yet even House of Cards sticks to many of the standard conventions of TV drama: 13 episodes per season, each 50 minutes long. They even have spots for commercial breaks, Willamon says, for when the episodes are re-broadcast on regular TV in international markets.
But he's eager to push against those limits. "I’ve toyed with the idea for a show that doesn’t have episodes at all," Willamon says. "That would simply be one eight-hour stream for a season, and the viewer decides when they want to pause, if at all."
It's a little ironic that this change is coming now, when, in the wake of The Sopranos, television has become so good. Just as reality TV began to take over the broadcast networks in the mid-1990s, HBO arrived to say a different way was possible. Quality could be a growth model. Since then, sleepy cable backwaters such as FX and AMC have become powerhouses of original programming by following the model HBO pioneered with The Sopranos. Shows like The Shield, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad may not have generated ratings as high as the latest incarnation of those generic CBS crime dramas. But they became deeply relevant parts of the conversation -- and, in some ways, you might even call then important.
>Bruce Springsteen back in the early 1990s sang, "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)." Today, it's more like 600.
The reason for the embarrassment of riches on television today is pretty easy to grasp, and not that different from what will make the next, even more powerful iteration of TV possible. Cable just keeps adding more channels. Bruce Springsteen back in the early 1990s sang, "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)." Today, it's more like 600. To distinguish themselves in this void, a few courageous executives said: "Let's set ourselves apart by making shows that are, you know, good." As it turns out, the entertainment industry has plenty of people that, with the right financial support and creative freedom, can make awesome stuff year after year. Now imagine when the number of channels becomes infinite.
A useful comparison to consider is radio since the birth of the podcast. Unlike TV, the barrier to entry for a podcast is pretty much the price of a digital audio recorder and an internet connection. As a result, the podcast as a genre unto itself has taken off much faster. Without the time constraints imposed by broadcasting over an individual frequency, podcasters have invented a kind of radio without limits. They broadcast whatever they want for as long as they want, and listeners can hear it whenever they want. The freeing effects of podcasting have created genuine stars of the genre, such as Marc Maron, and full-on production companies, like the Earwolf alt-comedy empire.
But the success of podcasting isn't just about the ability to post digital audio online. It's about the centralized platform for distribution iTunes provides to attract a large audience and surface quality content. In the same way, the expanded future of television depends on more than the technology to distribute video online.
>Netflix has also shown a willingness to put significant money behind programming as original as anything on traditional television.
It takes a platform like Netflix to consolidate an audience and underwrite the production of new forms and approaches. Netflix has already displayed a desire to break with convention in releasing all episodes of a "season" at once. With shows like the latest season of Arrested Development and House of Cards, it has also shown a willingness to put significant money behind programming as original as anything on traditional television.
But how much convention-busting creativity can Netflix afford to get behind? When technology makes previously existing limitations moot, the only limit on what you can do becomes money. And for now, that appears to be a serious constraint. House of Cards reportedly had a budget of $100 million -- or nearly all of Netflix's profits for 2013. One more show like that would leave Netflix in the red.
At the same time, a bigger investment by Netflix could mean a bigger reward, and experimenting with something new could make that reward even bigger. Netflix's impressive subscriber growth last year followed on its biggest push to date into original content. If that content deserves most of the credit for that increase in interest, then Netflix has tapped into a potentially virtuous cycle that broadcast television and even non-premium cable can't quite match. As long as Netflix keeps making shows that attract more subscribers, it has more cash flow to make more. And if its best shows are any indication, we all might be lucky enough that the stuff subscribers want to watch is actually what's good.
It's even possible to imagine a pay-as-you-go model, in keeping with Willamon's vision of a few hours released here and there throughout the year. In a variation on crowdsourcing, maybe Netflix could set subscription goals: Add so many new signups, and new episodes get produced. If something like that comes to pass, it would be seen as innovation. But it would also be returning to a business model that precedes television altogether. The serial was once a standby of movies, and of novels before that. After all, what are Dickens' novels but collections of episodes that, when they first came out, were released serially?
>We can see if episodes or seasons are conventions that viewers still care about.
The serial saw a seeming resurgence not that long ago with the popularity of Lost, a rare creative hit for broadcast TV. But picture Lost constrained only by the interest of viewers willing to pay more for more shows. Maybe viewers will resist changes to the formulas that have become so familiar that they're no longer questioned. But the brilliant opportunity presented by television not limited by time or channel is that now technology has served up the chance to ask the question.
If Netflix or someone with similar resources is willing to take the risk, we can see if episodes or seasons are conventions that viewers still care about. And because we can all so easily vote with our dollars, the makers of TV will know quickly what's working and what isn't. In a way, platforms like Netflix make possible the same kind of iteration in TV that has driven computing tech forward so quickly in the internet age. If TV changes as much as the web has in the past decade, the stuff today's iPad-addled kids watch by the time they're adults might look nothing like what we call television at all.
