The Times' Peak Snobbery: Why ‘Mid TV’ Is Actually What Viewers Want
I am disappointed but not at all surprised by the NYT’s “The Daily” Podcast this week, which featured their TV editor James Poniewozik. He has been pushing a term he invented “mid TV” to describe the sorts of shows that are reminiscent of “peak TV” hits but just not as good. (His example was Masters of the Air as a substitute for Band of Brothers.)
Poniewozik incorrectly blames this on greediness by the streaming services, whose only concern is in giving “The Algorithm” shows that seem like they could be good in order to keep people watching and subscribing. His theory is that it is less money and less hassle to make these sorts of shows, series he considers inferior.
But as we have been telling you all along, this is not the case. The reason the streaming services produce these types of shows has little to do with money-saving ways to manipulate “The Algorithm” and everything to do with popular tastes.
A New York Times critic dismissing popular tastes with a pithy put-down? Quelle surprise!
As we (and others) have noted many times, shows like Succession may be the darlings of New York Times critics and the rest of the so-called chattering classes (the Times having run no less than five stories about Succession above the fold on their home page the day of the series finale) but they are not all that popular with the TV viewing population writ large.
To wit, Succession averaged around two million viewers per episode its final season, while CBS’s hit Fire Country, which did not get a single New York Times article, praiseworthy or otherwise, averaged a little over five million.
As Exhibit B, there are the two infamous anonymous quotes that have been floating around the internet these past few years. The one about Netflix only making “snobby shows that no one watches” and the other about writers only wanting to work on Barry, and “you know who watches Barry? Nobody!!”
Exhibit C are Netflix’s self-reported ratings from earlier this year, where two series Poniewozik would definitely call “mid” at best—Ginny & Georgia and The Night Agent—lead the ratings pack.
The takeaways aren’t complicated:
The tastes and preferences of New York Times critics are those of a small-but-quite-influential cadre of educated aesthetes that in no way reflect the tastes of the mainstream, who tend to regard what they find “superb and nuanced” to be “confusing and boring.”
The streaming services need to cater to the masses because they are who is going to give them those massive subscriber numbers they need to stay in business.
The other takeaway is that this is not without precedent. The first golden age of TV took place in the 1950s when most of the people who owned TV sets were educated and affluent. When The Masses started to own TV sets in the early 1960s, we got CBS’s “Rural Strategy”—sitcoms like The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres and Petticoat Junction.
The second golden age also saw a cohort of educated affluent more urban viewers on streaming and premium cable in the 00s and 10s, which gave us The Sopranos and Succession. But as streaming went mass audience, the types of shows being produced needed to change too, lest streamers be stuck with “snobby shows nobody watches.”
The danger of critics hating on television is that the medium loses the sort of cachet that convinces people to initially pay for—and keep—multiple subscriptions. Though I have little hope that Poniewozik and his squad will recognize that the tastes of the masses are valid too, just different.
Easier to blame it on the evil network executives, I guess. A far more palatable villain for the Times’s audience.
