5 Reasons why TV shows suck now-a-days

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You hit it solid, PH, especially 2, 3, 4.

Stout work.

If you haven't, try watching some British TV shows. I like them because most of the characters are not some Hollywood Barbie or Ken look-a-like. They look like the could be your neighbor. I can't watch most of what Hollywood puts out these days. Much better writing in British shows, in my opinion. Intelligent is the word I'd use to describe their shows.

You certainly have some good points. I would also add that shows have way too much going on from the very first episode and that every character apparently needs some traumatic past experience or over-the-top drama going on in their lives.

Watch movies instead...

Jack Elam would never get any work today.

Agree with number 3...the more characters you have...the less character development.

There’s a huge reason for the decline in broadcast TV scripted narrative shows that I’m surprised no one has mentioned, though a couple, e. g., Stratego, have brushed up against it: the script itself! The writers have no idea how to construct a coherent narrative, which requires skill, concentration and discipline, so we get disjointed narratives, gussied up with a plethora of shallow, iconic (in the worst sense of the word), excessive reliance on CGI, and—my least favorite—the PLOT TWIST. Allied with the lazy writing is the lazy audience, which is growing. They have an attention span measured in nanoseconds. They’re screwing around on their tablets and phones—so why give more than a half-show to an audience that’s only half-watching. On a topic in Westworld, someone recently asked about the fate of a character. The final scene of the episode clearly showed what happened to her! Here on MC, I
see, based on stupid questions, that more people than ever aren’t paying attention to what they watch. When we were discussing the series Big Little Lies here on MC, one poster was very disappointed that the finale did not have what s/he thought was the de rigeur TWIST. NEITHER DOES THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOF! Great narrative does not need twists. This has been a long screed to say that the modern TV audience has no idea of what constitutes quality. They would be stunned by an episode of Have Gun, Will Travel, and would sneer at its black-and-white technology. Some others would be impressed by its literacy, and how much story was packed into that half-hour. The modern TV writer is, at best, cynical, at worst, a hack, and, in both cases, lazy.

There is one other factor in the steady erosion of the TV scripted narrative form: time. The time allotted to the editorial content of today’s “one hour” TV show is 42 minutes. Sixty years ago, it was 55 minutes. To be fair, more time is not always going to make for a better story, especially not if it is written by a hack. Several episodes of Daredevil that I’ve seen on Netflix are stuffed with boring filler, as Netflix demands they all run for an hour. On the other hand, HBO is smart enough to let its writers decide how much time it takes to tell their story. That said, the more time with which a capable writer has to work, the better able s/he is to develop characters, and subtlety and nuance in narrative. Just not much time for, you know, commercials.