Peak TV is over as Netflix becomes ‘unwatchable,’ Peter Biskind says

Peter Biskind, a long-time entertainment journalist and cultural critic, chronicled in previous bestsellers Hollywood’s groundbreaking New Wave of the 1970s (in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls) and the indie cinema movement of the 1990s (in Down and Dirty Pictures). Now he’s back with Pandora’s Box, a sweeping narrative that begins with HBO’s disruption of broadcast television all the way through the streaming wars and Netflix’s history from a provocative tech upstart that ushered in binge-watching and ad-free television, to now, as an industry leader pushing for the widest audience possible—just like the television networks it displaced as American cultural powerhouses.  

Throughout the book Biskind argues that appealing to broad audiences leads to lackluster shows and movies, which, in turn, drives away viewers. Once that happens few entertainment companies, whether traditional powerhouses like Hollywood studios or new age streamers like Netflix, can keep audiences for long. “As Netflix, for example, plays itself out and becomes unwatchable, something will replace it,” Biskind tells Fortune. 

Streamers like Netflix, Max, and its various other competitors have replaced networks, he believes. “The difference between streaming and the networks is crumbling because a lot of shows are moving back and forth between networks and streaming,” Biskind tells Fortune. “This attempt to find the biggest streaming audience is deleterious to content and they’re restructuring some of these companies…