by It’s official: Peak TV has peaked.
Last year, 516 scripted television series aired or streamed in the United States, a 14 percent decline from 2022, cable network FX said Friday. This was only the second decline in at least 15 years, and the largest, according to FX research.
The total is the most definitive evidence of a slowdown that executives have been predicting for at least a year. The rise of television (both in number of shows and quality of programming) has brought it to the forefront of American culture over the past decade.
But show orders from major studios began to fall precipitously in mid-2022, around the time Wall Street took a hit on entertainment companies’ strategy of spending at any cost to create new series.
Last year’s strikes by writers and actors (the first time both unions walked out at the same time since 1960, effectively shutting down scripted production for months) also delayed the release of new shows. The strikes wiped out all fall programming on scripted television networks, and the consequences are likely to be felt throughout 2024.
The total of 516 was the lowest since a drop in 2020, when the pandemic disrupted television productions and programming globally. Still, even with the decline, last year’s figure ranked as the fourth highest since FX began keeping records (2022, 2021 and 2019 all had more), giving viewers plenty of options but potentially overwhelming them as well.
In 2009, all 210 scripted shows aired on network and cable television in the United States, a small increase from years earlier in the decade, according to FX.
That number rose steadily over the next few years, and then sharply after Netflix began making original series in 2012. In 2015, there were 422 scripted shows. That led John Landgraf, an FX executive, to coin the term “Peak TV,” which industry experts quickly adopted to describe the era of streaming television.
In 2022, there were 600 scripted shows (an increase from a previous estimate of 599), which is expected to be the all-time high.
In addition to the fact that virtually all studios have reduced investment in making new television shows, several media companies are no longer investing in scripted series. Quibi came and went. Google and Facebook invested aggressively in traditional scripted television about five years ago, but both effectively stopped doing so. Television networks are making fewer scripted shows, as are many cable networks such as USA, TBS and Comedy Central.
Executives believe the number of shows will continue to decline this year.
