They don’t call it the era of “Peak TV” for nothing. Save for 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic briefly put a kink in the content pipeline, the amount of new scripted television shows being produced has grown larger every year since 2015. The era of streaming has produced so much new TV that viewers often struggle to sift through it all.
But overwhelmed viewers should be careful what they wish for. Though both the writers’ strike and the SAG-AFTRA strike are now in the rearview mirror, the content drought that comes in their wake has just begun. Episodes of new and returning shows will be increasingly rare as the backlog of series written and produced before May 2, when the writers strike began, runs out.