The prestige TV bubble

Every senior television commissioner in Hollywood has spent the last four years explaining that they are looking for the next Succession, the next Fleabag, the next Chernobyl. The commissioning has followed the wish. Studios and streamers have collectively poured funding into prestige-drama pitches, prestige limited series, and prestige-adjacent unscripted formats at a scale the market cannot sustain, and the resulting slate is beginning to visibly buckle under its own weight.

The economic logic of the bubble is that every commissioner needs a flagship to justify their annual spend, and the flagship has to be prestige because prestige is what awards juries and end-of-year critical lists reward. But no market can accommodate twelve flagships a year across four streamers plus HBO plus the linear networks — the audience for that number of prestige titles simply does not exist, and the marketing budgets cannot be scaled to support that many simultaneous releases. Something has to give, and it is starting to.

The most visible correction is at Netflix and Amazon, both of which have quietly slowed prestige commissioning in the last twelve months and reallocated toward genre and unscripted. That reallocation reads in the trade press as a retreat, but it is closer to a normalisation. The prestige bubble was always going to correct; the question was only whether the correction would be a soft landing or a sharp one. Netflix's approach so far suggests soft; Amazon's is closer to sharp.

The counter case is that prestige television has produced most of the best writing and directing of the last decade, and any correction is likely to damage the parts of the ecosystem that most deserve to survive. There is truth to this. The correction is not costless. Some of the shows that would have been greenlit under the previous regime will not be greenlit now, and some of the writers who would have made those shows will move to other industries. That loss is real.

But the current commissioning pattern is unsustainable, and the correction is preferable to the collapse it prevents. What the industry should be arguing for is not more prestige television, but better prestige television — commissioned at a slower rate, with more development time, and with less pressure to justify a series against a limited-episode film equivalent. If the correction produces that, it will have been worth its cost. If it produces a return to genre-only commissioning, the loss will be larger than any Succession the industry claims to want.