'We’re Definitely Post-Peak TV'

A conversation on what comes after TV’s Golden Age with critic Alan Sepinwall.

Taylor Dearden as Mel on The Pitt. (HBO Max)

It feels like television is at an inflection point, still vibrant, but having drifted notably from its peak-TV apotheosis.

Where does television stand right now? To get a better sense of the current state of affairs, we spoke with Alan Sepinwall. The longtime Rolling Stone film critic (now writing for his own newsletter, What’s Alan Watching) and author of The Revolution Was Televised and The Sopranos Sessions, among other books, weighed in on his career as a critic, the impact of authoritarian campaigns to silence late-night comedians, The Pitt, and much more. Read our conversation below.

Do you think we are in post-peak TV, and to what extent do you feel like that’s going to affect the quality of television in the near future?

We’re definitely post-peak TV. There’s not nearly as much output as there was before the strikes, before COVID. The business has decided the amount of content they were producing was unsustainable, which it very clearly was. Ideally, less would be more. I don’t know that that’s going to be the case, because I feel like if they’re making fewer things, they’re going to take fewer chances. While peak TV was impossible to keep up with, it also allowed all of these people to make really personal, really idiosyncratic, really strange projects, like Lady Dynamite with Maria Bamford. That would never get made today.

Set aside the fact that most of the stuff that’s been canceled or shut down in the last few years has tended to be about women or queer characters or characters of color, anything that’s very specific is just not going to happen. Everything’s IP-driven, everything’s formula-driven. Vince Gilligan’s got his Pluribus show, which is a wholly original idea. If you’re Vince Gilligan, you can do that, and nobody else can.

How has television criticism changed over the course of your time in the field, and do you feel like you’ve changed as a critic during that time frame?

It’s changed a ton. I’ve been doing this since 1996. Back then, there were the six broadcast networks, two of which were the WB and UPN, so they were looked at as second-tier. PBS did some stuff. HBO had Larry Sanders, basically, and that was it. You could keep track of everything. I would periodically watch episodes of JAG just to see what’s happening on JAG, what’s happening on Promised Land, which was a Touched by an Angel spinoff with Gerald McRaney.

At the same time, I would get one episode of Suddenly Susan and I would have to speculate on whether the series as a whole would be any good based off that pilot. Nowadays, I get a lot more data to work off of, because they send me whole seasons, or the bulk of seasons. That makes the reviewing job easier, but it’s also a lot more time intensive. if you’re getting six, eight, ten episodes all at once, you’re limited in how many things you can review any given week.

The shift in the mid-2000s [was] to TV criticism being much more heavily focused on recaps. That was a big thing for a while. As we got to peak TV, there was so much stuff that the demand was less about “let’s dive deep on this episode,” and more about, “please tell me what I should and should not be like looking out for and spending my precious time on.”

Between the Jimmy Kimmel story, CBS paying off Trump over 60 Minutes, and the firing of Stephen Colbert, do you feel like the politics of watching television have changed? To what extent do TV viewers, in your mind, have moral obligations regarding what they watch?

It’s a very hard question to answer, because if you are going to take a moral stand in terms of what you consume, you’re basically not going to be able to watch anything. Every corporation is morally compromised in some way. There are creators who have politics you might disagree with, or who are bad people. When you want to be wholly pure and watch something and not feel any guilt about it, that really, really limits your choices. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that. It’s just an almost impossible thing to have to do.

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America at the moment, you can’t really say, “I want to be apolitical,” because what’s happening in the country makes that impossible. You can’t put your head down and say, “This isn’t happening. This doesn’t affect me,” because it affects everybody.

The days of Johnny Carson or Jay Leno being able to be watched by everybody, and being able to tell jokes down the middle, [is over]. A whole outrage machine has been built up, especially on the right side of the aisle. Nothing is fair game anymore. Everything is a source of conflict.

Jimmy Kimmel, host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” (ABC)

Do you see a future for late-night comedy and talk shows on TV? What might that landscape look like in five years?

In five years, I will be surprised if there is more than one of them left, and I would not be shocked if all of them are gone. The Colbert thing is unfortunate and terrible. At the same time, these shows are really expensive. They’re vestiges of a time when people watched television in a really different way than they do now. If you’re interested in the celebrity, you’re just following them on their social media, or you’re watching them on Hot Ones. You are not necessarily waiting to see Drew Barrymore standing on Letterman’s desk and flashing her chest, and everyone talking about it the next day. That’s not really a thing anymore.

I think you’re going to see more and more what Fox has done, which is, since they sold the bulk of their assets to Disney, the Fox network itself is super budget-conscious. We have football, we have reality, we’ve got some animated shows. We’ve got some really inexpensively made sitcoms and dramas. But it’s not 2005 anymore.

Is there a genre of television that you wish you had a chance to write about more often?

I just had a conversation on the newsletter with Myles McNutt, who runs another one called Episodic Medium, about how I used to, in the old days, write about procedurals.

The genius of procedurals is you can jump in and watch an episode here and there. And I want to try to do more of that. I’m very much Mr. “I Like TV that Behaves Like TV,” and so I need to put my money where my mouth is, and watch more of that.

Like you, I’m also a huge fan of The Pitt. What do you think has captivated your attention in particular about the show, and is it related to this resurgence of the procedural?

One, it’s executed at a really high level. Two, it’s made by television veterans who know how to make television. I mean, the biggest problem in TV right now is there are so many shows now that are created by movie people, who have no training in television and no interest in television. It’s just the kind of movies they want to make are no longer being made by the movie business, so they have to come here, and they’re just structurally messy. It’s a lot of ideas that should have been a feature film and are instead expanded out to six, eight or ten hours, which is not sustainable.

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I like that The Pitt is made by TV people. I like that it feels like a TV show, even though it’s serialized. Even though you follow certain cases over multiple episodes, each episode feels satisfying in its own right. It has the rhythms down, and it’s managed to thread the needle between new school and old school in a way that not a lot else has. And it’s also a show about well-meaning people who are good at their jobs and trying to help other people at a moment in our country where there unfortunately doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of that, especially from the people in charge.

Speaking to the complexity, and frankly, the immense challenges of America in 2025, are there particular series, besides The Pitt, that are addressing that? I sometimes feel like culture is failing to articulate what’s going on in the country right now.

As we saw with CBS, as we’ve seen in a lot of places, people are afraid, both because this administration is vengeful, but also because there’s the fear of “We don’t want to alienate a certain percentage of the audience.” Apple had a show, The Savant with Jessica Chastain, who goes undercover on the alt-right to ferret out people who might be looking to cause acts of domestic terrorism, and they pulled it at the last second. Basically, I think because they were afraid of upsetting racists. It’s insane. I don’t think the show is very good, but if you want to say we’re pulling it because we don’t think it’s going to connect, and we wasted all this money, that’s fine. But to do it because you’re worried about a sensitive moment in a show, that’s not great.

In thinking about this year in TV, I’m often thinking about The Pitt and Severance as being two different models of what great TV can look like. Do you think the future is more likely to look like The Pitt or more likely to look like Severance?

I think we’re going to get a mix of both. But I do feel like the success of The Pitt has revealed that there is a real appetite for more old-school television, for shows that make longer seasons, for shows that are on regular schedules. Severance took three years off, and some of that was the strikes, but some of that is it’s a really expensive and complicated show. Whereas [shows] like The Pitt and Slow Horses that are able to stand an annual cadence, people like that. Reliability is good. I would not be surprised if the success of The Pitt is going to lead to more things like that.

Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb on Slow Horses. (Apple TV)

I loved your book The Revolution Was Televised, which I have my students at NYU read every year. if you were working on a sequel to the book, what shows would help you tell the story of TV in the years since you left off?

I’ve thought about that. I’m working on a bunch of other projects right now. I’ve got a Rod Serling biography in the hopper, but if I were to do a sequel, it would be the story of peak TV. You would want to do some streaming shows. I really have no interest in writing about House of Cards. So perhaps Orange Is the New Black as an early, trailblazing streaming show. You would want a blockbuster or two. Definitely Game of Thrones, possibly The Walking Dead. You would want some really specific, auteur-driven shows. And then you run into the challenge, like, do I want to write a whole chapter about Louie? It’s hugely important, but that guy sucks. Maybe I would do Better Things instead, or Master of None, or Girls. I’ve plotted out a rough outline of how that would work. I don’t know if I’m ever going to do it. I think it would be a really good book, but there’s a lot else going on.

You mentioned Louie, and there’s obviously a fair number of television series whose legacy is up in the air because of the nature of the people who made it. How do you wrap your head around that? How do you think about it critically?

For instance, Malcolm-Jamal Warner died earlier this year, and I wanted to write a tribute to him, which meant I had to go back and watch a Cosby Show episode. I wrote about the one with the Gordon Gartrelle shirt, which meant I’m watching Bill Cosby, which made me sick to my stomach, but at the same time, everyone around him is doing great work. Malcolm-Jamal Warner is incredible in that episode. It’s one of the funniest episodes of TV ever made. You don’t want to throw out the work of everybody else. Sometimes you just have to hold your nose about a certain show in certain cases, if the star or creator’s sins are not as great as they were by Cosby or by Spacey or by Louis C.K., and you have to shrug and say, “All right, fine, I’m not happy, but the show is really good.” But there’s definitely a lot of people who have turned out to be a lot worse than we thought. In The Revolution Was Televised, there’s a whole chapter being hugely laudatory of Joss Whedon.

Two last questions for you. Do you have a particular favorite character on television right now?

Mel on The Pitt [portrayed by Taylor Dearden].

I know you’ve recently switched your newsletter over from Substack to Ghost. What’s that transition been like for you?

That’s been pretty easy. The bigger transition is the fact that I’m no longer at Rolling Stone, so the newsletter has gone from a sideline to my primary workplace, where I’m publishing all my reviews, all my recaps. So far, the response has been really lovely. I’ve heard from a lot of people who said they were subscribing to Rolling Stone to read me. Now that I’m not there, they’re subscribing to this. Certainly, we’re in a very challenging environment in terms of legacy media.