Is The Sopranos creator David Chase right that quality TV is 'dying'?

• Recently, Chase stirred conversation with his doomy remarks about the industry. We explain the basis for his comments – and other showrunners weigh in on whether it is truly in crisis.

Every day for four years, Sam Esmail went to work, awaiting a phone call that never came. It was the mid 2010s, and Mr Robot – the New Jersey-born filmmaker's Emmy award-winning debut TV show, about a vigilante hacker who joins an underground movement of cyber anarchists – was experimenting with stranger and stranger storylines. Riskier and riskier shot compositions. Bolder and bolder anti-capitalist ideas.

"I remember thinking: Uhh, someone's going to call us at some point and tell us to knock it off, right?" he laughs. The experiments that Mr Robot was allowed to carry out on-screen "made me realise that TV was in a new place. But even then, you couldn't help but feel that it was all going to end soon. That they'd been letting the lunatics run the asylum, and that can't last".

In 2024, that end might finally be nigh. Last year saw a massive 14% decrease in original scripted shows broadcast on American television, with fewer new shows greenlit and plenty of existing ones cancelled. And last year, as some of the most critically revered small-screen sagas of the last decade, from Succession to Barry, came to their conclusions, fans were left to wonder what ambitious dramas might take their place at the top of the TV totem pole. Sure, shows like The Bear, Severance and The White Lotus continue to win ratings and applause. But they're increasingly coming to look like anomalies in a TV industry pulling back from commissioning complex stories in the vein of past golden age TV hits like Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

“ The Sopranos was the first television show that didn't feel like it was intentionally trying to tread water – Sam Esmail ”

All of which prompted the man credited with spearheading the last quarter century of prestige TV dramas, The Sopranos creator David Chase, to declare that "something is dying" in an interview marking 25 years since the show first hit the air. "This is the 25th anniversary, so of course it's a celebration," the 78-year-old told the Times. "But perhaps we shouldn't look at it like that. Maybe we should look at it like a funeral." Chase's words reverberated around the industry – with Esmail among those nodding along with that bleak outlook. "I'm hoping I'm wrong but I do agree with David that this golden age of television seems to be sunsetting," he tells the BBC.

"There's definitely been a contraction after years of it feeling like TV was undergoing this crazy expansion," adds Sam Boyd, creator of HBO romantic drama Love Life – a show that, he says "happened in the boom times, where a new streaming service was basically being announced every week, and they needed content. It felt like the gold rush. But I don't think if I wrote the pilot now that I'd be able to make the show." Boyd describes a climate of aggressive cost-cutting – and he would know. In 2022, Love Life was one of hundreds of titles that weren't just cancelled by HBO owners Warner Bros Discovery, but pulled from their streaming services entirely, in a move that some have alleged was in part to avoid having to pay residuals (payments based on viewing figures) to their cast, crew and writers.

Why is all this happening? At first glance, you'd be forgiven for thinking TV execs are attempting to steady the ship after one of the most turbulent periods in the history of the industry. After Covid-19 caused productions to shut down in 2020 for months, costing the industry millions, 2023 saw writers and actors down tools in strike action that lasted much of the year. Look a little closer, though, and the industry was already experiencing troubles before those costly interruptions.

The rise of an artform

Television's prestige era, experts widely agree, began with The Sopranos. "It was the first television show that didn't feel like it was intentionally trying to tread water," says Esmail, with a nod to how the show surprised audiences with storylines and characters that evolved over years, rather than resetting at the end of every episode (a novelty back in 1999). "That was my biggest beef with TV prior to The Sopranos. I didn't really watch television because of its repetitive nature. With a lot of shows, it was a repeat every week of the same characters in a different situation. But with The Sopranos, there was a sophistication to its construction across a number of seasons. You felt like you were on a long-form journey. It always felt like it was building towards something."

The Sopranos inspired others like it – The Wire, The Leftovers, Boardwalk Empire, the list goes on – and began to help centre TV as the go-to place for storytelling that’d delve deep into a character's psychology. Audiences gravitated en masse to these shows and the complicated, often unlikeable, sometimes morally reprehensible anti-heroes they revolved around. The boundaries of what a TV show could be began to expand. Series like Lost emerged, full of head-trip narratives and cinematic flourishes.

The likes of Deadwood followed in The Sopranos' sweary, bloody wake, with violence and profanity unlike much of what we'd seen on the small screen before. During this time, internet forums and the rise of social media helped cultivate fandoms around these shows that sparked a sea change in the way TV was being consumed. For decades, movies had been where the zeitgeist lay. Now the small-screen was where our most probing and ambitious stories were being told – and among those sitting up and paying attention to this was a tech industry making bold new leaps with video streaming technology.