Earlier this year I lay on the couch at 2 a.m., scared, uneasy, and desperately needing something—anything—to keep me company on TV. I landed on Cheers—a show I was too young to understand during its heyday in the 1980s—but somehow, in that early morning hour, a mere 14 hours after my apartment had been burglarized and completely ransacked, it seemed like the only thing that could get me through the horror of the last week.
That’s because only four days prior to the burglary, I found out a biopsy was needed after something suspicious showed up on my left breast during an MRI.
Oh, life.
I’d never really spent time with Sam, Diane, Norm, and Cliff before, but now, on this night, watching them tend bar at the place where everybody knows your name gave me a level of comfort that no weighted blanket could provide.
As Glamour’s senior West Coast editor, part of my job is to watch—and think critically about—TV. It’s the best when a show strikes the right balance of smart dialogue, great characters, and everyday situations that we can all relate to. It’s less fun when it’s a show that reminds me of how dire the circumstances are in the world at this moment, or how awful people can be.
But now, I was finding myself being triggered by shows I once would have had no hesitation jumping into. I’ve never been into watching series with gratuitous violence, but even tuning into SVU or Grey’s Anatomy felt too much lately. Apple Cider Vinegar, a limited series about a woman who faked cancer to become a mega-influencer, was too hard to stomach given I had already been going through initial rounds of medical testing as early as January and couldn’t bear to see someone lie about something so serious. And even though I didn’t lose my home in the Los Angeles fires, they were close enough to see from my balcony that I left town for the week. So watching Chicago Fire or Fire Country? I know both shows honor these heroic men and women, but right now it’s just too much.
Or take Hulu’s Dying for Sex, which is about a woman who receives a terminal cancer diagnosis and her desire to fulfill a surprising bucket-list item before she passes away. For what it’s worth, the series is great, but when I received advance screeners in early February there was no way I could conceive of watching it until after my biopsy results came back. Even then, it all hit too close to home.
It made me think: Life right now is hard enough—and you needn’t have had to go through a health scare (the results were eventually benign, thank goodness), a burglary, a natural disaster, or our current administration’s heartbreaking policies to know that.
But before you tell me to watch another episode of Friends or delve into the Hallmark oeuvre (no offense to either; you’re great!), I really do want to watch well-made television that everyone is talking about rather than something I’ve seen a hundred times.
Furthermore, I want to watch so-called prestige shows that are smart, funny, and interesting without feeling like my anxiety levels are going to skyrocket off into space.
I don’t mind if something is sad—life is often sad. (I bawled my eyes out at Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, but I also loved it, and found it so cathartic.) I want Nobody Wants This, I want Shrinking, I want Abbott Elementary, I want Land of Women, I want The Summer I Turned Pretty, I want Ted Lasso, I want The Crown (I still miss it). These aren’t shows that make me constantly feel like I’m fearing for my life or plunge me into a feeling of such heaviness that only an episode of The Golden Girls can bring me out of.
And yet it seems all the shows that are getting big-time buzz and are being debated over dinners with friends are frighteningly dark. But maybe that’s by design.
“TV has always reflected the mood of our culture, and suffice to say, we’re in a very dark time,” entertainment journalist and The Hollywood Reporter contributing editor Stacey Wilson Hunt tells me. “The shows we’re watching offer a gripping insight into just how dark.”
Hunt points to the popularity of series like Severance, Baby Reindeer, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Adolescence that specifically signal something that most of us are grappling with, “which is an inherent distrust in the systems and leaders who are supposed to protect us, whether it’s our bosses, our mentors, our leaders, our families and schools.” She says “human beings all over the world are feeling disenfranchisement from everything we were taught to hold dear.”
But it’s not only that, according to Maureen “Mo” Ryan, author of the New York Times bestseller Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, as well as a Vanity Fair contributing editor. “It’s always been the case that a lot of TV executives think difficult subjects and dark stories are more important and will get them and their networks or streamers a lot of attention. That has always been the case and will probably always be the case. And they’re not wrong that challenging storylines can be immensely rewarding and artistically excellent. But during my decades as a critic, I’ve watched more shows than I can count that mistook a consistent grimdark tone or nihilistic storytelling for gravity or meaning, and whew, that gets old really fast.”
A lot of you feel the same. The shows that our readers, as well as my friends, acquaintances, or people I meet randomly, talk to me about the most are the ones I mentioned earlier. I just want something real and something that doesn’t need a gimmick, as if that will make me care.
I remember when Nobody Wants This premiered last fall, and even though I had some criticism about the way Jewish women were portrayed, it was the show that I couldn’t get enough of, and neither could anybody else. The Netflix series ended 2024 as the top new original comedy in streaming, according to Nielsen, pulling in 4.9 billion viewing minutes after its debut last September.
Whether I was in LA, New York, or the Midwest, it seemed as though everyone was talking about it. We finally had a smart rom-com that was funny, sexy, and culturally relevant. And it was about love!
Tracey Pakosta, vice president, comedy series, at Netflix, says that part of the reason for the success of Nobody Wants This is that “Jessica Radloff Erin Foster’s story spares audiences from the ‘will they, won’t they’ angst, giving fans hope and inspiring conversations about the obstacles they’ve had to overcome in their own love lives.” In fact, Pakosta counts her father and her son—as well as her girlfriends—for being fans of the show’s must-watch hilarious romance.
“There is a power of relatability with comedy that makes life a little lighter,” she says. “Laughter helps us navigate life’s challenges, big and small, so we try to find the sweet spot between funny, authentic, and meaningful for our comedy offerings.”
So then why does it seem like the anxiety-producing shows outnumber the more uplifting ones? And is there anything we can do to make the playing field more even?
Ryan says two things give her hope on this front, starting with: “There’s still a ton of good TV being made, which is heartening.”
As for the second thing? Ryan points to shows like Max’s The Pitt. “It made me cry so, so many times! [But I kept watching] and the show wasn’t uniformly grimdark or nihilistic—modes of TV I generally find deeply immature and unsatisfying. There were lots of different kinds of stories and they were all nonmanipulative and executed at such a high level that I kept going because it was rewarding to do so. Plus—and this is big—these characters cared about each other, cared about their patients, and were good at their jobs. They work hard to do the right thing, and even when things are hard, there’s a lot to engage with.”
But even if a medical drama is not your thing—and right now, I’m steering a bit clear of those—Netflix’s Pakosta says the streamer is committed to giving us more lighthearted stories. “We’ve seen the fruits of our labor with Nobody Wants This, A Man on the Inside, and Running Point, and we are not slowing down,” she says, pointing to the renewal of all three of those series, as well as upcoming offerings like Michelle Buteau’s Survival of the Thickest, Tina Fey’s Four Seasons, and Leanne Morgan’s Leanne.
It’s a sentiment that Simran Sethi, president, scripted programming, Hulu Originals, ABC Entertainment and Freeform, agrees with as well, with prestige but breezy shows like Abbott Elementary, Only Murders in the Building, and more under her purview.
“The intention is always to entertain audiences and meet them where they are,” Sethi tells me via email. “That is why we make a wide variety of programming that will have broad appeal. We are always looking for worlds that audiences can escape to, whether that is a clearly light world in a comedy like Abbott Elementary or the propulsive, suspenseful world of Paradise. No matter the genre, our north star is to entertain.”
And listen: At a time when our country is in utter turmoil, I’m not opposed to watching heavy material if it feels right; I just don’t want to be consumed by darkness. Historically, prestige TV wasn’t always about lightness—look at The Sopranos or Mad Men—but in addition to their often tragic themes, there was obvious humor, satire, and highly stylized glimpses into niche worlds or bygone eras that made them feel less urgent and dire. I want—and need—more joy, more happiness, and more hope in my prestige viewing. And I don’t think we should be afraid to say it.
The post When Did Prestige TV Get This Grim? appeared first on Glamour.
