When you open Hulu to watch the last two episodes of something you’ve been enjoying slowly, and it’s already gone, it’s a certain kind of frustrating. There was no news. No goodbye. There is now only empty space where a show used to be. A lot of people have been through it now that it doesn’t make the news much, which could be the most telling sign of all.
It turned out that the streaming bubble didn’t pop with a loud crash. It went down slowly at first, and then all at once.
In the early days of streaming, the pitch was pretty simple: get more of everything, whenever you wanted it. Netflix lets shows air that no other network would touch. After that, Hulu and Amazon both put money on strange, ambitious, and very specific stories. It was thought that growth would come first, then profits, and Wall Street agreed, at least for a while.
In the end, the math stopped working. Netflix lost subscribers and saw its market value drop by a lot of money almost overnight. It took more than eight billion dollars in streaming losses for Disney, Paramount, and NBCUniversal to get investors to stop complaining. On the money front, the message was basically: don’t spend like there’s a gold rush, because there isn’t one anymore.
After that, there was a quiet but broad contraction. Budgets for development were cut. Early-stage projects were quietly canceled. When the spreadsheets had to look better for quarterly earnings, the first things that were cut were shows with loyal but small audiences. This is exactly the kind of niche programming that used to make streaming so popular. “Everyone in the business is crazy,” said a former studio executive, “because things are being cut all over the place.”
It’s important to remember what was lost when that contraction happened. During the best years of streaming, shows were truly strange and brave, willing to deal with tough emotions, go against genre norms, and trust viewers to keep up. Codes like that aren’t just written by accident. It happens because someone with money to spend on development took a chance on a writer with a unique idea and gave them enough time to see it through. When those budgets go away, the pipeline that makes the next surprise hit also goes away.
Part of the reason we are where we are is because of the platforms. Some people have called the huge amount of content made during the boom years “pick fatigue.” This is when you have too many options and not enough time to make a choice. Instead of starting something new, a lot of people went back and watched old shows again. In response, the streamers went after scale even more, which made the problem worse. In the end, the shows that didn’t get a lot of viewers quickly enough were taken off the air, no matter how well-reviewed they were or how many people really loved them.
Also, there’s something interesting about how these cancellations take place. A cult show on Hulu doesn’t have a proper ending. It doesn’t get a last season or even a clear reason. It is quietly taken out of the library and added to a growing list of things that used to be there. The writers who worked on it are left to watch the erasure from the outside. Many of them still have second jobs to make up for the residuals that streaming never really fixed.
The bigger picture doesn’t make things any better. As companies look for cheaper labor and bigger tax breaks, more and more production is moving overseas. This has eliminated the middle-class workers who kept Los Angeles running for decades. People who build sets, run cameras, and do all the other work that makes TV look good but isn’t seen are finding less work and less stability than at any other time in recent memory.
It’s still not clear if this contraction is a fix or a collapse. Some people in the business think that the chaos will eventually settle down into something leaner and more stable, like fewer shows with better support. Some people are not so sure. It only takes a short time to take apart the pipeline that develops unique talent that takes years to build. What seems like a way to save money now might look like the point in time when a generation of interesting voices stopped being made in five years.
There was a golden age of streaming, and it made work that is worth mourning. That’s all I have to say for now. The balloon has popped. The shows that were taken off the air should have had better endings than just going away from a menu screen.
