When was the golden age of television? There’s a general consensus that it began in 1999 with the premiere of The Sopranos. The endpoint is disputed: some would say it falls somewhere in the mid-2010s, others would say 2023, and a few might argue we’re still in it. Its agreed-upon characteristics include morally ambiguous (or, often, outright evil) protagonists, storytelling that treats episodes and whole seasons as chapters in a larger narrative, a high level of cinematic ambition, and exuberant freedom from broadcast standards around violence, language, and sex. At some point in the 2000s, people started referring to the products of this era as “prestige” television, to distinguish them from what TV shows used to be, which was not prestigious. After decades of being seen as a lesser medium, television had finally achieved cultural parity with film. People started to know the names of showrunners and regard them as auteurs.
If you’re judging a creative medium by the artistry and depth of its finest work, then it’s fair to place television’s peak in the early 21st century. But if the judgement rests on a medium’s embrace of its unique qualities — its capacity to do things no other art form can — the case gets weaker. The golden age of things we call TV shows may have been 1999 to 20-something. The golden age of the medium of television came earlier.
Unlike film or literature, television can create fictional worlds that exist without a closed end. A traditional episodic TV series isn’t a story — it’s a place. Audiences gather there, week after week, to see familiar characters in a familiar setting. The Sopranos is fascinating in the way it largely honors this pillar of the medium while enthusiastically breaking pretty much every other rule. The shows that followed in its wake leaned further into highly serialized storytelling with a constantly shifting status quo. On-demand viewing allowed for a level of narrative complexity that had been impossible when audiences couldn’t be counted on to catch every single episode. Plot momentum, rather than cozy familiarity, became the reason to keep watching.
At its best, golden age TV could be as cinematic as a great film, and as narratively rich as a great novel. Old TV had to be comforting and consistent; new TV could be challenging and dark. The medium had transcended itself. But in doing so, it lost what had made it singular. Sprawling serialized narratives genuinely were a new form of motion picture storytelling, but their closed-end nature made it possible for movies to try the same thing, if a studio had the requisite ambition. One such attempt became the biggest film franchise of all time. The first decade-plus of the Marvel Cinematic Universe was essentially a modern TV series, with each episode setting up the next, ultimately leading to an elaborate finale where all the plotlines converge. The MCU’s struggles since the end of its Avengers arc are a sign of just how TV-like it was: without the familiar group of characters people had come to expect onscreen, these films are losing the audience’s attention.
Was the ultimate destiny of TV always to evolve into Movies But Longer? Was the classic style of television — the kind that dominated in the 1990s — simply an artifact of a pre-DVR, pre-streaming ecosystem? Or was it massively popular for reasons other than a poverty of viewing options?
John Wells understands as well as anyone what TV used to be for. The shows he shepherded to the screen in the 90s were set in worlds which, at the time, weren’t seen as particularly enticing to viewers — a hospital emergency room, and the White House — but they attracted weekly audiences in the tens of millions by offering the same essential draw as Seinfeld, Cheers, and M*A*S*H: an ensemble of characters who function as a family, navigating storylines in a fixed location that starts to feel to the viewer like a second home.
The Pitt, created by Wells and his former ER collaborators, reworks this old formula for a post-golden-age world. ER was groundbreaking in its time for its constant use of accurate (and unexplained) medical jargon; its hallmark was long-take steadycam shots swooping around a controlled bedlam of doctors and nurses shouting complete gibberish. The Pitt takes its forerunner’s authenticity to a new extreme. It’s less consciously cinematic than ER — the lighting is realistically fluorescent and the camerawork isn’t showy. Events unfold nearly in real-time over a single high-intensity shift, leaving less room for excursions into personal drama. Thanks to the content freedoms of streaming, there’s R-rated language and a confronting amount of literal gory detail. But the show still has the same Wellsian DNA as ER and The West Wing: a fast-paced fixed setting, a surrogate-family ensemble of highly skilled professionals, and — maybe most importantly for its prospects as a cultural touchstone — an ability to be a clearinghouse for the social issues of the day. All of America’s problems eventually find their way into the emergency room, and at a time when most shows are shying away from the issues of the moment, The Pitt deliberately positions itself as a kaleidoscopic lens on what’s ailing the nation.
Watching television used to be how most people gained an ambient understanding of what was actually happening out there in the world. In the same way that nightly news broadcasts established the set of events everyone could agree had happened each day, primetime shows were how social currents were brought into the public consciousness, and many shows — dramas and comedies alike — treated this as a solemn responsibility. The cliche of the Very Special Episode was genuinely how mainstream American culture processed topics like racism, drug abuse and AIDS. It was all very silly, but it did at least result in a consensus reality. All anyone has now are the posts and infographics that happen to permeate their algorithmic bubble. The general level of confusion is both a cause and an effect of the increasing weirdness of actual events. In the last few years, the lone series regularly trying to sift through and crystallize what’s going on in American life has been Saturday Night Live, which might explain why, relative to the rest of the TV landscape, it’s more popular than ever.
On The Pitt, COVID happened, and people are still reckoning with the psychological scars of the pandemic. The healthcare system is fraying, and so is the social fabric. “Everyone’s got shorter fuses now,” one character remarks. Strangers in the hospital waiting room get into a physical altercation about masks. Patients who come through the ER include a woman who fears her teenage son is a violent incel, an immigrant shoved off a subway platform in front of an oncoming train, a phone-addicted beauty influencer who’s accidentally poisoned herself with grey market Korean face creams, a mysteriously sleepy four-year-old boy who turns out to have eaten his dad’s weed gummies, a kid with measles whose anti-vax parents won’t let him get the life-saving treatment he needs, a teenage girl desperate to get a medical abortion before the mandated 11-week cutoff, college students who’ve taken street drugs laced with fentanyl, a trans woman misgendered in her patient file, a mother-to-be serving as a pregnancy surrogate for a gay couple, and a guy having heart palpitations from vaping too much. The workload kicks into apocalyptic overdrive when a mass shooting at a music festival sends dozens of victims flooding in for treatment — a type of event the entire department is grimly well-trained for. This is America, the show screams. That the result mostly feels bracing and fresh instead of hokey is a sign of how much we’ve been lacking stuff like this — popular entertainment that makes a broad and multi-faceted effort to reflect the current moment. The show’s point of view is carefully calibrated: its liberal stance isn’t concealed, but rather than being strident or righteous, it’s low-key, resigned, and a little cynical, mirroring the attitude of Noah Wyle’s weary protagonist.
Twenty-some years ago, The Wire was revolutionary for its gritty authenticity and its depiction of modern America as a kind of high-functioning failed state. Those qualities also put a ceiling on its popular appeal: people didn’t watch TV to be bummed out. Things are different now. Tropes that once felt standard — twentysomething urbanites living in big cool lofts; medical workers who have time to stand around and discuss each other’s love lives; crime procedurals where justice is reliably served — now seem entirely detached from reality. An opening has been created for a new and somewhat counterintuitive type of comfort watch: a show that reassures the viewer that their hardships and anxieties are universal, and the spiraling chaos is real, but it’s going to be okay, because the world is held up by unseen legions of decent, hyper-competent people, many of whom are quite beautiful and/or fun to be around. They’re your friends and you can hang out with them every Thursday night and also whenever you want, forever. So far, the viewing public seems to be accepting the offer. Warner Bros. Discovery, notoriously stingy with its streaming numbers (probably because they’re often not good), has proudly noted that the show’s audience grew during each week of its 15-episode run, with over 16 million people now having watched the first episode. Nielsen data confirms it’s a rare hit for a Max original.
For cash flow reasons, the major streamers — noticing that shows like The Office and Suits were more popular on their platforms than splashy originals — had already been looking to revive some of the conventions of classical TV. After the abrupt end of the streaming boom in 2022, the type of big-budget star-studded limited series that had exemplified the prestige era was no longer selling; agents of TV writers were advising their clients to pitch inexpensive workplace shows that could run indefinitely. A shift that was already underway will now only pick up steam. With its network-style release cadence (season two is already shooting) and its potential for ER-level endurance, The Pitt is poised to establish what the next era of television might look like: long-running shows grounded in the realities of our time while offering the soothing, reliable pleasures that used to define the medium. In around 2050, when The Pitt: Miami is winding down its twelfth season and people are itching for something new and different, maybe we’ll try antiheroes again.