this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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I mean, this is entirely untrue. There's a bit in the first episode of the renewed 4th season of Family Guy joking about it. This was 20 years ago. FOX had already stumbled on the "people are more excited about the first season of a show" formula that Netflix wouldn't adopt for another decade.
And that's not even considering the graveyard of television in the 80s and 90s. Shows nobody even knew about until they'd been cancelled (American Gothic, the Original Battlestar Galactica, Freaks and Geeks) or shows that flared out from the enormous budget (Alf, Dinosaurs) too soon, but developed cult following after they were gone.
Survivorship bias is a hell of a drug.
On the plus side, it makes fishing for the TONS of shows that never got past a couple airings surprisingly entertaining.
Crap was so ruthless seasons weren't fully ordered, written or filmed by the time they were on the air because shows would get cancelled overnight, so they were fully ramped up and working without knowing if they'd end the season they were doing at the time. Between that and how much cheaper everything was it's no wonder no film actors would be caught dead in a TV show until prestige television broke out of that mold.
I mean, here's an article from 1992 complaining that TV costs too much to produce.
I'm sure a proper Marxist could say something about the stead decline of profit. But if TV studios are strapped for cash, you'd never know from that validations of their parent companies.
There was definitely a jump from TV to Movies that people didn't want to come back from. But there's also only so many hours in the day, and half of making a movie was the market you did after filming was completed.
But at the end of the day... People remember Cheers and Cosby Show much more vividly than The Critic or Joey.
Hah. That's a fun time capsule. They're whining about 1.4 million per episode, which just seems so quaint now. the figures going around are 6 mill per episode in season 1 of Stranger Things and 30 mill per episode in season four. Even adjusted for inflation Quantum Leap wouldn't know what to do with that much money.