The Hollywood Reporter published what amounts to a eulogy for the television industry we thought we knew, and the specifics are devastating: fully staffed writers rooms are luxuries now, not standard practice. Series regulars are being replaced with episode-by-episode guest stars. Real sets are giving way to green screens. Production value is becoming negotiable.

We spent a decade celebrating Peak TV—that glorious era when prestige was everywhere, budgets were unlimited, and every network and streamer was desperate to find the next Game of Thrones. Turns out we were watching a bubble inflate in real time.

The model was always unsustainable. Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and the rest built their streaming services by essentially lighting money on fire to buy subscriber growth. Wall Street tolerated it as long as user numbers went up. Then Wall Street stopped tolerating it, and suddenly everyone discovered that streaming economics are brutally unforgiving.

Here's what that means in practice: writers rooms that used to have 12-15 people now have four. Shows that used to employ dozens of recurring actors now have a core cast of five and everyone else is day-rate. Standing sets get torn down between seasons because storage is expensive. Location shooting gets replaced with virtual production because moving a crew costs money.

The result is television that looks like television but feels cheaper in ways you can't quite articulate. Fewer storylines because there aren't enough writers to service them. Less character development because there aren't enough episodes. Smaller worlds because there isn't budget for extras.

The cruel irony is that this is happening precisely when television had figured out how to be genuinely great. The last decade produced some of the best visual storytelling in entertainment history. Shows like Succession, The Bear, The Last of Us—these weren't just good TV, they were genuinely excellent art.

But art requires investment, and investment requires either faith or stupidity. The streamers had stupidity—they threw money at everything hoping something would stick. Now they've discovered religion in the form of cost containment, and the industry is contracting faster than it expanded.