A Surplus of Good TV? Try Depression Economics

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[Commentary] Eighty years ago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt taught us what to do when confronted by a surplus of something: Pay people not to make any more of it. And what we have a surplus of right now is good television.

There have never been more good TV shows available — perfectly edible series, mini-series and one-shots, tasty and in many cases nutritious — but we can’t choke them down as fast as they’re being produced. We need a Television Adjustment Act of 2013. Entire shows are going unseen by virtually everyone, though they’re worth watching and hang on for several seasons: “Fringe,” “The Big C,” “Happy Endings.” It would be hard to shower more acclaim on AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” but even its heavily promoted final-season premiere drew fewer than six million viewers. That means that roughly 310 million residents were not watching. We can pare the infants and toddlers from that group, since the show is about a meth manufacturer, but that still leaves a quarter-billion people who now have yet another series that they really, really plan to catch up on as soon as they have a spare 62 hours to binge-watch. The DVR hasn’t been around that long, but whose isn’t already full of shows that someone in the household fully intends to watch but never does?


A Surplus of Good TV? Try Depression Economics