How Television Got to be so Damn Good

“Oh, I don’t watch television.” Remember when your pretentious friends used to say that? You don’t hear it so much these days. That’s partially due to the accessibility of TV content on different platforms--you don’t literally have to watch TV now to watch a whole lot of TV. But, more to the point, anyone who would make such a proclamation now would sound like a fool because TV has become the seat of entertainment excellence. In fact, we’ve lived through a renaissance that saw the most groundbreaking dramas in the history of television rolling out one after another in the last 15 years or so. TV critic Alan Sepinwall tells the story of how a dozen of these shows--we’re talking everything from Oz to The Wire to 24 to Breaking Bad--came to be in his new self-published book The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever.