| Every so often, industry incentives shift and make room for a cavalcade of groundbreaking art. But the default setting is appealing to the masses.  Illustration by Ben Wiseman For a while there, we were told that television had replaced literature as the story engine of our age—with the likes of Tony Soprano and Don Draper filling the antihero roles of the newfangled Great American Novel. Now when you open the home screen of Max (formerly HBO Max, and before that HBO Go, and so on) you are likely to see a variety of not-so-prestige offerings—cooking shows, reality TV, old sitcom reruns. New TV, in short, looks a lot like old TV. In a vivid and illuminating essay in this week’s issue, Michael Schulman chronicles how television went from being low rent to high art, and now, perhaps, back low again. “Many streamers, including Netflix, are now launching ad-supported tiers,” he writes, “meaning that they’ll be answerable to the same sponsors that propped up the networks. We’ve come full circle.” If we truly are leaving a golden age of the medium, just how golden was it really? What stories were being ignored so that others could shine? And, amid the current gloom, might a new vision of TV emerge? Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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