So, sure, I think Landgraf has a fair point, to an extent, in that television, even crappy television, has high creative overhead: There’s a limited universe of people who have the skills to write and direct and produce shows, and given equipment and budgets and studio space and all of that, there must be a limit, some limit, to the good stuff that can be produced. But while that’s true in theory, I haven't really seen it play out in reality. And, not to take Landgraf too literally, but I don’t see why 370 or 400 or a similar number of scripted shows would necessarily be the peak here—not just because audiences prove willing, again and again, to pay for good content, and not just because the number of people clamoring for jobs in the entertainment industry is the stuff of cliche, but because the new definition of “television”—basically, just serialized video content—seems flexible enough to encompass many, many different types of shows, both costly and not.

Take the serialized Wet Hot American Summer reboot on Netflix, which was clearly filmed around its actors’ other commitments, and which wrote the meta-ness of that into its scripts. Take the fact that the Wet Hot reboot also spawned a documentary about its own making. “Television” is pretty much, at this point, “whatever consumers will watch,” and consumers are pretty permissive when it comes to things like production value. As long as something amuses/horrifies/intrigues/delights/distracts, we’ll at least give it a try. So while, sure, cable and streaming and all the new production outfits that have come on to the scene are going to change things, I don't really see why it would be a peak-and-decline situation. More like a slow evolution—an expansion of how we think about “television” as a medium.

The “real buzz” thing is interesting, too, I think, but not necessary for the reason Landgraf gives. Landgraf's is a very production-centric view, which makes sense given his job, but his definition of “buzz” seems to ignore the role that the Internet—a whole universe of people happy to recap and live-tweet and next-day-water-cooler and fan-fic the shows they watch and hate-watch and love and love to hate—plays in curating and introducing shows to new audiences. Hype may exist in a (somewhat) closed system, it’s true, even if the system, given the audience of potential Internet-streamers, is huge. To me, though, the most interesting questions here are about the social conventions that have yet to be fully shaped, and that will in turn shape that hype. What's the statute of limitations on spoiling, for example—a day? A week? A month? A year? How do you talk about TV when TV is no longer, strictly, “television”? There’s a great Key & Peele sketch that gets into that, featuring a dinner party where literally nothing can be talked about because everything will be a spoiler to someone. And it definitely does remain to be seen what television will become once it’s taken, for the most part, out of time.