For people who cover TV for a living, handling the absence of Game of Thrones this year was like getting used to a crater in the front yard. (The show’s final episodes were split into two seasons; 2017 saw the first half, and 2019 will see the second.) Thrones is a tentpole show—something that unites critics, fans, and even casual watchers under the same umbrella. My industry has built an entire business model around explaining, recapping, or simply just enjoying these kinds of shows, a lineage that’s also included Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica, and The Wire. You may notice, though, that none of those examples are airing anymore. And while Game of Thrones is probably the biggest tentpole of all, it also might be the last tentpole.

Blame that oft-invoked phrase “Peak TV”—or perhaps “Too Much TV.” There are certainly hundreds more scripted shows available right now than ever before, in total indifference to the limited number of hours I can shove content into my eyeballs. My colleague Joy Press’s survey of the coming streaming wars breaks down precisely how critical the situation is getting; read it, but keep a brown paper bag nearby in case you need to hyperventilate. (Maybe that’s just me.)

And that’s just the tip of the TV iceberg. There are also vast libraries of unscripted content—cooking shows, reality competitions, travel programs, and the really, really big subsection of television that is professional sports. There’s 24-hour news—several different versions of it, in fact. There are content libraries that are entirely dedicated to films (or there were: R.I.P., FilmStruck). And, of course, there are the thousands (millions!) of hours of usually amateur but often extremely entertaining video from users on platforms like YouTube, Twitch, and Instagram.

Typically, the main difference between the TV-that-was and the TV-that-is is framed as a quantifiable one: the new TV options cost less than the old ones (for now). The new TV options also offer more things to watch.

But really, the issue is how these voluminous options are structured and accessed. To put it another way: there are a lot of books in the world, but we’re not all having panic attacks every time we walk into a Barnes & Noble. It might be terrifying, though, if the books were all taken off the shelves, jumbled into various featureless bins, and carted off to different buildings that all cost different amounts of money to enter. That is what’s been happening to TV, as we’ve progressed from three rinky-dink broadcast channels to literally countless avenues for content.

As a result, searching for TV has become a huge part of the viewing experience—and watching has gone from a passive to an active pursuit. Most of us, most of the time, choose to watch a specific title—at a time and pace we also decide. Due to sheer volume (and, to be honest, mediocre in-app discovery), “just browsing” is an overwhelming experience, punctuated by knowledge that you could scroll through a database forever without truly reaching the end.

In some ways, this is a good thing. The mindless drone of TV as background noise is one of the reasons the medium was once christened “the idiot box”; the era of conscious viewing spurred the resurgence of TV as a critically lauded medium. That’s fun for everyone—especially people like me, who make a living telling other people what they should watch next.

But as this viewing model has become the norm—as distribution has increasingly taken the form of a database or library rather than a channel or stream—it’s significantly reduced the number of shows that everyone’s watching at approximately the same time. (If you look at same-day ratings, you’ll see just how catastrophic this reduction has been.) And when whole seasons drop all at once, it’s rare for any premiere to get more than a week of media coverage. It’s even harder for any of those debuts to build up the word-of-mouth head of steam necessary to excite viewers at home. Netflix has worked very hard to perfect its algorithms, which target specific “taste clusters” of users. But based on how much money Netflix and Amazon pour into P.R. campaigns for their shows—including a huge injection of cash into awards P.R., in particular—it seems that these streaming giants have found even their formulas have limitations.