Over the past 20 years, American television entered a Golden Age. Before the turn of the millennium, most TV shows followed familiar patterns: crime shows and situational comedies—also known as sitcoms—consisted of self-contained episodes with little plot development through a season or the run of the show.
Then, in 1999, a network called HBO took a huge risk by investing $2 million per episode in The Sopranos, a show that broke with the familiar pattern of television productions. The Sopranos invested in character development and took its time to tell a compelling story. It was a massive success that showed that audiences were willing to sit through drawn-out shows as long as they were good. HBO reproduced that early success with Six Feet Under and The Wire.
As the years passed, other networks such as AMC and FX got on the bandwagon of high-quality, high-cost productions. The streaming giant Netflix then began producing binge-worthy television. With a per-episode cost of $15 million, the last season of Game of Thrones held the record as the most expensive ever produced. This was later dwarfed by Disney and Marvel TV spin-offs of movies, with a cost upwards of $25 million per episode.
High-quality, high-cost television is built on reruns and on-demand services like Netflix. It means the show has an extremely long shelf-life.