How did OTT shows we once loved become OTT shows we can barely finish?

Is TV bad now or are we just buried under an avalanche of content no one actually wants to watch? Between bloated franchises, algorithm-led OTT shows and prestige fatigue, the small screen feels smaller than ever.

My recent bout of rage/frustration/resigned acceptance was prompted by the agonising one-two punch of Squid Game’s final season and the fourth instalment of The Bear. Unlike some, I actually really enjoyed the former’s sometimes slow-burning second season, but its third? It clumsily kills off the most interesting players early on, but without much emotional impact or pay-off; features head-scratching, soap opera-esque twists which pay no heed to previous character development; feels weirdly slow and dull for a show about mass murder; uses a CGI baby that hurt my eyes; and then ends with Cate Blanchett kicking off Squid Game’s American spin-off. (Can someone please explain to me why the double Oscar winner was playing ddakji in Los Angeles?)

The games themselves and the eerie, childish set design remain impeccable, but the same sadly can’t be said for the show as a whole. How, I wondered, has this cultural phenomenon been reduced to this?

Then, I made the error of moving straight on to the new season of The Bear. Its quality was less of a shock, simply because season three was such a downer—a dragged out, pretentiously artsy endurance test with only one redeeming episode (the Tina-centric, Ayo Edebiri-directed ‘Napkins’, which is really brilliant).

Season four is perhaps more watchable overall, but has no perfect episodes (though the Syd-focused ‘Worms’ comes closest)—it has a handful of interesting moments, but is, mainly, a collection of very prolonged and not-particularly-engaging plot points playing out until we reach a (very predictable) conclusion. Will this restaurant survive? By the end, I honestly didn’t really care.

How did the show which gave us the family nightmare of ‘Fishes’, the happy tears of ‘Forks’, the dreamy Copenhagen travelogue of ‘Honeydew’, and the 20-minute panic attack of ‘Review’ in season one, end up in a place where it had me rolling my eyes and scrolling blankly through my phone as I watched it?

And it’s not just these two shows. The first half of this year has featured much more than its fair share of high-profile disappointments. There was The Last of Us’s second outing—after an explosive first season, the post-apocalyptic thriller returned with a decent first episode and a truly knockout second episode, an almost self-contained action epic, but then slowly plummeted into confused plotting and inertia.