Peak TV & Peak Beer

If you aren’t sure what “peak TV” means then this may help: “When (John) Landgraf said ‘peak TV,’ he was trying to name a problem. Nearly 400 original series aired in 2015, and that number will get higher in 2016. From Landgraf’s perspective, this volume is keeping audiences from finding good series they would enjoy, and this is unsustainable on the network end of things. But peak TV has caught on as a description more than as a warning and that’s because it’s perfectly expressive. There is an insane amount of good television out there, and like Everest (and far lesser climbs), it can be genuinely overwhelming.”

Kind of like standing in the beer aisle at a liquor store. Or facing the taps at Flying Saucer.

Last week Jeff Alworth wrote about “The Importance of Self-Distribution Laws” to small breweries, so ultimately the number of choices beer drinkers have. This either provides context for a 21-tweet explanation of why “TV is so good and movies aren’t” or vice versa.

The Storify version (update: there was a link, but it no longer works) of Matthew Stoller’s analysis is easy to follow. But if you don’t want to bother you should still find these three points relevant to beer:

8. Part of this is an artificial boom of investment as the internet TV land grab happens. There will be a shake out.

19. It’s a simple dynamic. Concentrated industries see big winners, little innovation, lots of lowest common denominator. Aka. The Avengers

20. Competitive decentralized industries see lots of weird innovation and interesting stuff emerge. Hence Peak TV.