This is Everything Else, the FT Culture Podcast.

I'm Grizalda and this week is devoted to TV, what we watch, how we watch it, and why it matters.

I'll be joined by two of our TV writers, India Ross and Harriet Fitch Little, to discuss the so-called golden age of television, how it evolved from Mad Men and The Wire to Atlanta and Insecure, and what the future holds, now that the likes of Facebook are getting in on the act.

After that, I'll speak to Joy Press, the former culture editor of the LA Times, who's just written a book called Stealing the Show, How Women Are Revolutionising Television.

Harry and India, thanks for coming in.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, it's very nice to be here.

India, I'm going to start with you.

So we're talking about TV's golden age.

What exactly does that mean? Well, golden age is a super contentious term and we could argue

all day long as to whether this constitutes won and what the kind of chronology was. But

for the purposes of argument, let's just say that it is widely agreed about 15 or 20 years ago, TV

underwent this pretty radical creative leap where it's widely perceived that it was elevated

from quote unquote entertainment to an art form that was like worthy of our attention and

worthy of examination in the manner of other art forms like, you know, literature,

whatever. And it's sort of, again, like widely agreed, although arguably began with this show

The Sopranos, which was created by David Chase and focused on this mob man and his family

living in suburban New Jersey. Basically, the break of this show is that it was able to tell a narrative over a long

arc, whereas like pre-Golden Age TV had been, like, constrained by the economics of broadcasting,

so shows were required to appeal to an enormous number of people, and they also had to exist

as, like, self-contained units for the purposes of syndication. So episodes had to

stand alone. And you were basically totally constrained in what you could do with TV in that era.

...