Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a program for people who like understanding how things work and how to make them work better.

More than they like getting into bar fights over politics.

I'm your host, Andrew Heek. And I don't think we realize just how

many bad creative decisions are really responses to economic realities.

To begin with, I think it's pretty obvious that television is way better now

than when I was a kid.

Shows like Game of Thrones, Battlestar Galactica, succession, they're all wonderfully

built upon developments from prior episodes, sometimes for years. It's really good storytelling.

And it's not that our attention spans have expanded or

our writers are either more talented or have decided to do less cocaine it's

because we have streaming services.

When I was a kid, you could only watch a given television show by tuning in at a particular time.

You had to be butt-in seat on couch at 7 PM on Thursday, on Thursday or you would miss news radio. You could get around that

with the VCR but I don't think people today quite appreciate just how clunky and

difficult most of those devilish toasters were.

As a child, I thought our VCR was a toaster we stored under our TV for my dad to yell at.

And even if you bested the electric devil slot,

you still had to remember to actually sit down and program the thing

to record the thing when you were gone.

Usually we didn't.

As a result, every TV show that went out on the airwaves was a procedural.

It was purposely designed to be self-encompassing so that if a viewer missed out on an episode or two, they could plug right back in and the next one with minimal confusion.

...