Hi, my name is Willie Staley, and I'm a story editor for the New York Times magazine.

This week's Sunday Reed is an article I wrote for the magazine.

It originated out of a hunch, when I had about television.

The TV shows these days are generally bad, or they're not as good as they used to be at least to me

that there's been this noticeable degradation in quality I'd bring this up at our magazine's ideas meetings.

Maybe I sounded a little like a crank, but it was a fixation of mine that was bothering me for years.

There would be these shows that everyone loved and everyone wrote about and

I'd watch them just mystified and I like TV. Gone was the era defined by these

prestige series like the Sopranos, Madman, or Breaking Bad.

Instead, they've been replaced with abundance, seemingly limitless libraries of content that

you can passively put on in the background.

And it seemed like a moment to step back and say, time out.

How did we get here?

For a long time, this is pretty impossible to answer, because streaming services are famously protective of their viewership data.

There wasn't really a way to tell if anything on streaming was a bona fide hit in viewer numbers.

In most cases, not even the showrunners or writers,

the people making these things knew.

But last year, that changed. Netflix, the streaming giant and market leader, started releasing its data.

The data came in a spreadsheet, thousands of rows long,

with the shows arranged for most watched to least.

It covered 280 million subscribers across 190 countries.

It was honestly fascinating.

...