Hollywood made 14% fewer shows in 2023, marking the end of Peak TV

It's official: Peak TV has reached its peak.

Last year, 516 scripted television series aired or streamed in the United States, a 14 percent decline from 2022, the FX cable network said Friday. That was only the second decline in at least 15 years, and the largest, according to FX's research.

The total is the most definitive evidence of a slowdown that executives have been predicting for at least a year. The rise of television – both in terms of the number of shows and the quality of programming – has brought television to the forefront of American culture over the past decade.

But orders for shows from the major studios began to drop precipitously in mid-2022, around the time Wall Street soured on entertainment companies' cost-free strategy to create new series.

Last year's strikes by screenwriters and actors — the first time since 1960 that both unions acted simultaneously, halting script production for months — also delayed the release of new shows. The strikes wiped out the entire fall lineup for scripted network TV, and the fallout will likely be felt in 2024.

The total of 516 was the lowest since a decline in 2020, when the pandemic disrupted productions and television lineups worldwide. Still, even with the decline, last year's figure ranked fourth since FX started keeping records (2022, 2021 and 2019 had more), giving viewers plenty of options but also potentially overwhelming them.

In 2009, all 210 scripted programs aired on network and cable television in the United States, a small increase from years at the start of the decade, according to FX.

That number rose steadily in subsequent years, and then sharply after Netflix started making original series in 2012. In 2015, there were 422 scripted shows. That prompted John Landgraf, an FX executive, to coin the term “Peak TV,” which industry insiders quickly adopted to describe the streaming television era.

In 2022, there were 600 scripted shows (up from a previous estimate of 599), which is expected to be the peak.

In addition to the fact that virtually every studio has slowed investments in creating new television shows, several media companies have stopped investing in scripted series. Quibi came and went. Google and Facebook invested aggressively in traditional scripted television about five years ago, but both have essentially exited. The broadcast networks are producing fewer scripted programs, as are many cable networks such as USA, TBS and Comedy Central.

Executives believe the number of shows will continue to decline this year.