A Record High of 455 Scripted TV Shows Aired in 2016 (vulture.com)

In case you wanted to ground your abstract TV FOMO in hard numbers, FX has data on the fact that, yes, there really is too much TV. An anonymous reader shares a report: The network, whose CEO John Landgraf coined the idea of "peak TV," has released its unofficial tally of the number of shows on TV, finding that 455 different scripted television series from broadcast, cable, and streaming sources aired in the last year. That's an 8 percent increase from last year, when 421 shows aired on TV; a 71 percent increase from 2011, when a mere 266 shows were on TV; and a 137 percent increase from 2006, when there were 192 shows on TV.

Comments

Too much TV, yeah right

[OzPeter]

Saying that there is too much TV implies that I should be trying to watch every show on TV. But if different segments of the population watch different types of shows then who cares how many shows there are on TV? That's simply called having a choice.

Unless of course you mean all those "reality" shows that have* to die.

* note that my list of shows that have to die may differ from other peoples lists. But here on /. I'm pretty sure that I can safely say that every damn ghost hunter/big foot hunter/alien hunter etc reality show needs to die a painful death.

Re:Too much TV, yeah right

[totallyarb]

"That's how all shows are going to be once the network model fully dissolves."

Couldn't agree more. I realised the other day that roughly 50% of the "shows" I regularly watch these days are my YouTube subscriptions. And most of the rest are on Netflix. The era of running "TV channels" is all but over; the concept of "primetime" is on the way out too. Now it's all about content producers going directly to their target audience, who watch as and when it suits them.

Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that *broadcasting* is dead. Rather than one single signal going out to millions of people, we have millions of individual signals, which may or may not have the same content. And of course that's going to encourage diversity.