Almost all modern TV series are just a movie spread out over entire TV seasons. They are filled with nothing but teasers and cliff hangers in order to artificially stimulate intrigue and extend the relatively thin plots. I can barely imagine something more boring than modern streaming TV series. They also tend to devolve into characters forming romantic relationships with each other, because there's usually nothing else to do with a small and finite character set once the initial ideas are exhausted.
Movies are far deeper because they try to focus on a coherent story and character development. The incentives for TV series are all wrong aside from episodic comedies and docuseries.
The trends of TV have more to do with attention span, addiction, marketing/advertising, etc. than it being a supposedly more wanted format for actual content reasons.
I'm sorry, but I think this is an incredibly reductive take on television.
You could make all the same arguments about novels vs. short stories. The fact is that they're both related forms of art which take different approaches to developing narratives.
> Movies are far deeper because they try to focus on a coherent story and character development. The incentives for TV series are all wrong aside from episodic comedies and docuseries.
Here you seem to be arguing that movies, as a form, are superior (or perhaps that TV can't practically compete with film because the incentives are wrong, so that in practice, films are higher quality than TV).
I wasn't making an argument about the potential of the form though, merely about what viewers want. It should go without saying that in long-form writing you have more of an ability to develop characters, stories, and plot arcs than in short-form writing. These more fully developed characters, stories, and plot arcs are more compelling to readers/viewers.
Historically, this is why we've rarely seen short stories achieve the same level of commercial success as the successful novels, and now that we have the internet, the barriers[1] to television asserting the same dominance over videographic media have been torn down.
edit: And to be clear, I also disagree that in practice, television (as produced) is inferior to film (as produced). Of course there is plenty of filler and contrived drama in television (this has always been the case in film too), but we're in a renaissance of television shows which are incredibly tightly written and even dense, from a storytelling perspective.
[1]: namely, that you couldn't run a movie/episodes for 10+ hours on television, due to the complexity around scheduling slots, so you'd have to break it up, leading to confusion and fragmentation of understanding among the viewership
My picks for "best TV of the last decade": Better Call Saul, Atlanta, High Maintenance, Maniac, Severance, Game of Thrones (S1-5 only), Undone, and The Expanse. Maybe an honourable mention to Black Mirror, Bojack Horseman, and Silicon Valley.
I have some others I'd personally rate up there, but which are probably more niche (not as widely appealing).
I have actually seen some of those, including two (Silicon Valley and Game of Thrones) to fruition. Those two are actually excellent examples of what I am talking about, and you even called it out by cutting off the later seasons of Game of Thrones.
The types of TV series that are not episodic seem to always devolve in this way towards worse quality and inter-character romantic relationships, not to mention having cliff hangers at the end of every episode. It's a tension and resolve tactic that gets pretty annoying.
Black Mirrors is just a bunch of unrelated short stories which aren't that great compared to a movie.
Bojack Horseman is pretty good indeed, but mostly because it's a comedy. The drama isn't very interesting.
I've heard that a character dies in every Game of Thrones episode, which means some characters will lack depth since they won't have the time required to develop it.
Movies are far deeper because they try to focus on a coherent story and character development. The incentives for TV series are all wrong aside from episodic comedies and docuseries.
The trends of TV have more to do with attention span, addiction, marketing/advertising, etc. than it being a supposedly more wanted format for actual content reasons.