This is a uniquely confusing moment in the history of the small screen.

The Hollywood strikes, one of which has finally ended, haven’t just been about the next contract (or the fall TV season). They’re also part of an existential fight over what television’s next iteration will be.

The battle is being fought against the backdrop of two seismic shifts: the much-discussed decline of prestige television and the beginning of the end of television’s disruption by streaming services. The former has arguably been underway for years, while the latter exploded into full view in recent months, as streamers panicked over profitability and the deluge of new content dried up. Together, they are poised to radically alter the television landscape.

That landscape has already, of course, been altered. If prestige shows such as “Breaking Bad” and “The Sopranos” expanded our understanding of what the medium was capable of, streamers spent the past decade supercharging the industry’s experimental streak. The antihero dramas were followed by a wave of great, quirky shows that were freed from the constraints of appealing to mainstream audiences. This proliferation of boutique TV wasn’t limited to streaming — HBO and FX were major innovators, too — but was driven by disrupters greenlighting weird, exciting ad-free content in a race to acquire new subscribers. It was a TV gold rush, and one broadcast television struggled to keep up with.

That was Peak TV — a term first coined by FX’s John Landgraf in 2015 to describe a problem: too many TV shows. That was back when 400 or so scripted shows aired in a year. Last year, which will probably be the literal peak of television production, there were 599.

Now television’s boom cycle has gone bust, and Peak TV is winding down, like prestige TV did before it. There are hints of what might come after. The contraction now in progress suggests (given the kinds of projects being canceled) that streamers are embracing more conservative, less experimental programming even as they look for the next “Game of Thrones.” There will probably be more revivals. More reboots. And, if some executives have their way, a heavier reliance on formulas and algorithms, perhaps assisted by new technologies such as artificial intelligence.

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But the wild, weedy overgrowth of the Peak TV era is yielding fruit, too. Ambitious stuff, some so weird and convention-averse that it fails, some so ethically fraught that watching it work disturbs as much as it thrills. Antiheroes are over. So are dramedies. So, perhaps, are boundary-pushing comedy specials, which may have crested with Bo Burnham’s “Inside” and Jerrod Carmichael’s “Rothaniel.” But there’s still experimental energy, and it’s popping up through the cracks even as broadcast television languishes and streamers, panicked by losses, scramble to salvage pieces of the TV model they broke.

I think of this latest wave, emerging in the post-apocalyptic aftermath of the Great Television Disruption, as Post-TV.

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Whereas Peak TV was epitomized by the dramedy — a poignant compromise of a genre, so nuanced it sometimes lapsed into tepid indeterminacy — Post-TV takes big, definitive swings. If Peak TV centered marginalized perspectives to explore how they coexist with and despite racism and misogyny, Post-TV goes further, sometimes all but forgetting that a dominant culture exists. If Peak TV had winky, self-referential reality shows, Post-TV supercharges the frame and turns the camera on the creators.

With luck, television’s next era will retain something of the innovation made possible by this one. Without it, and if the worst tendencies animating the fight between the unions and the studios prevail, television might face a future shaped more by AI and ChatGPT than by the writers, actors and creators who made TV seem capable of something like high art.

The great streaming explosion — and implosion

Peak TV quickly got co-opted, as so many useful terms are, to describe something slightly different: a stunning proliferation of great, idiosyncratic shows that got to exist because there was so much output. Thanks to the creative leeway many streamers offered, a lot of very beautiful series got made, among them “Catastrophe,” “Transparent,” “Fleabag,” “The Leftovers,” “Reservation Dogs” and “Atlanta.” For viewers, this was pretty amazing: no ads, cheap subscriptions and endless offerings on demand, many of them good to great. An enormous range of aesthetic sensibilities was suddenly being catered to. There was a sense of creative and consumer plenty — the same sense that’s not so gradually slipping away.

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Streaming services have spent the past decade trying to persuade consumers to abandon cable and broadcast television — to become cord-cutters — on the understanding that they’d revolutionized the model and were committed, in the long term, to offering better, more ambitious fare for a lower cost. Now it looks as though they might instead embrace a counterintuitive but predictable retrogression. Their victory over broadcast television now near-complete, many seem poised to turn streaming into a less pleasant user experience that replicates some of the more annoying aspects of cable and broadcast TV — complete with ads, fewer choices, rising prices and increasingly bland offerings pitched to a theoretical mainstream audience.

In 2022, it was reported that streaming, which had for years been nipping at the heels of broadcast television and cable, finally drew a higher viewership share than both, in the same month, for the first time. Yet Netflix lost more subscribers than it signed on in the first quarter of last year, which precipitated an industry-wide panic compounded by streaming losses at Paramount, Disney and NBCUniversal (amounting to more than $8.3 billion). These losses weren’t exactly new; Disney’s streaming service had lost $630 million just the year before. What changed was the Wall Street consensus on how tolerable those losses were and why they were happening.

The pivot was abrupt. Orders for new shows plummeted. Cancellations of existing series soared. Deals with established creators fell through. There were layoffs. The market for new shows dried up, and a scarcity mind-set materialized overnight in an industry that had, for more than a decade, been buying like crazy and handing out deals right and left.

‘Succession’ and the end of prestige TV

Under the circumstances, it seems only right that “Succession,” the drama about ultrarich siblings squabbling for control of their dad’s media empire, ended just before the strikes began. The show is widely cited as prestige television’s last gasp.

There was a belatedness to “Succession” that made its reception strangely nostalgic. It felt like a product from a slightly earlier time, and you could almost hear people missing — in advance — the feeling of talking about a show like this. The nostalgia wasn’t just for good television with snappy dialogue; it was also for the kind of deeply engaged TV chatter that used to be everywhere. Each episode of “Succession” was received as an event at a moment when it was becoming clear that occasions of this sort would be rare going forward.

The way we used to talk about TV, in person and online, was a golden age unto itself. It was moving to see folks processing art and pleasure and plot, jointly and sociably developing something like a collective critical apparatus. And to see television changing in response — talking back to its fans and critics, sometimes directly. Fans will always exist, but most of the forums for that kind of dedicated, obsessive TV talk (including Twitter and the A.V. Club) have decayed, almost past recognition, if they’re even still around. An entire invisible apparatus that enabled the ascent of television to something like art (or at least film) is collapsing.

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“Succession’s” audience was relatively small. But facing extinction, too, are the Big Shows, such as “Game of Thrones.” Puny though these audiences were compared with the sitcoms of the past, they felt like juggernauts. The sense of occasion they provided had value, even if the shows sometimes didn’t. We live in a time when any given person’s reality is significantly shaped by the inputs their personalized algorithms serve up, and although the Big Shows certainly couldn’t get Americans to agree on what’s real, there was some comfort in knowing that a big slice of the country could companionably occupy a shared unreality, at least for the space of an episode.

Studios have spent fortunes on would-be Big Shows, but no comparable phenomenon has surfaced. We do, admittedly, still have “House of the Dragon,” the “Game of Thrones” prequel, which did great numbers. But there’s something just a little … unhealthy about that, isn’t there? Not just derivative, but symptomatic of an enormous archive of properties built to feed off established fan bases. I’d cheekily call this “Zombie TV” if there weren’t six spinoffs of “The Walking Dead.” (Along with three “Dexter” spinoffs, four “Yellowstone” offshoots and four variants on “Billions.”)

Some genuinely great stuff has come out of this trend. “Better Call Saul” was as good as “Breaking Bad,” and “Andor” was superior to almost everything in the Star Wars universe. If “Velma” crashed and burned as a wearisomely self-referential spinoff of “Scooby-Doo,” “Wednesday” more than made up for it by becoming one of Netflix’s most-watched shows this year.

Yet the sheer abundance of recyclings and revivals seems to signal a downturn. “The Conners” is heading into its sixth season on ABC, “And Just Like That…” just got renewed for a third, “Night Court” and “That ’90s Show” for a second, while “Weeds” and “Nurse Jackie” prepare to come back. The TV landscape feels like it’s haunted by TV ghosts. Timothy Olyphant resurrected Raylan Givens this year in “Justified: City Primeval,” and this fall will mark the return of “Frasier,” 30 years after that spinoff — among the most successful in television history — first premiered. If that’s not nostalgic enough, it’ll be set back in Boston, and the first two episodes will be directed by James Burrows, who co-created “Cheers.”

Kathy Bates might be fantastic in the new “Matlock.” I’m hopeful her undeniable greatness will be transformative. But let’s face it: A lot of this year’s original scripted television has been pleasant and predictable, a return to tried-and-true formulas. “Poker Face” is no “Russian Doll.” It isn’t groundbreaking or transcendent. It isn’t even particularly ambitious, but it’s exactly what you’d want from Rian Johnson and Natasha Lyonne. “Hijack,” likewise, is an admirably predictable thriller that lets you relax into Idris Elba’s charisma. “The Night Agent” is a better show, but workmanlike: a straightforward political thriller from beginning to end. “The Diplomat” is fun in an algorithmically informed sort of way, more “The West Wing” than “The Americans,” with just a hint of the kind of romance I associate with period dramas.

These are all entertaining shows. They are also (sometimes pleasingly) formulaic.

The Post-TV era

Ambitious TV isn’t dead. If anything, its experiments are getting even more bold, pointed, self-referential. A subset of shows is emerging that runs on the kind of creative profligacy that defined these past few years in television but that can also only exist in its wake.

A decade spent running hundreds of stories through a public addicted to discussing things online does things to consumers and creators. Audiences became incredibly sophisticated; “Westworld” fan forums, for example, correctly guessed several plot twists in the fabulous puzzle box of a first season, causing writers to (sometimes disastrously) redraft the show. A spiraling feedback loop between savvy viewers and producers doesn’t just stop, so a strange bifurcation is underway: Even as streamers scurry back to tested formulas, there’s still a discernible avant-garde dedicated to going a little further than Peak TV ever did.

The Peak TV era burned through the burden of representation (usually a first-wave challenge), got past the attendant clichés and found something interesting and chewy on the other side. Much of it remained corrective in spirit, however; if a show’s protagonists belonged to a marginalized group, for example, there was a tendency to foreground the ways the oppressive dominant culture drove the conflict.

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This new wave sources its conflicts differently, sometimes from entirely within a community, or a genre. I’m thinking of masterpieces such as “Beef,” Lee Sung Jin’s stunning, hilarious, brutally specific exploration of a particular kind of Southern Californian, intra-Asian American rage that doesn’t find Whiteness (for example) interesting enough to define itself against. Or “Mrs. Davis,” a Pynchon-esque adventure about the Holy Grail and motherhood that has revolutionized my understanding of what television can do. (Damon Lindelof, one of the co-creators of “Mrs. Davis,” stands out as a formidable figure in television, one who has not just survived but also shaped all the eras discussed here.)

Few such shows will be perfect, though those two come close. “Swarm,” Janine Nabers and Donald Glover’s horror comedy for Prime Video, stars Dominique Fishback as a mild-mannered, hungry and totally ruthless devotee who literally slays on behalf of the singer she idolizes. As a broadside against fan culture, the series falls a little flat, but Fishback’s Dre is unforgettable: spectacularly awkward, believable, specific. “Yellowjackets,” the show about a high school girls’ soccer team stranded after a plane crash, is notable for how carefully it excludes “the patriarchy” from its frame. In fact, the frame — which notoriously causes the protagonists to start eating their teammates — was chosen not just because it would facilitate the cannibal plot but also because it would allow a story about conflict between very flawed women to exist without those distorting effects. “We didn’t want it to be about being women in a man’s world,” one of the showrunners, Ashley Lyle, told the New York Times Magazine.

A second, perhaps related epiphenomenon of Peak TV has been a crop of experimental, reality-distorting shows making interesting use of the conventions of reality TV. Simultaneously hampered and supercharged by self-knowledge, some of these shows have been extraordinary. They have wrecked expectations.

One example is “Jury Duty,” the finely calibrated, improvised breakout hit on Freevee that pranked a man by making him think he was a juror in an actual trial when everyone concerned, including the judge, was an actor. It became a massive hit on TikTok, where the target’s unflagging decency, despite all that was thrown at him, made him famous and beloved. The series also earned James Marsden an Emmy nomination for playing a vacuous version of himself.

“Jury Duty” forms part of an ethically fraught but addictive emerging genre — “semi-reality TV,” maybe? — that suggests audiences might be ready for reality TV to get, oh, prestigious. Interested in questions of authorship. Absorbed in the thorny problem of its own production. The genre includes Nathan Fielder’s “The Rehearsal” on HBO, which began as a reality show in which Fielder offered people needlessly accurate reproductions of real-life situations so they could rehearse difficult situations in advance, and became something much stranger. It also includes Jason Woliner’s “Paul T. Goldman,” a Peacock meta-documentary based on a deluded man’s self-published memoir about the end of his marriage that exposes his hubris and gullibility, even as he directs humiliating reenactments of his life. These shows usually end up breaking the fourth wall to include their actual creators, often in unflattering ways. They flirt with control and indict and enhance the television definition of “reality.”

Streaming after the flood

The story of emergent microgenres is important. But the bigger story, the one that could fundamentally transform the industry, is the sort of existential war in progress over whether programming in the future will remain a human concern, with actors and writers, or become mostly (or indeed purely) algorithmic.

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That’s an extreme formulation. But long before they started panicking over profits, studios were doing body scans of extras so as to have their digital likenesses and using available technology to “resurrect” deceased actors. The Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists strikes were the product of a climate where content producers desperate to cut costs are quite likely to explore how much they can rely on new technologies such as AI and ChatGPT instead of (for example) writers.

We could, at least in theory, go from Peak TV, a moment known for the free rein it gave creatives, to one in which algorithms effectively supplant them.

For now, at least, the creators are fighting back, and not just on the picket lines. And if Post-TV describes shows still pursuing bold experiments in a climate that doesn’t particularly encourage them, some older properties might make the cut, too. “Black Mirror,” for instance, a Netflix show that peaked back when streamers were on the rise, returned this year with an aggressive revision of its usual brand. Several episodes replaced its trademark nightmarish technofuturism with pure, supernatural horror.

But the tech dystopias weren’t entirely absent: In the first episode of its most recent season, “Black Mirror” made the villain a Netflix stand-in armed with a powerful, identity-stealing algorithm. That episode, “Joan Is Awful,” is a fun bit of human pluck.

But it feels a little like an entry in the annals of “semi-reality TV” that Netflix allowed it.

correction

A previous version of this article incorrectly said Netflix lost more subscribers than it signed on in 2022; it lost more subscribers than it signed on in the first quarter of 2022. The article has been corrected.

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