[COLUMN] The Sympathizer Feels Like a Farewell to Prestige Peak TV | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

The Sympathizer launched on HBO this weekend. It’s very good, a highlight in what has been – to date – a tremendous year for television.

The Sympathizer is adapted from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. It is overseen by legendary South Korean director Park Chan-wook, regarded as one of the best filmmakers working today. It has an impressive cast, led by Hoa Xuande and featuring Sandra Oh, David Duchovny, and John Cho, but it also includes Oscar-winner Robert Downey Jr. playing five characters in a scene-stealing supporting performance that seems sure to win him an Emmy.

It’s a thorny, complex, and ambitious work. It deals with big themes and ideas, from immigrant identity to Hollywood’s complicated relationship to South East Asia. It is a lavish production, with Robert Downey Jr. reportedly pocketing at least $2m per episode for his work on the series. Even allowing for generous subsidies, the show’s location shooting in Thailand couldn’t have come cheap. The series had an “intense six-month shoot.”

Having seen the show in its entirety, The Sympathizer is worth every penny. It might have been possible to make a cheaper version of the show from a less exacting creator and featuring a more cost-effective star, but that heady cocktail is part of what makes the show stand out. The reviews seem to agree, with critics lauding it as “the best show this year” and a series that “matches executive producer Nguyen’s brilliant novel in both ambition and execution.”

The Sympathizer comes towards the end of what has been a fairly impressive run of prestige television miniseries: Shōgun on FX, Ripley on Netflix, The Curse on Showtime. It really does feel like the prestige and self-contained form has had something of a moment. Of course, the prestige miniseries has always been around. FX has turned itself into the master of the form. However, this concentration feels notable for a couple of reasons.

Most obviously, it exists in contrast to larger trends within the media industry in general and television in particular. In some ways, this feels like the last gasp of the format, the death rattle of what FX Chairman John Landgraf described in August 2015 as “Peak TV.” Landgraf was speaking in an era of unprecedented television production, and applying the same logic that operates in oil extraction. There would inevitably come a time when growth could not be sustained.

For years, the industry watched and waited to reach that tipping point. For the better part of a decade the number of television shows in production kept increasing: 409 original scripted shows in 2015, 455 in 2016, 487 in 2017, 495 in 2018, 532 in 2019. There was a minor dip to 493 in 2020, reflecting the impact of global pandemic on production, but the number climbed again to 559 in 2021 and then 599 in 2022. It was a boom time for television production.

There were a number of reasons for this. Companies like Amazon, Apple and Netflix were breaking into the market by brute force, with huge resources at the disposal of the two tech giants and competitive interest rates on loans for Netflix creating an arms race. Many of the legacy studios created streaming services of their own and felt the need to compete by filling those platforms with some new shiny (and expensive) content.

Since the turn of the millennium, HBO had enjoyed a particularly privileged position in the television market. They were a high-end provider, and they were willing to spend to back that up. As the company’s CEO, Casey Bloys, recalls of the 2010s, the company would just aggressively buy pitches to take them off the market, explaining, “There was a lot of development, a lot of buying, much more so than we ever would have been able to produce.”

This was an era where creative voices could get cushy deals at major companies. Phoebe Waller Bridge received a $60m deal from Amazon. Netflix poached Ryan Murphy from FX for $300m. In 2017, Shonda Rhimes signed a $100m four-year deal with Netflix, with the streamer offering her a “significant” raise to renew that deal when it lapsed. Some of these deals have led to hits like Bridgerton or Dahmer, but some have led to absolutely nothing.

This approach was always reckless. However, just as the streaming boom led to the production of financially-reckless-but-artistically-beautiful films like The Irishman, Okja or The Other Side of the Wind, this goldrush led to genuinely wonderful television. Barry Jenkins got to make The Underground Railroad for Amazon, Ava DuVernay oversaw When They See Us for Netflix and Issa Rae got to produce Insecure at HBO. Even if they weren’t blockbusters, these were great shows.

“Peak TV” was never sustainable. This happened quite quickly. In 2021, AT&T divested itself of Warner Bros., conceding defeat in its efforts to vertically integrate its internet service and streaming content. In April 2022, the market experienced “the Great Netflix Correction.” In August 2022, Warner Bros. decided it would be cheaper to just write off some of its films and television shows than it would be release them on stream.

Streaming services were no longer treated as markets of themselves. It wasn’t just the production of new shows that slowed. In May 2023, Disney pulled several of its own shows and movies from Disney+. In June 2023, Warner Bros. began selling items from its library to Netflix, effectively conceding that they could not profit on the company’s streaming service. In 2023, the number of original scripted shows dropped by 14%, marking the official end of the “Peak TV” era.

HBO was particularly affected by this shift, given Warner Discovery CEO David Zaslav’s mission to boost free cash flow at the company. To put it simply, HBO’s brand of quality didn’t seem as important to its parent company as it had in earlier years. In July 2022, HBO Max pulled back on kids and family programming. In April 2023, the company announced that it would be dropping HBO from the title of its streaming service, Max.

Priorities were shifting away from artistic sensibilities and self-contained properties. Jeff Bezos pivoted Amazon Prime towards blockbuster television, famously demanding that they “bring [him] Game of Thrones.” This led Amazon to commission the two most expensive television shows ever made, The Rings of Power and Citadel, effectively back-to-back. At Netflix, anonymous insiders noted that the “tendency to do anything to attract talent and giving them carte blanche is going away.”

HBO was also affected by this shift. For decades, the company had been known for gestating original and diverse programming with a strong emphasis on creative voices: David Chase’s The Sopranos, David Milch’s Deadwood, David Simon’s The Wire, Jesse Armstrong’s Succession. However, there has been a pivot. In September 2022, the current president of Warner Bros. Discovery International, Gerhard Zeiler, announced the company would “focus more [on] the development of franchises.”

This appears to be common to both HBO and Max. HBO is eagerly franchising Game of Thrones into House of the Dragon and a plethora of other spin-offs. Issa López’s Night Country was reworked as a fourth season of True Detective. On Max, And Just Like That spun out of Sex and the City. This year will see the launch of The Penguin spinning out of The Batman and Dune: Prophecy spinning out of Dune. There are plans for a blockbuster streaming re-adaptation of the Harry Potter franchise.

This is why The Sympathizer feels like one of the last gasps of a big, bold creator-centric model of television production. Indeed, the deal to produce the series was only finalized in June 2021, just two months after David Zaslav was announced to lead the merged Warner-Discovery. In her profile of Park Chan-wook, Jia Tolentino acknowledged that even “by the time of [her] visit to set, the network was at the center of new industry contractions.” Would it have been made even a year later?

Indeed, it’s worth acknowledging that many of these miniseries come with franchise potential baked in. FX packages what are effectively miniseries under the banner of intellectual property brands, like Fargo or American Crime Story. Ripley adapts just the first of Patricia Highsmith’s novels about Tom Ripley, leaving open the possibility of future seasons. Shōgun adapts just one book in author James Clavell’s Asian Saga, so it’s possible for FX to commission a follow-up.

Viet Thanh Nguyen even wrote The Committed, a sequel to The Sympathizer, although it seems highly unlikely that HBO and Park Chan-wook would commit to another season order. As such, these very impressive (and often expensive) prestige miniseries have a weirdly funereal quality to them. They are reminders of the excess and the extravagance of “peak TV”, the point where companies were so committed to a television arms race that they would take big swings on creative concepts.

In its own weird way, it’s appropriate that The Sympathizer devotes an extended stretch of its middle section to the production of a film very transparently modelled on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. The show does this in the context of interrogating Hollywood’s depiction of the Vietnam War, but Apocalypse Now also exists as a monument marking the end of the so-called “New Hollywood” era before everything collapsed with Heaven’s Gate. Apocalypse Now was as far as Coppola’s generation could take that revolution, but it stands as a testament to it.

The Sympathizer is a wonder. Unfortunately, such wonders often serve as monuments to bygone ages.