Good analysis! Always enjoy your work. One note: there were three networks in the beginning, not four. ABC, NBC, CBS. Fox didn’t come along until the early 1990s and by that time cable already had original programming.
This probably makes me sound like such a jerk but I think it's appalling to spend $60 million on an episode of TV so that people can be entertained for an hour (and pay a subscription fee and watch ads). For $60M, Amazon could send every person in the US two free books. We'd get more than an hour's worth of entertainment and possibly learn something or gain more empathy in the process.
Good analysis! Always enjoy your work. One note: there were three networks in the beginning, not four. ABC, NBC, CBS. Fox didn’t come along until the early 1990s and by that time cable already had original programming.
I thought the fourth one was PBS.
Started around 1970
This probably makes me sound like such a jerk but I think it's appalling to spend $60 million on an episode of TV so that people can be entertained for an hour (and pay a subscription fee and watch ads). For $60M, Amazon could send every person in the US two free books. We'd get more than an hour's worth of entertainment and possibly learn something or gain more empathy in the process.
Realizing I conflated the price of a single episode with the cost of a whole season in my math. $700M per season=2 books for every American