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Recently, Warner Bros.
Discovery has begun quietly and not so quietly removing titles from its streaming platform HBO Max.
Fletcher,Camping, andVinyl.
On its face, this is a story as old as television itself.
Maybe that episode ofThe Defenderswould play again in reruns and youd have a chance to catch what you missed.
It was an ephemeral medium.
Losing access to a handful of TV shows feels like a pittance, comparatively.
you could streamHouse of the Dragonon your pocket computer while you commute to work!
Many of those disappearing shows, likeMrs.
What are people even complaining about here?
Plus, shows appear and disappear on streaming platforms all the time!
This is just how capitalism works!
[Elaborate insufferable shrug.]
Sure, you never hadallthe toys.
Some of the toys arent getting made anymore.
Some never made it into the Toy Subscription Program in the first place.
Some were once in the program and then got removedbecause actually they were racist toys.
(This is its own separate discussion.)
This is not an exclusively TV-related digital problem.
Its not even a distinctly digital problem.
Does that make it feel better when someones hard work disappears, though?
Someones favorite show, someones fascinating academic primary source, vanished at the whim of an enormous corporation?
In the case of TV, that sense of loss goes beyond the baseline frustration.
There was a period in not-so-distant memory when beloved TV series were regularly made available as physical releases.
Theres no comparable consumer-facing organization for older TV.
(Sidenote: I desperately wish this is what Paley was all about!
I would buysomany Paley Collector Edition DVDs of otherwise lost TV shows!
ButWestworldis the exception, not the rule.
And just because a DVD existed as a listing somewhere at one point does not make it actually accessible.
Any Amazon search will show you many listings for currentlyunavailable DVD sets.
It can mean thatcreatorshave no physical copies of their own work.
So when shows disappear from streaming platforms, the feeling of a yawning void is all the more palpable.
Theres another element here, too.
But streaming has turned TV into an amorphous, unending content blob.
Theres no specific time towatch a show, no moment when it solidly exists as a cultural artifact.
Each individual title becomes something like Schrodingers TV show, an option that sort of still exists aspossible.
Sure, you havent watched that show yet.
But you haventnotwatched it, either its still uncertain, still unresolved.
At this point, its unclear when or whereit will be available again.
How many doors are there, each with something exciting inside?
When titles disappear without warning, the whole space starts to seem less stable.
The platform becomes a less reliable destination.
For a few years, streaming felt like a massive, glorious new space for TV.
It may actually be much smaller than we thought.
