Here is Maureen Ryan’s article about the, now over, Golden Age of Television.
I highly recommend it.
As someone who’s seen 294 movies so far in the theater this year, with at least 18-20 more to see by the end of the month, you can imagine that I obviously think there are a lot of good-to-great movies out there to be seen. And I missed so many good ones that came and went before I had a chance to see them, like Restrepo.
Now, a big chunk of that unbelieveable number is made up of older films at retrospectives, foreign-language films, arthouse films and documentaries, I count repeats, and I’m lucky enough to live in a place where I can see these films, but current excellent films are out there. Many people will have to wait until they’re on DVD/streaming/cable to see them, but they did play in theaters.
TV may, in aggregate be worse than in the past (not that I necessarily agree) but the tools for finding and watching the good stuff are so expansive that if you’re watching a lot of crap it is kind of your own damn fault.
That’s not quite true for new release movies (a lot of people don’t live within ready access to the full range of movies released), but for movies four months after that viewed at home, again if you’re mostly watching crap then that’s your own damn fault.