The End of Showtime and TV's Brand Era

The hollow search for a bundle that can compete with Netflix is going to keep making TV worse.

Some slightly mixed messaging here. Credit: Showtime

In news announced this week but that has been coming for a long time, Paramount Global will shut down the Showtime standalone “app” on April 30. Earlier this year, the troubled media conglomerate killed Showtime’s linear channel and rebranded it with the beautifully named “Paramount+ with Showtime.” Anytime you can utilize a plus sign and a preposition, you have to do it.

Although perceived as a lesser HBO, Showtime played a key role in cable’s original programming boom in the 21st century. Queer as Folk and The L Word presented new perspectives not commonly seen on television. The miniseries Sleeper Cell experimented with distribution and scheduling by airing all its episodes within two weeks. The creative peaks of Dexter, Homeland, Masters of Sex, and The Affair are undeniable. Weeds, Californication, and Nurse Jackie helped popularize the half-hour dramedy (light on the comedy) that streamers still love. This is the channel that aired Twin Peaks: The Return.

On the one hand, it’s silly to mourn the end of a corporate entity, even if it results in the loss of jobs. On the other hand, the death of Showtime, a company with a 46-year history that traverses multiple television eras, is yet another sign that the industry’s longtime organizational structure—networks and channels with identifiable brands—is evaporating.

Paramount Global’s failed bid to compete in the streaming realm and two decades of CBS/Viacom nonsense dismantled MTV, Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon. Much has been said about what Warner Bros. Discovery executives have done to dilute HBO, but they’ve done equally weird work to TNT and TBS. FX is a search filter on Hulu, which is a tile on Disney+. Even ESPN is viewed as a flawed asset in 2024.

Cable’s decline is regularly attributed to the rise in cord-cutting (or cord-nevering) and streaming viewership. A 2023 study from Insider Intelligence found that the number of people who don’t subscribe to a traditional linear TV provider (cable, satellite, or telecom service) outpaces those who do (144 million to 121 million people). However, the same survey found that nearly 40 million people access linear TV through newer methods like YouTube TV and Hulu + Live TV, flipping that allegedly disruptive figure back in favor of linear TV subscriptions (roughly 161 million to 144 million). People are less inclined to pay Comcast and DirecTV for access to linear television, but they still like linear television.

Cable channels should play a role in maintaining or growing that consumer interest. But outside of heightened spending on sports and news, the conglomerates that own the abovementioned channels have punted on original programming or moved that money over to exclusives for their streaming platforms. The January announcement that brought us Paramount+ with Showtime also came with a restructuring, layoffs, and a downsized budget.

Brand value isn’t entirely dead in the streaming ecosystem. Apple TV+ is following the Quality TV playbook by spending hundreds of millions on expensive shows with A-listers that maybe no one watches. Amazon Prime Video has cornered the market on what TV Plus friend Liam Mathews highlights over at Dad Shows.

But in 2024, Netflix has transcended an easily definable brand and remains the default streaming platform for the largest number of U.S. viewers. Meanwhile, among the C-suite class, the most popular strategy to ride out streaming ecosystem contractions is to bundle middling platforms together. Apple and Paramount have discussed it. An industry survey with a small sample size released this week says there’s interest in a Paramount+ and Peacock bundle. The Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Fox super-sized sports bundle isn’t going to be very good, but people will try to convince us of the contrary. Those maneuvers, while potentially beneficial for consumers looking to spend less money, will only further collapse the boundaries between previously discrete entities. Everything becomes a vertical or a tile or a search filter.

Consumers are content-motivated. We’ll subscribe to the platforms or bundles that offer the programming we like the most. But too many media companies ruined successful hubs for the programming chasing a competition with Netflix that they were never going to win. Showtime is just the latest, but there will be more.

Just one small follow-up on last week’s WrestleMania XL predictions post: I was more accurate than not with my predicts. I nailed the tag team title split, rightly projected the World Heavyweight Championship chicanery, and correctly assumed something weird was up with the LWO-Dominic Mysterio & Santos Escobar match (the weirdness just happened on SmackDown the night before).

This is TV Plus, a newsletter about television written by Cory Barker, a media studies professor and veteran blogger. Readers can expect dispatches on industry trends, overlooked shows, and historical antecedents to current events.

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