Commercial-free premium television reemerged as a refuge from chaotic advertisement-saturated media

Evidence

But by far the most important innovation was the immersive, commercial-free television to which addled audiences bombarded from all sides were now flocking. A few clever producers like Tom Fontana, creator of HBO’s Oz, and later David Chase, who conceived The Sopranos, were not only themselves attracted to the idea of making more filmic television, with psychological texture, but intuited that some viewers would be looking for a fully formed alternative reality they might enter for a time, a natural response when the built attentional environment becomes inhospitably chaotic. Indeed, what we witness in the disenchanted TV viewer is a return of something older—the deep, high-quality attention of motion picture viewers, those engrossed in a good book, or early television audiences, completely lost in the presentation. This is and always was the durable advantage of film and television, before the former was carved up by chase scenes and the latter by commercial breaks. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1106

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s own story of television being ‘kidnapped by commercial interests at birth’ earlier in the volume; also parallels the noise-vs-signal rhetoric from the silence books. — connects to: Broadcast advertising first breached the boundary between public and private space — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 326; The free-TV contract shifted against viewers as advertising proliferated — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 514; Wikipedia forsook billions of potential advertising revenue to remain commercial-free. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 912 (+3 more)
• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels the Grafting & Growth article’s theme of premium/alternative structures emerging as refuges within commodified systems.