Prestige TV was a transitional business-era artifact, not a permanent golden age

Evidence

From the vantage of 2022, prestige comes into relief as a limited era of high-production-value ensemble-cast work-place dramas that secured the cache of cable brands when new subscription services were beginning to alter the cable business model, and that provided lower-risk investment when studios and talent were driven away from movies after the dot-com bust. What comes after is the stream, aqua regia for prestige gold. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 211

Categorization

• XREF: Historicizing ‘prestige TV’ as a contingent business moment directly supports the reader’s structural reading of immediacy’s economic cause; parallels her Antitheory-fighting instinct to denaturalize what looks like permanent aesthetic value.
• SEED: ‘Aqua regia for prestige gold’ — streaming as dissolving agent — is a usable metaphor for an essay on how mode-of-delivery reshapes aesthetic value.