Is High Quality Prestige TV Preparing A New Generation To Love Stage Plays?

“Where there’s truth to the idea of a television ‘golden age’ (ask me over a cup of coffee or a whiskey ginger someday), it’s in the fact that cable and streaming outlets have allowed shows to flourish when they appeal to more deeply invested but smaller audiences. This is what I have called in the past The Age Of Enthusiasm. It has also encouraged the proliferation of shows that are more idiosyncratic, personal, and experimental than television was before. Now, drama and comedy enthusiasts have daily exposure to stuff that’s weird and complicated and formally experimental. They are a good, prepared audience for interesting plays in a way that I, as a teenager in the late 1980s, was not.”