In the bad old days before cable and the internet, TV shows didn't need to be good to be watched by millions. Even cornball programs such as My Mother the Car pulled audiences that dwarf today's blockbusters on streaming services such as Neftlix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. With niche marketing comes a massive increase in both the quantity and quality of shows, but some critics worry that the fragmentation of the viewing public means we no longer share common ground the way we did when there were just three national networks.

"I think that's a lot of crap," says Glenn Garvin, a Miami Herald staffer and Reason's television critic. "The explosion of television material that started with cable in the 1980s has been a grand thing. What if you don't want to watch My Mother The Car, The Rifleman, or The Beverly Hillbillies?" At the same, Garvin believes that cable news and most talk shows have declined in quality because they play to narrowly defined political points of view. More worryingly, he says that the move away from accuracy and fairness in reporting toward something closer to activism makes it harder for people to get informed.

Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Garvin, who just covered one of the industry's biggest annual events, the annual convention of The National Association of Television Program Executives, about the shift from broadcasting to on-demand viewing, the influx of shows and formats from countries such as Turkey, Korea, and Brazil, and the proliferation of programming. "There's maybe 500 or so scripted shows on at any given time," says Garvin. "That's not too many in a country of almost 350 million people."