In contradistinction to prestige TV’s much discussed fixation on ‘antiheroes’ and the ‘morally gray,’ mid TV operates more by subjecting these kinds of morally ambiguous characters to rituals of detoxification—they’re more likely to be visually murky and gray than morally so.
If you, like me, have been spending time in front of your television over the past few years, you may, like me, have noticed a troubling trend: TV is mid.
Mid, as others here have and will document, signifies a sense of let-down-ness. According to USA Today, “‘mid’ can be used as a replacement for ‘boring,’ ‘not good,’ ‘mediocre,’ ‘low quality,’ among others. The slang more so describes something that is just OK or mid-tier and is not used for things that are truly bad or awful.” Importantly, though, “mid” does not carry the active disidentification that scholars like Jonathan Gray, Melissa Click, and others have associated with hatewatching and antifandom. Instead, mid is affectively flattened; it spurs sighs of resignation rather than the heat of frustration or anger. In response to the mid object, you, like parents and partners everywhere, are not mad—just disappointed.
And, according to many viewers and critics, such disappointment abounds in the post-network era of streaming TV, which has proliferated a set of mid television programs. The literary-mythic aspirations of canonical shows like Deadwood, The Sopranos, or The Wire, which expressly invited comparisons to canonical literature from Dickens to Shakespeare, have not entirely disappeared from the scene (think, for instance, of Succession’s episode titles alluding to John Berryman), but the programs that occupy the space they left (the space of “prestige” networks, awards contenders) increasingly feel just-okay. Mid TV often apes the style of the golden age of TV, but with a few updates and adjustments. In contradistinction to prestige TV’s much discussed fixation on ‘antiheroes’ and the ‘morally gray,’ mid TV operates more by subjecting these kinds of morally ambiguous characters to rituals of detoxification—they’re more likely to be visually murky and gray than morally so. Where we once had Don Draper, Walter White, and their imitators, we now have Ted Lasso, the well-meaning billionaire of Loot, and the actual therapists at the center of Shrinking. Even The Last of Us’s depiction of its morally gray protagonists Joel and Ellie ultimately feels like a heartwarming odd-couple surrogate father-daughter pairing. Of course, television still abounds with scumbags and bad behavior, but even when depicting so-called “problematic” characters, mid TV can nonetheless feel like a niceification machine, or, alternatively, a morality machine. For instance, mid TV often aims to work as a corrective to previous pop cultural narratives or even previous TV shows—think Pam & Tommy, American Crime Story: Impeachment, and House of the Dragon. Many of these shows presume to speak to a cultural problem or question, or to aspire to atone for the perceived oversights and issues of past media objects. House of the Dragon, in particular, with its focus on women characters and its relationship to sex and sexual violence, seems designed to “right” the “wrongs” of its predecessor Game of Thrones, which relied so heavily on sex and sexual violence to propel its narrative that the cultural critic Myles McNutt coined the portmanteau “sexposition” to describe the show’s persistent intertwining of sex scenes and expository dialogue. But despite their higher aspirations, many such popular TV shows (whether we define popular via online engagement, awards success, or viewer metrics) end up feeling mid.
I want to chart a gesture I’ve noticed across these mid TV shows: that of the “departure” episode. As defined by the TV critic Kathryn Van Arendonk, the term departure episode refers to “self-contained installments of a TV series that depart from the established norms of how that TV series operates.” Van Arendonk coined this term in part to combat a persistent tendency to call any episode that deviates from a show’s normal mode as a “bottle episode” — an older term that specifically refers to a “TV money-saving strategy, an attempt to make an episode with the least amount of budget required,” e.g. by only using one existing set, only the main cast, etc. By contrast, a departure episode encompasses variations like musical episodes or flashback episodes. Many TV shows have departure episodes, and many of those are all-time-great entries for their respective series: think Seinfeld’s “The Chinese Restaurant,” Breaking Bad’s “The Fly,” even Only Murders in the Building’s wordless episode “The Boy in 6B.” As opposed to the budget-cutting constraints of the bottle episode, the departure episode is often a moment of formal play or experimentation. However, increasingly, the departure episode feels less like an artistic experiment and more like a requisite gesture — a gesture whose main purpose is to signify a certain kind of “seriousness” associated with “prestige.” From middling fare like Stranger Things’s “The Lost Sister” to Mythic Quest’s “A Dark Quiet Death” to Feud: Capote’s “The Secret Inner Lives of Swans,” or even the far more successful (at least in this TV critic’s opinion) iterations like The Bear’s “Fishes” or Industry’s “White Mischief,” the departure episode has started to seep into the genre makeup of streaming TV. These departure episodes often feature high-profile guest stars (ranging from Jake Johnson to Jamie Lee Curtis), are sometimes episode-length flashbacks, and often shift focus from a show’s central characters to follow a side character’s point of view. And across the board, these departure episodes aim to signal a kind of prestige-y seriousness. By breaking with a show’s standard mode, they strive to foreground thematic parallels and surface “deeper” “themes.” I have two examples I want to spend a bit more time with, from two shows that I see as each being (proto)typically mid in their own ways.
First: Ted Lasso’s “Coach Beard After Hours.” This departure episode abandons the eponymous Ted as the POV character, in favor of a secondary character Coach Beard. To me, this episode’s mode of departure is less interesting than the reason for its existence. Ted Lasso co-creator, writer, and cast member Brendan Hunt, who plays Coach Beard, stated in an interview with the LA Times: “We’d had a 10-episode season mapped out, and were breaking episodes when Season 1 debuted. Ten days later, not only were we fully picked up for Season 2, but we were also picked up for two more episodes. So they had to be episodes that we hadn’t planned for.”
The Coach Beard episode is an add-on, the byproduct of an extended season order and an extended budget—of more time and more money and more episodes. So, what is worth doing with that extra time? To create a space for a moment where the show becomes what it normally isn’t. This, in essence, is what the departure episode does, for various ends: in some way, the show briefly becomes what it is not.
The Ted Lasso example illuminates that the contemporary departure episode is not motivated by the same factors as the historical “bottle episode,” even as the LA Times may refer to “Beard After Hours” as a bottle episode (it is decidedly not one). Instead, the mid TV departure episode signals a desire for prestige: a refusal for the mid to be read as mid, or even to simply be mid, and a call for the viewing audience to not recognize the mid as such.
Second: “Long, Long Time” from HBO’s The Last of Us. This episode breaks with The Last of Us’s action-thriller-zombie genre conventions to tell a queer flashback love story between two minor characters played by high-ish profile guest stars (Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett). The Last of Us is mid in a variety of ways: its scares aren’t that scary, its thrills aren’t that thrilling, its sets and character dynamics and insights begin to feel repetitive. However, as far as zombie TV series go, it’s entertaining enough. But “Long, Long Time” points to The Last of Us’s desire to be more than “entertaining enough.” Not only does it deploy many of the conventions of contemporary departure episodes, but it also makes substantial changes from the show’s video game source material—largely to make it more romantic, optimistic, and redemptive. In the video game, the couple Bill and Frank are minor characters (Frank is only seen by the player postmortem); in the show, they have one of the show’s nine episodes all to themselves. In the game, the couple have a destructive falling-out, leading to Frank becoming infected and committing suicide, leaving Bill a note telling him he hates him. In contrast, in the TV version of The Last of Us, in the words of Kirsten Acuna, “the pair live out an idyllic existence, dying in each other’s arms.” My critique here is not to say that “Long, Long Time” would have necessarily been a better episode if it had stuck to the “darkness” of the source material rather than the relative “niceness” of the adaptation. Rather, I want to note the way that these adaptational choices coincide with the logics of the departure episode and of mid TV. “Long, Long Time” is by far the most “prestige-y” episode of The Last of Us in both form and content and, tellingly, racked up a bevy of Emmy nominations. Also tellingly, at least three critics compared this 75 minute long episode to the first 10 minutes of Pixar’s Up.
In these shifts from the bottle episode (a cost-cutting industry practice) to the departure episode (a prestige-seeking formal practice), we can chart shifts in the discourse of what television (an archetypal middlebrow form) means for culture. Departure episodes like “Coach Beard After Hours” and “Long, Long Time” exemplify the kinds of logics at play in the contemporary TV landscape. To me, the fact that we have moved away from the “television that invites comparisons to the novel to curry a sense of highbrowness/prestige” to “television that must briefly become not-itself to curry a sense of prestige” also registers shifts in television’s modes of production and reception.
What troubles me, as someone who studies television for a living, is the hyperbolic praise leveled upon so much mid TV. Television is a form that I love. In the streaming era, it can feel frankly overwhelming to sift through the “more, more, more” that platforms offer—especially when so much of it ends up being forgettable, derivative, mildly disappointing. The hype around mid TV suggests, possibly, that the experience of and discourse around television is so exhausted and overwhelming that we feel bowled over by merely competent television when we encounter it. But at stake in our aesthetic judgments of television is our ability to name the mid as such—and perhaps, more importantly, the good.
Olivia Stowell is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan, where she researches race and labor in contemporary television and popular culture. At any given moment, you can probably find her walking her dog Maisie, watching reality TV (for work!), or strategizing about how to acquire hard-to-get restaurant reservations.