In the early 2010s, seemingly everybody was talking about how television was in the midst of a “golden age.” This beatification of the medium in the teens emerged out of a long-simmering blog-level conversation about whether and how TV was (or had recently become) an “art form,” but now the conversation was starting to go mainstream, jumping the tracks from the AV Club comments section into popular discourse. “From where I sat,” wrote beloved TV critic Alan Sepinwall in his 2013 book on 2000s television, “TV was in the middle of another golden age.” Journalist Brett Martin’s own 2013 TV book, Difficult Men, called it a “golden age” too, drawing meta-attention to how much critics historically love declaring periods of time to be golden ages. “Welcome to TV’s Second Golden Age,” offered CBS Sunday Morning later that year, and no less an authority than Steven Soderbergh proposed the dawn of a “second golden age of television” from a podium at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2014, in The New York Times, David Carr wrote that he was “barely keeping up in TV’s new golden age,” and, by the end of the year, Vanity Fair was asking, seemingly behind the times: “Are We in a Golden Age of Television?”

The irony is that, by the time these outlets were gleefully gilding a decade of prestige television, the critics were getting antsy again. Just as the golden age was being cast, keen observers of the discourse were beginning to hear tell of a new age, not golden, but silver perhaps? But what, exactly, was TV’s “silver age”? To Andy Greenwald, writing in Grantland (talk about golden ages) in 2012, the TV silver age was an exciting new horizon of creative innovation. Anchored by Showtime’s hit espionage drama Homeland, the archetypal series of the silver age was, “a refreshingly artful hybrid: cable brains spliced with network brawn.” If the golden age prior was about premium cable channels striking out on their own, inventing new forms unburdened by network convention, the silver age was about recasting those tried-and-true network conventions with the high-end production values and sex and cursing of the golden age.

But others imagined this silver age as a time of decline. “With an increase in expectations and a glut of new programming,” Hank Stuever wrote in The Washington Post in 2015, “we’ve become accustomed to shows that are, at their best, pretty good instead of brilliant.” I think, in retrospect, that Stuever’s take is prophetic rather than descriptive. Looking back, many of the shows we might associate with this silver age—Homeland (the first season), The Americans, The Leftovers, The Knick, late Mad Men, late........

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