(This is the latest chapter of a book-iu-progress, “Television, and How It Got That Way.” For the full book, so far, click “The Book,” under “categories.”)
For a cozy time, streaming networks were just a bonus fringe.
They were kind of like an Imax theater in a multiplex or a luxury box in a stadium: They offered appealing alternatives (including “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” shown here), without affecting the masses.
Then Covid came and spun everything into overdrive.
In less than nine months, four major streamers were born — Apple TV+. Disney+, Max and Peacock. Streaming seemed like a made-for-Covid phenomena.
In 2019, streaming was mostly confined to Netflix and Amazon Prime. Globally, they had 167 million and 126 million subscribers; Hulu had 23 million, CBS All Access had 11 million.
Now jump ahead six years. In mid-2025, it was 300 million for Netflix, 200 for Amazon, 126 for Disney+, 113 for Max, 78 for Paramount+ (replacing CBS All-Access), 55 for Hulu and 41 for Peacock.
That’s quite a jump — from 227 million for the big four in 2019 to 907 million for the top seven in ’25. Add lots of smaller streamers and the total hits a billion subscriptions.
Some were overseas, some were multiple subscriptions, but the effect was there: If you have Netflix, Amazon and Disney, there’s little time for CBS.
And, due to Covid, much of this happened at hyperspeed.
The early pace was leisurely, as technology developed. YouTube and Apple iTunes started in 2005, Amazon Unbox in 2006. In 2007, Apple TV began and Netflix started streaming. In 2008, Roku began and NBC and Fox combined to create Hulu. The next year, CBS tried TV.com.
Then, in 2012, the industry standardized its technical details and production increased. Streamers used the same approach that propelled cable: Don’t worry about quantity; instead, do a few things that make an impact.
The first streaming shows to win the top Emmys might seem like polar opposites — the darkly angry “Handmaid’s Tale” and the giddy “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”
But both had a rich, cinematic feel. They had strong female and cross-generational appeal. And they reflected two unique women.
One is Margaret Atwood, who wrote the 1985 “Handmaid’s Tale” novel, then saw it become a movie, an opera and Hulu’s potent series. The other was a sort of show-biz cyclone.
Ballerinas and comedians don’t seem to blend much, but Amy Sherman-Palladino was both.
Her father (Dan Sherman) was a comedian from the Bronx; her mother was a dancer from Mississippi. Sherman-Palladino grew up in Los Angeles, started studying ballet at 4 and had a unique career detour — quitting dance when she had a chance to write for “Roseanne.”
She created two shows about dance — the clever drama-comedy “Bunheads” for Hulu and “Etoile” for Amazon Prime. And she made one about comedy … which is her wheelhouse.
“Stand-up comedy is its own very strange world of desperation and pain and anger,” she told the Television Critics Association.
Like many good comics, Sherman-Palladino can seize a room. She wears big hats, spews big gushes of words.
“We’ve been doing comedy for about 30,000 years now, I believe,” she said, adding: “I know a lot about Joan Rivers …. I knew Sally Marr, who was Lenny Bruce’s mother.”
So when she created Midge Maisel -(a 1950s housewife who tries stand-up), she didn’t need much research.
Sherman-Palladino had already established her machine-gun dialog with “Gilmore Girls.” It did well for the CW, but she and her husband (Dan Palladino) quit before the seventh and final season, over budget issues.
Amazon Prime wasn’t like that. “For the first time in our career,” she said, “we have the support from the brass …. We have all the pieces to go big.”
“Mrs. Maisel” had a richly cinematic look. It laid out the 1950s beautifully; then Sherman-Palladino added the pain, anger, wit and joy.
In 2018 (a year after “Handmaid’s Tale” became the first streamer to win the best-drama Emmy), “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” won for best comedy. Sherman-Palladino was also named best comedy writer and director — the first woman to win in either category.
The next year, 2019, another Amazon comedy (“Fleabag,” from British writer-star Phoebe Waller-Bridge) won. And in 2020-21, a streaming comedy won twice in a row.
That was “Ted Lasso” for Apple TV+ — one of the Covid-era arrivals.
The timing was mostly a coincidence, but it worked neatly.
Eyeing the early success of Netflix and Amazon, others wanted to jump in. But they had learned a lesson from (as usual) CBS’ mistakess: It has to be something big.
CBS All Access had a great library of old shows, but new ones were scarce.
It started well in 2017 with “Star Trek: Discovery” and “The Good Fight” (a beautifully written “Good Wife” spin-off). But its 2018 shows — “Tell Me a Story,” “One Dollar,” “Strange Angel” — were quickly ignored. With only 11 million subscribers in 2019, CBS All Access was sputtering.
Others felt they needed size to compete with Netflix. Disney took that to an extreme, buying the Fox movie studio and its cable channels. Now it had:
— The Marvel franchise, one of the two sci-fi giants. It had already bought the other one, the “Star Wars” franchise.
— A majority of the Hulu streamer; it would later buy the rest.
— The National Geographic Channel, which makes the sort of first-class nature films that Disney savors.
— FX, a cable channel that was already known for high-quality drama, from the “The Shield” and “Justified” to the O.J. Simpson and “Fargo” mini-series.
Combining all of them, Disney had the heft it wanted; the rush began:
Apple TV started in November of 2019, Disney+ in December. Then came Max in May of 2020 and Peacock in July. In March of 2021, CBS All Access became the much more ambitious Paramount+.
It was a sudden streaming surge … that fit neatly into the pandemic.
Americans’ first national warning about Covid came on Jan. 31, 2020. A national emergency was declared (a bit tardily) on March 13.
At the time, Apple TV+ was barely four months old, Disney was three months, Max and Peacock were coming. Tragedy and opportunity merged.
Some of the broadcast-network shows had finished their production for 2019-2020, but some hadn’t. For its final three episodes, “Saturday Night Live” had cast members filming themselves from home. For summer and fall, the TV schedules were in tatters.
Sports events were held in empty stadiums. Movie box-office totals tumbled — from $11.4 billion in the U.S. and Canada in 2019 to just $2.1 billion in 2020, nudging ahead slightly to $4.5 billion in 2021.
So people had a lot more time to watch this new streaming notion. Then Disney went further: Major movies — intended to draw big crowds in theaters — were diverted to Disney+.
There were animated films — “Soul” in 2020, “Luca” in 2021, “Turning Red” in 2022 — plus Tom Hanks’ “Pinocchio” in 2022.
Other streamers bought movies that were originally meant for theaters. There was Hanks’ “Greyhound” in 2020 on Apple TV+, Eddie Murphy’s “Coming 2 America” in 2021 on Amazon, Will Smith’s “Emancipation” in 2022 on Apple and many more.
Long-term, that might have been a mistake. Families fell out of the habit of going to movie theaters; some theaters closed forever.
But short-term, it propelled this new streaming surge.
Along the way, streamers stuck to the formula of doing less, but doing it well.
Disney+ found that short seasons — often just six episodes — worked for “Star Wars” and Marvel spin-offs. It had “The Mandalorian” in 2019; “Loki,” “Hawkeye,” Boba Fett” and the remarkable “WandaVision” in 2021; “Obi-Won Kenobi” in 2022.
But it also turned youth novels into top series. “The Mysterious Benedict Society” arrived in 2021, “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” in 2023.
Others had pre-pandemic success, mostly with fantasy. In 2019, Amazon had “The Boys”; Apple had “For All Mankind” (from Ronald D. Moore, creator of the “Battlestar Galactica” reboot) and Jason Momoa’s “See.”
And 2019 was when Apple TV+ launched “The Morning Show” — one step in Reese Witherspoon becoming the queen of streaming and beyond. Which, of course, is another story.