Hello!
It's late July and as you may have noticed, my usual summer marathon review of the previous broadcast TV season has not yet commenced. I really only have myself to blame for this, but I do have a couple excuses as well. I had to port everything over to a new computer during the spring, and so I had to make a bunch of changes to adapt to new versions of the program and the packages I use for coding. I was back up and running pretty quickly for the daily tables, but Schedules Plus and The Breakdown were more complicated beasts.
And before I could start on the usual summer routine, I had to make one of these posts describing the landscape in general. As predicted last summer, the writers' strike made 2023-24 the most heavily disrupted broadcast TV season of the 25 in my archive. And these posts always take awhile. But here we finally are! I'll get into the logistics for this summer's The Breakdown at the end, but first we'll dive right into what made 2023-24 so crazy, and what it means for evaluating the shows that aired this season.
