‘Krish’ discovering his fiancés life has been made into a dystopian TV show after flicking through the fictional streaming platform ‘Streamberry’ in Black Mirror. NETFLIX

Jonathan Seidler is an Australian writer. This is his column for Esquire.

MY WIFE AND I are currently stuck in a content hole. This is the polite term we’ve coined for the yawning interregnum between finishing one great series and having to search vainly and endlessly to find another one. Much like time, space and Grammys categories, content holes are extremely elastic; they can last as little as one hour or as long as a few weeks. I’m positive that everyone with a streaming service login knows what I’m talking about, even if you are fortunate enough to be presently ensconced in the new season of something exciting like Tommy Lee’s Men In Black memory blaster (the original of which is a definite life raft next time you find yourself drowning in the void of decent things to watch. It’s on Netflix).

It goes a bit like this: each night, after the weird gremlin that has temporarily taken hold of my daughter’s personality finally decides to go to sleep, we sit down with the remote and surf through the various streaming services we leech off my brother-in-law’s Mum or an aunt twice removed, swiping through endless Adam Sandler movies, bad Marvel spin-offs and The Real Housewives Of Who Honestly Cares At This Point, uselessly trying to locate something remotely interesting to watch. Eventually we give up, having spent far longer looking for a 30 minute show that isn’t woeful than we once spent perusing the racks at Blockbuster. 

O, what I would give for a moody video store guy to sort through my TV, snort arrogantly at my ‘To Watch’ list and casually unearth some excellent David Fincher movie or dark British comedy I’ve never seen. I would pay top dollar for that in the same way I don’t currently pay for Stan. 

I feel like content holes used to be more infrequent, but then again, this makes sense. Only a couple of years ago, streaming was a golden, Oscar-winning bastion of programming, unleashing a torrent of binge-worthy fare the likes of which we hadn’t seen since the late 1990s heyday of HBO. They also used to spend a lot more money. This year, streamers have tightened their purses even more, stuck between the rock of hungry consumers (like us) and the hard place of trying to stay afloat amid dwindling subscriber numbers during inflationary times. And their actors and writers never used to go on strike for months at a time, bottlenecking production to the point that a new season of Big Mouth seems like manna from heaven. 

I also can’t be the only one to have noticed that there’s a lot of duplication going on. You can watch Seinfeld, once the golden goose of TV, on almost every platform. Ditto Friends, which seems to show up everywhere. Owned properties that used to be glitzy events are either winding down (Sex Education, whose creator said it had run its course) or not being renewed (Amazon’s Marvellous Mrs Maisel, in what has to be the travesty of the year.) In their absence is a void so strong we’re currently filling it watching Fisk, an admittedly excellent ABC comedy starring Kitty Flanagan and Aaron Chen that was recently added to streaming but whose most recent season aired a year ago.  

Slate perhaps put it best when they declared that peak tv was over: ‘Welcome to trough TV.’

Maybe my wife and I are just purists who check Rotten Tomatoes before we invest in hour long war epics based on best-selling books when we should be less picky. I mean, there’s so many seasons of Selling Sunset out there that we could be intellectually satiated for weeks. Months even. But it does feel like we’re paying/borrowing passwords for 5 different services that cost more than Austar ever did and somehow have less good shit between them. The exception to this rule is SBS On Demand, which frequently has amazing movies (but also has an ungodly number of Budget Direct ads cleaving into the middle of them). And while Netflix Australia and Stan in particular have commissioned an incredible amount of stellar local content (Heartbreak High, the new Onefour documentary, Bump and The Tourist), they’re still buried under mountains of American stuff I wouldn’t watch even if it was on Channel 7 on Saturday night in 1995 and the only other alternative was Hey Hey It’s Saturday.

But sometimes, from deep content holes you’ll find yourself a glinting diamond. In our case, it’s a gorgeous Japanese show called Old Enough, randomly syndicated by Netflix. The episodes are ten minutes each and set in small cities or towns, where toddlers and young children are tasked with running small errands or completing tasks to encourage their independence. It is adorable and there are tons of them, and I guarantee you we would never have found it when the streaming services were winning Oscars. Or maybe we’re just looking for good stuff in all the wrong places.

Jonathan Seidler is an Esquire columnist and the author of It’s A Shame About Ray (Allen & Unwin).

Like all proper columns, this one will be back next week. You can see every one of Jonno’s columns for Esquire here.