It's amazing how TV shows even as recent as ten years ago could not be greenlit today. I've been binging shows from the first decade of the 21st century. With each passing year, I feel more and more like that was a truly special time for the medium. A real peak, unlikely to return any time soon.
Sopranos
This is the one that started it all; ask yourself if HBO would allow it today. This one is borderline. David Chase would have had to seriously up the number of roles for POCs, and he might even be pressured into a female mob boss, but maybe it could get done. We are still allowed to delve into the darkness of various forms of crime, so it's possible we would still have gotten it although I bet it would be reduced in quality to something on the level of, say, Sons of Anarchy or Animal Kingdom.
Mad Men
Insufficiently diverse, of course. Insufficiently negative about women's roles in the '60s. Attempted to portray the era in which it was set realistically, rather than in accordance with popular mythology. Insufficient comeuppance to the male characters for their sins. Smoking glamorized (was a problem even back then). Even in its day, period dramas went the way of things like The Nick or Masters of Sex to promote corrrect cultural values over realistc looks at humanity. Complete unacceptable.
Deadwood
Every sin known to man, yet all the sinners had their place, and the drive to civilization was led by a murdering racist whoremonger. Casual and constant ethic and racial slurs. Indians are referred to as dirt-worshippers, Chinese as celestials, the n-word is dropped with regularity, the single Jewish character is frequently just referred to as "The Jew". The slurs go beyond names into negative stereotypes. One of the female leads is called a "loopy f-ckin' c-nt" on a number of occasions and women are generally referred to by euphemisms for their genitals. And that's the Good Guys. The Big Bad is actually more polite. Honestly, if cancel culture ever turns its eye to Deadwood, everyone who ever came within earshot of this production will never work again. (I just hope they don't come after the people who binge it.) Despite all that it remains the finest TV show ever created and one of the finest works of art of our lifetimes.
Entourage
Obviously not is the same dramatic class as the others but it shares a similar fate. It was the male equivalent of Sex and the City, that is to say: a fantasy. Fantasies are our often dark, unhealthy, desires that need to be overruled for the sake of civilization. It's probably psychologically beneficial to have such fantasies and satisfy them through fiction. But we can't do that any more. Even acknowledging the existence of lusts and untoward thoughts is a transgression. Entourage was pretty much non-stop lusts and untoward thoughts. I thought it was fun. I have no illusion that it represented anything short of make-believe, but it's portrayal of a male fantasy life appealed to me. I guess that makes me one of the bad guys. (I'll leave it as an excercise for the reader to determine if its female counterpart, Sex and the City, could be made today.)
Leaving Entourage aside, the other three are absolutely pantheon level drama. It may be possible in this brave new world to create shows of equivalent quality that do not violate any of our new hyper-moral constraints, but nobody has yet. Perhaps there is the belief today that socio-political validation counts as good drama and delving into personal humanity is passe. More than anything else, this leads me to believe we are wandering into an artistic dark age.
Tangentially related: Also a Nike commercial dark age.
