It can hardly have escaped your attention that the production value of TV has skyrocketed in recent years. It’s not so long since even some of the best shows around — “Buffy The Vampire Slayer,” for one — looked a little bit crummy in comparison to even the cheap end of the horror movie market. But with an insatiable appetite for new small-screen content, flush new players like Amazon and Netflix entering the market, advances in visual effects and the like, and shorter orders of episodes, a large chunk of television (at least on the streaming/cable end) looks as good as anything you can see in a movie theater, and shows like “Game Of Thrones” deliver a level of spectacle on par with a movie blockbuster.
But it obviously comes at a price, and an interesting Variety piece has revealed exactly what your favorite binge-magnets cost to their studios and networks. And topping the list, of course, is “Game Of Thrones,” which the trade says will cost as much as $15 million an episode for its eighth and final season, which starts filming soon.
Now, there’s a few mitigating factors here — there’s only six episodes in the final season so they can afford to splash out a bit more, the episodes are likely to come in well over an hour a piece (likely closer to 90 minutes, if the Season 7 finale was any guide), and keeping the five key “Game Of Thrones” cast members, in Emilia Clarke, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Peter DInklage, Kit Harington and Lena Headey, on board costs about $2.5 million an episode (though that’s a bargain compared to the cast of “The Big Bang Theory,” who make roughly $900,000 an episode).
Even so, it’s a sum that would have been unthinkable not long ago — when the show began, Variety report, the budget was $6 million an episode, about standard for HBO (the average for cable dramas around the same time was around the $3m or $4m mark). And it’s whacking prices up across the board — Netflix’s flop “The Get Down” cost about $11 million an episode, their hit “The Crown” about $10 million, “Westworld” is about the same, Amazon’s upcoming “Jack Ryan” and Starz’s “American Gods” both come in about $8 million, and “Stranger Things” has gone up to the same after a first season that cost a more modest $6 million.
Clearly, given the success of most of these shows, these mostly aren’t bad investments, especially if you’re going by a subscription model anyway. But as YouTube’s global head of content points out, the new interlopers are inflating prices to some extent. “I look at a show like ’13 Reasons Why.’ On Netflix [it costs] $5 million an episode. I made shows like that for years at the WB for $2 million an episode. It’s ‘interior high school,’ ‘interior home.’ There’s no rhyme or reason to what they’re paying.”
And in the peak TV era, when a network relatively new to prestige drama like TNT, who sunk $5 million an episode into Shakespeare drama “Will” only to see it be mostly ignored by viewers, this sort of budgetary arms race could end up being damaging for many, especially if it ends up going even higher, as Netflix’s finance chief David Wells predicts. “Is $20 million-an-hour television possible? Certainly.”