Fair dues to Nicole Kidman, but who’s watching all the telly she’s in?

Nicole Kidman is in a good place. This is not to suggest that she was recently in a bad place. But the raves for her performance as a sexed-up senior executive in Halina Reijn’s Babygirl – a hit at Venice International Film Festival – confirm she is still at the top of her game. Another Oscar nomination seems inevitable. Not bad going for a TV star.
I am being only mildly facetious. Obviously, the Australian actor never stopped shooting movies, but, though this might not have registered with everyone, the amount of telly she has done recently is staggering. In 2023 she was in the thriller Special Ops: Lioness for Paramount+; Faraway Downs, a TV version of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, and the Hong Kong drama Expats for Prime.
This year she appeared in one big series and one TV movie: the flashy soap The Perfect Couple for Netflix, and the romcom A Family Affair for the same streamer. Does that last one count? Maybe not. But the Internet Movie Database has her pencilled in for another five incoming series, including the title role in an adaptation of Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta books.
If you told a 20th-century Kidman fan she’d be doing that much TV in the 2020s they wouldn’t know what to think. Maybe this is a bad thing. (Not really.) Does it mean she can’t get movies? (It does not.) Who the heck is watching all that telly? (Now there’s the question.)
The Kidman avalanche tells us something in particular about that actor. She has, like so many others, accepted the notion that films no longer automatically carry more prestige than TV. But it suggests something else about the medium that nobody with a flat screen and an internet connection can have missed. There is now just too much bloody television. Nobody can absorb this much comedy, drama, reality, documentary, gameshows, news, sport and movies. It’s worse than that. Nobody can even grasp what’s available.
Last week’s Emmy Awards did not just remind you of stuff you hadn’t yet watched. They reminded you of whole streaming services you’d ignored since paying your first subscription. I watched two seasons (we now say that here instead of “series”) of Hacks, the cosy comedy show that beat the noncomedy The Bear to best comedy, but I hadn’t noticed there had been a third. Good luck to them.
True Detective: Night Country? I’m still half way through the one with Colin Farrell that nobody liked. I’ve seen banners on Apple TV+ for Palm Royale, but I’m not entirely sure what it is. Hang on. Oh, it’s got Allison Janney in it. I’ll watch that after I’ve finished season four of Slow Horses or that thing with Vince Vaughn based on the Carl Hiaasen book. Someone said that was good. Or am I thinking of the one with Natalie Portman?
We are not just talking about new “content”. There is a mass of still-breathing shows that most vaguely aware people assumed had perished aeons ago. It is one thing to discover poor Elisabeth Moss is still suffering her way through another season of The Handmaid’s Tale. To hear they’re still making Grey’s Anatomy is akin to learning I Love Lucy remains on the go. How long ago was it that Katherine Heigl left Grey’s to kill off the movie romcom for good? Fourteen years, apparently. We barely knew who Adele was then.
All this has imposed a wearying tyranny of choice upon the consumer. Obviously things were considerably more wretched in the olden days. Scarred veterans of one-channel Ireland will shudder at the memory of turning the dial on your TV (yup, they once, like radios, had dials) and finding that, after a circuit of static, you went from Mart and Market back to Mart and Market again. Before that, for fun, you had to read a stupid book or throw some awful ball against a wall.
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So, yes, appalling. But one was, at least, freed from the pressure of filtering an impossible mass of opportunities. If we only had, say, Baby Reindeer or Ripley as options, we’d stick to one and have whatever experience the chosen show provided. Now the endless options set the viewer – particularly the lone viewer – in a state of cultural paralysis. When that person does start a programme, fear of missing out quickly imposes itself, and, as likely as not, he or she ends up abandoning the series for another.
It is a little-observed phenomenon of the streaming age that we now speak of not “finishing” a show as we once spoke of not “finishing” a book. That’s new. If there were fewer alternatives you would never have abandoned Silo for Shogun or Better Call Saul for Ozark. It’s a terrible, terrible problem, and Nicole Kidman isn’t helping.