"Every so often, you'll hear a critic - and by "a critic," I mean me - lamenting over theater that, in its DNA, it's actually much closer to being television. These are plays that take little or no advantage of their own liveness, the distinctive possibilities and the meaningful, imagination-sparking limitations of bringing a whole bunch of people together in a space for a heightened, fleeting period."
"The age of Will & Grace is over, and the time of Fleabag has come. Solo shows are everywhere, for obvious economic reasons, but now, in more than a few of these pieces, there's another element in play for their creators - to wit, their streaming future. Call it the Edinburgh-to-Netflix pipeline. Flight of the Conchords and the Mighty Boosh are its ancient ancestors, Phoebe Waller-Bridge is its grand matriarch, Baby Reindeer is its upstart,"
"Along with our current savviness to the form comes something really anti-theatrical. Waller-Bridge and the Boosh were originally writing to be in a room with people. Brian Watkins - the playwright and TV writer whose Weather Girl is now at St. Ann's Warehouse after a London run and an Edinburgh Fringe debut - seems, by contrast, to be presenting a storyboard live onstage."
Contemporary theater increasingly borrows television formats, producing plays that often forgo live-theatrical possibilities in favor of TV-style intimacy and narrative. Older sitcom-shaped plays relied on domestic settings, conversational humor, and limited physical action. A new wave of solo shows emphasizes economic efficiency and streaming potential, generating an Edinburgh-to-Netflix pipeline with antecedents in Flight of the Conchords and the Mighty Boosh and with figures like Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Baby Reindeer, and Rachel Bloom. The trend has produced parody and prompted concerns about anti-theatrical work, where some creators present storyboard-like performances rather than pieces fully exploiting liveness.
Read at Vulture
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