‘Too many characters, too many plot lines, characters who weren’t very good at their jobs, and their personal lives were a mess.’ Thus the memo to the creatives behind Hill Street Blues. ‘It was like a blueprint for what made every show successful since The Sopranos,’ Kevin Spacey giggles to Peter Biskind. ‘If the NBC executives had had their way, the road from then to now would never have been paved.’ As the quondamlead of one of that road’s biggest stones, House of Cards, Spacey can perhaps be excused his post hoc moment. Still, his big point stands. There was TV before The Sopranos and TV after The Sopranos, and they are not the same.

In Pandora’s Box, Biskind tells the story of how a medium once despised as pabulum for the great unwashed became the narrative art form of the first two decades of the 21st century. That’s right. Biskind believes that ‘peak TV’ has been and gone. This thesis gives his book the kind of tight three-act structure of the shows he loves disdain. It’s a nice conceit, but a glance at the Radio Times is enough to show that a conceit is all it is. Could it be that Biskind needed some imaginary drama to enliven an otherwise ho-hum tale?

He made his name with Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998), an interview-based account of the Movie Brats revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The book heaved with sex, drugs and Tinseltown gossip that had you howling with laughter and honking with disgust even as you marvelled anew at the modernist masterpieces of Altman, Bogdanovich, Coppola et al.

Alas, the writers and directors in tellyland, while unpleasant enough, are yawns by comparison. ‘I pissed in someone’s pencil cup’ is as colourful as things get. Your eyes light up when Chris Albrecht, the CEO of HBO, is nicked for assaulting his fiancée, but glaze over again when a judge orders Albrecht to get some domestic-abuse counselling. The young Scorsese would have ordered a rewrite.

Talking of rewrites, Glenn Close sees Damages, the five-season legal conspiracy thriller she headlined in, as ‘kind of a 21st- century version of what Dickens was in the 18th century’ (sic). Biskind concurs. ‘The sweep and depth of HBO’s shows,’ he says, ‘propelled TV into shouting distance of the great 19th-century novels.’ It’s a fair point, but it could have been pushed further. If, say, Breaking Bad or Broadwalk Empire are today’s equivalents of Bleak House, that is because they are emphatically not modernist works of art. For all their risky subject matter, for all their eschewal of moral uplift (‘I don’t care if the characters are likeable so long as they’re interesting,’ rasps some HBO suit), the new TV dramas have the form and feel of Victorian realism.

There was TV before The Sopranos and TV after The Sopranos, and they are not the same

Except when it comes to filth. They can’t get enough of that. When HBO’s Michael Fuchs hired Sheila Nevins as director of documentary programming, she pronounced herself ‘free to do sex shows that people could jerk off to’. A few years later the network put out a western series called Deadwood. I never caught it, and since Biskind says it was about ‘a vast pigsty, where humans rut in the muck of their own making’, I’m not overly sorry.

If you like a modernist turn to your narrative, you could do worse than Remotely. David Thomson calls his book ‘a pained rhapsody over America’. This turns out to be a polite way of saying that he couldn’t be bothered organising his thoughts about the box sets he and his wife gorged on during lockdown into anything like a conventional argument. Chief among the shows that crop up are Ozark, I Love Lucy and Fawlty Towers, three series about husbands and wives that allow Thomson to riff on the idea that television isn’t an arena for art (as theatres and cinemas might occasionally be) but a kind of weather system, ‘a state of thought  – like being in love with someone (yet at odds with them – as in family)’. Anyone who thinks they’ve heard this before has probably read Thomson’s Television: A Biography a few years back.

Not that Remotely isn’t worth working your way through. Thomson is the greatest writer on movies there’s ever been. He can’t but be insightful, even about a medium he has long disparaged. Claire Foy’s young Elizabeth II in The Crown has an ‘intrepid shyness’. Succession, for all its stellar dialogue, is ‘a board game’ next to the ‘blood sport’ of Ozark. As for True Detective, I’m not sure that anything can be ‘honourably pretentious’. But Thomson is surely right to say that TV had hitherto ‘been intimidated about reaching for poetry’.

That reaching still goes on. Whatever Biskind’s subtitle says about ‘the greed, lust and lies that broke television’, we remain at peak TV. There was as much quality programming last year as there was in 2013 and 2003. It is true, of course, that there is plenty of tripe too; but there always was and always will be. Good writers are few and far between, and no matter how many production companies and broadcasting networks there are, there is no way of upping the number of people who can hold a pen. You can grow the market in wine or widgets; you can’t grow the market in talent and taste. But since no one with an IQ above single figures wants to spend more than a fraction of the day in front of the box, what’s the beef? The BBC alone still produces more quality drama than anyone sane can handle. If Biskind really thinks television is broken he should stay in more.