[COLUMN] This January's Biggest Shows Were Surprisingly Small | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

January is traditionally seen as a dumping month for films – “dumpuary” – but this was never quite the case for television.

While the traditional television season used to begin in September, the past decade or so has seen January become a big month for television launches. Over the past couple of years, January has launched seasons of The Last of Us, True Detective: Night Country and Severance, among others. This year, January saw the launch of new seasons of The Pitt, Wonder Man and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. These are buzzy, successful and well-reviewed shows.

However, it’s interesting to look at them as a whole, as part of a larger trend. Conceptually, these are very different pieces of television. The Pitt is a medical procedural unfolding in real time in a Pittsburgh emergency room. Wonder Man is a superhero show about the production of a superhero blockbuster. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a high fantasy adventure that unfolds at a pseudo-medieval tournament. They exist in different genres and modes, with different tones and pitches.

Still, it does feel like there is a trend connecting these shows. They are, to put it frankly, all relatively cheap to produce. Of course, the term “relatively” is doing a lot of heavy-lifting there. The Pitt has an expansive cast and a flashy production. Wonder Man stars Oscar-winner Ben Kingsley and involves superheroes. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a pseudo-period piece with a lot of elaborate costumes and set design, as well as impressive stunt work. They don’t look especially cheap, as television goes.

It’s worth putting this in context, of course. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a spin-off from Game of Thrones, a series that redefined what was possible on a television budget. By the final season of Game of Thrones, that show was budgeted at $15m per episode. The first Game of Thrones spin-off, House of the Dragon, reportedly cost “under $20m per episode.” By way of contrast, not even accounting for inflation, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms reportedly costs less than $10m per episode.

Similarly, the live action shows spinning out from the Marvel Cinematic Universe have been notoriously expensive, as a result of the effort it takes to bring blockbuster scale to the small screen. Episodes of shows like WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier reportedly cost “up to $25m an episode.” Reportedly the second season of Loki ended up costing over $35m per episode. While there has been no budget released, Wonder Man looks remarkably cheaper.

Over the past decade or so, driven by the streaming wars, studios have shown a willingness to invest absurd amounts of money in television series. Amazon spent $465m on the first season of Rings of Power, with reportedly $1bn invested in the show’s source material and future, making it the most expensive television show ever produced. Amazon also produced the second most expensive television show of all time, with the first season of Citadel costing $300m for six episodes.

There are plenty of other examples of this sort of budgetary inflation in television and on streaming. Apple reportedly spent $200m on the second season of Severance. The final season of Stranger Things reportedly cost Netflix between $400m and $480m. On Disney+, The Acolyte cost a comparatively modest $230m for one season, while the budget of $650m for two whole twelve-episode seasons of Andor seems like a bargain by comparison.

The simple reality is that this was never sustainable. Even in practical terms, it is very difficult to quantify what value an individual show adds to a service. If somebody watches Severance on Apple, does that prove that they subscribed to watch Severance? Or is it possible that they subscribed for something else and are just watching Severance because it happens to be on the service while they are subscribed for that something else? It’s impossible to balance and quantify those metrics to justify expenditure.

Of course, the economics of streaming were much more straightforward than the difficult question of how to quantify an individual show’s success. For many years, these streaming services were effectively financial black holes for their large corporate owners. In March 2025, it was reported that Apple was losing $1b a year on its service. In February 2025, it was calculated that Disney+ had lost $10.7b since its launch in 2019. HBO Max was losing $2bn a year when Warners was sold in 2022.

The bleeding had to be stopped somehow. While it seems unlikely that studios will ever completely recover their losses, the past couple of years have seen many of the companies achieve something approaching profitability. Disney’s streaming division reported its first profitable quarter in May 2024, while in May 2025, Paramount reported a modest streaming loss of $109m, down from a $286m loss in the previous quarter. The line was tilting clumsily in the general direction of up.

While these streaming services tried to extract more money from customers with the introduction of ad-supported tiers and international expansion, they also made an effort to cut costs by reducing their content spends. Paramount wound down its expensive Star Trek shows, with cancellations for Picard (June 2022), Discovery (March 2023), Prodigy (June 2023), Lower Decks (April 2024) and Strange New Worlds (June 2025). There is currently only one ongoing Star Trek show without a set end date - Starfleet Academy.

At Disney, there was an appreciable shift away from the expensive live action Marvel and Star Wars shows. In 2021, Disney released four live action Marvel shows (WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki and Hawkeye). In 2022, allowing for a single episode airing late in the previous December, the company released three seasons of live action Star Wars shows (The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi and the first season of Andor). There was a real glut of expensive content.

This year, it seems like the only live action season of Star Wars to be released will be the second season of Ahsoka, while The Mandalorian has been converted into a theatrical movie. There will be at least two live action Marvel seasons, Wonder Man and Daredevil, but those are the cheaper shows. VisionQuest, spinning out of WandaVision, may premiere later this year; it would be the only one of the three shows that could come close to those earlier shows in terms of scale and spectacle.

There is a clear sense that studios in general and streaming services in particular are being asked to do more with less, to stretch what they already have just a little bit further. A significant portion of Wonder Man, for example, was actually shot before the writers’ and actors’ strikes in late 2023. As a result, a lot of the show’s cost won’t be reported in Disney’ upcoming quarterly earnings call. The company has already absorbed the cost and effort of making it, delaying its release to stretch it out.

With A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and Wonder Man, it does feel like the studios are testing the waters to see what audiences will tolerate within familiar brands. Wonder Man takes place within the shared superhero universe, but does not feature blockbuster-level action scenes. The most compelling action scene in the opening episode follows Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul Mateen II) weaving through traffic in his car while rushing to an audition.

Unlike Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms doesn’t chase dragons across the vast continents of its fictional world. It doesn’t feature an expansive cast of recognizable actors like Sean Bean, Charles Dance, Mark Addy, Matt Smith or Paddy Considine. Instead, the series features a relatively unknown cast of respectable character actors who spend most of the season in a single location engaged in stunts that can be filmed practically rather than requiring extensive effects.

There is a real question being asked here. After years of telling audiences that streaming could “maintain the visual standard fans have come to expect” from theatrically-released blockbusters, an approach that most likely damaged both television as an artform and cinema as an economic prospect, it feels like studios are asking audiences whether they will accept series that look more like television use to look rather than competing with the scale and spectacle of cinema.

This also evident with The Pitt, which recently pulled off a modestly surprising Emmys win over Severance, most likely because of what it represented. The Pitt is an old-fashioned television show, with a reasonable budget, a reasonably long season and a quick turnaround between seasons. The Pitt is a slightly elevated form of the classic television procedural typified by E.R. – although how slightly likely remains a point of some contention.

This January, it really seems like the big trend was that largest shows were all a bit smaller – and that was perhaps part of what made them great.