Mar 24, 2026 3:57am PT

One Real Post-Peak TV Crunch: A Supply Chain That’s Too Slow

With shows taking months longer to reach screen, a slowing production pipeline is helping to push the market toward crime, unscripted and Asia Pacific imports, Ampere Analysis' Olivia Deane argued at France's Series Mania in an early presentation at its Forum on Tuesday

Callum McLennan, John Hopewell

Microdramas: Consumer demand remains 'insatiable,' Ampere Analysis said at Series Mania

AR/COL/Liuyi/Qinfan/Vigloo/ABC TV

In one of the earliest sessions at the Series Mania Forum conference strand in Lille, France, Ampere Analysis research manager Olivia Deane took to the stage Tuesday with a presentation titled “A Year in Series: The Post-Peak-TV Era,” armed with data that reframes the industry’s current malaise. The headline isn’t just that there’s less money. It’s that television has become so slow to make that the market can’t feed its own appetite.

Deane’s argument is that the conventional Peak-TV-is-over narrative misses the structural problem underneath. “There were only 2% fewer Western European scripted TV commissions announced in 2025 than in 2020,” she told Variety, “but they will take on an average 40% longer to make.” That bottleneck, not the commissioning decline itself, is what’s choking the supply chain.