We consume more literature in a year than last generations consumed in a lifetime. Filling all of that with groundbreaking writing is an impossible prospect. Competent production is much more scalable: if you can make one good episode you can make 100.

> We consume more literature in a year than last generations consumed in a lifetime.

This is probably true if you take the average person, but there have always been people reading their entire lives, and there has been a mass market for bad literature for hundreds of years. Cervantes was decrying the state of literature and the huge amount of poor, samey chivalric books in 1605.

We don't need to fill all of it to have some good shows, especially when those shows are already on top of the production ladder and aren't limited by funding. The top shows should be equivalently "top" in all aspects.

It's because money cannot manufacture good writing. There are reliable processes by which a holder of capital can turn $10 million into good production and $100 million into great production, and you can parallelize this as much as you want. There are enough serviceable directors, editors, camera operators, etc. to scale up your production volumes to dozens of shows and billions of dollars.

There is no such repeatable mechanism for original writing. You can find great writing for nothing and pay through your nose for terrible writing. You can find a great writer who delivers a great concept but then she has nothing else in the tank. Or she does, but you can't find another one of her.

You see billionaires buy their way into being big-time movie producers but you never see them buy their way into being big-time screenwriters.