Recently I’ve become fascinated by a TV phenomenon that I’ve started calling ghost shows—series that dominate the online conversation one year before all but vanishing from it the next. I don't mean shows that have been canceled. Ghost shows are still on the air. They’re still being watched. Possibly by large numbers of people. But hardly anyone seems to talk about them anymore. They don’t disappear from your television. They just disappear, suddenly and unexpectedly, from the discourse around your television. I picture them gliding soundlessly through an ominous cultural fog, afloat but weirdly translucent, like ghost ships.
What’s a good example of a ghost show? Squid Game is what got me thinking about the concept in the first place. Season 1 of the South Korean survival thriller was a global sensation, endlessly discussed; it inspired speculation and analysis, generated memes, impacted the broader worlds of fashion and design, and influenced discussions of economics and policy. Season 3 is out now, and Netflix claims it was viewed 60.1 million times in its first three days, becoming the streamer’s most-watched debut ever. Have you seen more than a handful of posts about it? Have you been in a single online space where someone brought it up? I haven’t. When the show first dropped in 2021, I could barely log on without seeing 10 photos of dudes in pink jumpsuits and PlayStation masks. But I’ve had precisely one conversation with another human being about Season 3 of Squid Game. It was about how weird it is that no one is talking about Season 3 of Squid Game.
It’s easy, of course, to think up reasons Squid Game might have fallen off the conversational map. For instance: The first season, with its deranged premise (adults play lethal versions of children’s games for money), distinctive style, frequent plot twists, and startling violence, had a novelty value that subsequent seasons lacked. The first season was a gripping exploration of viscerally urgent social and economic themes, but the world has changed fast in the last few years; after South Korea's 2024 martial law crisis and the arrival of masked ICE agents on the streets of the United States, Squid Game’s take on wealth inequality suddenly seems a little behind the zeitgeist. And maybe, most importantly for the discourse, the later seasons of Squid Game just haven’t been as good as the first.
But what fascinates me about ghost shows isn’t really why they became ghost shows. Taken individually, their ghostliness usually isn't hard to explain. What fascinates me is that there are so many ghost shows now. It's fascinating that this happens all the time; that we’re constantly haunted by these quasi-irrelevant specters, the lingering souls of hype cycles past. Take Severance: Season 1 seemed to hold the whole internet in thrall. Season 2? It wasn’t quite as ghostly as Squid Game has been, but it was shockingly quiet considering the noise around Season 1. Yellowjackets? Total ghost show. Fargo? Ghost show, and the later seasons don’t even dip in quality that much. The Last of Us has ghost-show potential, even if it’s not quite there yet. True Detective is a rare example of a series that became a ghost show and then came back from the dead, as if to illustrate that time really is a flat circle. Ted Lasso was inescapable in Season 1; the later seasons dwindled so dramatically that just now I had to check whether the show is still in production. (It is, somehow.)
Again, I’m not saying that any of these series are commercial or artistic failures; I’m just saying it’s a little astonishing to see so many shows command saturation-level attention in their early years and then, in their later years, get less than The Gilded Age. Not an exaggeration: I’ve heard from more people about The Morning Show lately than about the new season of Squid Game. The Morning Show!!
This strikes me as a new phenomenon, or at least a partly new one. Sure, in the past it was common for series to settle into a lower-key groove once we started taking them for granted. But they didn't just disappear. Attention, historically, has tended to be at least somewhat self-sustaining. Once a show broke through—once enough people were invested in it—it would go on attracting commentary even if its popularity or quality waned. Maybe it would get less attention over time, but it would still get a lot; we didn’t suddenly stop talking about Lost or Battlestar Galactica just because they’d passed their peaks. The pattern was more like the one we see now with The Bear, which is very much not a ghost show, though it's no longer the cultural steamroller it once was: It’s gone off the rails, but the fact that it’s gone off the rails is something many people still want to talk about.
This is probably the moment to acknowledge that I’m only describing my own impressions here. I have no objective metrics for quantifying The Conversation, and the nature of online attention is itself constantly shifting. It was hard enough to measure when headlines and column inches were the currency of the day; now, when everything depends on an ephemeral flow of posts and jokes and podcast patter, it's even more elusive.
With any series I’ve called a ghost show, there’s always the possibility that it’s really not a ghost show at all, and I’m simply plugged into the wrong slice of online discourse. Maybe millions of Americans are talking about Squid Game, and by some trick of algorithmic chance, I’m just not following any of them. In fact, the most revealing thing about ghost shows may be that they show us the limitations of our own individual perspectives on the discourse. The internet is vast, after all. How can any of us claim to know what the conversation is? I’ve talked to enough people about this topic to believe that the feeling of being surrounded by ghost shows is widespread. But maybe the ghost shows are different for each of us?
And this, basically, is the state of TV culture in 2025: We’re more likely than ever to look to the shows we watch to provide us with a sense of community, but most of the time we don’t really know who else is watching. Decades ago, the limited scope of broadcast television meant that enormous swaths of the country could be guaranteed to watch the same stuff at the same time, no matter what it was. More recently, the split between prestige TV and network TV meant you could easily sort yourself into the camp where you belonged: At work you'd probably be talking about Two and a Half Men, but if you liked Deadwood better, there were lots of people online who shared your interest.
These days, though, there are a million shows on a million streaming services, the borders are all blurry, and communities have to be assembled and disassembled on a case-by-case basis. You could argue, in fact, that one of the reasons some shows do attract such overwhelming attention in their early seasons is that we’re trying to re-create that vanishing feeling of sharing our viewing experience with everyone around us. And you could argue that some shows fall into ghostliness so quickly now because we’re desperate to keep that feeling going: We have to move on to the next thing immediately, before they have time to make more. With rare exceptions, we're a culture of very intense but very temporary bandwagons.
I mean, look at how excited people get over casting announcements—often even more excited than they end up getting over the thing the cast goes on to make. For many shows, it’s as if our participation as audience members or fans has become uncoupled from the timeline of whatever we're meant to be watching. Everything happens a beat too early. Shows seem to begin before they start and, in the case of ghost shows, to be over a long time before they end.
