(AfroGamers.com) Around 70 TV shows landed this summer, give or take. Not seventy episodes, mind you, but that many separate series, each elbowing for the same corner of my evening, and buried somewhere in that avalanche sits a masterpiece I will never lay eyes on, since the clock simply ran dry.
That number reads like paradise. Blerds my age grew up rationing. We taped Toonami blocks onto VHS, swapped fifth-generation fansubs that looked filmed through a screen door, and waited half a year for a lone volume to reach the shelf at Suncoast. Scarcity made us reverent. You cherished whatever you could grab, because grabbing it cost real effort, gas money, patience. That old tape made the rounds through the whole crew till the ribbon stretched loose and warbly.
Now the spout just pours, day and night, no shutoff valve anywhere, and some nights I sit here wondering just how much we gave up to get flooded like this.
Understand me clearly. I am not out here shaking my cane at streaming. Crunchyroll dropping simulcasts on my television the same day Japan gets them still feels like a small miracle to a man who once mailed money orders overseas. The access is beautiful. Its sheer volume, though, has crossed some invisible line, and past that line the joy starts curdling into a chore.
Think about what all those titles in a twelve-week window actually demand. Depending on the folks counting and which extras get lumped in, the shorts and donghua and spring holdovers, the real tally stays slippery, which honestly makes the pileup worse. Say you want to keep pace with the ten everybody online insists are essential. That is roughly two hundred forty minutes of viewing every seven days, minimum, and that math assumes zero rewatches, zero pausing to soak in a gorgeous cut, zero rewinding the moment your nephew wanders in talking about Fortnite. Nobody grown has that runway. Not with a job, a partner, a jump shot to work on, a mama who calls on Sundays expecting you to pick up.
So what happens? We skim. These programs get treated the way we handle a crowded buffet, loading the plate, tasting two bites of everything, savoring almost nothing. Episode one gets a shot. If minute four does not detonate, that series dies in the queue forever, sitting there like a library book left on the shelf to yellow.
I felt this shift land on me personally a while back. Buddy of mine, a real one, texted the group chat asking had anybody finished a certain fantasy joint. Silence. Six grown Black men who have quoted Berserk at each other since college, and not a soul among us had rolled past the third installment. We had all started it. Every last one of us had bailed somewhere in the middle. What used to bind us, a room full of grown folks hollering at the same screen, just quietly came apart. Now it is six dudes in six apartments, each half-watching something different, and nobody around to holler back.
That loneliness is the real cost, and hardly anybody names it.
Older fandom moved slow on purpose. Some of the shows that defined it ran fifty, seventy, a hundred plus installments across years, and that patience built cathedrals. You lived inside those worlds. Fans theorized between drops, argued at the barbershop, wore the shirt, drew the fan art in the margins of your notebook during a lecture you should have been absorbing. The gap between chapters gave the story room to breathe inside your imagination, and that breathing is where love actually grows. A tale you finish in one sitting cannot haunt you. It has no time to.
Compare that against the current churn. A title debuts, trends for four days, gets memed into oblivion, then vanishes so completely that by the finale the internet has already sprinted toward whatever launched the following Friday. Remember the sensation everybody swore was generational last spring? Be honest. Half of you cannot recall the protagonist’s name. That is not because the writing failed. It flopped because we barely held it long enough for the memory to set, like concrete poured and abandoned before it cured.
The studios catch the worst of it, and this part actually messes me up. Animators and other production workers over in Japan are still dealing with demanding schedules and uneven pay, especially people trying to establish themselves at the lower end of the industry. A major 2026 survey found younger creators earning considerably less than their older peers while workers across the field still averaged nearly nine hours of work a day. The abundance I am complaining about does not appear out of thin air. Somebody has to make all of this stuff, and when the calendar keeps screaming for more, quicker, cheaper, schedules and craft can wind up fighting each other. You can sometimes see that pressure in the corners, in held frames stretched a little longer or episodes where the production clearly seems to be fighting the clock.
None of this means the golden age is behind us. Some of the finest storytelling this art form ever produced dropped inside the last handful of years. The problem is not that quality is drowning. What ails us is that greatness now arrives faster than any human being can honor it. We are being handed feasts and told to eat them like drive-thru.
I think about my pops and his records. He owned maybe 40 albums, total, and he knew each down to the pops and hisses. Cat could tell you which musician sneezed on which track. That intimacy came from limits. Forty was a number a man could truly master. Give that same man a service with ninety million songs and watch him stop listening deeply to any of them, since a world where everything is available makes nothing feel chosen. Choosing is what turns a thing into yours.
Maybe the fix lives in us rather than the industry, since the machine will never voluntarily slow a printing press that runs this hot. Perhaps the move for grown Blerds is deliberate scarcity. Pick three per season. Three. Watch them like your father watched those forty albums, present and unhurried, phone across the room. Let the other seventy go without guilt. They will exist next winter regardless, and honestly, if a series is worthy, it will survive your patience. The classics always do. Nobody rushed through Cowboy Bebop to stay relevant, and it outlived every fad that raced past it.
There is a particular kind of peace in choosing less. This whole culture we built runs on dread, the nagging itch that everybody else caught some conversation while you blinked. Anime, of all the stuff I love, was never meant to feel like a chore you owe. It was the treat you earned once the chores got handled.
So I am drawing a line for myself this time. Come fall, when the slate drops and the timeline loses its whole mind over another eighty titles, I am picking a handful and going all the way under. I want to be the old head in the barbershop down the road who can still quote the dialogue cold, tear up at the theme song, feel that story knocking around in his chest. No more blurs I half-remember.
The medium gave us everything. Turns out everything, dumped all at once, can leave a person with nothing to hold. Pick your few. Hold them close. Let the flood roll on by.
Staff Writer; Jay Baker
An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…
He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.