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Did they stop making episodic comfort TV on purpose?

At one moment, The Office, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation and Community were all on at the same time on the same network.

But that was, perhaps, the last gasp of truly episodic comfort TV, so far as I can tell. My father doubted me, so I went through that same network's modern weekly programming, and it was tragic. Cliched procedurals, multi-hour blocks of gameshows in prime time, reruns and news. Not a single frame of it sounded interesting or even tolerable.

Don't get me wrong, it's possible to get serialized comfort TV. The Good Place is perhaps one of the best TV shows produced in the English language. But the shared cultural event of enduring sitcoms or comfort dramas like Gilmore Girls is long gone, and I can't quite figure out why. I heard Suits was the most streamed TV show last year, and it wasn't because there was a lot of buzz around it, or because it's a show of amazing quality. It's because it's comfortable and largely episodic.

But instead, roughly a billion dollars is being spent on Rings of Power, which, to be direct, is not entertaining unless you're distracted with your phone.

We've reached a very strange equilibrium where writing is being seriously under-invested in, despite burgets being up overall and a long-term licensure valuation resting largely on strength of writing. I'd search for a model involing interest rates, but this trend survived very low and very high rates.

Is it about form factor? But streaming gives outsized returns to comfort mega-hits. The issue isn't people spending more time on phones, it's that they're spending more time on old shows on whatever devices they have. If changes in consumption drive a lack of ability to produce content, you'd think that's because the content needs to change, but what we're seeing is that it just needs to stay the same as it was 15 years ago.

Is it a problem of legibility? I can't see how -- although many more studio numbers are private, losing money on streaming is really easy. With limited information, Hollywood used to very reliably circle the things they knew would work and double down. But if The Office is the big money maker, why not try and produce hits like that again?

Is it about risk? If so, wouldn't that council making a larger number of smaller bets, or doing more to ensure the big bets would be enduring hits?

Is reality and other content an attractive content basin? If so, how do you explain The Office and Suits? I'm sure reality makes them a fair bit of money somewhat reliably, but it's not producing outsized gains, and is too easy to compete on, so I anticipate returns being low, if steady..

Is streaming eating the lunch of comfort-content providers? Again, how do you explain the current success dynamics around long-since-finished shows being so popular?

I can't figure this out for the life of me.