When a streaming show is canceled after just one or maybe two seasons, audience frustration radiates out from social media. TV used to be a business that aimed for long-running hits, but it doesn’t feel that way anymore and there’s no shortage of catastrophizing. “Television is dead,” is how one person put it. “The current model is unsustainable. It’s profit over art.”

The disappointment is real — but this is also a romanticization of the past. TV has always been profit over art. Pretending otherwise doesn’t help us understand what’s happening now.

But I get why it’s easy to buy into the fantasy that things were better before streaming upended everything. Survivorship bias means we remember all those old network shows that ran for multiple seasons and then lived on in reruns, but not the countless others — and truly, the numbers are staggering — that were canceled only a few episodes in, becoming yet more pop cultural detritus consigned to the Hollywood junk heap.

But it’s never been this bad — right? I don’t know if that’s accurate either! Around 600 scripted shows premiered in 2022. But go back 20 years, to 2002, and that number was 182. More shows are getting made, therefore more shows are getting canceled. But proportionally, the percentage canceled might not be drastically different.

With the traditional broadcast model, a long-running hit with 22 episodes a season can mean big profits, especially in syndication. For generations, that financial incentive also did the work of shaping audience expectations for the regularity that came with long-running shows.

None of this applies to streaming originals. That’s because money isn’t pouring in — at least, not money pegged to individual shows. The business model is different, which means the goals are different. Here’s how entertainment journalist Rick Ellis explains the thought process in his Too Much TV newsletter: “While many people in Hollywood don’t want to believe it, three new originals with eight-episode seasons are better for subscriber numbers than one show with 24 episodes. Especially because three different shows provides more of a chance you’ll have one that breaks out with audiences.”

Perhaps! But this has left audiences feeling forsaken. And people who make their living in television are experiencing one of the most intense periods of professional destabilization in recent memory.

Who wants a diet of short-run shows only? Maybe it wouldn’t feel so dire if a nice chunk of streaming shows — 10 or 15 of them across different platforms — were getting multiple seasons.

The history of television is littered with shows that barely made it to double-digit episodes, but there were always exceptions — shows that struggled in the early going but were given a chance to find an audience. That’s not because executives were more nurturing than they are now; if a show with mediocre ratings stayed on the schedule, it was probably because there was nothing else to fill the slot.

The 1979-80 TV season was notorious for the number of shows that failed, including “Salvage 1” starring Andy Griffith as a guy who recovered abandoned space junk and used it to build his own rocket. Fourteen episodes aired in the first season. When the second season rolled around, the network aired just two episodes before pulling it off the schedule for good. Imagine how frustrated audiences must have been! But that wasn’t uncommon; four or eight episodes might air and then — poof — suddenly a show was gone because it was a ratings disaster. At least with streaming, you’re getting a completed season (even if it’s short) before it’s canceled.

Here’s another frustration you hear right now: Hollywood has never been more obsessed with IP, aka intellectual property. I agree that this endless lineup of prequels and reboots and adaptations is tiresome. No one wants to take a risk on original ideas. But let’s not fall into the trap of revisionist history, either. Going back decades, spinoffs have always been part of the TV landscape, which is really just another way of saying … IP

IMDb has a page listing “Short Lived TV Shows 1970’s/80’s” and it’s a fascinating time capsule. Never heard of most of these shows. But what’s really surprising is just how many were based on movies (cough, IP once again).

Scroll down the list and … there was a TV series based on “Casablanca”?? (Lasted all of five episodes; maybe Sam got tired of playing that piano every week.) There was another based on “The King and I.” Also: “Breaking Away,” “Animal House,” “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” “The Four Seasons,” “Logan’s Run” and more — all hoping to be the next “M*A*S*H,” I’m guessing.

I’m not in the prediction business and I can’t say whether the TV industry can recover if it continues to abandon the kind of long-running shows that become part of the fabric of our pop cultural lives. But it’s also a mistake to think through the current challenges if we’re only taking into account what’s transpired over the last 10 years or so.

Viewer discontent is real. Media bosses might want to start taking that seriously again.

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

With the return of Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building” for Season 4, the podcasting, murder-solving trio of Charles, Oliver and Mabel try to figure out who killed Sazz Pataki, Charles’ old friend and stunt double from his TV stardom heyday.

Nothing seems amiss at first. There’s no body or obvious crime scene. But Sazz hasn’t been answering calls or texts, and once Charles and his pals start poking around, they realize there’s been another murder in the building. Slowly but surely, they piece together the clues.

In an amusing twist, Hollywood has come calling. A studio wants to turn their podcast into a movie. So off they go to the Paramount lot in Los Angeles to sign away their life rights. This is such an enjoyably meta idea, because both Steve Martin and Martin Short have a rich history of satirizing show business in general, and the vapidness of Los Angeles in particular. Unleashing Charles and Oliver’s neuroses and egos in a Hollywood setting works as well as expected, largely because Selena Gomez’s Mabel functions as a splash of vinegar. She is less dazzled, and skeptical about the whole thing.

But all the pieces are already in place, including a script, a cast and a directing duo who are fresh off a “heart-wrenching, deeply, deeply viral Walmart ad campaign.” The directors are sisters whose last name is Brothers. They are the Brothers sisters. The show’s delight in wordplay remains intact!

I’m generally less enthusiastic about the show’s (over)reliance on A-list guest stars to fill out its world, with the exceptions of Shirley MacLaine (Season 2) and Meryl Streep (Season 3 and a brief return in Season 4). But you can’t argue with the lineup this season. Molly Shannon is the sharklike studio exec who has hired Eugene Levy to play Charles, Zach Galifianakis to play Oliver and Eva Longoria to play Mabel, whose character has been aged up by a couple of decades because apparently focus groups found the real age gap creepy. (Since when has Hollywood cared about that?!) Galifianakis is especially prickly about the gig and proposes a risky take on the character: “I was thinking about maybe playing him talented.”

At the studio, our New York threesome stumble upon a Hollywood backlot version of their home city — an old-school rap beat plays as a guy pushes a hot dog cart and a mother leans over the fire escape to holler at her kid — and it’s funny because this blatantly and hilariously corny depiction of a quasi-Washington Heights neighborhood is no less stereotypical than the show’s own depiction of New York’s Upper West Side.

They don’t stay in LA for long. Back at The Arconia, their glorious apartment building, they find proof that Sazz (Jane Lynch, who is piquant in all the right ways) is indeed dead. Even so, she shows up as a ghostly apparition who accompanies Charles on his quest to solve her murder — or, she tells him, maybe she’s just a “manifestation of your rapidly declining mental state.” His grief feels more poignant this time and losing his friend seems to cut him deeper than the previous tragedies he’s weathered.

The show’s great balancing act — between humor and moments that hit you in the gut — has always been its strength. Melissa McCarthy’s comedic instincts fit right in, as Charles’ over-the-top sister, with whom they temporarily bunk at her house on Staten Island. She is somehow melancholic and exuberant all at once.

A bar frequented by stunt performers is called Concussions and it’s the kind of throwaway but memorable joke that has you think: Please let this silly-smart show continue for a few seasons more, with its vulnerable, sardonic, wonderfully screwball outlook on life and death and everything in between.

“Only Murders in the Building” Season 4 — 3 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: Hulu

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

After rear-ending a guy and his golf cart off a pier, a police detective in the Florida Keys named Yancy is demoted to restaurant inspector. A decently sardonic premise, even if I’m not sure how that works (aren’t these different departments?), but in Apple TV+’s “Bad Monkey,” starring Vince Vaughn, Yancy is pulled back into police work when some tourists out deep sea fishing reel in a disembodied human arm. “We’re in the memory-makin’ business,” their grizzled captain shrugs.

Adapted from author Carl Hiaasen’s 2013 comic crime novel, the show is from Bill Lawrence, of “Scrubs” fame, and, more recently for Apple, “Ted Lasso” and “Shrinking.” Lawrence has a tendency to go sappy in ways I find emotionally dishonest — the men at the center of his shows, including this one, are frequently stunted but good-hearted and we’re supposed to adore them for it. But tonally, the 10-episode season of “Bad Monkey” is aiming for something different, and for the better.

Yancy is the quippy, easygoing lone ranger of the type that often shows up in the novels of Thomas Pynchon or Elmore Leonard, with unending confidence, but judgment that isn’t always the best. The kind of guy who doesn’t follow the rules, but somehow nails the bad guys anyway. That’s a promising setup.

The show largely works. But I would like it considerably more if someone other than Vaughn were in the central role. He doesn’t embody a specific character so much as play a version of his well-worn persona, delivering a glib, fast-talking patter but little else to suggest there’s a human being underneath all that bluster. He’s blank behind the eyes.

Audiences will likely be drawn to the show either way. Despite an abundance of television thanks to streaming, the actual quality in the aggregate has gone way down. I think at this point viewers are just grateful for anything halfway competent and entertaining and the kind of easy watching that doesn’t insult your intelligence.

So what’s with that arm pulled from the water back in the Keys? Yancy is instructed to drive it up to Miami and hopefully offload the case to the good folks of Dade County. But not before he buys some popsicles and fresh crab and tosses them in the cooler along with the arm. At the morgue, he meets the medical examiner, Rosa (Natalie Martinez), who will eventually team up with him on the case (and fall into bed with him, as well). If only there were some sizzle between them, but their chemistry remains theoretical.

A parallel storyline unfolds in the Bahamas, where a young fisherman named Neville (Ronald Peet) and his pet capuchin monkey (who is neither bad nor good, but simply there) live a simple and idyllic life in a beach shack left to Neville by his father. Turns out, the land has been sold out from under him and the humble abode is demolished when a couple of obnoxious American developers (Meredith Hagner and Rob Delaney) come looking to build a resort. They are also — surprise! — connected to that mysterious arm.

Looking to stymie their plans, Neville seeks out the services of a priestess known as the Dragon Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith), who is suffering a crisis of confidence and just wants off the island. Her story takes a while to get going — initially it veers awfully close to exotifying the character — but it becomes the most resonant narrative of the series, especially as it pertains to her push-pull relationship with her grandmother (a terrific L. Scott Caldwell). Turner-Smith’s career has been underwhelming so far, but when she gets a chance to be vulnerable here, she’s quite good.

Eventually, Yancy and Rosa make their way to the Bahamas, where the storylines finally intersect. An unseen narrator guides us through it all — sample voiceover: “(She) knew she might get a UTI banging in the jacuzzi, but she still felt it was worth it” — which gives the show a mirthful energy and personality it’s otherwise lacking. Plus, there’s a brief but welcome appearance by Scott Glenn, underplaying it beautifully as Yancy’s extraordinarily Zen father.

The show is fundamentally a portrait of downmarket scammers and oddballs who lack a moral compass or even a conscience. The setting is a fantasy all on its own, considering the Florida Keys are ground zero for sea-level rise in Florida. But maybe that’s too much of a bummer for “Bad Monkey” to acknowledge. It’s happy to tackle the sleazoids of humanity. But the climate crisis? As if!

“Bad Monkey” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: Apple TV+

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

In 1964, Life magazine ran a 6,000-word story on Elizabeth Taylor culled from nearly 40 hours of audio interviews with the biographer and journalist Richard Meryman Jr. The headline was “Our Eyes Have Fingers,” a phrase borrowed from Taylor, who was describing the electric connection between her and her fifth husband Richard Burton, who she would divorce and remarry before divorcing once again. That speaks to the combustible magnetism between them. Or as Taylor put it: “When we look at each other, it’s like our eyes have fingers and they grab ahold.”

Always vivid on screen, that quality also existed in her life and self-expression offscreen.

The Meryman interviews — long, winding conversations over drinks (a “scotch and sodie,” as Taylor playfully puts it) — have been unearthed and they form the basis of the absorbing HBO documentary, “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes.” Director Nanette Burstein layers the audio over clips from Taylor’s films, press footage, home movies and personal photos.

“National Velvet” made her a child star in 1945, but she was playing women in their 20s by the time she was a teenager. Even so, “I was not prepared to be an adult,” she says. “I’d been sheltered and protected and the repercussions were that I made horrendous mistakes.” Success in Hollywood requires a certain amount of ego, but in these 1964 interviews, she comes across as introspective and eager to pull back the curtain. Celebrity image management is not on the menu.

“I’m just fascinated by the phenomenon of Elizabeth Taylor,” Meryman says at the outset. Ummhmm, she replies. I laughed!

Then he asks: What do you think your public image is?

“My public image? Oooooh, I would think it was an untrustworthy lady, completely superficial, not too pretty.” Not too pretty? “I mean, inside — not too pretty a picture. Maybe because of my personal life, I suggest something illicit. But I am not illicit. And I am not immoral. I have made mistakes and I have paid for them. But still it doesn’t make up. I know that I will never be able to pay the bill. But that is not something you can put in the story.”

When asked about her children, her response is level-headed: “I absolutely can not talk about them. I feel terribly protective. They have a right to privacy.” And she is thoughtful about the crazy-making nature of celebrity. “What I have done is deliberately make a dividing line. The person that my family knows is real. But the other Elizabeth Taylor, the famous one, really has no depth or meaning to me. It’s a commodity and it makes money. One is flesh-and-blood and one is cellophane.” Even today, we rarely hear Hollywood’s most famous drop the act and spell it out in terms as blunt as these.

She laments that “all I have achieved is be a movie star that once or twice has managed to do a fairly capable job of acting. I’m not satisfied with what I am. I’m not satisfied with what I’ve done. I want to improve.”

Presumably, Meryman’s interviews with Taylor took place over several years (the film states they were conducted for a book project) because she talks about “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” which came out in 1966. The clips selected by documentary director Burstein are a reminder of the ways Taylor found small moments of comedy as Martha, the tragic whirling dervish and heavy-drinking chaos agent extraordinaire of Edward Albee’s play, on which the movie is based. Like the way she tells her husband to “shuddup” out of the side of her mouth, a cigarette balanced between her lips.

“Martha is bawdy, sloppy, snarly, but there are moments when, all of a sudden the facade will crack and you will see the hurt, the infinite kind of pain of this woman,” she says. “Because it’s such a complete change from anything I’ve ever done, in a sense it’s one of the easiest things I’ve ever done,” she says. “I have Martha to hide behind, so I’ve lost Elizabeth Taylor. I feel much freer, much more experimental.”

The interviews cover her various roles and marriages, and the drama therein (she admits to henpecking her husbands and always wanting them to push back; too often, they did it with violence). As the conversation winds down, Meryman says: “I think I’ve finished my list of questions.” Taylor is content. “Would you like a drink, dear? Should we turn the little machine off?”

Drinking ran in the family and it would become a problem for Taylor, as well. The documentary ends with shorter excerpts from a 1985 taped interview with journalist Dominick Dunne after she had spent time in recovery at the Betty Ford Center. Her eight marriages behind her, she is finally focused on other things. “I don’t think I’ve ever tried to be alone,” she says. She would spend much of the decade focused on AIDS activism and we see a clip that speaks to this: “No one wanted to talk about it, no one wanted to become involved,” she says, standing at a podium giving a speech. “And it so angered me that I finally thought to myself: ‘Bitch, do something yourself.’”

To Dunne, she explains her thought process more deeply.

“I think there is a reason for having fame — a reason that can be turned into constructive uses because fame can be a very negative thing. And unless you turn it around and make it work for you, what is the point of having it?”

“Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: 7 p.m. Saturday on HBO (streaming on Max)

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.