I honestly want to vomit every time I hear this narrative being pushed. People are really comparing the soulless conglomerate that is Hollywood to slightly less rigid world of network TV via think group made by dozens of writers and directors while completely forgetting the power afforded to the independent auteur. People are choosing their pop albums over pop singles and ignoring the ever growing, ever more accessible world of independent cinema. Louis CK's Horace and Pete is the most intimate television program I can name, and its intimacy is admittedly just borrowed from the work of Mike Leigh and the stage play aesthetic with superficial structural limitations of television programming. That's really all television is: having to tell your story episodically instead of the freedom to tell it however you want to. Also, if your show is successfully you make 10 more seasons until it sucks. The same can be said about movies in the age of the billion dollar franchise, but there's not a rich well of independent television that compares to independent film. You need more resources, thus have less control, over 10 hours of television as opposed to 90 minutes of film. That's just how it's going to work in most cases.
Is television better than it ever has been? That's subjective, but I think we can all agree that it's shifted to be more like film at least in regards to the ones getting critical praise.