The series everyone used to see

For years, the evenings around Ramadan gave the region something rare: a handful of series that almost everyone watched.

There were only a few channels that mattered and only a few hours that counted, after the fast was broken. The same faces, the same plot twists, the same arguments the next day in the taxi and at the family table. A grandmother in Alexandria and a nephew in Dammam could talk about the same scene, because both of them had seen it.

That was not because those shows were the finest ever made. It was because the window was narrow. A limited number of screen hours met a limited number of productions, and the overlap felt like a common culture.

Both limits have gone. Every series sits there at any hour, on any phone, in any country. And making a show, or a clip, or a song, now costs close to nothing, so everyone who can make one does. There is no shortage of things to watch. There is a shortage of people watching the same thing.

The loss is easy to miss. Mention a scene at dinner and you get polite blank faces, not because your cousins have poor taste, but because each of them spent the month inside a different story. The middle that let strangers share a joke grows thinner every year.

It changes what the work is worth, too. A good series used to earn its keep for years in reruns. Now attention lands somewhere nobody predicted, stays a week, and wanders off.

Quantity is guaranteed. Quality is harder than ever to find, and the comfort of knowing the people beside you saw it too is almost gone.