^^
You can't really compare family and crime shows to superhero shows.
Family and crime are a staple of human condition, those shows are always relevant. Superhero shows can and most often are about family and/or crime themselves.
Which is my point. Superhero shows are essentially a subset of crime procedurals. Crime may be a staple etc., but look at how many crime shows are about FBI agents specifically. FBI agents are a particular subset of crimefighters, just as superheroes are. They have their own associated set of tropes and conventions and visual identifiers that differentiate them from other types of crimefighter. Same for beat cops or hardboiled private eyes or whatever.
And, yes, superhero shows also have an SF/fantasy element, but so do a lot of procedurals, like
The X-Files, Fringe, Sleepy Hollow, Almost Human, Minority Report, etc. Indeed, superhero fiction is intrinsically one big genre mashup. Sometimes it's procedural and SF, sometimes procedural and fantasy, sometimes action and horror, sometimes SF and comedy, etc. The whole genre evolved as an outgrowth of other genres. The earliest superhero comics grew out of pulp literature, combining elements of both pulp sci-fi and pulp crime/detective stories. Early comics experimented with a wild variety of genres from sci-fi to fantasy to horror to Westerns. The Marvel Age of comics took on its distinctive character by absorbing elements from Timely's previous lines of monster, sci-fi, and romance comics.
But genres do wax and wane in popularity. At the turn of the century there were a ton of space based sci-fi shows; at the start of this decade, virtually none.
And now we're suddenly seeing a resurgence of space shows. So a temporary lull did not mean the end of the genre. And space shows are just a subset of sci-fi. SF shows didn't go away; we still got plenty of them, just ones set mainly on present-day Earth. It was a shift in emphasis and style within the genre, rather than a loss of interest in the genre as a whole. Superheroes are also a genre with a lot of different subsets -- grounded street-level action, techno-sci-fi, superpowered adventure, high fantasy, comedy, you name it.
True, there were a million Westerns on TV in the '60s and hardly any today. There's no guarantee that a genre will remain viable. But my point is that there's no guarantee it won't. It's easily possible for a genre to remain popular for decades. There's no inevitable point of overload, certainly not one that people can see coming. People have been predicting superhero franchise fatigue for many years now, and the genre's just gotten bigger and more popular since. I'm pretty sure I remember some people predicting that
Batman Begins would surely bomb because people were tired of Batman.
Really, we're only just beginning to see the true range of the superhero genre within the past few years. We're seeing it branch out in more diverse directions than ever before. Not just more diverse types of storytelling, from the upbeat fun of
Ant-Man and
Supergirl to the grit of
Powers and
Jessica Jones, but more diversification of the sex and ethnicity of superheroes, which should bring in new audiences. The more diverse a population is, the better its ability to adapt to change, spread into new niches, and avoid extinction. So I don't think superhero movies and shows will be going anywhere anytime soon. Even if they decline from their peak, they'll still be around in various forms for a long time to come.
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