![]() The high-stakes Writers Guild of America strike has focused attention on Hollywood’s labor unrest, but the really systemic issue is streaming’s busted math. ![]() Netflix has tightened the screws and recovered somewhat, but the inarguable consensus is that there is still a great deal of pain to come as the industry cuts back, consolidates, and fumbles toward a more functional economic framework. Yet there are still streamers burning mountains of cash to entertain audiences that already have too much to watch. Certain shows that were enthusiastically green-lit two years ago probably wouldn’t be made now. In that time, it’s become clear that the business model dominating modern Hollywood is deeply broken but also that it probably isn’t going anywhere - at least not yet.Īcross the town, there’s despair and creative destruction and all sorts of countervailing indicators. It’s been a little more than a year since the Great Netflix Freak-out, when the streaming pioneer’s first-ever loss of subscribers and ensuing stock drop sparked overdramatic proclamations that TV as we’d come to know it was finished. “I think we may be in the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme.” “The industry went a little crazy, and there’s going to be some pain in it righting itself, but I actually think it’s going to get to what hopefully will be more normal and livable, the place where we should have been the whole time.” Because now they’re competing with younger people and women and people of color that they never had to compete with before. By the way, there’s a real social-progressive way to look at that, which nobody talks about, which is that the people who’ve gotten pushed out of the Hollywood economy generally are older white men. “We’ve invited all these fancy artists into the medium, and they look at it like art, not a job.” ![]() “Where’s my Alias? Where’s my West Wing? Where’s my 24? Where’s my Ally McBeal, Once and Again, and Brothers & Sisters? I have a friend who works at Netflix, and for years I’ve been asking, ‘When are all of you streamers going to get your prestige heads out of your asses?’” “The reason nobody really wants to open the books on this is because if Wall Street got a look, they’d have a collective stroke.” Let’s take one of the truly successful money-printing inventions in the history of the modern world - which was the carriage system with cable television - and let’s just end it and reinvent ourselves as tech companies, where we pour billions down the drain in pursuit of a return that is completely speculative, still, this many years into it.’” That seems like the thing to do.’ Which essentially was like, ‘Let’s all commit ritual suicide. “Everything became big tech - the Amazon model of ‘We don’t actually have to make money we just have to show shareholder growth.’ Everyone said, ‘Great. “These companies took what was an extraordinarily successful economic model and they destroyed it in favor of a model that may or may not work - but almost certainly won’t work as well as the old model.” “It’s like the entire system has snapped.” ![]() ![]() “It’s such a fucking disaster, isn’t it?” “This is the single worst time to be making anything in the history of the medium. If you call a slew of Hollywood’s most powerful showrunners, studio chiefs, agents, and operators and ask them to describe the state of the television business, they will say things like: ![]()
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