Television "The Binge Purge": TV's streaming model is broken. It's also not going away. (Vulture)

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

The Binge Purge

WWW.VULTURE.COM

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TV’s streaming model is broken. It’s also not going away. For Hollywood, figuring that out will be a horror show.

 

Quote

 

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:

 

“This is the single worst time to be making anything in the history of the medium. It’s just as dark as it’s ever been.”

 

“It’s such a fucking disaster, isn’t it?”

 

“It’s like the entire system has snapped.”

 

“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.”

 

“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. That seems like the thing to do.’ Which essentially was like, ‘Let’s all commit ritual suicide. 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.’”

 

“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.”

 

“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?’”

 

“We’ve invited all these fancy artists into the medium, and they look at it like art, not a job.”

 

“People are getting fucked. 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. Because now they’re competing with younger people and women and people of color that they never had to compete with before. And it hurts.”

 

“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.”

 

“I think we may be in the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme.”

 

 

[skillzdadirecta]

10 hours ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

The Binge Purge

WWW.VULTURE.COM

---

TV’s streaming model is broken. It’s also not going away. For Hollywood, figuring that out will be a horror show.

 

 

All of this is true but...

 

10 hours ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

“People are getting fucked. 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. Because now they’re competing with younger people and women and people of color that they never had to compete with before. And it hurts.”

 

I mean that's ONE way to look at it 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

33 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

I mean that's ONE way to look at it 

 

I definitely had a "playing the world's smallest violin" reaction to that one!

[skillzdadirecta]

1 minute ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

 

I definitely had a "playing the world's smallest violin" reaction to that one!

I mean... someone actually said that out loud. Gives you an idea of how "up their own asses" people in Hollywood are.

[Keyser_Soze]

1 hour ago, skillzdadirecta said:

I mean... someone actually said that out loud. Gives you an idea of how "up their own asses" people in Hollywood are.

 

Didn't @Fizzzzle say the same thing like yesterday?

(Well, I don't mean sympathizing with the whiteys but the part about POC filling up the writers rooms)

[skillzdadirecta]

3 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

Didn't @Fizzzzle say the same thing like yesterday?

(Well, I don't mean sympathizing with the whiteys but the part about POC filling up the writers rooms)

He did... he was talking about the Daily Show I believe. Make no mistake... POC aren't "filling up" shit. We're just more represented than we were. Honestly in Hollywood it's more of an age thing... young vs old that is a very real issue. 

[Keyser_Soze]

5 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

Honestly in Hollywood it's more of an age thing... young vs old that is a very real issue. 

 

Seems to be an issue in more than just Hollywood but having these old people croak is a good start.

[skillzdadirecta]

1 minute ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

Seems to be an issue in more than just Hollywood but having these old people croak is a good start.

Well the flip side is they are putting inexperienced kids in positions they shouldn't be in and exploiting the HELL out of them by under paying them and over working them. I see this shit happening all the time and I'm not even that old!

[GoldenTongue]

13 hours ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

“People are getting fucked. 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. Because now they’re competing with younger people and women and people of color that they never had to compete with before. And it hurts.”

I'm really curious if the language here actually matches the intent of what the author was trying to communicate.  I wouldn't be completely shocked if that were the case, but still...JFC.

 

1 hour ago, skillzdadirecta said:

Well the flip side is they are putting inexperienced kids in positions they shouldn't be in and exploiting the HELL out of them by under paying them and over working them. I see this shit happening all the time and I'm not even that old!

TBF, not exactly a new issue, just a bit of an evolution of the Peter Principle.  People are hired/promoted to (or beyond) their level of incompetence with some frequency, for a host of reasons.

[skillzdadirecta]

3 minutes ago, GoldenTongue said:

TBF, not exactly a new issue, just a bit of an evolution of the Peter Principle.  People are hired/promoted to (or beyond) their level of incompetence with some frequency, for a host of reasons.

 

Yeah it's not a new issue in general industries but in Hollywood it kinda is. For decades Hollywood followed an apperenticeship system where you had to work your way up to a position of say... editor or D.P.by working with established folks who taught you the ropes. Technological advancements changed all of that in the last 15 years so you have kids who grew up using editing software on their laptops or shooting on their phones that may have the technical chops, in some areas, but lack the experience and professionalism to handle the tasks they are given. It can end up costing producers more money in the long run when they have to hire actual experienced folks to come in and clean up these kids' messes. Happens all the time... I'm doing a favor for a friend on their short film for this very reason.