Why do entertainment executives hate entertainment?

If you do not like movies and TV you cannot make good movies and TV

This week, Warner Bros Discovery laid off the bulk of the corporate leadership of Turner Classic Movies, or TCM, the iconic cable channel that has, despite its origins in Ted Turner looking for a way to make use of the MGM films to which he’d retained the rights, become an institutional pillar of film history and preservation as well as the only cable channel it’s safe for your boomer parents to have on in the background all the time.

The cuts so alarmed Martin Scorsese, who founded a preservation and restoration organization, The Film Foundation, that partners with TCM, that he got Steven Spielberg and Paul Thomas Anderson on a group call with WBD C.E.O. David Zaslav (my mortal enemy), ultimately releasing an anodyne statement about being “heartened and encouraged by the conversations we’ve had.”

In a Twitter thread explaining the magnitude of the layoffs, the Entertainment Weekly writer Maureen Lee Lenker put it somewhat more bluntly:

David Zaslav can sit at Jack Warner's desk and renovate Bob Evans' house all he wants. He doesn't love movies or TCM. He doesn't even know what movies his own studio released (we all saw it in action at the film festival).

Zaslav is this cycle’s big Hollywood villain, most famous for burying completed but unreleased movies for tax write-offs and removing shows from their streaming platforms to save money. When “Max,” the new streaming service that combined all of WBD’s streaming apps into a single offering, was released in May, its interface credited directors and producers together under the hilariously dismissive heading “Creators,” which was both a blatant violation of bargaining agreements around credits and an on-the-nose suggestion that the WBD people simply couldn’t be bothered to care what a “director” is or what one does.

But he is hardly the only person in Hollywood who seems to have more contempt than love for what the industry does. This excellent Vulture piece about the state of streaming by Lane Brown and Joseph Adalian has been rattling around in my head all week, specifically this quote:

One high-level agent says that studios regard the WGA’s demands — for higher minimum pay and staffing requirements, among other things — as simply incompatible with the way TV is now made: “The Writers Guild, delusionally, is harkening back to a day when there were 25 episodes of Nash Bridges a year and repeats and residuals. Back-end payments existed because Europeans were willing to watch our garbage, and Americans were willing to watch repeats of that garbage on cable at 11 at night. The real issue is that the medium changed. Instead of getting a job as a staff writer on CSI: Miami for 46 weeks a year, now it’s a 25-week job working on Wednesday, which is a better show. That’s just progress.”

This begins as a relatively lucid description of why back-end payments existed and then becomes a bizarre fantasy in which, for some strange reason, writers are now obligated to trade stable and remunerative employment for a vague sense of creative fulfillment and prestige, and this trade is called “progress.”

But even if you’d accept the proposed trade, the premises are faulty. It’s not at all clear to me that Wednesday, Netflix’s Addams Family reboot, is “better” than CSI: Miami, which entertained and employed people for ten years, made a bunch of companies a ton of money, and gave rise to a beloved meme about David Caruso putting on his sunglasses after saying a pun.¹ In some sense the agent even seems to agree! Later in the piece, after dismissing Nash Bridges as “garbage,” they’re quoted complaining that no one wants to write Two and a Half Men²:

This bifurcated development system has left a hole where the more populist shows that once ruled prime time used to fit. “It’s hard to develop hit sitcoms when the people selling, pitching, buying, and programming them don’t seem to like them. They don’t seem to like what the audience likes,” says the top agent. “I mean, I’m sorry, but people seem to really like Two and a Half Men, and none of my writers want to write that. They all want to write Barry. And you know who watches Barry? Nobody.”

I don’t meant to make one agent’s offhand quotes to Vulture emblematic of an entire industry, and I know there are many people in Hollywood who would disagree.³ But the contempt on display for (1) the product being produced, (2) the people who make that product, and (3) the people who consume that product is, I think, widely shared--look at Zaslav, HBO, and TCM. That contempt is nothing new in the entertainment industry, of course. But as it grows and develops it has increasingly made the people in charge unable to distinguish between good product and bad product.⁴

The agent here is committing the same mistake as a lot of bad critics and even more bad development executives, which is to think of “prestige” as a desirable marker of quality, instead of as a kind of genre, or, more cynically, a set of narrative and aesthetic tropes (antiheroes, serialized narratives, film-like cinematography) designed to appeal to a particular marketing demographic--one that happens to be a target demographic for subscription streaming services. As the Vulture piece goes on to point out, just because something is eight episodes long and “actually about trauma” doesn’t automatically make it good, let alone popular:

In an attempt to make their wares stand out among the glut, some platforms simply spent more money on them with mixed results. Over time, the expensive signifiers of prestige TV — the movie stars, the set pieces, the cinematography — became so familiar and easy to appropriate that it could take viewers six or seven hours to realize the show they were watching was a fugazi. “Premium and streaming have been chasing more of a film attitude than a TV attitude, which is making shows more expensive but oftentimes not as good as they used to be,” says [The Shield creator Shawn] Ryan. “You’re seeing ideas that should’ve been movies being elongated into eight episodes, and they don’t have the narrative engines to sustain them for that long.”

Of course, the inverse is true as well: Just as it’s possible to make bad prestige TV, it’s equally possible to make good trash TV. Which is to say, “trash” (or “network,” or “middlebrow”) can be understood a set of formal markers just as “prestige” should be, and there can be a wide range of quality within the stuff that meets that criteria. We all know this to be true intuitively: There are reality shows made with care, intent, and attention to detail, just as there are prestige shows that are absolute dogshit.⁵

The agent describes the old residuals system like this: “Back-end payments existed because Europeans were willing to watch our garbage, and Americans were willing to watch repeats of that garbage on cable at 11 at night.” The idea is that people are no longer willing to watch “garbage,” presumably because so many more options are available to them. But this is only a satisfying answer if you assume that “garbage” is automatically bad. What if the problem is that we’re not really making much good garbage anymore?

Look, I’m not going to try to claim Nash Bridges as a Scenes from a Marriage-level masterpiece or anything, but like CSI: Miami it’s a well-oiled, highly developed, extraordinarily competent piece of mass entertainment--the television equivalent of a Honda Civic. Shows like Nash Bridges could be brain-numbingly stupid (and often politically evil), but they gave lots of people consistent employment, produced tons of value, and required an enormous amount of talent and skill to pull off; they may have been “garbage” in the sense that they were made and marketed to mass audiences, but they were exceptionally well-engineered garbage. Streaming-era shows are often just as brain-numbingly stupid and politically evil as a Nash Bridges or CSI: Miami, but without ever being actually entertaining.

You don’t even have to watch the garbage to appreciate its role in the creative ecosystem. The Shield creator Shawn Ryan, who’s quoted in the story above, was a Nash Bridges writer; so too was Watchmen and The Leftovers creator Damon Lindelof. I’m not the first person to make this point, but the entire first generation of “prestige TV” in the 2000s--which is to say, 90 percent of the actually good prestige TV⁶--was written by people who’d spent a lot of time learning to write quickly to a tight structure for a big audience, a set of skills no longer as widespread among writers, to dire consequences for audiences, who have essentially traded consistent, engaging entertainment for the convenience of on-demand streaming.

Networks used to create several Honda Civic shows a year (and, yes, a lot of lemons); these days, if I can stretch this metaphor past the breaking point, streaming platforms seem to mostly create Tesla Model 3s, which is to say expensive, technologically interesting products that gesture at luxury and quality but tend to fall apart quickly and rely almost entirely on hype and conspicuous consumption (not to mention labor exploitation!) to make themselves profitable--and then only after years of burning cash in pursuit of a business model.

The thing is, Hollywood knows that outside of your Chicago Fires and Abbot Elementarys,⁷ it isn’t making Civics like it used to. There are plenty of quotes to this effect in the Vulture piece, e.g.:

“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.”

But the diagnosis here rings false to me. Is the problem really that streamers (or writers) are too focused on “prestige” at the expense of “populist” “garbage”? Netflix, the biggest streamer of all, produces mind-boggling amounts of middlebrow and trash TV; every time I open the app there’s a new reality competition between friendship bracelet makers or whatever.

There are many, many cultural and technological reasons for the various (and often overstated) malaises of the streaming era, and there’s no one weird trick for the industry to fix itself. But it’s hard not to notice that, from a labor perspective, the big difference between the era of West Wing and Ally McBeal and now is not so much that writers and directors and actors are too pretentious for lady-lawyer shows but that back then seasons lasted for 20+ episodes, paid more people, promised more consistency (to audiences and to workers above and below the line), and underwent more development. Streamers seem happy to make middlebrow TV; but they also seem unable or unwilling to consistently make good middlebrow TV--by paying enough people, building enough institutional knowledge, committing enough resources, and marketing the product.

You hear sometimes a call from writers or directors or other creatives for studios and streamers to take more risks and get more creative. But I don’t really think the problem of bad TV in the streaming era is an issue of “creativity” (versus conservatism) or “risk” (versus safety) so much as it is an issue of professionalism (versus saying “yes” to 1,000 shows at once, under-developing them, and then killing them en masse for no clear reason). Maybe the reason writers and directors and other creatives are treating TV “like art” instead of like “a job” is because none of the people who hire them are treating it like a job either!

1. To be clear, while I have seen a disturbing number of CSI: Miami episodes I haven’t seen Wednesday at all, so it’s totally possible! But as I go on to explain I’m not sure comparing the two shows really makes sense in the first place.

2. Don’t be surprised that the agent complaining that their writers don’t want to write Two and a Half Men is the same agent who was just saying it’s “progress” that writers do eight episodes of Wednesday now instead of 24 episodes of CSI: Miami--agents suffer from a rare brain disease that prevents them from understanding anything.

3. Also, anecdotally, I don’t think it’s at all true that writers don’t want to write Two and a Half Men. In my experience writers want to do literally anything that will get them health insurance. If they’re writing Barry ripoffs, it’s because that’s what gets them meetings.

4. This wide-ranging contempt for audiences/workers/product has, of course, been an intermittent feature of Hollywood forever, but I think it has become a default setting among executives in the streaming era. Executives from a lot of industries that transitioned to the internet have been black-pilled on granular metrics and the revelation that most people will mostly accept “good enough” product if it’s slightly more convenient; in some sense I don’t blame them, but I also think if you end up feeling that cynical about the business you’re in you should probably quit it.

5. One of the bizarre byproducts of the streaming era is the TV Show or Movie That Obviously Cost a Ton of Money But Somehow Looks Incredibly Cheap. (Zaslav should note that HBO, almost alone among Prestige Platforms, seems to have the institutional knowledge and capability to make all of its shows and movies look actually expensive and competently made, even when they’re not ultimately all that good.)

6. This is sort of beside the point but I believe pretty strongly that in retrospect we will remember the 2000s as a better decade for quality TV than the 2010s. As the Vulture article suggests, the streaming boom has certainly made for more TV, but not really better TV.

7. Consider this footnote a blanket “to be sure” statement allowing that (1) the old system produced a lot of bad stuff, garbage or not and (2) the new system has produced some good stuff.