Posted on 02/23/2024 6:35:01 AM PST by SJackson
Even as streamers like Netflix, Amazon and Disney+ are spending almost incomprehensible amounts of money creating the movies and shows fueling the Peak TV wars, the numbers show that audiences are turning down much of that content to watch old television shows instead.
A recent article noted that according to Nielsen, which tracks viewership numbers, “the most minutes last year – more than 57 billion – were spent watching ‘Suits,’ a legal drama that premiered 12 years prior.” The show had more than double the number of viewing minutes than Netflix’s race-swapping woke usurpation fantasy, “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story.”
The Hollywood Reporter noted that the “top 10 overall titles in Nielsen’s year-end rankings are all acquired shows, the first time that’s happened in the four years streaming rankings have been publicly available.” Acquired means the library of older shows that Netflix bought after spending $17 billion on content, much of it on new shows like “Bridgerton” whose three seasons cost $168 million, only to lose to the estimated $200,000 per episode that it paid for “Suits”.
In 2023, more people were watching “NCIS” reruns than the top two streaming programs combined. And more are watching old episodes of “Friends” than either “Ted Lasso” or Star Wars’ “The Mandalorian” despite an estimated $120 million per season budget.
In 2022, Amazon had spent $500 million to buy the rights to Tolkien’s world in order to produce a woke multicultural version of “The Lord of the Rings”, but twice as many people watched “Seinfeld” reruns (not to mention “The Great British Baking Show”) as “The Rings of Power”.
After an unfathomable $238 billion in Peak TV spending that year, most viewers were comfortable dialing up old episodes of “NCIS”, “Criminal Minds”, “Gilmore Girls”, “Seinfeld”, “Supernatural”, “The Simpsons”, and “Heartland”: a show about a horse ranch set in Canada.
The trend continues with Nielsen numbers for this week showing old school shows Suits, NCIS and Grey’s Anatomy in the top 10.
The issue isn’t just “wokeness”. Apart from ‘Heartland’, the old shows that are popular now are not traditional or conservative, but they were generally popular in their own time. Some of the shows were made with a more male audience in mind, a demographic that is no longer serviced by the current streaming industry with rare exceptions like Amazon’s ‘Reacher’.
(‘Reacher’ now ranks as the number two series on streaming, vastly outperforming anything else on Amazon, suggesting that male audiences have been deprived of programming.)
But another issue is a radical demographic transformation in the industry that began with #MeToo and the BLM hate movement. Hollywood made DEI commitments and carried them out, whether it was locking the Oscars behind racial quotas for participating films or dumping white male talent in favor of affirmative action quotas.
Writers Guild of America numbers show that 64% staff writers had been men in 2011, but by 2020, only a third were men. 71% of staff writers had been white in 2011, but less than half were by 2020. Male story editors declined from 61% to 39% while white story editors fell from 79% to 39%. Professional talent at key points in the production chain likewise declined sharply.
By 2020, the number of white producers fell by 24%, the number of male producers by 25%, white co-producers fell by 30%, white supervising producers by 23%, white executive story editors fell by 26% and male executive editors by 27%. The numbers are likely worse now.
While you don’t need to be a white man to write, such a massive industry demographic turnover could not happen without bringing in a whole lot of unqualified personnel for the wrong reasons.
The demands of DEI and the need to produce massive amounts of new content for the streaming wars led to a hiring surge of writers, directors and other creative personnel who were not actually qualified. The impact of that is all around us.
Disney has lost a fortune on movies staffed by inexperienced DEI hires. “The Marvels”, its first comic book universe movie that didn’t even hit $100 million (amounting to likely losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars) was written and directed by Nia DaCosta, hailed as the first black woman to direct a superhero film, with one previous low budget horror film to her name. Her fellow writers had little more than a few episodes of Disney+ Marvel shows under their belts.
“Madame Web”, a recent effort to launch a Spider Man movie franchise without Spider Man, performed even worse for Sony. The movie was helmed by a TV director based on a screenplay originally written by an otherwise mostly unknown minority writer/director, and crashed badly.
The decline of animation quality at Disney has been chronicled in features like Film Threat’s D-Files which put it down to an urgent need to hire new diverse staff while purging the “old white guys” The new diverse hires “understood very little about actual animation and bringing art to life”, and “struggled to succeed at a job they weren’t qualified to have in the first place”. Their ineptitude was blamed on an intolerant workplace and the veterans were forced out.
Something similar has been going on across the industry and no one is allowed to talk about it.
When the editor-in-chief of The Hollywood Reporter proposed a story on how, “those white men who had spent decades writing scripts—which had been turned into blockbuster movies and hit television shows—were no longer getting hired”, he was intimidated into backing away from it.
That was one of the many stories documented in The Free Press‘ coverage which quoted multiple writers and producers, mostly anonymously, describing a DEI culture in which, “suddenly, every conversation with every agent or head of content started with: Is anyone BIPOC attached to this?” Multiple emails contained dismissals such as, “This one a dead end — they are going to limit search to women and bipoc candidates” and “Studio now telling us this job must go to a female / bipoc writer. Sorry — it sucks.”
“I’m all for LGBT and Native Americans, blacks, females, whatever minorities that have not been served correctly in the making of content, whether it’s television or movies or whatever, but I think it’s gone too far. I know a lot of very talented people that can’t get work because they’re not black, Native American, female or LGBTQ,” legendary Chinatown producer Howard Koch said.
Why are shows from the 1990s beating billion dollar projects at Netflix, Amazon and Disney?
One answer is that Hollywood purged or sidelined a lot of its own talent leading to productions that have ten times the cost of their old forebears, but are badly written, acted and directed. A $200 million fan film may make for an impressive trailer, but minute by minute still remain as fundamentally unprofessional as anything uploaded by a random amateur to YouTube.
The issue is not just wokeness onscreen, but wokeness behind the scenes. A lot of the old movies and shows were woke for the level of the time, but they were also competently written, directed and acted by some of the best talent that money could buy. That is no longer true.
Sam Goldwyn, an immigrant and former glove salesman who never learned to speak proper English, yet was responsible for some of the greatest films of the forties, had a simple formula. “You get yourself a great story. Then you get the best writer available. Then you get the best director. Then you hire a first-class cast, the right cast, and a great cameraman.” Not anymore.
Now you get a story that conveys an important socially relevant message about a minority group. Then you get an inexperienced writer from an oppressed group, a BIPOC director who has done nothing except four music videos, a TikTok BLM influencer as your star and a cameraman who is also the only white male on the set and prays all day not to be fired.
What did they know in the nineties and the oughts that no one seems to know today?
TV shows were ‘woke’ ten, twenty and thirty years ago, but the message was, except for some artsy projects, a subtle addition rather than the entire purpose of every single movie and show. Hollywood hypocritically pushed wokeness, but was careful about adopting and internalizing it. And while the upper ranks of Hollywood still mostly consist of white men, the creative talent was fed to the sharks leading to the likes of Disney’s Bob Iger overseeing a sinking DEI ship.
Last fall, Disney was being congratulated for landing Ahsoka, its latest woke Star Wars series, in the number two spot of original streaming shows, but it didn’t even break the top 10 overall. Disney had spent as much as $25 million an episode with more special effects than many movies only to lose to Suits: a show from 2011 with few effects and a budget of $3 million.
The audience had spoken.
YouTube is pretty much all we watch. We watch people with the same values that we have and the same problems.
If DEI was a correct thing then 13% of actors would be black and almost 20% would be Hispanic and then there would be a sprinkling of Arabs and Asians and the rest would be white and close to 50% male and there would be a lot of fat people.
They also don’t give them original material they’re putting them in iconic roles that everyone recognizes. It’s like a popular song sung to a different tune nobody likes it they like the original.
As far as all that sexual stuff in real life in a city with 28,000 people even with all the indoctrination their public face wouldn’t amount to a drop in a bucket but they’re more well-known because of all the drama they always create.
I’ve been working my way through the original Perry Mason series. It is a lot of fun.
In my post I meant B-17’s not B-52’s. My bad
Watch
Car 54
Sgt Bilko
Amos & Andy **
** Even though the “civil rights” moved campaigned against this show its genius and many black comics such as Red Fox defended the show. Primarily the show depicts hard working black Americans in a middle class setting. The goofballs providing comic relief are Andrew Brown, Kingfish and Algonquin J. Calhoun. Every other black is a hard-working middle class American. The white equivalent is “The Honeymooners”. Ralph and Ed no more represented white American then Andy, Kingfish & Algonquin represented black America. The actors and writers in both cases provided incredible comedy!
I know your concerns. At this point, I am skeptical even of Baptist or Catholic run hospitals. I am also skeptical of doctors, dentists, and other practitioners who belong to multioffice medical providers.
Back in the pre-cable days there were 63 hours of prime time among the three networks. Some was chewed up by sports and reruns. That increased some with Fox and then more with cable channels producing some original content. Now a lot more content is produced which means they are digging deeper for producers, directors, writers and actors. Some will be surprise hits that wouldn’t have been made with the old system, but most is dreck that that would have been correctly dumped in the trash with only 63 hours available.
The fact is most of the studios are cutting back right now and what they writers and actors got in the recent contracts was pretty much a Pyrrhic victory. Studios also got rid of a lot of expensive production deals. 2024 will be a very lean and weak year for TV and the movies.
An old show like Seinfeld can still command a $1 Million an episode in syndication, and I am sure that is true of other shows like that from the 1990’s. I would rather watch, that, 3rd Rock, Just Shoot Me, News Radio, Spin City, etc. which have great writing and are still just as funny. Lot of great drama’s still to watch and I love Dallas Reruns.
I only like the first 3 seasons after that it become pretty much the Alan Alda show, some of the best characters left or were fired.
We recently watched all of the old “Avengers” with Patrick McNee and Diana Rigg. Very entertaining! Mr. sneakers is watching all of the Star Trek series. Other than that, the only newer shows we watch are Barnwood Builders, Maine Cabin Masters, Oak Island and Time Team (archaeology show). All the new stuff is crap.
The show was so dense, with so many characters and so many intricate plot points that spilled over into various season - it was hard to keep it all straight watching it either week to week - or season to season, some of which had 18 months between seasons. (Ditto for Game of Thrones).
Much better the second time b/c we watch it in either a two or three hour block - plot flows SO much better and it’s far easier to follow. I picked up on a lot of things that I missed the first round. It just got better and better - Season 6 is my absolute favorite - and the ending was just...weird.
Saw an interview with one of the writers and he said if they’d gone another season, the character “Syl” who owned the Bada-Bing would have died in the hospital - last the series left off, he was not expected to survive. Great character and I’d love another season - thought the prequel was a huge disappointment...
I like The Saint, Danger Man, and the classic Mission Impossible.
Will do.
I think it has a lot to do with most of those old shows not having an arc. As much as I love serialized TV it doesn’t lend itself to casual viewing. Episodic TV you can watch any episode any time, you don’t have to know anything that happened before. The rise of serialization has opened many wonderful doors for story telling. But there’s still a lot of audience for 1 episode stories with nothing to keep track of.
I have been streaming a lot of foreign cop shows; British, French, Australian, New Zealand, Scandinavian.
Yo Ms. Verposa-Jackson!
We axcept the fak dat we hadta skip a hole Satday in juvie for whatever white kid's head we kicked da sh@# outta at recess, but we think you crazy bitch to make us rite dis paper tellin you who we think we are. You will see us as we want you to see us — in the mose rizz terms and the mose spectful definitions. So what we found out is that each one of us is a She-He, a basketball-rappa, and an entitled Influencer, a social services sucking immigrant, and drag queen babysitter. Do dat answer your question? Shiiii!
Peace out,
The Breakfast Club
For the record. Brit Box and Acorn both feature “old” British, Canadien, Australian and New Zealand TV shows. Once you get comfortable with police cars driving on the wrong side of the road, the experience is not really foreign.
We have become very enamored of Australian and New Zealand TV. Both are first rate and un political except for “Rake” and that is pure political comedy.
The recent programming is polluted with both superfluous African and Pakistani that are totally out of place and unbelievable.
Brit Box:
https://www.britbox.com/us/
Lorry = Truck
Take away = Take out
Pudding = desert
and on and on.......
The series “Justified” although more recent, was a lot of fun. Great crime drama with lot of humor and quirky characters.
We keep running through the Frasier series at bedtime. Pure gold. Must have gone through it at least 10 times already. We’ll just start over again, and let it roll - never gets old.
Imagine seeing the ending live on your TV in real time.
Hint: Many thousands of people panicked and called their cable TV companies at that moment.
Lol.
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