🍿 2022-09-07 13:32:05 – Paris/France.
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The day after giving birth last month, Lindsay Katai was in the hospital's postpartum ward with her new baby when her fiancé stumbled upon some bad news on Twitter. “'Oh no,' he said. "They removed 'Infinity Train' from HBO Max. » ”
"And that's how I found out," Katai said.
Critically Acclaimed animated show which she had worked extensively on was simply deleted, thrown into a black hole of business-saving measures, along with several titles on HBO Max. The company, she added, even deleted all mentions of the show from its social media accounts.
“It's hard because before your show was on and it could be gone forever, whether it was on cable or the network. … But we thought we were protected from that because of the Streaming. It was always kind of a consolation – we don't get paid that much. We don't get any residuals. But at least we'll be accessible for a long time. Lo and behold, that is no longer the case,” Katai said. “It's a purely outcome-based decision-making process that's all about maximizing profits over any type of artistic voice. »
"I don't feel good about being a writer right now," she added. “I don't feel good about being in the industry right now. »
The television in Streaming is going through an existential crisis, involving the people who make it and the viewers who watch it. Its groundbreaking zeal naturally waned, as that initial wave of near-limitless expansion, limitless creative opportunities, and vast archive choices crumbles, after a series of mega-mergers and a dip in new subscribers.
Just when the Streaming eventually attracted more viewers than cable TV and broadcast, its major players are engaged in a predicted long war for subscribers, who are becoming all too aware of rising subscription prices and, both subtly and directly , a change in the programs. happen and how long they stay. Ads may soon become more common and services may be bundled (for one low monthly price!), already sparking visions of a future reminiscent of the dark days of cable.
The list of seismic rumbles in recent weeks is long, as reported in The Hollywood Reporter, Variety and elsewhere: Warner Bros. Discovery removes shows from its archives and unfinished films from HBO Max as it prepares to merge it with its service of Streaming sister Discovery Plus, after promising shareholders a $3 billion cost cut. Faced with a plummeting stock price and a worrying loss of subscribers, Netflix plans to add an ad-supported model at a lower price and may crack down on password sharing. Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus, all of which can be subscribed to in a cable package, are raising prices after suffering a more than $XNUMX billion hit in the fiscal third quarter. Meanwhile, Amazon Prime Video has just launched the most expensive show ever – a Lord of the Rings drama – in hopes of gaining traction in a crowded market.
"The services of Streaming tend to become more similar to the broadcast networks and cable networks that existed before,” said Tim Doyle, a television writer and producer who has worked in the industry for more than three decades. “They suddenly had this brilliant idea that if you put ads on, you can make money selling the ads! So they're kind of falling back on things that are familiar to them.
Fear of having your show or movie deleted on the whim of an executive – a growing reality for many, including Katai – is only made worse by the fact that in the post-DVD digital age, viewers may never be able to access the shows again. Showrunners may not even have physical copies of their own work. And that's not the only downside for creators.
No song, movie or show can escape the revisionist impulses of the digital age
For Doyle, who mainly works on sitcoms, one of the downsides of the War of the Streaming is that "it hasn't been very good for comedy. … The first thing these businessmen who run everything now ran away from was comedy, because it's harder. You can't manufacture another comedy like you can manufacture another Dick Wolf show about firefighters, paramedics, or hot cops in Chicago. These types of shows are a kind of paint-by-numbers. You can basically recycle scripts every year. Moreover, he added, most of these services Streaming want to appeal to a global market, and comedy doesn't tend to translate successfully from one culture to another.
Doyle thinks that the quality of broadcasts in Streaming – comedies and dramas alike – is destined to decline, especially as these companies must find a way to cut costs and increase profits.
"In the services of Streaming, the focus was on this premium product. There is an episode of “The Mandalorian” that [cost millions of dollars] to do. You can't compare it to an episode of 'NCIS' in terms of budget, in terms of show,” Doyle said. But if most services are losing money, it stands to reason that these types of budgets are unsustainable. "I suspect some of the shows are going to get [worse]."
The anxieties that creators associate with work in the revolution of Streaming have been portrayed in the TV shows themselves. The most recent season of HBO's dark comedy-drama "Barry" features a subplot in which Sally (Sarah Goldberg), strikes critical gold (98% on Rotten Tomatoes) with a semi-autobiographical television series titled "Joplin." , which she creates and stars for a central Streaming fictitious called BanShe.
No sooner had Sally's show premiered (minor spoiler ahead) than BanShe's internal algorithm decided it wasn't a success. The show is canceled 12 hours after its premiere and its episodes are deleted from the database. The script served as a sharp commentary on the current state of the industry.
And that borrows from reality. On Ringer's "The Prestige TV" podcast, "Barry" co-creator Bill Hader said he has a friend who sadly knows about Sally's experience. The day his friend's show premiered on Netflix, "He texted me a picture, like, 'We're on the homepage! '” Hader said. A day or two later, Hader launched Netflix and couldn't find the show. "That was the first time I heard, 'Yeah, apparently the algorithm didn't like it.' ”
During Hader's press junkets for the show, an interviewer criticized the script as "'a bit too broad, satirical type stuff with a capital S,'" he said. "And I was like, 'But it happened! It's happening!' ”
Comedian Adam Conover, who has created shows for cable and Streaming – “Adam Ruins Everything” for cable TruTV and “The G Word with Adam Conover” on Netflix — worries that "the direction the industry is headed is something potentially worse than cable." It's my fear. I think we're going there quickly.
"The first promise of the years of Streaming was a fantasy and/or a lie. And we're entering an entertainment industry that's far worse for everyone. Everyone, including the shareholders of those companies,” Conover said. “The only people who are going to benefit are the very few CEOs at the top who make the deals happen, but everyone loses. »
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In the revolutionary rush to streaming television, many of the old ways of business have crumbled. Creators, who once could aim for syndication and rebroadcast fees, “are paid a lot less. Much, much less,” Conover observed. The same goes for writers, producers, production teams and animators. And, since TV seasons tend to be shorter on these services, there's less work. Mega-deals that make headlines are rare, but still fuel the illusion that the networks of Streaming “are just as big as those old broadcast networks in the 90s, except they pay a fraction of what creators were paid,” Conover said.
When he pitched "Adam Ruins Everything," during what now seems like cable's last hurrah in the mid-2010s, "I pitched probably a dozen different places," he said. "I'm still presenting TV for a living, but now when I go to present it, there's only [a few] places you can go. This is monopsony in action.
Monopsony, Conover said. This is when a company dominates the buying market for a particular industry. If you're selling salami and there's only one sandwich shop to buy it, that's monopsony. Think of a monopoly, but the other way around. “If there's less competition for my services, I can't start a bidding war with two companies that want to buy my show. »
At first, the creators were attracted by the Streaming because of the freedoms it offered, which could arguably lead to more interesting and less predictable shows and movies. Netflix, in particular, was famous for not giving ratings to its creators.
But an industry vet who has worked in both the Streaming and network television and agreed to speak with The Washington Post on condition of anonymity to avoid repercussions for his career, said most services now give "a ton of ratings ... because they're risk averse . ”
"My observation is that they're all trying to develop what I would say is less interesting television," the creator said. “They all want more networking stuff. The irony for me, and for many, is that the networks have been destroying themselves with really bland, cutting programs over the years and people have been turning them off more and more. Then the Streaming happened, especially Netflix, with some really interesting stuff. And now I think the Streaming et Netflix decided they wanted their content to be more network-like. I think in their minds they think that makes it more accessible. But I think for the audience, that makes it less interesting.
In August 2022, Warner Bros. Discovery has announced that it will merge HBO Max and Discovery Plus into a single Streaming. (Video: Allie Caren/The Washington Post)
The networks of Streaming also tend to favor diversity, said Erin Hanna, professor of film studies at the University of Oregon. “With the explosion in production, you had more content being produced, so there was more opportunity for creators of color, for queer stories to be told. Groups that have long been marginalized on television, in particular, but also in cinema, were telling new stories and having more content of this type.
Now those opportunities appear to be in jeopardy, she said, citing the controversial cancellation by Netflix in 2019 of “One Day at a Time,” a sitcom following a multigenerational Cuban-American family. She also cited a Daily Beast report that said in HBO Max's recent redesign, "no less than 13 people of color previously tasked with developing shows like 'The Gordita Chronicles' and Spanish-language docuseries 'Menudo: Forever Young' have been let go, likely influencing the types of shows and movies that are greenlit in the future,” resulting in “barely more non-white people in the top content ranks.” (In response to the story, the company highlighted several "diverse character-led" shows and told The Daily Beast in a statement, "HBO and HBO Max have always shown a commitment to diverse programming and storytelling, and always will.")
The result is "less diversity in front of and behind the camera," Hanna said. “There is a kind of seesaw…
SOURCE: Reviews News
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