Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Our new media diets - with John Podhoretz

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

In this episode, we break down changes in our media diets that have been changed as a result of the pandemic and the tech market boom, and what will revert back to VERY pre-pandemic habits. John Podhoretz returns to our conversation. He’s been a prolific TV and film critic for over four decades. John is editor in chief of Commentary Magazine and host of Commentary’s award-winning daily podcast, he’s a columnist for the New York Post, a book author, and was film critic for the Weekly Standard and television critic for the New York Post.

Everybody that we know is obsessed with shows like that. Succession and the White Lotus and the like. And that's because obsession with social status and money and things like that are consuming elements of the chattering class. But I don't think they're consuming elements of the lives of most people when they sit down and they want to watch something on their screen. Last week, we asked Mohamed El-Aryan what the economy and the markets would look like in 2023. Sticking with a version of that theme, we wanted to ask our friend and frequent guest on this podcast, John Podhortz, what we're going to actually watch in 2023.

What's happening to the film and television industry and what's happening to our consumption habits? John, who's been on this podcast to talk about a range of issues, is a writer, public intellectual, and culture critic. He's the editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine, which I'm a big fan of and I'm on the board of. He's host of Commentary's award-winning daily podcast. He's a columnist for the New York Post. He was film critic for the Weekly Standard and now writes frequent reviews of television and film for the Washington Free Beacon.

This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast, fan favorite, longtime friend, John Podhortz. John, thanks for coming on. Hi, Dan. I mean, look, I'm no Muhammad Al-Aryan, but I'll do in a pinch. Do you mind, by the way, that you come on right at, so the last episode was Muhammad Al-Aryan, and I know you're a huge fan. I don't mind.

I feel very insecure because his episodes are just amazingly great, and now I got to, it's like going on after, you know, it's like you go on after Jerry Seinfeld to do a stand-up, like, you know, in the lineup. That's not good. Yeah, but you know what's amazing about Muhammad, among many other things, is that he can swing from talking about the Fed funds rate and go deep on it, and then suddenly we're deep in the Meadowlands and talking about the jet season.

Yeah. And he's just as deep on that. A well-rounded person. Yeah, but you have range, too. Okay, well. So with Muhammad, we talked about... It doesn't make me any money, my range. My range, the big distinction

here is that I'm not the president of a university. I didn't run, yes, I didn't run the world's largest hedge fund. Nothing. No one's asked you to run PIMCO or the Harvard Management Company. A range, that and a nickel will get me a cup of coffee. But yeah.

You're right. You've got range. So with Mohamed, we talked about the economy in 2023. And so with you, we're going to talk about television and film in 2023. And looking ahead and trying to understand, like with Mohamed, it was like, what the hell is going to be happening in the economy and the markets for the next year? And with you, we're going to talk about what are people going to be watching for the next year? Something you and I have talked about offline. And I want to start by reading, quoting Derek Thompson, who's been on this podcast, who writes for The Atlantic.

I think Derek Thompson is like often much maligned on the commentary podcast, or at least during COVID he was. But he's a smart guy so he wrote this piece that that just came out in atlantic where he goes he tries to understand why there are all these mass layoffs in tech and because he he says actually they don't really make sense but but he's trying to figure out all the possible culprits and one of them and i'm quoting here he says, many people predicted that the digitization of the pandemic economy in 2020, such as the rise in streaming entertainment and online food delivery apps and at-home fitness were, quote, accelerations,

pushing us all into a future that was coming anyway. In this interpretation, the pandemic was a time machine, hastening the 2030s and raising tech valuations accordingly. Hiring boomed across tech as companies added tens of thousands of workers to meet this expectation of acceleration. So basically he was saying, which in the early version of this podcast, our post-corona podcast, which is why actually we had Derek Thompson on. We were trying to figure out what are the big changes that were coming that, you know, if you believe, or as he's pointing to, as you believe that, like, we thought all these things were going to come in the 30s or the 2030s or 2040s, and the pandemic just brought them in 2020 and 2021. And that was the new normal,

that that was going to stay. It just moved up it accelerated and you know that that was how we were going to consume television and film and now the time machine seems to be a bust it seems that if you just look at recent news and entertainment it's something's reverting back to pre-pandemic and so i i know you have views on this. And so I want you to tell us, was the time machine thing completely overstated and why? Not only, I've come to believe that not only was it overstated, but that this will be a moment that will be worth studying in the business schools of the future, or let's say the last, the years immediately before the pandemic into the pandemic, uh, in which the, um, entertainment industry, um, committed grave self-harm, uh, in the guise of attempting to get itself right with the future, that it cut off various of its limbs,

thinking that a stronger limb would grow in its place. And that didn't happen. So I'm thinking about how the entertainment industry accelerated like crazy in the 1970s and the 1980s due to the simultaneous entry into the business of cable television and home video devices, right? First the VCR, then the DVD player. And suddenly this business, which had two arms, right? It had theatrical distribution and television. Suddenly had three or four. So there were more ancillary.

Suddenly there was more money to be made. You made a movie. You sold it to TV. That was all there was. Then suddenly you had a movie. Broadcast television. So suddenly it was on ABC with ads. Broadcast television and So suddenly it was on ABC with ads. Broadcast television. And to syndicated television.

But you sold it and then there was ad supported. The revenue generated was ads for the buyer of that movie. So you had two bites of the apple. Put it in theaters, made money from that. You sold it to television, you made money from that. Suddenly there are two more stops along the way. You have, um, or there's one more stop on the way, which is home video, which starts as a rental business. So you rent, then you also, then, and cable television comes in. So you sell it not only to broadcast television, but to cable television television and then you can rent it at a movie theater and then eventually dvds come in and then you can buy it or become a

collector and then so there's suddenly there's way more money to be made producing uh filmed entertainment way more just simply because the marketplace opened up and then China opens up. There's all sorts of different, the internationalization of the business. Suddenly this very respectable, high dollar cash business becomes a very big deal

in terms of what you can produce and these blockbusters start getting made and all of that what happened when streaming came in is that streaming killed two of the killed the home video market right so it killed off the dvd because now you didn't have to own something you could you could find it and rent it instantaneously it killed killed off the home video store and the DVD store. And that was a serious threat. Suddenly your market is being, you know, suddenly you've got less of a market, right? Streaming combined with mobile and tablets.

Right, right. So altogether, you have a threat to this very healthy business because one of its ancillary money-making arms basically goes away. So then a madness grips around the mid-2010s. A madness grips the entire industry which is streaming comes in that's netflix it's pretty much entirely netflix and netflix becomes a wall street darling around 2012 2013 and netflix aims a bazooka at conventional entertainment the conventional entertainment business. It says we're going to lose as much money as we possibly can in order to claim market share. So not only are we selling this monthly subscription, we're going to spend $10 to $20 billion a year just making stuff that will go on our service.

And we are going to eat everybody's lunch. And everybody else goes bananas. Bob Iger, now back at Disney after his retirement, writes a book called The Ride of a Lifetime. And he described, at the beginning of the book, he describes this moment in 2015 when he takes everybody to an off-site of his business and he says, we an off-site his business and he says we must radically revolutionize our business because streaming is going to kill us what year

what year does he 2015 2015 okay we need to create we need to take a dominant position in streaming entertainment or we're going to be destroyed and uh sets this path in motion in which they need to create Disney Plus. And it takes years to create Disney Plus, as it turns out. They need a good interface. I don't know. I'm sorry. Anyway, so Disney, all these, and then since he jumps into it, and they're the most successful conventional entertainment conglomerate, Disney, right? It owns Star Wars.

It owns Marvel. It makes more money than anybody else. It has all sorts of television assets. It owns ABC. Then it buys Fox. It's huge. And it's like, if we don't get into this, we're going to die. And everybody else says, well, Bob Iger is the best entertainment executive in the world.

He knows what he's talking about. We all have to get into this or we're going to die. There's this mad rush towards streaming. So suddenly, not only – and so what is it that they can sell on their streaming services to get market share once they go up? It's we have stuff that you can't get anywhere else. So you got to come to us. So Disney – if you're in this mindset, Disney is like, okay, we're going to put as much stuff on here. We're going to make stuff for it but we're also going to put stuff on it you can't get anywhere else. And we're going to use our conventional brands from all of our other, from movies and from television,

to sell our streaming service, to get people to subscribe to our streaming service. So suddenly Pixar, the most successful animating studio, you know, basically of all time, 19 straight hits or something like that, three of its four movies are put on, or all of its movies are essentially put on the streaming service first. Star Wars, the most expensive property that it bought, suddenly has a TV show that's very successful, The Mandalorian, but it's on the streaming service. It's not on ABC, which is a vastly larger audience than the streaming service, or on the Disney Channel, which also actually has a large audience on cable.

Everybody else follows suit. There's all this desperate effort to gain market share against Netflix. So what did they do so they had this business motion picture and television but let's just say motion picture it's an 11 billion grosses 11 billion dollars a year uh and obviously the pandemic comes in and vastly disrupts it and this you know they can't make money from it. But it's $11 billion a year business. And even if the pandemic hadn't happened, this I think would have happened inevitably, given the focus on this, they basically say, eh, we're looking at this now. So we're not going to care about this over here. Our focus, and we're trying to convince Wall Street that our focus is this, streaming.

And they basically make moves that do critical damage not only to their theatrical distribution, which again which are in direct competition with streaming because it's the same device. You could watch ABC or the Disney Channel or you could watch Disney+, but you can't watch all three at the same time. So why this fascinates me is that they took existing healthy businesses and harmed them in pursuit of a business that had not yet matured on the grounds that if they didn't get in and throw themselves in, they're going to be left behind. Now, let me ask you. You're a businessman, and I'm not. But my own business, the media business. Don't undersell yourself.

The commentary magazine platform, the glop platform. You guys, you're a mini Rupert, but go ahead. Okay, but in my business, my business was – the media business was materially damaged by all kinds of technological innovations that really did mean that it would no longer hold the kind of financial sway over cities and things like that, newspapers that it once had. But there was the same thing. It's like if we don't get into this now we're going to we're going to be left behind is that the way business actually works does it does it help to be the early adopter i'm not sure that if you're disney and you have a very powerful, strong brand, that you can't wait and go in when everything is mature. You're the leading – you have the leading position in the already extant fields.

And the idea that you need to be in the early war to establish dominance I think is a misunderstanding. Like, let Netflix mature the business, then you go in. Like, Netflix isn't the Xerox machine and no one else can make a copier. Especially in tech, there's always this fear of the first, you know, the early adopter who's going to capture the early adopters. If we don't capture the early adopters, someone else is going to capture the early adopters. If we don't capture the early adopters, someone else is going to own the early adopters. There's iPhone and then there's everyone else,

and everyone else is not the iPhone. Right. But that's what's interesting is I think that these businesses started being viewed on Wall Street as tech businesses, as Silicon Valley businesses, and not as a century-old media business that began with radio, moved into Victrolas, moved into motion pictures, moved into television,

and the like, with its own richness, its own history, its own way of doing things. And that suddenly it was like, man, you can really – you could make your – you could be – you could get your stock price to 280 or 400 or something like that and then everybody is rich in a way that no one ever imagined being rich. So let's say you're a person who makes, I just, like, you make $10 million a year, but somebody says, you know, you can make $200 million a year. So you're like, well, I'm going to do everything I can to make $200 million a year. Well, that's a risk,

and your risk is that you're going to threaten your $10 million a year income hunting the snark of $200 million a year. And I think that's what happened this year with the collapse of streaming, which clearly was a bubble because it all happened in kind of a week when Netflix simply announced that it had stopped growing in one quarter, that it had lost 2 million subscribers or something like that in one quarter. At the same time that there's rising inflation, at the same time that interest rates are going up. So there is this macro, there are macro events happening there beyond the control of Netflix combined with a quote-unquote for the first time we're not growing. Right. Which I think causes the panic.

Well, here's the other interesting thing about streaming in terms of its being the replacement, the next thing. So yeah, Netflix made a lot of programming. And it made a lot of movies and that sort of thing. But you're Disney, you're NBC, you're Comcast, you're Viacom, you own these broadcast networks and television stations and movie studios. And one thing that you see because you're alarmed by the fact that other people are making money on it is streaming is very undiscriminating. Novelty does not sell streaming.

The most popular show on Netflix for several years was The Office, which had gone off the air 10 years earlier, somebody, I can't remember who, the Office and Seinfeld and some other show. Friends. Friends, right. Warner Brothers. Somebody paid close to a billion dollars just to get Friends off Netflix and on their service. Friends had been off the air. Not only had Friends been off the air for 20 years, but you could watch it every night in your city and on Nick at night.

So streaming is not discriminating. Novelty, you don't need novelty to sell streaming, it turns out. You just need crowd-pleasing entertainment. So why do I bring this up? Only because... Well, that explains the style of content, too. I mean, the genre of content going back to another era.

Yeah. But my point is, being the supplier of new material that then can go on to streaming the way movies would then go on to vhs and then go on to cable and on to broadcast why is that bad what why like what in what mindset do you look at something and say you know i made something 20 years ago that sold just sold for a billion dollars again like i resold for the 18th time for a billion dollars that's a

pretty good business you know if i make a sitcom now that people like in five years i could sell it for a billion dollars after i sell it into syndication and i run it on my network and i do this and i do that it seems like these businesses cut off their primary source of income and the business that they controlled in pursuit of a tertiary or secondary source of income in a business that they did not control and did not entirely understand. And that's why I say I think it's like a model for study for gold rushes. Like I understand when a poor person in 1849 sells everything, gets a wagon and goes to go pan for gold in California. I don't understand why, you know, the Biddles of Philadelphia would do that when they were

already rich and running banks in the East. And this is the equivalent of the Biddle saying, my bank doesn't count. I'm going to go and pan for gold in California or the Yukon. It was a bizarre turn of events, but it was created by an atmosphere of panic. And the atmosphere of panic is everything's changing. This is the 21st century. We just don't know what's going to happen. Maybe we can jump on a bandwagon or do something and that'll give us some sense of direction as opposed to like, I'm putting down my head, this is what I know how to do. We're going to go through a storm, but maybe we're the ones who are

going to survive the storm because we make money. We make money now, and we're all going into a business in which Netflix had yet, when Iger announced that Disney was going to revolutionize itself and pursue this event, Netflix was losing billions of dollars a year. Now, granted, okay, you could see down the road. Spending, overinvesting, spending a fortune on content.

Yeah. But it worked. I mean, in some ways you could say that they – it's a little like SDI or something. It's like they terrified the old guard into saying, well, we can't possibly compete. They spent $17 billion on content a year and then disney said well we better we better say uncle and give up because we can't compete with this but of course it could compete with this how i mentioned tablets before the reality is i i gotta believe some of the calculation was that every one of us is walking around with a supercomputer that has a screen

a very visually uh satisfying screen to watch content on and walk around with it in our pockets. And they just assume that there would be all this streaming consumption on these devices. And I watch an entire generation now consuming content on their devices, but it's not the streaming services content. It's TikTok. It's TikTok, right. And what's TikTok? It's 20 seconds long. See, there was this idea because it's hard to do this, right?

It's hard to conceptualize where these things are going. So it makes sense if you think about it logically, that if you have this little phone, that you can't pay attention to something little in front of you like this for, you know, 20 minutes without blinking. Like there's too many distractions in your line of sight and, you know, there's going to be a plot development and you're going to miss it and okay so tiktok's perfect because these things are 20 seconds long and you can kind of concentrate on them for 20 seconds and then when somebody walks by in the street you can still not bump into them because you're you're that you you will have time to avoid running into them. And this, I think, is true in general. Like Bob Iger ran an entertainment conglomerate,

and then he got envious of the stock price of a company that did one thing. It streamed content to people, and then it made content, so it did two things. But he had a movie studio he had television networks he had sports channels he had amusement parks he had this company that did all this stuff surpassingly well and he risked it all to get into an immature business that did something that wasn't organic to what he knew. And that's the business story, I think, of the streaming era, is that Netflix tricked all these companies into wasting tens of billions of dollars. Not that it didn't trick them because it didn't want it to.

I'm sure it's worried about it because it doesn't want this. It doesn't want to be competed with but they all fell for you know like going after this this future that may not happen i mean we don't know what's we don't i mean it'll happen like it's one way of of consuming entertainment is to get it by ordering it up on demand which is all streaming is. Right. Right. It's the same as Peloton. You don't watch it on their schedule.

It's Peloton. You watch it on your schedule. It's Peloton. I want to work out when I want to work out. I don't want to go to a class. Yeah. I just decide when I get my virtual trainer to show up and do my – Right.

Okay. So now let's talk about the actual kind of content that's being created because that's also a little bit of like what's new is old again. So you and I last night were talking about this new show, Night Court, which is not a new show, right? Night Court, when I was growing up, Night Court was in the 80s. I think the first episode was in 1984. It had a run of about 8 to 10 years in which Harry Anderson, who most listeners, I guess, on this podcast won't know, but Harry Anderson was an actor who played a, he was a judge on a night shift of a Manhattan criminal court.

And this was an NBC original series, you know, 80s, early 90s, and then it ended in, I think, 92. And it's back. Right? It's not a new show. It's a very old show. It's not only back. It's not only back. If you went and said, what were the 10 great shows of the 1980s that everybody remembers fondly? Cheers.

And Night Court had this long run, right? It was a long run. It was a wacky sitcom. It wasn't the conventional NBC sitcom, which was sort of set. It was set in this kind of wacky night world, right? But yeah, Cheers, The Cosby Show. Night Court would not necessarily come up in your list of like the 10 shows that people remember fondly from the 80s. So they premiered this new version of Night Court last week or the week before on NBC. And the first episode gets 10 million viewers. Nothing on broadcast television anymore outside of football gets 10 million viewers.

Football gets 10 million viewers and nothing else gets 10 million viewers. On network broadcast, conventional, one of the big four networks. Just doesn't happen anymore. A big hit gets 8 million or 9 million. This was 10 million viewers. What?

This is like pre-existing IP, as they call it, right? They were launching pre-existing IP. Of course, when Night Court was on, people watched it for 10 years, and then it was in syndication, though it didn't seem to do particularly well because it doesn't have a long tail. 20, 25, 30 million people were watching it. So it turns out 30, 40 years later, people are like, I like Night Court.

Oh, there's a new Night Court. Oh, look, the guy, the big star of Night Court, who actually wasn't Harry Anderson, but was the secondary comic player, John Larroquette, he's back on it, playing the same character. I like that. I'm going to watch it. Ten million people watched it. And then apparently the next week, eight million people, it retained most of its audience. Eight million people watched it. So we keep getting these signals from television over time that people liked old-fashioned broadcast television.

They liked it. When they didn't have any choice but broadcast television, 40 million people watched it. We'll watch it, whatever. Now there's lots of choices and the market is divided. But it's still the case that if you provide something that people want to watch, 10 million people will watch it at the same time.

That's a good business. You can sell a lot of ads against that audience and make an enormous amount of money um and then it makes you ask whether again the decision making on the part of the people who do this has been skewed for so long because they want to be edgy or they want to be they want to advance the form like not even bad motives like they want to be a place that creative we want to be part they want to advance the form. Not even bad motives. They want to be a place that creative people... We want to be part of the conversation. The conversation as defined

by what's on Twitter and what's in... So there's these elite conversations about Mad Men and about White Lotus now or about Succession 3 is coming out. It's the conversation. Everyone's talking about it. Who's everyone? Your point is not

those 10 people watching Night Court. Right. So 10 million people watch Night Court and maybe some of them watched the second season of The White Lotus, which was the sensation of last year. I didn't see this. I saw the first season and I liked it and I

gather the second season is pretty good. It's like six or seven episodes. There's a – someone dies at a resort and there are three different storylines and you don't know who did it. And it's an infomercial for high-end travel to Italy. Right, exactly. But the thing is, the broadcast business shrank because of first cable, then home video, and then whatever, and then streaming. It's still a mammoth business. And people, for some reason, forgot that. Or they're like, you know what we're going to do?

We're just going to make game shows because they're cheap and no one's watching. So yeah, they make game shows. So then they have a thing that people like. And they kind of play into the fact that it's a declining business rather than trying to strengthen it by making stuff, pleasing stuff. Now, by the way, I should say, it's not that you could just sum up a formula

to make pleasing stuff. It's hard. Most things fail. It's not like they want to make things that'll flop. They don't. But all the energy, the ancillary energy went into doing other things, you know, like boosting the strength of other businesses, boosting the strength of your cable business, boosting the strength of your streaming business, whatever. And then, as I say, you have this business sitting there that can summon up 10 million people when nothing does anymore. There was a time in the 1950s,

Reader's Digest, in a country that was half the size, population-wise, had 15 million subscribers, or the TV Guide had 15 million subscribers, that kind of thing. There's no magazine today, I think, that actually has a million subscribers. Like, solid AARP probably has that many, but that's because people are members of AARP. Like, all these businesses have shrunk because the market for diversion has expanded so radically. But if you have one, you shouldn't neglect it. So your point is White Lotus, Succession, these kinds of shows that are part of the conversation among elites and among journalists

and public intellectuals, that's not going to be the genre that's going to be produced. We're going to be seeing more night court type stuff. And on that first category, you and I were talking the other day about there is this quality to those shows that, I mean, I don't know if class warfare is the right phrase, but there's just this unbelievable over-characterization and demonization,

villainization of, you know, the rich and famous in these shows in a way that, you know, obviously there's always been an element of that in popular culture, but it's like at a whole other level. There's not a single character in any of these shows that have a redeeming quality. I mean mean even if you go back to like the sopranos or uh or um

i don't know any of these i don't know yeah like the original ones like dynasty in dallas like there are always a couple of good people who are being tormented by the bad people right but they were they were usually they were like people from modest circumstances who were being tormented by the bad people. Right. But they were, usually they were like people from modest circumstances who were suddenly elevated into the upper reaches of society and must save their souls from being corrupted by the rich, evil people. But that's a real thing. That's a classic dynamic in literature from whatever from the get-go.

But that's not what's happening now. No. In these shows I'm setting. So what's going on? So here's what – yeah, go ahead. No, I was going to say this. No, so what's going on? So those shows, everybody that we know is obsessed with shows like that.

Succession of the White Lotus. Yeah, right. that uh separate shows like succession and yeah right right and and that's because obsession with social status and money and things like that are consuming elements of uh the the chattering class but i don't think they're consuming elements of the lives of most people when they sit down and they want to watch something on their screen. Like this is not, this is not what eats them up. Um, it eats, you know, it's like it eats you up if you went to college with a Murdoch and then he's a Murdoch and then you're like, man, that's not fair. Or you worked somewhere, you were at a resort and there were these people who had nicer rooms than you and you're like, why do they get a nice room and I don't. Understandable. The thing is you get close enough to fantastic wealth and power if you're a person in these positions. This is what David Brooks called the status income

disequilibrium. You're a writer or you're this or you're that and you went to college with these people and you know they might even have gone to their weddings or something like that. But they just live a different level of life than you are, and much of your life is taken with feelings of inadequacy, rage, disappointment, and envy, and that is characterized in the entertainment that you like to watch. But if you're like a person, you're the median income in the United States,

which is I think $68,000 a year or something like that, family income, you don't really care what the Murdochs do. You don't care. Maybe you're interested in... You probably don't even know who the Murdochs are. Or even if you know, you don't care. You're not following it.

Yeah, right. And then this gets confused, as you would say, because the conversation takes place. And even though you are running a populist business like Mass Entertainment, where what you want is to get into the national bloodstream in a way that will get you 4% to 5% to 10% to 15% of the overall population of the United States to consume your product, but you can't get out of the buzz in your head of the top 0.5 percent who are making all the noise around you. And you have to clear your head, but it's really hard to clear your head. And so you have very unimaginative ways in which entertainment executives do this, right? So they know if you run, again, a broadcast network, if you run CBS or NBC, what you know is you're probably going to have a pretty good experience putting on a mystery cop show. A cop show like CSI or NCIS or any of the Law & Orders.

Okay, let's go through them, right? Law & Order franchise began in 1990. Yeah, they have two or three shows on the air, two or three Law & Orders on the air. They have a reboot of the original Law & Order. They have sexual perversion unit or whatever that thing is called. And then They have a reboot of the original Law and Order. They have sexual perversion unit or whatever that thing is called. And then they have organized crime.

There are three Chicago shows produced by the same guy, Dick Wolf. Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, and Chicago PD. All of which are crime shows. Like even Chicago Fire is a crime show because it's about firefighters

but it's always an arson or something like that. Okay, CSI. On CBS, you have CSI. Which began in 2000. Or the CSI knockoffs.

NCIS, which is, which has, I think, two or three NCISs. And Blue Bloods, which is this astoundingly long-running show about a family of cops in New York. Yeah, NYPD family.

By the way, you left out SWAT. Oh, FBI. There's a SWAT show and FBI. There's two FBIs and a SWAT show. Okay. So what do they know? They know people like these shows, so they just put them on. They don't try to advance the form.

They know that this is what people like, and they try to brand them. Blue Bloods, I'm just put them on. They don't try to advance the form. They know that this is what people like. And they try to brand them. By the way, Blue Bloods, I'm just pulling this up. Blue Bloods, which debuted in 2010, rarely dips below 10 million viewers per episode. Yeah, right. So Blue Bloods, which is a very pedestrian show. And there's two 911 shows, by the way.

Yeah, two 911. Okay. So what they know is people will watch these. I know too it many times. And there's two 9-1-1 shows, by the way. Yeah, two 9-1-1. Okay. So what they know is people will watch these. I know too much about these. No, but what's interesting, so people will watch these, but they don't promote them. They don't try to get them Emmys.

They don't work to make them part of the national conversation. And so you have these two different tracks. So as I say, it's very hard for them to get out of the noise, the buzz in their ears from Twitter and the conversation of the hyper-aware media online people and all of that. But they do know they need to make some money,

and so unimaginatively they'll put on four FBI shows. Because they know that works, but they're not going to look for something new. And in totality, these cop shows are generating something like 75 million viewers. I mean, it's an unbelievable number, right? Yeah. And basically, this is the backbone of this is the backbone of what what remains on on on network and that's not counting all the all the um the and they're on streamers right they're all on streamers so and also the reality cop shows also which were very controversial during the

summer of 2020 post george well these cop shows were controversial. So there's a... So when George Floyd happened and there was all the defund the police talk and, of course, everybody in Hollywood was joining in and allyship and all of that. Yeah, they're announcing, we're pulling this content from our left. Yeah, so they pulled cops, right? They stopped running cops,

which is like the oldest... One of the oldest shows on television, had been running since 1985 or something like that. And then there's a sitcom called Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Yeah. My kids love it. My kids are obsessed. Are you kidding?

So Brooklyn Nine-Nine goes through this crisis because it's like, what do we do? We're a cop show and we're a sitcom, but of course cops are bad. So they're going to make a last season. Andy Samberg freaking out with his agent what did you get me into yeah so they make this last season and like what they have is that the that the uh the gay black captain of the police department has resigned when the show comes on because he can no longer be a policeman because uh things are so so terrible and then so he is kind of like the sacrificial lamb and then they go on and they do wacky cop stuff for another eight episodes and then they and then they end so um it's it was pretty lame

but yeah so i just think again so my my my ultimate point. By the way, one of my sons who's obsessed, both my sons are obsessed with Brooklyn Nine-Nine. They can just watch episode after episode after episode. So the other night I introduced one of them to The Office, and we just started watching old episodes of The Office, which he absolutely loved. And he says, wow, this reminds me of what Brooklyn Nine-Nine used to be. Right, yeah.

No, The Office, and my kids also love Parks and Rec, which is, and again, those shows, which is often true of broadcast shows that went into syndication, most famously Star Trek, which had a three-year not very successful run on NBC and then became this pop culture phenomenon for half a century after that. You'd have these shows that did okay, would go into syndication, and then audiences would find them and go berserk and watch them forever. And that's also happened on streaming. That's part

of what I'm talking about. There are shows that get canceled off networks. There was a show called Lucifer in which the devil comes back and starts solving crimes in LA. I'm not kidding. That's the plot. He runs a nightclub and he solves crimes. Lucifer. Lucifer. That show is on Fox for three years. They cancel it. It goes on Netflix It's a huge bonanza for Netflix and then they make three more years of it They take it from the network because it's working on their system So like that's what I'm saying. The streamers are undiscriminating the best way I could look at it say DVDs come in and they make a lot of money and then

imagine a world in which in 1992, the head of Jack Welch announces that henceforth their entire business is going to be directed toward producing DVDs. Streaming is just a method of distribution. It's like looking at the reverse end of the telescope. It's not a genre. It's not even a medium. It is a method of distribution.

And it's going to be an incredibly efficient method of distribution. And therefore, your worst methods of distribution are probably going to fall by the wayside there's no question that that's one of the reasons that movies movies will never come back the way that they were once because it's not an efficient way method of distribution to make people leave their homes drive somewhere park buy a ticket buy food you know get a babysitter, all of that. Like it's an inefficient way to get something that you could get more efficiently and it will exist in some form but it's not going to be the way it was simply because you're not going to have people talking at the screen

when you're in your own house and you're going to be able to go in the kitchen and make your own popcorn for 22 cents instead of $9 a bucket. And it's just, you know, in that way, it can't go back the way it was. And the medium can help tee up for you based on all the impressions it gets from your viewing habits, figure out exactly what you want to watch, and put things on your radar screen that you may not have ever occurred to you because they just have all this data on you. Yeah, I'm skeptical. it's like super efficient i yeah i'm sort of skeptical about that stuff i'm not i'm not sure why because um maybe it's just because i anecdotally or personally that doesn't work on me like you know when it says you might like this

and it's at the bottom i know i'm not i'm not a conventional viewer so i understand that but and i understand this idea that you can harness the the day the tech you can harness the data but every time i hear people talk about that then you get immediately to how russia you know russia won trump the election through the harnessing of big data and i start getting a little I don't know about that stuff. I don't know. But we should talk about the everything old is new again stuff because the thing about Night Court is we're going to see every single show

from the 1980s now that only had two seasons. I see Magnum P.I. is now up. Magnum P.I. is on, but Magnum P.I., yeah, is on. But you're going to have like, I mean, literally, name shows you don't even remember. Ten Speed and Brown Shoe, Hard Castle and McCormick. Eight is enough. Eight is, yeah.

They're just, you know, because they have a name that people remember and because old people watch broadcast television, so it skews that way. and so they're gonna remember, and then maybe you get their kids watching too. So they're literally just gonna use up, it's not just the concept of the show, it's gonna be what they call these pre-aware titles, right? Right. These titles conjure up some kind of nostalgia for people. Now people then say this is terrible, like Ross Douthat wrote a book called The Decadent Society in which he said the problem is that we're not making things new.

We're just rebooting old things. But if you think about it, so it's not titles in the motion picture industry from 1915 till 1980, half of the movies made in the United States were westerns. Half. Most of them don't even exist anymore. Like they were made for five cents and they were on bad film stock and the film stock degraded and they vanished. You don't even

know they exist think about what that means that means that 200 movies a year were being made there were like hallmark christmas movie there 200 movies a year were being made they were westerns that's the decadent society all westerns have exactly the same plot a lone guy against a rancher or a cattle thief or a you know a bad rancher or a bad cattle thief or a gang that comes into town. There's no difference. The plots are exactly the same. So this is always true of popular culture. Everything is an iteration of something else.

And everybody always tries to limit risk by using things that are familiar. So where do you put, so I get the return of this, what we would call old content that's new again. I get the over-conversation, the hyper-conversation, or disproportionate emphasis in conversation, in public conversation about shows like White Lotus and Succession that are sort of disconnected from what people are actually watching. Where do you fit the sort of what's in between

those two eras, which are shows like The Wire? Right. Or The Sopranos? Well, okay, so those are two interesting examples because The Sopranos was a huge hit and was a key moment, if not the key moment, in directing creative ferment on television away from the broadcast networks and onto cable and HBO and pay cable.

The Wire, which was never a hit. HBO made six seasons of The Wire because everybody thought The Wire was great. And The Wire was never a hit, but it was prestigious. And all HBO was trying to do, as my friend Rob Long constantly says, writes our Hollywood commentary column for commentary, all HBO wanted to do was make sure that people stayed on HBO,

like didn't churn, didn't drop their subscriptions. So anything that contributed to that notion that you want to watch HBO, including that they had a show you didn't necessarily watch like The Wire, but you knew was very much something that other people thought was great, was good for them. Even if it didn't score audience, it was the prestige sold the brand. Here's another example of how- By the way, can I say something about The Wire?

Yeah. This same chattering class that gets excited about shows like Succession and White Lotus also were the same category. I hate to categorize people. Ilk. Sounds terrible. Who were very excited about The Wire. And still is, by the way.

They still are. The Wire was not... I don't think of the wires I think of like White Lotus and Succession. You know, but the breakdown and decay of urban,

quote unquote, liberal government, do I say, even though it wasn't characterized as such. You know, the police, you know,

is interesting. Corrupt politicians running a city. The police were not the devils in that show at all. you know the police you know is interesting corrupt politicians running a city the police were not the the devils in that show at all um you know the breakdown in education public education i mean just think of some of the themes i think it was that was the third season about the schools yeah this was not this show did not fit a liberal caricature of the way the world works no but it did feel when you watch some of these other yeah more modern versions of it like right caricature of the way the world works.

No, but it did fit. The way you do feel when you watch some of these other more modern versions of it, like Succession and White Lotus. But The Wire, David Simon, who was the guiding genius behind The Wire, is a very radically left-wing guy, and he thinks America is horrible. His problem is with American society in general, which perpetuates inequality, injustice, unfairness,

racial division, and all of that. And so all of this then goes under the rubric, I would say. It's like liberals are ineffectual and bad in Baltimore and the wire, but they are just tools of the evil that is America. So in that sense, it serves very much a thematic, radical thematic purpose, even as it's ruthlessly honest about what was going on. But that third season could be like an advertisement

for Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy, or for the charter school movement. It could, except then what are you doing? But that third season could be like an advertisement for Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy. Yes. Or for like the charter school movement. It could, except then what are you doing? All you're doing then is perpetuating the system, which needs to be radically overhauled. So I don't know. So in the end, I mean, the thing that we wanted to get to, and I guess we're way over time here, but is in a couple weeks, or next week,

on Peacock, which is one of the least watched streaming services, which is NBC's streaming service. That's why it's called Peacock. It's got, what, some 15 million subscribers? Something like that. It's good, so no one really understands why its numbers are so low.

It has a lot of good stuff on it. Nonetheless, Peacock has a show coming on called Poker Face, and it is executive produced by Rian Johnson, who made the Knives Out movies, which are Netflix. By the way, Netflix paid him $450 million to make two Knives Out movies. So just to give you an idea of how Netflix was spending its money until the second quarter last year when suddenly everything changed. So Johnson's making Netflix, making Poker Face for Peacock. And it's an actress named Natasha Lyonne and she's in it.

And he went to Peacock and said, you know what people loved? Columbo. I want to make Columbo. Guest of the week who's a murderer, and we have to watch Natasha as she figures out how the murderer did it. Like, that was the Columbo thing, right? You saw the murderer do it, and then you watched Peter Falk break down and break that person down. Still a great show, still an amazing thing to watch. So he goes to Peacock. Peacock is now making Columbo. That's what poker he explicitly he's making colombo so streaming the most radical

disruption in the history of entertainment and all of that is now making a popular show from 1970 that's 52 53 years ago colombo he goes to them and says, let's make Columbo. They're like, great. So once again, proving streaming is a distribution method. And in the end, television is television and people like good television and they don't like bad television, and they don't really care, and they like movies. They don't care how they get it, in my view. In other words, why is streaming – I keep thinking, why is streaming – and here's the other thing. Why is streaming better than networks? Why was cable – no commercials, right?

That was it. There's no commercials. And you can do it on your own schedule. Right, and no commercials. So now, five years from now, there will be commercials. Right now, you can start paying less on a lot of these streaming services if you agree to have ad support. Five years from now, that will not be a choice.

The way in movie theaters, it was not a choice. Go to movie theaters, they show you some commercials, even though you paid for your ticket and all that. I think that, so even there, the advantage of streaming and cable is going to go away because they're not going to be able to resist leaving, they can't resist leaving the ad money on the table. So then it's like, so put everything on the broadcast networks.

The audience for the broadcast networks is theoretically 330 million people. Again, you have 100% market penetration. So I want to, before we wrap, one last thing. You mentioned briefly I noticed you strategically just breezed by the role of NFL and college football

in saving the television industry so I just want to pull up this one stat I send you whenever these new stats come out about people's viewing habits about football I send them to you

I text them to you and rub your face in it because you know about a decade ago you were rub your face in it because, you know, about a decade ago you were telling me this. Yeah, but you were also telling me that football was done, you know. And there was about a decade ago this during the Ray Rice controversy in the NFL, there was this sense that, oh, my God, football is on this downward spiral.

So here we go. According to one recent study, 82 NFL games are in the, from 2022, 82 NFL games were in the 100 most watched TV shows of 2022. Right. Now, to show you how crazy this is, on Christmas, so I watched all the Christmas NFL games. So on Christmas, but someone would say, oh, Dan, you're Jewish. You don't celebrate Christmas. Of course you watch football. But I'm not alone. So the Los Angeles Rams

played the Denver Broncos. They were number 35 on that list of 100, the Broncos and the Rams. Now let me tell you, the Broncos finished the season 5-12 and the Rams finished the season 5-12. At the time, they were both 4-10, I think.

No, no, no. They were both horrendous teams. It was a horrendous game. That game got more viewers than any NBA game, any Major League Baseball game, any World Cup game. Got more viewers than the Oscars or any scripted television show. A horrendous football game on Christmas got more viewers than the Oscars or any scripted television show. Yes. A horrendous football game on Christmas got more viewers than the Oscars

or any scripted television show. Yeah. This, to me, is like... This is a... You know, people had written eulogies for football a decade ago. So, that was foolish of me. But, I mean, the whole question for me is... By the way, Alon, we have our cold open. That was it. That was foolish of me. Sorry the whole question for me is...

By the way, Alon, we have our cold open. That was it. That was foolish of me. Sorry, go ahead. All right, keep going. No, my presumption was that the stuff, which has actually gotten worse in the last 10 years, but the stuff with CRE and the concussions and all of that,

we're going to create a national crisis for football. CTE, yeah. CTE, excuse me. And I guess that hasn't happened yet generationally. You'll know that it's the case when parents in West Texas don't let their kids go out for the high school football team. It's not going to be the NFL that proves this. It's going to be the question of whether in 2045,

it would be like having your kids, for parents in America, being on a football team would be like having your kids stand on top of subway cars while they go through the tunnels, subway surfing. If it doesn't get there, football will be fine. But it needs that. It's got to bubble up from the way, I think,

there was a point at which boxing, which was the most popular sport in the world, something happened and people got disgusted by it or found it. And boxing is still rates on pay cable and stuff, but it's not what it was. Like 100 million people would watch a boxing match. Yeah, but if you look at mixed martial arts today, which also is a massive business and have a massive audience, and you look at WWE, I mean, the new CEO of WWE, Nick Khan, I was just listening to a conversation with him and Bill Simmons. I mean, he was going through the data.

So I know it's fake, it's not real wrestling, but mixed martial arts is real. So there's successors to boxing. Oh, no, I agree. I'm just saying I think that was a question of whether or not the cultural, I mean, I just thought the cultural change was going to come faster, and it may not come at all. I don't know. I mean, in other words, like, you know, all faster, and it may not come at all. I don't know.

I mean, in other words, like, you know, all this, like, don't, don't, don't. Yeah, I understand. You want to coddle your kids. I want my kid to score a touchdown. Like, that could be the cultural message of the next generation. And the power of live. The power of live. Yeah. generation not and the power of live the power of live yeah um so i don't i don't i only i assume

that there would again be a be a cultural change that would affect the the the viability of football the power of live is very real because football is one of these the whole thing about this is that these are things and game shows are like this too where you actually don't know what's going to happen. You don't know what's going to happen in one of these games. Every game, every moment is a plot twist. And that's exciting. And most everything else is formulaic. And there's a lot of fakeness and people sense fakeness.

And whatever's going on in football, it's not really fake. And I notice this in part, not that I follow football as closely, certainly not as closely as you do, but the outrage at calls, which is like a real thing always, umpires making a bad call on a pitch or something like that. But there is some sense in which what you're watching on a football field is too – and this is a just contest. They're putting themselves on the line. It's a just contest. And then you have some figure from outside who says that was holding or that was – you put your hand in somebody's face or that was roughing the

passer or something like that. And the rage that people have because they still think that this is all, this is a contest of fairness and that someone's coming in and doing something that ruins that. And it's a real emotion. Like, people get

totally crazed and insane. So I want to tell you two things, and we'll wrap on that. One, the ease with which you could substitute these controversial calls with technology is unbelievable. So what usually the call is, I mean, is

does the player get in the end zone or not? Did the player get the first down or not? Was the player out of bounds or not? If you had technology in the football, you could actually see exactly where the football landed, where, did it make it over the line? It's just so easy to do. Of course, if you inserted that, it

would remove this drama of this ref making a call, and then the coach on the sideline going bananas, and all that drama. There's this guy, Warren Sharp sharp who's a like a sports betting analyst he's got a podcast and a newsletter and i watched him last night doing this riff about like doing the history statistical history of the different reps officiating

certain games in the playoffs and what we should make of them and what we think of them and which ones get you know uh influenced by the home crowd and which ones don't. I mean, by name and like in the, it's incredible. Like this becomes, you can't remove the ref. It's part of the, it's part of the cast. Can I also say one thing about baseball that, one thing about football that, that is true that, that baseball partially baseball has partially ruined itself because of the ability to do this kind of statistical isolating on things.

And so therefore it's become very mechanical and data-driven and all of that. And there are just too many actors at any given point in a contest on a football play for that really to function. And there's so much improvisation going on if you're the quarterback or whatever, even though you're running a play. And I noticed watching a game last night, there was this weird moment when a team that was up like 30... The Giants-Eagles game? Giants-Eagles, right.

The Eagles are up like 38 to nothing. I know it wasn't that, but with 27, 28, 26 to nothing. And they were going to run a two-point conversion. Like, why? And then the broadcast, whoever the caller said, well, you know, the analytics told them that they should do that. And then somebody had a moment on the sidelines where it's like, you know what, this would be a bad look for us. It's kind of crazy when we're ahead 26 points.

Just let them kick the single point. If that happened more in baseball, baseball has had this flavor drained from it by the Sabre metrics and all of that. So I will say that football just remains dramatic in a way. It does. It's the best. Thanks for doing this. This is long. I feel like Abe Greenwald here.

I mean, I barely got a word in. I'm like the Abe. I'm the Abe of my own podcast. But, you know, I appreciate you taking the time. This was great. Masterclass, as always. And thanks for doing it. We'll have you back on.

Okay. that's our show for today to keep up with john potthorst's work you can do it at commentary.org go to commentary.org i urge you to subscribe to commentary magazine and to listen to their podcast their daily podcast and john also has another podcast that he does with Jonah Goldberg and Rob Long about popular culture, or as they point out, about culture that used to be popular. It's called GLOP, G-L-O-P. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.