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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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Ultimately, Hollywood is there to make money. Since activists will keep pushing and pushing until someone stops them, I guess it was inevitable that eventually there would be pushback from the viewers and therefore those who hold the purse-strings. When Disney spends $180 million on four hours of television, even they are going to care if nobody watches it. When Amazon spends $700 million on a series that gets outwatched by a car man running a farm badly, the business people notice these things.

One benefit of the streaming age is that series don't need to appeal to everyone, they just need to appeal to their market. If modern political correctness was as strong during the linear TV age, it could have been worse. We only had four channels to choose between when I was growing up, I can't imagine how it would have been if every single one of them was forced to include 1/4 black people in every Regency drama or sassy girlbosses or an inexplicably large number of gays.

I think the future of streaming is like Youtube. Hyper-specific niches and sub-brands determined by the algorithm. Sure, there won't be a common media culture, but that ship has already sailed anyway.