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Hollywood’s Ultimate Values
Be honest. When you read the words “ultimate values” did you think of morality? Don’t be naïve. We’re talking about money, cold hard media cash. But stick around; the two meanings of the term “values” have odd ways of converging sometimes.
Studio executives making veiled references to “the Ultimate” may sound mystical, but it’s a purely practical insider’s term, a studio’s secret estimate of the present and future value of every movie and show they own. Suppose Apple wants to buy Warner Bros Discovery, or NBCUniversal buys Paramount Global to combine their two middling-successful streaming services. Coming to agreement on how much things are worth, the act of setting a price is the essence of the market, of capitalism itself.
In fine detail, it means being able to look at a complicated mosaic and make credible guesses about how much each of thousands of individual properties are worth—films? New ones, old ones? Television shows for broadcast and cable? Plus remake rights? Franchises? How much more will Harry Potter or The Big Bang Theory earn for Warners over the remainder of their lifetimes? How much are 20-year-old episodes of The Dennis Miller Show or 30-year-old episodes of The Nanny worth? Nobody knows exactly. As with real estate, you can make an informed estimate based on accepted professional standards.
But also like the real estate business, unpredictable change can affect those valuations. Big city retail outlets and office towers, for instance, have suddenly lost a surprising amount of value. Cultural trends can and have done the same, in the distant and recent past, to media properties that act as collateral for current and future investments.
Ricochet member Clavius has spent the past thirty years as an IT executive for some of the biggest of worldwide entertainment companies. How do people inside the studio gates talk about total valuation?
“For a studio without a major streaming service, say Sony Pictures, the ‘ultimate’ is the whole deal, from greenlight to run out into the long trail of TV (streaming included). The ultimate is the lifetime (10 years for accounting purposes) estimate of the revenue and expense for a title”.
“The issue for the in-house production arms of the streamers is that putting a title on a streaming service does not generate revenue for that title. Sure, you could estimate some amount based on viewership, but viewers buy the service, not the title. Completely different from people going to a movie, buying a DVD, or a network/cable channel/streamer licensing a title.”
“To be honest, this is the biggest issue for the entertainment industry today. If I can’t tie revenue to a title, how do I judge its success? As far as I can tell, the tech streamers like Netflix and Amazon don’t care.”
Here, we should acknowledge the business insights of The Ankler, a user-supported media insider’s website that’s a rare, successful alternative to traditional Hollywood, trade paper-legacy linked sites. While everyone else in Hollywood seemed frozen in pandemic-era fear, The Ankler was a rare voice warning that almost every studio’s (except shrewd Sony) vain attempt to overwhelm Netflix with sheer spending would result in setting vast pyramids of Hollywood’s money on fire. It was not, shall we say, always a welcome voice. It is now widely, if grudgingly, conceded to have been right.
Taking the theatrical side for granted was a mistake. Streaming at home is great, it’s here to stay, but it’ll never entirely replace the social aspect of kids, families, couples, laughing and weeping in public together. Memories of those cheering in-person crowds give a title its lasting magic, even when its theatrical release is now ten months, or 10 years, or even 47 years ago.
Another industry-wide mistake was allowing the slow neglect of linear (non-streaming) television, both broadcast and cable, still the most reliable revenue stream that Hollywood has ever known. A lot of money was hoovered up by studio spending on buying up libraries of films and TV shows, to beef up their inventories for entry into streaming. Or so I’ve read. But @clavius clued me in on a subtlety I didn’t realize.
Says Clavius: “Amazon bought MGM mainly for the underlying IP that MGM owned — the rights to make new movies, episodic content, etc. — from what MGM owned. The library was secondary. And at the time of the acquisition, the ability of MGM to license content was not relevant.”
In other words, they aren’t buying a chunk of the past for its own sake, but for what they can make out of it in the future.
“The only thing I might add is that the environment re: Streaming has evolved in the past six months. At a certain tech-company streaming service, earning real revenue from third parties on titles is now a significant part of the “get to profitability” strategy. So the purchase of MGM now has value because it has the theatrical and licensing people and systems to make money on content, not just because of the library and underlying IP.”
Like its streaming rival, Apple, Amazon doesn’t need to rely on the success of films and TV. They owe their breathtaking wealth to other industries. This makes them different than Netflix, the biggest streaming giant, which lives or dies on this business alone. For Amazon and Apple, the enormous costs of making media might as well be a rounding error filed under “subscription service expenses”. But other than an occasional theatrical run for prestige, Apple has stayed in streaming and has not built much of its own library.
Amazon, by contrast, has a Netflix-like production line for their own original shows. They aren’t just making the product for themselves, either. Taking a page, perhaps, from Sony’s strategy, who jokingly calls it their “arms dealer” doctrine, Amazon/MGM will sell as well as buy. With the addition of MGM, they’ve chosen to become a full service, full-fledged movie studio.
Clavius nods. “So that is the question. Will the studios keep all their content for their in-house streaming services or will they also license that content to other broadcasters? And if they will only stream the content, a library has only value in adding or keeping subscribers, which is not title ultimate based valuation”.
At this point in our online discourse, @muleskinner asked “So the whole may not be greater than the sum of its parts? And @clavius replied, “It all depends on how you value the content”. That’s Hollywood’s trillion-dollar question. Any sudden, market-wide loss of faith in the underlying values, any collapse of confidence in the collateral that props up an entire industry, can cause wider events like the Great Recession of 2008-2014. Could it happen in the culture industry? Media seismologists can identify a couple of past events that offer some potentially disquieting clues to the present.
One of them was something most people under 65 have never thought about: the jump from black and white to color. It was financially fateful for Hollywood’s vast libraries of films rented to television. Once color TV took off, stations and syndicators sharply devalued all black and white movies and shows, with a few nostalgic exceptions, like I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners. For a few years, Hollywood’s deal collateral wasn’t worth quite as much at Wall Street’s pawn shop. But soon, everyone was making money again, color films and TV alike. The industry shrugged off the loss.
A few years later, Hollywood absorbed another loss in the collateral value that underlies the creditworthy-ness of film and television production. It’s what happened to the assessed valuations of all the various “square” pre-Seventies films and TV that now had steeply waning value in syndication because they were now culturally out of sync.
(@jimkearney, Ricochet’s other veteran Hollywood exec, is our expert in the history of television syndication as well as a lot of other media history. Ideally, he should step in to take the steering wheel on this subject. In the comments, I hope.)
Almost all older shows gradually lose their value, but times of changing tastes make the old shows depreciate faster. In the age of Welcome Back, Kotter and Dallas, reruns of old fashioned, family-friendly TV like The Donna Reed Show and The Rifleman were worth less than they’d been only a few years before. (At least for the time being. When room opened on Nineties cable systems, Boomer-friendly ad-supported channels mined some more residual value from old shows.)
Purely as a thought exercise: What if something like that change happened in reverse? What would happen if the country or the world came to broadly retreat from substantial parts of the culture and the entertainment of the past dozen or so years? Just hypothetically speaking? How might that work out, what would it look like?
Non-Western media libraries tend to be conservative. Chinese, Japanese, South Korean, Indian, Russian, and Turkish TV would not be much affected by a cultural shift. Let’s ruefully specify that by and large a retreat on some major aspects of modern media life, the ones we commonly consider woke, would primarily affect English speaking films and shows, especially US ones. A drop in the (hypothetical, back-of-the-envelope) estimated ultimate value of all Western media properties held by every global corporation from, say, today’s ebullient 1.77 trillion dollars to a wised-up, slimmed down 1.52 trillion dollars wouldn’t be big enough to cause an economy-wide earthquake on Wall Street. But it would certainly be an extinction level event for much of today’s Hollywood.
I’ve watched crime dramas about people willing to kill over $50,000. Imagine what a handful of like-minded men would do to ward off a loss of $250,000,000,000. They wouldn’t like to see that happen. It’s not personal. It’s business.
Before we sign off, let’s give one and a half cheers for streaming. Whatever problems it has brought to Hollywood, it has brought plenty of cultural gatekeepers down to size. The result has been a fragmented, sometimes trivialized culture. But it’s also made access to the world’s viewers freer and more open than ever. Not that everyone likes that openness, of course. With National Public Radio much in the news lately, you might enjoy this prescient bit of futurism from 31 years ago.
One of the first mentions of what we’d now call “streaming video” is found in this June 24, 1993 article in the Chicago Reader. “One of the most telling moments of my ordeal-by-NPR came while Linda Wertheimer was interviewing a computer developer on what will happen when computers are linked into televisions—the so-called intelligent TV. He predicted the development of literally hundreds of new interactive television networks and services “that would give the individual TV viewer an incredible amount of power to program for their own tastes rather than have to rely on these programming guys.”
Replied a perturbed Wertheimer: “Is there any way we can dodge this bullet?”
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Good stuff, Gary.
My own prediction is that we’ll end up with two or three streamers (Netflix, Apple, Amazon, most likely) that will stream and nothing else, leaving the production to everyone else. Everyone making content sells to any or all of them, with the usual jostling for position and pay bumps for exclusivity that networks always did. Eventually, I see this taking over even broadcast and cable, so that everything comes through this channel, with the opposite players ensuring price competition. Theaters will exist for the reasons you stated, but reduced. More of an event than an outlet.
Thanks, Judge.
Every home has a kitchen, but people on dates go out to restaurants. Movie theaters, same deal.
Social contagion is a real thing, and not always a bad thing. It’s the reason that so many of my wife’s friends went with her to see The Sound of Freedom and Jesus Revolution.
I don’t know what their strategy is, but so far it seems as if they’re funding a limited number of bespoke productions that will aggregate into a library of “Not Utter Crap That Gets Lost in a Bewildering Blizzard of Options.” Much like HBO in the early days when they had a few shows, perhaps.
My daughter, who is 25 and very keen on contemporary culture, uses streaming to binge 90s dramas and old British sitcoms and such. She finds the storytelling more efficient and the cultural milieu more interesting. FWIW.
If I were king of the forest, I’d reorg all the streaming services by decades and genres. As it is now, I have to take Peacock to get my nightly Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Paramount for Perry Mason. Or vice versa? Don’t know / don’t care, as there’s no brand loyalty in streaming anymore. Nothing means anything, to paraphrase Goldman. Max is Netflix is Prime.
But doesn’t this mean that the streamers have become the equivalent of the old networks? Yes and no – everyone talks about Amazon for a week because they have the hot new must-see show, just like everyone talked about NBC because it had Miami Vice. It’s just accelerated and more prone to churn; it’ll be Prime next week and maybe Hulu after that. But the old networks did not have the maddening depth of the on-demand library. You had one thing: THE SHOW THAT’S ON RIGHT NOW. If we’d had the opportunity in 1974 to watch Kojak but also the opportunity to browse 47 other shows we might possibly like more than Kojak, who knows, we would have clicked and scrolled before settling into Kolchak and then wishing we’d stuck with Kojak.
Oh, you say, but you could always change the channel. See what’s on ABC. Isn’t that kinda the same? Not really. Once you watched the first 13 minutes to the commercial, you were committed. You might flick over to see if there were pretty girls or nasty gangsters, but you’d head back, because you wanted to see Kojak unwrap the Tootsie Pop and bark orders at Crockah.
If this means repositioning the IP to create new iterations, well, I can’t think of an industry less capable of reimagine the works of the past to create new art that isn’t saturated in Presentism. If it means using the vast dead library to draw new eyeballs, they’re dealing with a modern audience increasingly trained to regard these B&W playlets as evidence of a detestable culture. Unless they rearrange the bones. Okay hear me out, F Troop, but dark and gritty, with an idealistic Ken-Berry character striving to prevent genocide
Part of the problems that theaters are having are self-inflicted; by the studios at least. They’re releasing onto streaming like 45 days after release.
It would kind of be like cable anyway, in that you’re paying for a lot of stuff you don’t actually want. Although if you’re subscribed to multiple streaming services it’s also similar.
My hope (I don’t think it’s a prediction, and I think it’s unlikely) is that there’s a point where instead of them telling me what I want to watch, I tell them and I get just that. You see some of it with the specialized channels but I also don’t want just the one thing.
That’s the AI future. I ignore everything the studios made because I just feel like asking the computer to give me the third season of Rome.
60s Batman, but he finally gets to nail Julie Newmar!
But this is AI, so don’t you think the extra fingers and toes and what-not, might be a distraction?
As author of the OP, of course I should object to this blatant thread-hijack, diverting attention from conservative unawareness of the complex financial underpinnings of Hollywood. However, I am inclined to rule in the Judge’s favor, as inclusive television history must include Julie Newmar, as well as Stephanie Powers, Barbara Feldon, Diana Rigg and Nancy Kovack.
Because history demands it. That’s the spirit that guides these threads.
“The end of the Culture Wars was near, when quite accidentally,
A hero whose reins abruptly seized, and turned a retreat into vic-to-ry!”
And then there’s the risk of what Fred Allen said about early Fifties radio: (paraphrasing) “The jokes were the same, the hosts were the same, the formats were the same, even the sameness was getting to be the same”.
It’s a weirdly repetitive, but logical, series of narrowing events. Most people like it targeted towards them but only to a certain degree. After that it feels pandering and creepy.
Of course, some people have an infinitely forgiving attitude towards “pandering” and “creepy”.
Good thing, because if a trainwreck like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is anything to go by, they’ve no talent for it whatsoever.
Great post, Gary. It amuses me to no end that Tubi is making money while Disney+ hemorrhages cash.
Thanks, Percival. It also amuses me no end that until recently, and to some degree even now, live network events are a big surprise to Wall Street. The Super Bowl, and sports generally from the Masters to women’s basketball, is still generally an ad-supported live TV market.
I’m old, like to watch sports and hate change. As an old sports viewer, I’m worried many of the sporting events I enjoy watching are going to switch exclusively to streaming like they have done with Thursday Night Football which streams on Amazon. It will interesting how the major sports leagues handle this. Many sports leagues like the NBA have media deals that are about ready to expire. Amazon and Apple have a ton of money and could buy exclusive rights to many major sporting events. Will I one day be watching the Super Bowl or the NBA Finals on Apple or Amazon?
I’ll admit that I know very little about the economics of streaming. But I’ve never understood why every content producer seems to think they need to have their own streaming service. Why not leave all the work of managing the infrastructure to the companies that really know how to do it well (like Netflix and Hulu)?
Nobody cares what studio makes the shows they like. Ask a normal person on the street what studio produced Seinfeld or Breaking Bad, and they won’t know. Back in the day, they could tell you what channel it was on, but that didn’t tell you anything about who actually made it. Nowadays you have to know which streamer carries which studio’s library, and even that doesn’t always help (Yellowstone is produced by Paramount, but it’s on Peacock for some reason). I sometimes find myself hunting around six or seven different streaming services because I can’t remember which one carries a show I’ve been watching. This confusion has even spawned services like JustWatch, whose entire business model is based on the fact that streaming is such a mess.
And then once you find the show, you have to remember how this particular streaming service’s user interface works. Where do they hide the captions menu? What does the “back” button do? Can I turn off autoplay?
I honestly don’t see how this situation serves anybody. (Well, anybody except JustWatch.) It’s hostile to the consumer, and it doesn’t seem to be particularly profitable to the owners of the services. My dream is a huge consolidation; I want to see all of the little studio-specific services die, and for them to instead offer their programming as add-on packages on the big services like Hulu. I’m willing to continue paying to subscribe to the packages I want, but I want them all to be in the same place, with a consistent UI.
Diana Rigg (sigh) . . . I first saw her on The Avengers when I was ten. I’m convinced that was what triggered the start of puberty . . .
Yeah, whenever the algorithm says I might like a thing, I tend to stay away from it on principle. Unless it’s something I was already going to watch anyway.
The thing I liked about cable is the sense of discovery. I didn’t know there was going to be an A-Team marathon, but now I know what I’m doing with my weekend.
Everyone saw the pile that Netflix was raking in. They decided that they wanted a piece of that. It was a little like watching the proliferation of car companies in the early 20th century. Carriage makers started making cars. Engine makers started making cars. Everyone sought to leverage their expertise in an expanding market. There wasn’t room for all of them and sorting all that out took time.
I worked at a company that witnessed how much money the outfit that was handling “systems integration” was pulling down and on that basis decided that we were going to be a systems integration house too. It would be just that simple, despite what the naysayers said. I was one of the naysayers.
True for the most part, but Disney is discovering that a reputation built on a century of judicious guidance can evaporate overnight when subjected to not-so-secret agendas. Once the aura of wholesomeness is gone, lots of luck getting it back.
This is the industry that overvalued AOL in that Warner merger in anticipation of streaming because they thought people would always need AOL or Compuserve or the like to access The Internet. (One of my kid’s teenage school chums told me at the time that he thought it was dumb and that AOL was already a dinosaur.) Somebody should analyze whether Hollywood owned/run by a set of founding studio czars versus Hollywood plagued by megacorporate groupthink was a more efficient mode of operating.
At our house we have moved more into Britbox and Acorn for murder mysteries, comedies, and cop shows that seem to have more consistent quality but mostly because it is also nice to have a regular set of options in one place rather than struggle to remember whether the thing we were watching is on Netflix, Prime, Apple TV, Hulu, Peacock, Paramount, Max….
Sometimes I also like Tubi probably because I am old and find things there that are more worthwhile than many current offerings on Netflix and Amazon. (And to revive an old crush on Peta Wilson in one of those implausible La Femme Nikita episodes.)
It is surprising that in a digital era, Netflix and Amazon insist on presenting a very slowly changing list of immediate options (mostly repellent choices) and make searching their vast collections painful.
Netflix has also suddenly made it tough to use my iPad app to download stuff for airplane travel. Something about joining a household…
She was a Gender-Enhancing Puberty Stimulator. Elegant, too!
There are connections between movie magic and computer magic. It’s understandable that tech companies regard themselves as media. Sony calls itself an entertainment company, grounded in technology. But the business methods of Silicon Valley and Hollywood differ, and companies with no real basis in tech, like super-agents Endeavor, like to pose as technology companies. Endeavor calls itself a platform, as if they had a locked-in ecosystem.
Tech companies burn through as much as a decade of venture capital funding before they turn a profit, the idea being that by the time they do, they’ll be totally dominant in their market. But movies don’t work like that. If Disney blows $500 million on a series of bad films, it’s not an investment in something that’ll make money in 2031. It’s just gone.
Streaming is an example of each studio thinking, “everyone else is doing it…we can’t be the only ones who aren’t”.
You’re obviously older than me. Did you ever see UFO?
Mrs. Emma Peel, the talented amateur was both hot and incredibly cool. My kids were amazed to learn that the old lady in Game of Thrones had ever been that sexy.
Thanks, Gary, for the topic and the invite. So much to unpack.
Huge thumbs up for recommending The Ankler. In addition to being the playing field of choice for Ricochet co-founder @RobLong ‘s superb, amusing and easily managed (thanks to brevity) podcast Martini Shot , the pay side of Ankler includes Entertainment Strategy Guy and voices close to the agents and entertainment lawyers with insider access.
Another Substack resource for those valuing the insider’s opinion is Price Point by Roy Price, a presently free newsletter packed with insights from Amazon’s former top creative exec.
@GaryMcVey you are correct that television content has provided a most reliable cash flow over the years. One of the reasons is that while feature films target us when we are quite young, there are more ways to sell us and our eyeballs throughout life via video distribution.
Subscription streamers are indeed stuck in a bit of a quandary these days. First they spent like drunken sailors for years while ignoring the patterns and viewing habits obvious to anyone who opened a Nielsen pocketpiece over the last 70 years.
Then they tried to emulate the Netflix model but within their individual owned content universes and thus without broad appeal. They compounded the foolishness by coming up with consumer unfriendly ideas like blasting pop-up promotional noise at log on; favoring owned over most popular content; trying to get away with one widely popular program per month/year instead of filling the catalogue with daily treats; and then, arrogance of arrogance, sticking ads into pay channels well after viewers have learned to bypass commercials with DVRs. (Don’t make me hate you, Paramount+.)
Some few streamers give value at their price point. Hulu is expensive but we use it the most. We’re in our third year of watching NYPD Blue reruns every Tuesday night. Frasier, Cheers, and now L.A. Law have also found regular slots on our virtual magnetic schedule. Yes we’ll pay $17.99 a month for that kind of quality archive, commercial free. I’ve found the long lost but fondly remembered early years of L.A. Law a rerun revelation. Despite liberal writers, the show is redolent of Reaganism in the feel-good sense.
Another value is BritBox, for half that price. For those of us no longer targeted by the traditional big four American networks, BritBox provides decades of catch-up with an assortment of the best of the BBC and ITV shows ever made. Without going too deep into the weeds, they have recent originals plus a TV Cooperstown archive with Foyle’s War, Poirot, Lewis, Scott & Bailey, Vera (still in production but only for two new episodes remaining), Miranda, QI, Unforgotten, Upstairs Downstairs, MI-5 (and lots of other Keeley Hawes stuff) etc. etc.
Because everyone in the U.K. is crazy or brilliant enough to pay taxes for owning televisions, they aim for all or most demographics and don’t lose all interest in viewers when we turn 35, 50, or “65+”.
Since most sensible streamers don’t require ads, you’d think U.S. programmers would also target older viewers now that our system isn’t so ad-dependent. But not so often. The sickness of movie Hollywood has infused the first decade of streaming culture: a culture of excess, swinging for the fences, pandering to youth “culture”, preening for insider approval and awards while disdaining the broader public, and worshipping “woke” values.
The good news is, the market’s feedback system can be harshly corrective.
Viewers “learn to churn” when a network’s only decent show finishes its run. Some even wait until all 8 weekly episodes accumulate, then watch them all fast and leave.
Ascendant are free ad-supported channels showcasing old-fashions schedule grids populated with durable content like old Carson and Antique Roadshow reruns, local newscasts from around the country, and even some politically shunned minor news channels. Yes, the mandatory commercials are annoying but the mute button minimizes more than 50% of the pain. They’d do better with 5-10 second spots with little countdown clocks.
In addition to taking cues from customer feedback, here’s more free consulting for the programmers:
The old Perry Mason black and white reruns still run as is. If they stripped out the music they could probably recycle half the plots. I know, they did, Matlock, and guess what, it’s coming back. Whenever a genre, e.g. clue-based light mysteries, falls from favor with Hollywood hipsters, that’s when it comes back. Monk. Now CBS is trying Elsbeth. Not bad!
Production technology is not now 100% democratized, but each step in that direction is important. In 1989 America’s Funniest Home Videos debuted. It’s still in originals, just like The Simpsons, except a lot cheaper to produce. Early video pioneers with Sony Portapaks morphed into everyone in the world with “broadcast quality” smartphones. The sophisticated LED “volumes” used to produce Mandalorian at Manhattan Beach Studios are also being built for commercials in Tampa. How soon until consumers can shoot a season of a Baywatch or Magnum PI-styled show by sending a one man second unit to the beach for a couple of days? Probably sooner than we think.
There are tempting global audiences out there. From importing the formats for All in the Family to Survivor, to recouping costs by selling action shows and babes at the beach abroad, past practice encourages awareness that as McLuhan said, we now live in a Global Village.
All true, and I’d certainly be on board for considering adaptation of hits like New Tricks or Lewis from the U.K. or beautiful looking French shows like Candice Renoir.
Still, there’s an advantage of a little “America First” thinking. Why? Because the industry would feign horror at such a thing, and thus it’s a clear field. Shows which reflect America’s underlying core values are less in supply but still in demand. Shows celebrating job creators turn up on the non-fiction dial, but in prime time corporate types become killers in crime shows. Instead of giving us law enforcement heroes, since the success of The Sopranos anti-heroes were overdone.
Some did work. Mad Men incorporated humor, realism, and celebrated the wild history of an industry central to our culture, and nice-looking too. Other anti-heroes gnawed away at our culture by having the audience root for serial killers, narcotics profiteers, traitors, etc. Don’t be surprised if the audience rebels by giving high ratings to ideas featuring white cops with guns once again. Or comedies where families stick together and father sometimes does know best. Just don’t forget: three jokes to a page. It still works, if they’re funny.
Note that I’m not predicting massive opportunities for a video counterculture of Bible-readers conquering all, or endorsing a GAC Family + Hallmark = megaprofits equation. I don’t know what’s more off-putting, the sanctimony itself or the stiff, scrubbed actors performing stiff, scrubbed scripts. You can tell it’s one of those channels quicker than tits appear on Cinemax, i.e. under five seconds.
It’s not realistic to expect Hollywood to turn around instantly, drop wokeness entirely, and return to the good old days when Italians could say “thassa spicy meat-ball” in commercials. Too much to hope for.
I recommend a period of neutrality. Race neutral casting. Politically neutral franchises, or balanced conflicts. So more like Law & Order seasons one through nine only, before agendas (hell we coulda turned around 532 votes in Florida if we had only done the gun control episode sooner) became more important than surprising plot twists.
Now if you’re doing a comedy set in, e.g. the campus of Harvard, I’m not saying ignore politics or what’s actually going on there. That would be ridiculous, but not funny. Comedy writers work off human flaws. If you don’t have to exaggerate to be spot-on funny, so much the better. The high bar for that franchise would be characters more credibly absurd than the now former President of that place discrediting her institution before Congress at the hands of a sympathetic, slightly pudgy “everywoman” type from upstate New York.
Incidentally, Congresswoman Stefanik’s district curves around Troy, New York (near Albany) where they shot exteriors for HBO’s superb The Gilded Age. I strongly recommend it. The show looks beautiful, employs a cast worthy of Broadway’s finest, stirring music, much attention to period accuracy and historic events, and respectful of, can you believe it, the business acumen of a ruthless and much maligned “robber baron” family fighting as underdogs for entry into Manhattan social circles. Season Three is in production. Seasons one and two are on Max, alongside HBO classics like Deadwood, and a recent instant classic, the final episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm with a clever take on the Seinfeld finale. Try it, you’ll like it.
That’s a terrific comment, Jim, enough wisdom to float a post of its own.
It’s hard to get people to say a good word about Les Moonves these days, as he is one of the (much less guilty) execs tarnished by #metoo (this is true of Roy Price as well), but Moonves had an excellent sense of public taste. Today, he’s criticized for the hero shows that made CBS a powerhouse in the early years of this century–CSI:NY, Blue Bloods, Hawaii Five-O, because they’re so pale and male.
Moonves knew something that previous generations of Hollywood executives did; despite the town’s general aversion to Republican politics, audiences are very tolerant of conservative and conservative-ish actors in tough guy roles–cops, spies, private investigators.
If they’re smart they’ll keep and license the content, like Paramount has been doing with its comedies on Hulu. You can enhance the local with added content, frame stuff the way TCM does, or use it to fuel a reboot or similar holding, but an ABC knows that an NYPD Blue belongs on Hulu too because Disney+ is a kiddie/family brand.
Sometimes studios overdo the “protectionist” approach, e.g. Law & Order original recipe in basic syndication makes so much, it has “made” several channels in fact, A&E, then TNT, now some others, but never been streamed in full archive on Peacock. It’s an easy DVR solution for the fans, but you wonder if Peacock might have gotten more loft by featuring it there.
As for title based valuation, they must look at the usage data. They probably see patterns. Do viewers go more for actors-become-celebs as in Suits, or do great episodes or seasons stand out and get repeated more?
Do viewers rerun best episodes over and over, or do most folks watch in sequence? Surely Frasier fans know their favorites, and if they’re not playing “The Ski Lodge” over and over, they might consider it. Does season four of 24, a deserving favorite, or @Lileks favorite season of Rome outperform? You can’t know too much about customer taste, but the only way to know exactly why someone subscribed or churned out is to ask them. They should and they will, if the AI can’t guess.
Returning to my question about UFO…
You’ve got that right.
But seriously, there are good things to say about almost everyone. Question is, when?
Saving a “say what you will …” for the obit has advantages. (1) less likely it gets back to him; (2) okay to speak well of in that context; and (3) less chance you’ll open the door a crack and suddenly, cue horror music, he’s back in power.