Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Monday, April 15th, 2024

Just about every question about the streaming TV business can be answered with "it depends"

Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Monday, March 15th, 2024:

JUST ABOUT EVERY QUESTION ABOUT THE STREAMING TV BUSINESS CAN BE ANSWERED WITH 'IT DEPENDS'
I have had a reasonable amount of success with this newsletter and I think in large part it is because I am notoriously contrary. I am one of those people who  - when faced with the conventional wisdom that everyone "knows" - will dig in to see if I can find the flaw. That doesn't mean that I am correct more (or even less) than the average entertainment industry reporter. But it does mean that I ask a lot of questions and put in a lot of hours trying to understand really complex parts of the streaming business.

I am working on a book entitled "Everything You Think You Know About The Streaming TV Business Is (Probably) Wrong," and while I'm trying to have some fun with the framing, the underlying premise is legitimate. It astounds me that more than a decade into the prime streaming TV era, so many people working and reporting in the industry don't understand some of the basic concepts of how things work. Or things are framed in a way that reporters know will stoke the viral traffic fires because they are writing something they know their readers want to believe.

As one example, this piece by Daniel Bessner in Harpers is being shared everywhere in Hollywood today. The overall point is a valid one - Hollywood's middle class, including the writers - are being financially squeezed to the point of near extinction.

But there are also paragraphs scattered through the piece that are infuriating because they are delivered with little context or no nuance:

The industry as a whole is now facing a broad contraction. Between August 2022 and the end of last year, employment fell by 26 percent—more than one job gone in every four. Layoffs hit Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix, Paramount Global, Roku, and others in 2022. In 2023, firings swept through the representation giants United Talent Agency and Creative Artists Agency; Netflix, Paramount Global, and Roku again; plus Hulu, NBCUniversal, and Lionsgate. 

While it's true there has been a contraction, I wonder what could have happened in 2023 that might have contributed greatly to that contraction? Let me think.....oh, yeah. A HOLLYWOOD STRIKE THAT SHUT DOWN THE INDUSTRY FOR NEARLY SIX MONTHS. This is not to say that there wouldn't have been a sizeable contraction regardless of the strike. But even at this point in 2024, the industry continues to work through the aftereffects. We have no way of knowing what kind of impact the strike did have and with many people anticipating the possibility of another strike later this year, I don't know that this is the best time to be using current industry weakness as a predictor of anything.

But to be fair, there is a lot of great stuff in the piece and it's well worth reading. But it does conflate the TV and movie industry problems quite a bit and I'd argue they have some very different structural issues.

Unfortunately, generally nuanced pieces such as the one in Harpers also prompt a lot of people who should know better into seeing what they want to see. Like this example:

No, it doesn't. That is not what the Harper's piece argues and Sonny ignores one of the big points it does make. Higher interest rates made "making less stuff" inevitable, especially for companies that are deficit financing a great hunk of their original content production. And as I noted above, the strike also had an impact.

Bessner also highlights how many of the big media companies have been spending billions - sometimes tens of billions - annually on stock buybacks in order to artificially boost the company's stock price. That's money that would have otherwise had to go back into the company before President Reagan changed the laws that prohibited such practices. It's not that the big moguls are inherently more evil than they were in 1970. They just have fewer constraints governing them in 2024.

But let's not forget that another contributor to this industry death spiral is the impact of debt on strategy at some of the big media companies. The merger between Warner Media and Discovery added tens of billions of debt to the combined company, on top of the billions worth of AT&T debt that company dumped on Warner Brothers before they got rid of the studio. WBD execs claim the massive debts aren't a problem, because they are generally at lower rates and they are steadily paying them down. But the company has been paying down the debt by doing the equivalent of what my farmer grandfather would have described as "eating your seed corn." There is a big difference between cutting excess overhead and chopping entire departments because you hope you and your stock options will be vacationing in Vail before anyone realizes those departments had an actual value to the company's future.

I worry that sometimes I come off as a bit cranky and that's really not my personality. Tomorrow I'll shuffle back to a more traditional mix of news and stuff. I have an interview to post tomorrow with Ben Roy, the producer of the Netflix series Our Living World as well as one with Bryce Sparks, one of the off-road racers featured in the new Discovery show Mud Madness. I'll excerpt a bit of both of those interviews in tomorrow's newsletter. 

And to mix things up, on Thursday I will be interviewing renowned jazz saxophonist Joshua Redman and vocalist Gabrielle Cavassa ahead of Friday's premiere of Next At Kennedy Center's "Joshua Redman, where are we." I'll have an excerpt from those interviews in Thursday's newsletter. 

ODDS AND SODS
* Today's cancellation of CNN's primetime talker King Charles reminded me that I reviewed the show when it premiered last November.

* It's probably not a surprise, but a new report finds that streamers with NFL rights had more engaged subscribers than those without football rights during football season.

WHAT'S NEW TONIGHT AND TOMORROW

MONDAY, APRIL 15TH, 2024:
* Contraband: Seized At The Border Season Premiere (Discovery)
* Marvel Studio Legends (Disney+)
* Music Mayhem Series Premiere (AXS tv)
* Rachael Ray's Meals In Minutes Series Premiere (fyi)
* The Stranger (Hulu)

TUESDAY, APRIL 16TH:
* An American Bombing: The Road To April 19th (HBO)
* CTRL+ALT+DESIRE (Paramount+)
* Hip Hop World (Prime Video)
* Jimmy Carr: Natural Born Killer (Netflix) - [first look video]
* Sounds Delicious With Carnie Wilson Series Premiere (AXS TV)

SEE YOU ON TUESDAY!