Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Tuesday, January 24th, 2023

The case for loving your job.

Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Tuesday, January 24th, 2023.

HILARY DUFF ON "HOW I MET YOUR FATHER'
Hulu's How I Met Your Father comes back for a second season and I recently asked Hilary Duff about how her character or other characters in the show had changed from season one to season two. I was especially interested in whether she or other cast members went into the new season with suggestions on how they'd like to see their characters evolve and if they'd had any discussions with the show's producers or writers ahead of the new season:

I don't know if it was a sit-down ‑‑ it wasn't, at least for me. When the season was starting, I didn't say "This is what I would love to see happen."  They (the writers) are so damn good.  They think of things that we wouldn't. If we as a group are like, "Oh, my God.  What if this happened?  Or this?" then they come with something that's so much better. And that's why they're the writers and not us.  They really surprise us at every turn.  And I think it exceeds my expectations.  But I will say that it is a collaborative effort. If there's something we don't want to do or a pitch that we have for a joke.  Everyone is very open ears and ready to make us feel heard, which is a cool place to work. 

And we also really like to corner them in hallways, so we can find out what is happening.

HOW A SINGLE PERSON CHANGES A CULTURE
I really enjoy Ted Gioia's Substack "The Honest Broker" because he talks a lot about how the culture of a company can affect its bottom line and while he isn't discussing the television and streaming business in his newest newsletter, it certainly resonates with me as I look at the company cultures of some of the streamers:

At the lowest levels in a corporation, those analytical STEM skills help you get a promotion and a raise. But at the highest levels of management, your creativity, imagination, and core values are tested constantly. When you face the biggest decisions, there are so many trade-offs that no spreadsheet or algorithm can guide you—everything from worker motivation to community support can be at stake.

You can’t even quantify those things, let alone calculate their trade-offs. You need something deeper. It’s more a matter of values and creative insight than math.
Barnes & Noble found a new CEO who had the right kind of values. Let’s find a few more, and but them in places where they do some good. Maybe we should even look for someone like Miles Davis.
Paramount is still dealing with some of the consequences of having an overall terrible company culture for at least a decade. It lost a lot of the people who had an institutional memory of how things worked and the wrong executives were often rewarded because of factors that had little to do with performance. There are a lot of new, bright people there. But turning around a culture - especially when it's not coming from the top - is difficult.

And after speaking with a number of people at Warner Bros. Discovery, it's clear that the culture that is coming from the highest levels of management is making the company's struggles to find its way even more challenging. I spoke with one senior film executive from Warners last week, who described top corporate management's overall approach to problem solving as "I'm a dick because I can be." I'm no expert on corporate management, but that attitude does not seem to be helpful.

There is an entire industry of consultants who are paid lots of money to show companies how to "build a healthy corporate culture," and more often than not, it involves stupid teambuilding exercises and a lot of graphic-filled slides. 

But I'm talking about building a viable corporate culture through specific actions from the top. Not just leading by example, but also trusting your employees and having a love for your core business. Gioia's description of Barnes & Noble's fortunes a few years ago might sound familiar to people in the entertainment business:

Barnes & Noble is no tech startup, and is about as un-cool as retailers get. It’s like The Gap, but for books. The company was founded in 1886, and it flourished during the 20th century. But the digital age caught the company by surprise.

For a while, Barnes & Noble tried to imitate Amazon. It ramped up online sales, and introduced its own eBook reader (the Nook), but with little success.

Even after its leading bricks-and-mortar competitor Borders shut down in 2011, B&N still couldn’t find a winning strategy. By 2018 the company was in total collapse. Barnes & Noble lost $18 million that year, and fired 1,800 full time employees—in essence shifting almost all store operations to part time staff. Around that same time, the company fired its CEO due to sexual harassment claims.

Every indicator was miserable. Same-store sales were down. Online sales were down. The share price was down more than 80%.

Gioia's description of the average B&N store back then also likely resonates with people who have watched entertainment industry executives chase all sorts of side businesses rather than focusing on the core assets of the company:

But I’ll be blunt about it: B&N was a lousy bookstore. I gave up shopping there because it never had the book I wanted in stock. Instead it shifted a huge portion of its floorspace to peddling toys, greeting cards, calendars, and various chachkas.

Not many people were buying these items, as far as I could tell. Do people really go toy shopping at a bookstore? Toys R Us also filed for bankruptcy in 2018, and if they couldn’t compete with Amazon, how could B&N hope to do any better?

The other B&N big initiative was cafes inside the store, but these were even less appealing than the bookstore. I drink a lot of coffee, but I’d need to be desperate for a caffeine fix before I’d buy a cup of java at B&N.

And in a bizarre strategic move, the company decided to launch freestanding restaurants under the name Barnes & Noble Kitchen—no books, just meals. But this was another disaster.

But now Barnes & Noble is not just a successful book chain again. It's opening new stores, some of them in locations where Amazon Books outlets failed. And people both inside and outside the company credit a new CEO who - gasp - loved books:

If you want to sell music, you must love those songs. If you want to succeed in journalism, you must love those newspapers. If you want to succeed in movies, you must love the cinema.

But this kind of love is rare nowadays. I often see record labels promote new artists for all sorts of gimmicky reasons—even labels I once trusted such as Deutsche Grammophon or Concord. I’ve come to doubt whether the people in charge really love the music.

Maybe they once did, but at some point they lost faith in the redemptive power of songs. That’s the only explanation I can give for what they’re doing. Instead they put their faith in something else—maybe a brand licensing deal, or a fashion line tie-in, or a human interest story. Or maybe they just decided that money talks, and began making creative decisions based on discounted cash flow projections.

But here’s the problem. If you don’t really love the music (or books or newspapers or cinema or whatever), those cash flow projections turn out to be wrong. That’s because creative fields like music and writing live and die based on creativity, not financial statements and branding deals.

Now picture Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav and ask yourself: does he love the television and movie business? I have no doubt that he loves the idea of being a studio head and being seen as one of the big shots in the entertainment business. But Zaslav loves the Aspen Ideas Festival part of the entertainment business more than he does the screening room. And that attitude filters its way down the ranks of the company.

The difference between loving the job and loving what you do is best illustrated by the statement from a Netflix executive that "we only cancel shows that aren't successful." While that might be technically true, it also is the type of thing that you'd expect to hear from an executive preparing to move a factory to Thailand to cut costs.

Someone who loves the content more than the content job would have answered the question differently. "Yes, a lot of our original shows have been canceled. It's never an easy decision, but it gets down to the show not finding the audience it needs to be successful. But one reason you read about the shows we've canceled is that we take a lot of creative swings for the fences. We greenlight projects you'd never see anywhere else. We believe in our creative people and we believe in giving them a chance. But failures don't mean it wasn't worth it or the show wasn't good enough. It means we couldn't figure out how to get it the audience it deserves."

If I was a creative person, I would make Netflix my first stop. There are a lot of roadblocks that stand in the way of the success of any new original show or movie. Many of them are out of your control. But if you don't believe corporate management loves the entertainment business and believes in the mission, then you're starting out with one hand tied behind your back.

ODDS AND SODS
* Here is a rundown of Every Academy Award-Nominated Movie You Can Watch On A Streaming Service.

* Apple TV+ has picked up Tehran for a third season.

WHAT'S NEW FOR TUESDAY:

American Auto Season Premiere (NBC)
Barcelona Crime Series Premiere (MHz Choice)
How I Met Your Father Season Two Premiere (Hulu)
I Am Jazz Season Premiere (TLC)
9-1-1: Lone Star (Fox)
Physical: 100 (Netflix)
The Winchesters Spring Premiere (The CW)

Click Here to see the list of all of the upcoming premiere dates for the next few months.

SEE YOU WEDNESDAY!

If you have any feedback, send it along to Rick@AllYourScreens.com and follow me on Twitter @aysrick.