1. Collateral Damage From The Death Of The Monoculture
Back when streaming was first becoming a thing, I frequently wrote about how the new, shorter streaming seasons were wreaking havoc on the lives of Hollywood’s writers, directors, producers, crew and actors.
Because while no TV show lasted forever, the 25-episode seasons provided something akin to full-time employment, filming, as they did, from August to June, which allowed for some semblance of family life—Thanksgiving and Christmas, regular child care arrangements, steady paychecks.
And while streaming shows paid more, their seasons were 50 percent shorter and rarely held the promise of residuals, making the above career much less attractive in the long term.
That was before the collapse of the monoculture.
For as an article in the Wall Street Journal poignantly illustrated this week, that event is fully wreaking havoc on the entire Hollywood ecosystem, driving some into bankruptcy and others to flee LA.
And if anything, it is only going to be getting worse.
Why It Matters
Hollywood is not just the world you see on Entourage. It’s thousands of people who work as grips and production assistants, journeymen screenwriters, animation artists. All of whom, as the article points out, came to Hollywood from elsewhere, looking to be part of the Great American Dream Factory.
For years, that factory provided them with a solid living.
But no more.
The number of films and TV series with budgets of at least $40MM is down almost 40 percent from 2022 and that number is not expected to go up, at least not in any meaningful way.
That not only impacts the people who’d otherwise be hired on those productions, but also all the adjacent businesses, from prop houses to craft services providers to businesses throughout the LA area who are seeing spending drop along with the amount of disposable income available in sizable chunks of the population.
The Creator Economy does create some jobs (pun intended) but, again, not in significant enough numbers to make a difference to the job market.
Then there’s AI, which is already threatening a whole host of jobs, animation and editing being first and foremost among them.
There are other jobs, too, where you can easily see AI taking over: script supervisor, for instance—AI can easily ascertain whether the lines were read as written and note which takes the director liked.
So it’s a problem, though, to paraphrase Puff The Magic Dragon, nothing lasts forever and the glory days of Hollywood may well be gone.
This is something other industries—most notably journalism and print media in general—have had to deal with as the internet changes their industry. And now it is Hollywood’s turn.
Which is not to diminish the pain and feeling of loss so many people will have at its collapse, but also an admission there is not much we can do about it.
What You Need To Do About It
If you work in any part of the movie or TV business you need to accept that the new reality—Creators and AI—are here to stay… and then figure out how you can fit into that new reality.
Sometimes the answer is by finding new skills, other times it’s by adapting your old ones, oftentimes it’s finding something that is vaguely adjacent to where you have passion and can see yourself succeeding.
But whatever you do, do not remain in place, burying your head in the sand and waiting for the waves of change to wash over you.
That is not going to work and you need to be proactive here. Remember that you are someone who once took risks—that’s how you wound up with the career you have.
Now go take action again.
If you are Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass and the rest of the governing officials in California, prepare for this bust. Because it is only going to get worse and you need to step in and try and stanch the bleeding.
Or, at the very least, pretend to be sympathetic.
2. AI-Driven Gaming For The Masses
In case you were wondering what people were building with AI, Gavin Purcell, Fallon’s executive producer and host of a popular AI-focused podcast just released an Andreessen-Horowitz-funded site called “AndThen,” which is an audio-based game show that lets you play out different scenarios (talk a bomber out of blowing up a diner before the police get there) or play a $100,000 Pyramid/Password type game with an animated host.
It’s getting some buzz and it’s notable because it’s not trying to do things that AI can’t currently do—the audio-based game is familiar enough that it’s not going to scare people away.
Which may be its problem.
Why It Matters
For all its AI-ness, the game feels a lot like a 90s-era computer game, the ones that had several dozen canned answers and after you’d played them for a few days you could predict which ones.
That’s not a deal-breaker, especially since given it is AI, you will ideally not be getting canned responses, though the game does feel somewhat predictable—the host asked my fictional partner what she thought of my clues, she gave a fairly enthusiastic response—is that going to happen every time?
The interface looks and feels like a 90s computer game too—you are not in any sort of metaverse-like interface, but rather a text-heavy one that feels familiar but not groundbreaking.
I suspect that is the point though—to get people feeling comfortable, and the actual games themselves are less relevant here than the net takeaway—the interactivity of AI being used for gaming in a way that takes advantage of its ability to think or at least appear to think.
This sort of activity seems well-suited to AI, circa October 2025, versus anything you can imagine with the Sora 2.0 videos, which are still very much in beta mode.
It also gives AndThen room to grow as technology becomes more reliable, to add in video and backgrounds and the like.
Which is much wiser, IMHO, than starting out too ambitious and turning people off.
One thing I feel confident predicting though is that we will see more of these sorts of attempts in the months to come—entertainment platforms that attempt to use AI to entertain us rather than inform us. (Though the latter is a distinct possibility, too, especially with a “Learn To X” platform, where X can be anything from “speak German” to “code.”)
What You Need To Do About It
Pay attention to how well AndThen and its kin do over the next few months.
Do they remain niche or does one of them break out?
If so, why does it break out?
Can it work on TV rather than just on a browser or mobile app?
If you are in the industry, pay attention to how quickly consumers embrace interactivity, as I suspect that will be AI’s big contribution to everything from discovery to advertising.
And if you want to play AndThen and test it out yourself, here is the link.
Alan Wolk is co-founder and lead analyst at the consulting firm TV[R]EV. He is the author of the best-selling industry primer, Over The Top: How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry. Wolk frequently speaks about changes in the television industry, both at conferences and to anyone who’ll listen.
Week in Review is an opinion column. It does not necessarily represent the opinions of StreamTV Insider.