1. 60 Minutesgate Is The Monoculture’s Dying Gasp
Spend some time on Twitter this week and you will learn that Bari Weiss and her Ellison overlords have taken down yet another cherished American institution, the long-running CBS newsmagazine show 60 Minutes.
It all came to a head this week when 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley laced into his new Weiss-appointed boss, the tech journalist Nick Bilton, in Bilton’s introductory meeting with staff.
In what can best be described as a “suicide by police” style move, Pelley called Bilton unqualified and accused him of starting the LA fires with his space lasers. (Oh wait, that was something else, but he did accuse Bilton of destroying 60 Minutes at the behest of Weiss and the Ellisons.)
Bilton shut down the meeting, telling the staff to enjoy the bagels, the staff applauded Pelley once Bilton left, Pelley was, unsurprisingly, fired the next morning and Progressive Twitter went into overdrive, each new poster attempting to outdo the next as they bemoaned the Dolchstoßlegende (stab in the back) the new owners had delivered to the hallowed institution.
As if.
The sad fact is that 60 Minutes, like all television news, has been on life support for at least a decade.
As in a five year old article in Digiday about CBS’s 2021 plans to revive the show noted that, as per CBS, the median age of the audience was over 65.
Which means that by now it’s likely over 70.
And that off of Twitter and LinkedIn, the average person’s reaction to the 60 Minutes debacle was likely to be “Wait, it’s still on the air?”
Why It Matters
As I have been Cassandraing for the past several years, television news is slowly dying. It’s been replaced by the internet and social media, and what remains is largely a relic of the past, watched primarily by retired Boomers and their caregivers.
60 Minutes is no exception.
The bombastic Mr. Pelley is 68. His rival for lead host spot, Lesley Stahl, is 84. And their audience reflects that.
Pelley allegedly made $5 million a year. Bilton allegedly only made $2.5 million. So it’s not like we’re talking about a pair of starving cub reporters or a long-time employee getting canned just before retirement.
Look, 60 Minutes was a great show in its day. It produced some stellar journalism. But the world it thrived in no longer exists.
The line between news and opinion has been permanently blurred by papers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal that run both on the front page and do little to distinguish between them.
By cable news networks that rely on talk shows for their ratings.
By podcasts and substacks that are where “serious” people get their news.
By Instagram and TikTok, which is where Gen Z gets its news, the algorithm feeding them narrower and narrower versions of a story until belief becomes divorced from reality and black is white and up is down and they don’t realize most people believe otherwise.
So no, Bari Weiss is not trying to kill 60 Minutes. Its death was preordained a good decade ago when the ecosystem that made its success possible began its long, slow decline.
The result has been massive fragmentation and the formation of thousands of small isolated bubbles of audiences and content—Feudal Media.
So in the age of Feudal Media, 60 Minutes matters a whole lot less. It’s not shaping national conversations the way it did in its heyday. Yes, its numbers were up 9% over the past year. But that’s not a national audience. It’s an elderly, overly political audience of the sort that still watches linear TV.
Big difference.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are a member of the Chattering Classes, the sort of Very Serious Person who is busy tweeting out lamentations and condemnations, you need to take a breath and look around you.
Realize that your media habits are no longer universal.
Realize that most people under 30 get all or most of their news from social media.
Realize that the conversation in your bubble rarely extends into other bubbles.
And reframe your objections to reflect that, to reflect that you are mostly upset about a show that you and your same-age peers have loved for decades and the greater message about the decline of the monoculture. And that what’s going on at CBS is a sign, not a cause.
If you are Scott Pelley, I get it. We’ve all been at jobs that changed, companies whose new management didn’t seem to get it.
On the other hand it’s hard to work up more sympathy. You’re 68. You have been making $5 million/year (or close) for quite some time. You’ll start a substack based off your recent actions and may even make more from it.
So congrats, I guess.
If you’re Nick Bilton and the CBS team: you do get some sympathy. Because whatever you do, the Chattering Classes are not going to be happy about it. Focus on the Feudal Media era we are in and work on creating something that will appeal to that bubble. Not to the audience the show had in its heyday, but the audience it can claim now. If you can nail that you’ll have a victory and if you can then expand beyond that bubble, even better.
In other words, ignore the haters.
2. Will YouTube Eat The Movies?
The other ubiquitous story this week was about how a pair of horror films produced by Zoomer YouTube creators beat out the latest Star Wars installment at the box office.
Leading the pack was Backrooms, based on 20-year-old Kane Parsons’ viral YouTube horror series about an endless, unsettling maze of yellow office-like rooms. Produced by Blumhouse-Atomic Monster and distributed by A24, it opened at $81.4 million domestically on a reported $10 million budget, taking the No. 1 box office spot.
In second place was Obsession, an original about a man whose romantic wish turns into a nightmare. Director Curry Barker, 26, built his audience on YouTube and TikTok with short horror and comedy videos. Made for a reported $1 million, the film took in $27.4 million domestically in its third weekend.
And then way back in third was Disney’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu at $24.5 million.
So no wonder Hollywood felt like the ground had shifted beneath its collective feet.
Why It Matters
There is an element of inevitability around this moment.
For years audiences have been complaining that Hollywood is stuck in a rut.
That superhero movies and sequels are fine in small doses but if it’s the only thing you’re putting out then they might as well stay home and watch TV, thank you.
That indie films need to actually be, you know, good. Not just woke or quirky.
And so of course two horror films made by YouTube creators struck a nerve with audiences who have been craving something different.
Their success proves a few things too.
First, is that YouTubers can find success on the big screen doing longer-form content. This has been in question since the first round of YouTubers bombed in their attempts to transition to a bigger platform, PewDiePie being the most notorious among them.
It also shows that their audiences will follow them to theaters.
Which involves leaving their bedrooms, buying tickets, getting to the theater on time and a host of other adult-level tasks.
I have heard Hollywood types asterisking this weekend by claiming that horror movies are a unique genre, easy to make on a budget, frequently made by newcomers, beloved by the sorts of teens who jammed the theaters this weekend and thus the results are not applicable to other genres.
To which I respond, well, maybe, but if I were a betting man I would not put money on that.
YouTubers are becoming more sophisticated, it is where the most creative Zoomers are gravitating, so I would not count on them all being bad at comedy and drama.
But that’s just me.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are a Hollywood studio, avoid your first instinct, which will be to sign up dozens of random YouTubers and give them all movie deals.
Since you will no doubt ignore that advice and do so anyway, at least try and treat them with respect once you have them in-house. Find them mentors who will respect them and not regard them as dumb kids.
Understand that their aesthetic is likely different than yours. Don’t force things on them.
If you are a YouTuber and are being pursued by a Hollywood studio, get yourself a lawyer. Someone who knows the ins-and-outs of this sort of deal and who can protect your interests.
You can thank me in your Oscar-night speech.
If you are a Hollywood executive, stop making movies based on data. On a spreadsheet that says audiences like X, overseas audiences like Y and (especially) Oscar voters like A, B and C.
And that if audiences liked something once, they’ll like it the next 10 times you feed it to them too.
Start telling the stories you want to tell. For audiences who want to hear them. Don’t worry about who is in them, who is making them, which checkboxes they check.
Just tell good stories and everything will be alright.
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.