1. Scripted Series Make A Comeback
Netflix content chief Bela Bajaria opened her upfront by noting that, “Other companies are spending the majority of their budget on sports and cutting back on scripted shows.”
This was not, in fact true, as Deadline was quick to point out.
The broadcast networks were all actually adding scripted series to their line-ups. Not a whole lot of them and they were placing smaller orders than usual, but the trend, which had been heading downwards, was definitely reversing itself this year.
Why It Matters
U.S. broadcasters, it seems, are not actually seeing an uptick in demand for scripted series on linear. Rather, they are looking at these scripted series as a way to boost their syndication revenue overseas.
The new series are largely from their own studios, which means they profit when the series are sold for streaming or linear rights. There is still a big demand for US-made television overseas, especially with Hollywood’s high production values.
So there’s that.
But the new seasons in this current offering are often much shorter than the traditional 25-episode season. CBS, for example, is cutting down the number of episodes on Fire Country, NCIS: Sydney and NCIS: Origins to 13, 10 and 10 respectively. Other networks like ABC have similarly shorter seasons in the works.
It’s an interesting play because shorter seasons are a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, if you are selling the streaming rights, a 10 episode season is fine. Bingeing 10 hours of a series is plenty and it’s not likely to read as “shorter than usual” in that context.
But five seasons of 12 episodes only gives you 60 in total, which is not nearly enough to fill a FAST channel or even a hole in a linear line-up. Whereas five seasons of a 25 episode season nets you 125 episodes, which is a whole different ballgame.
Point being that just because the broadcasters are putting out new scripted series doesn’t mean they are going to reap the same profits off them as when they had much longer seasons.
Or not.
It’s hard to know given that streaming series all tend to be settling into the 10-12 episode range.
It’s good for storytelling—things don’t get dull, plotlines don’t jump the shark—but it also changes the rhythm of the medium.
With 25-episode seasons, there was a sense of ambient awareness—the characters were with you every week and became part of your life. It’s why series like The Brady Bunch, which also ran daily as reruns, became such an integral part of life for Americans over 45: they were there with you all the time, you felt like you knew every aspect of their lives, like they were a part of your family.
And that matters.
As I have noted in the past, the shift away from the 25-episode September-to-June season impacts more than just what the viewer sees. Because under that set-up, creative workers in Hollywood—actors, writers, producers, crew—were able to plan their lives around what was essentially a full year of steady employment with time off for holidays.
That is not the case with streaming and it makes a career in television a lot less attractive. Yes, there is more money per episode. And more creative freedom. But the job becomes a constant hustle and the middle class, the people who wrote, produced and starred in the bulk of sitcoms and dramas, the ones who are not superstars, are finding it harder to make a living.
And that is before you even factor in AI.
So there’s that too and it’s an issue.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are Bela Bajaria, have someone fact check your remarks before you make them. Yes, the broadcast networks had been cutting scripted and so it was not a wild assumption. It just didn’t happen to line up with the reality of what was going on onstage at the upfronts that happened prior to yours.
If you are one of the broadcast networks, understand that while selling the rights to scripted series has been lucrative in the past, that might change when you try and sell smaller runs to buyers who are mostly interested in streaming.
That math will likely vary from market to market, but just because a series is produced for NBC instead of Peacock does not guarantee that it will be snapped up for big bucks the way it once was.
If you are an overseas buyer, consider the trade off between the appeal of American content and the cost. The math here too will vary from market to market and really will depend on how popular American content is in your region, versus the homegrown variety.
Or the Korean variety. Take your pick.
Finally, and it makes me sad to say this, but if you are a writer on many of these shows, now is the time to start rethinking your career. Because AI is going to be able to do much of the heavy lifting on procedurals and basic comedies. Can it write them unaided? No. But it can get pretty close.
And that is not the stuff career longevity is made of.
2. The Blurry Line Between Opinion And News
One of the key tenets of my Feudal Media thesis is that with the collapse of the monoculture came the end of a single source of truth. And that a key signifier of that is the blurring of the line between opinion and news, between facts and feels.
So I have been watching the recent shenanigans at the New York Times with no small degree of interest.
For those of you who do not follow closely, the Times recently ran a very controversial piece by one of their more controversial OpEd writers that created a thunderstorm of allegations around unreliable sources, heretofore undocumented canine behavior and the repetition of ancient libels.
And while outwardly the Times stuck by the story, inwardly, as per Dylan Byers in Puck and a number of other reporters, there were the stirrings of a civil war as reporters in the News division reacted with anger and disbelief.
Why It Matters
Imagine, if you will, that the Washington Post had chosen to run their uncovering of the Watergate break-in as an Opinion piece.
That they had not employed all of the truth-telling mechanisms of the modern newsroom, but rather, let Woodward and Bernstein tell their tale of presidential wrongdoing with a much, much lower bar for truth in an article that, to the average reader, seemed to be a news story.
Imagine too that Woodward and Bernstein had been burned by sources before, sources who turned out to have invented their stories from whole cloth, thus making the absence of oversight a real issue.
That seems to be the main gripe of the newsroom folks: that a story that big should have been treated as a news story, not as one man’s opinion piece, and that in doing so they traded veracity for clicks, and that the ensuing fallout undermined the news division’s ability to do the job to which it had been entrusted, namely to ferret out the actual truth.
Not just some easily propagandized version of the truth.
Which is an incredibly valid point, so it is worth it to look at how exactly the Times, and by extension, all of mass media, got here.
It began when TPTB realized that the Opinion section was a great source of clicks, retweets and other behavior put in motion by controversial takes.
And so that section, which was once neatly buried away at the back of the front section of print newspapers where it was primarily visited by erudite political junkies, made its way to the front page of the website where it sat, undifferentiated from the real news.
That people couldn’t tell the difference was, in fact, the point.
Cable news had become less about news and more about opinion as the most popular shows were all opinion-based talk shows where the hosts POV shaped what was presented as “news.”
Social media then took off and more and more people, younger people in particular, began getting their news from “news influencers” on Instagram and TikTok, charismatic hosts with no actual journalism training and no editor to help them determine fact from fiction.
And today, this is where almost a third of Zoomers get their news. Fed to them by an algorithm that all but ensures they only see a single, very slanted POV.
At the same time, the Times became more than just a newspaper. It became a “media company” whose readers came for the Games and Cooking sections—news was secondary and if it was mixed up with opinion, did it really matter?
Which is why, if you asked people in 2016 to name the Times’ best known reporter, they’d likely have mentioned Maggie Haberman, a newsroom star.
Whereas today the likely answer is Ezra Klein, a star of the Opinion section.
It is not just the Times however.
Every mainstream paper from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Post promotes their opinion stories as that is what appeals to their most loyal readers—it is what they come for, where they leave comments and otherwise “engage with the content.”
Throw in too that outside of the Journal, Post, Times and Axios, our other sources of news are largely substacks and podcasts that reflect the opinions of their authors. It’s why so many journalists go solo: there is more money to be made in promulgating your own opinion than in being part of a news team where someone else may fact check you.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are a brand of any sort—an executive, a corporate entity, a manufacturer, a politician—you need to realize that opinion and spin are everything and that in the world of Feudal Media, attention is the coin of the realm.
Meaning you must do what it takes to get those clicks, distasteful as that may personally be.
What would have gotten a Gen Xer excommunicated for its inherent thirstiness is now table stakes.
So learn vertical video. Learn to express your opinions as if they were incontrovertible facts. Learn how to manage spin.
If you are a news organization, do not give up
I remain convinced that there is an audience out there for real impartial news. Remember that papers like the New York Times were a reaction to the Yellow Journalism of the late 1800s, where truth was less important than outrage.
So Remember the Maine and see if you can make truth sexy yet again.
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.