The Binge Purple

Hollywood's streaming model is broken. It's also not going away. For the people who make TV, figuring that out will be a horror show

- By Josef Adalian and Lane Brown

If you call a slew of Hollywood’s most powerful showrunners, studio chiefs, agents, and operators and ask them to describe the state of the television business, they will say things like:

“This is the single worst time to be making anything in the history of the medium. It’s just as dark as it’s ever been.”

“It’s such a fucking disaster, isn’t it?”

“It’s like the entire system has snapped.” “These companies took what was an extraordinarily successful economic model and they destroyed it in favor of a model that may or may not work—but almost certainly won’t work as well as the old model.”

“Everything became big tech—the Amazon model of ‘We don’t actually have to make money; we just have to show shareholder growth.’ Everyone said, ‘Great. That seems like the thing to do.’ Which essentially was like, ‘Let’s all commit ritual suicide. Let’s take one of the truly successful money-printing inventions in the history of the modern world—which was the carriage system with cable television—and let’s just end it and reinvent ourselves as tech companies, where we pour billions down the drain in pursuit of a return that is completely speculative, still, this many years into it.’”

“The reason nobody really wants to open the books on this is because if Wall Street got a look, they’d have a collective stroke.”