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+--- Thread: Narcissist showrunners are making content for no one (TV entertainment hobbies) (/thread-16666.html)
Narcissist showrunners are making content for no one (TV entertainment hobbies) - C C - Oct 15, 2024
ECHO CHAMBERLAIN: "Why entertainment is failing"
https://youtu.be/pn5n1abri3k
VIDEO EXCERPT: With too many entertainment products these days, it feels like the showrunner is the real protagonist, instead of the main character. Too often, showrunners will treat a name brand property like a customizable template.
They perform self inserts and indulge in identity preoccupation, making it about themselves. In channeling their history, trauma, and identity -- they are coming from a place of authenticity, which must therefore be compelling [in order to succeed].
When taking your inner creative drives, and then setting aside your own world views, shedding your morbidities, and shaping that raw material into something for everyone -- you are being generous. But writing for an audience of you, and the rest of the writing room, and leaning into those world views and morbidities -- is selfish, and lame.
Take Leslye Headland, who was raised in a strictly religious context. In her $230 million show [The Acolyte], there is a clear sense of her deconstructing strict religious sects and religious observance.
She's a lesbian, therefore the content will be heavy with sapphic themes, lesbian, and gay characters. She has unresolved cross-purposes with her sister -- therefore, that gets explored.
There's nothing wrong with personal stuff as a galvanizing force of creativity. The issue was with proportionality, self-indulgence. Whether a showrunner is playing their issues out without discretion or sufficient filters on the page and the screen. And whether the audience has been given appropriate enough consideration.
And the fact you didn't will a wholly new story world into existence, but just made whatever use you wanted of a brand with a built-in appeal.
The problem with trying to inject [political] messaging into entertainment, is that in entertainment -- first and foremost -- the medium is the message. If the entertainment is lackluster, people won't be receptive to you or your worldview. And if the audience doesn't show up, because you put the cart before the horse, then don't be petulant and blame the audience. It's not their fault.
If you're trying to be socially progressive, but your creativity is stale -- relying on the past to develop a progressive present -- then there's a disconnect there that people can sense and instinctively aren't interested in...
Narcissists are making content for no one
RE: Narcissist showrunners are making content for no one (TV entertainment hobbies) - Yazata - Oct 18, 2024
It seems to me that when studios pay the big bucks buy properties like StarWars, the whole point is that they are buying an already-existing audience. It's why they don't try to create something original and new, because something new will have to find a new audience of its own, and that's harder and more of a gamble.
But then those same studios will try to reconstruct the property that they just bought, in the belief that since (so they assume) they have this huge audience of StarWars (or Dr Who or whatever) fans locked in, that they have an opportunity to inflict whatever social change agendas they like upon that built-in audience, with all of those eyeballs watching. They see it first and foremost as a political opportunity.
They seem to have no interest in continuing what originally attracted all those fans in the first place or even in preserving the properties' overarching mythos. So everything is subject to change and soon the only thing 'StarWars' about StarWars is the name.
Fans predictably are alienated, lose interest and start to defect en-masse. The response to that is typically to blame the damnable fans for being too politically incorrect. Unfortunately for the studios, nobody has ever been insulted into enjoying particular entertainment products. The supposedly can't-fail intellectual properties that the studios paid such massive amounts of money for in the belief that they were less risky than doing something original begin to bomb. Billions of dollars are lost.
Paying big money to purchase an audience and then driving it off by treating it with contempt is the closest thing to an own-goal that exists in the entertainment world. Will they learn from it or stop doing it? Probably not. They are blinded by their own unshakeable sense of political self-rightousness.
RE: Narcissist showrunners are making content for no one (TV entertainment hobbies) - Syne - Oct 19, 2024
Once anyone on the right was essentially blacklisted, it became an echo chamber. Too many people telling each other the same excuses for failure.