THEY JUST DON'T GET IT: WHY THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY SUCKS

Are you not entertained? -- Maximus

I think we would all agree that the entirety of the entertainment industry is in a bad way nowadays. Television, film, gaming...it's not going downhill so much as falling off a cliff, and burning on the way down.

Everything about entertainment is markedly, noticeably, objectively worse than it was just a few years ago. The few shows, films and games which are really good only highlight how terrible, or at least how mediocre, almost everything else has become; and there is as yet very little sign this is going to change anytime soon. No surprise there: in order to fix a problem, you have to know that it actually exists, and admit it, at least to yourself. The Industry is not ready to do this, and so it continues to fall, and continues to burn.

I could a tale unfold as to how this came to be, and I will someday soon enough, but I am going to keep this one short and to the point, folks:

The Entertainment Industry is rubbish because it no longer entertains. It has forgotten its mission, the very reason for its own existence.

You know, to entertain.

The word, in case you were wondering, means "to provide someone with amusement or enjoyment." And this is precisely what Hollywood has stopped doing. They no longer amuse or entertain. The relief they used to provide us from the pains and pressures and anxieties of everyday life, through comedy, through drama, through fantasy, through role-playing, is no more.

Instead, they lecture us.

What people used to rush to as an escape is now something from which they require an escape. The refuge has become a trap. It is almost impossible to find a movie, television show or immersive video game made in the last five years which doesn't try to beat you into complete submission with its political, racial, and sexual takes. The basic premise of entertainment, which storytelling, has been thrown out: in its place we now have political propaganda tailored for the sort of people who can't live without Twitter....the trouble here being that Twitter was not, is not, and never will be representative of Americans or even common humanity. Twitter is a fringe, an outland, a dumping ground. It is a sluice where political obsessives, passive-aggressive weaklings and monomaniacs are irresistably drained. But because industry executives and pundits scroll through it all day, they have come to believe it matters, that the badly-written opinions within it actually reflect the feelings of the broad masses, the actual population. One may as well take a Gallup poll in a lunatic asylum or a methadone clinic. The answers you get will be honest, but they will not represent reality. Not for the rest of us, anyway.

Put more simply, they are making entertainment for an audience that doesn't exist.

One does not have to be a right-winger (I'm not, incidentally) to detest the state, and continuing, direction of entertainment. Nor does one have to be intolerant of the politics of others. One merely has to remember the days, not so long ago, when the purpose of a TV show, movie or video game was to engage its audience rather than talk down to them or try to fill their head with theories generated by university professors who have never held a real job. When a storyteller could try to make a moral point without revealing his own personal voting habits. When a showrunner or game designer understood that there is a fair country distance between giving a story a philosophy and pumping it full of ideology.

Everything sucks nowadays because the people making it suck at what they do. Suck on a fundamental, foundational level. They are surgeons who don't know how to cut, electricians who don't understand electricity, handymen with no tools. And they cannot fix the problem either because they are too stupid to know there is a problem, or too arrogant to admit it, which amounts to the same thing.

They just don't get it.

I said above I wasn't going to get into the "why" here, but now I find I cannot avoid it.

The stark fact is that a lot of this idiocy is driven by a debasement of the very idea of activism caused by the internet generally, and social media specifically. In my parents' day, "activism" meant risking getting your skull split or your life taken to promote a cause you believed worthy of your blood. Now it means tapping "like" as you swipe a screen from the comfort of your couch. It follows that actual action, i.e. spending money or going somewhere physically, and the simulacrum of action embodied in clicking "like" or "downvote" on a video or a post or a thread, has also been conflated. A generation raised on the idea that social media is real, that it matters, that it is vital and necessary, cannot distinguish between "likes" and actual, meaningful actions taken in the real world.

What I mean by this is that getting 40,000 likes on Twitter for your defense of "She Hulk" or "Velma" or "Willow" doesn't mean those 40,000 people will watch the shows in question. They simply agree with the politics which drive the creation of those shows in the first place. But their likes, their snarky Tweets and clever Facebook and Instagram posts, do not actually translate to ratings, sales, or dollars. The act of clicking a screen and the act of going out to see a movie, or spending money to watch a show or buy a video game, are not at all the same. They are not, in fact, even connected. One exists in the real world, and one does not. One is a simulation of reality, and one IS reality. And lest you think I am lecturing you, I learned this the hard way when I first became a novelist. I spent thousands on Facebook ads which provided me with the most mouth-watering analytics imaginable. They showed me, via attractive-looking graphs, that tens of thousands of people were "engaged" by my ads every day. But "engagement," and even the far more elusive "clicks," did not translate to actual sales. There was a fatal gap between what I was being told and what was happening, or not happening, to my bank account. It turned out the advertisements were being pitched to people who had zero interest in the product: it was "side of the bus" advertising, which reaches huge audiences but not necessarily to people with any interest in what I was peddling.

It's the same here. No matter how hard Hollywood panders to the extreme left, it will not change the fact that the extreme left is only a tiny percentage of society and not, as a rule, interested in what Hollywood has to offer regardless. They will "like," but they will not buy. And Hollywood has yet to accept that fact. They keep doubling down, keep rewarding failure, keep blaming everyone but themselves for the situation. But the funny thing about reality is that it always trumps denial in the end. Always. You can deny your plane is going down 'til you're blue in the face, but brother, when it hits that mountain, you will know it. Capitalism is ultimately a very Darwinian process. If folks want what you've got, you're a millionaire. If they don't, well, as Dalton said in "Roadhouse," there's always barber college.

In the real world, when a business fails to deliver a product the consumer wants, the product fails, and ultimately the business itself. In Hollywood, the products are failing left and right, but the business considers itself "too big" to meet such a fate, and continues to churn out wokeist, box-checked entertainment almost nobody wants out of sheer spite. Whether this is sustainable, and Hollywood really is Too Big To Fail, I don't know: it's possible that if quality storytelling ceases to exist entirely and audiences have absolutely no alternative but to watch shows like "The Rings of Power," they may actually end up doing so out of sheer boredom. But so long as media exists from the Before Time -- before wokeism, before box-checking, before pandering to extremists became the norm -- audiences will also have something to compare modern TV shows, movies and games to. And that does not bode well for the people in studio offices and writer's rooms today.