[FrontPageMagazine] Directors, writers and actors hired to fill DEI quotas make garbage that turns off viewers.
Even as streamers like Netflix, Amazon and Disney+ are spending almost incomprehensible amounts of money creating the movies and shows fueling the Peak TV wars, the numbers show that audiences are turning down much of that content to watch old television shows instead.
A recent article noted that according to Nielsen, which tracks viewership numbers, “the most minutes last year – more than 57 billion – were spent watching ‘Suits,’ a legal drama that premiered 12 years prior.” The show had more than double the number of viewing minutes than Netflix’s race-swapping woke usurpation fantasy, “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story.”
The Hollywood Reporter noted that the “top 10 overall titles in Nielsen’s year-end rankings are all acquired shows, the first time that’s happened in the four years streaming rankings have been publicly available.” Acquired means the library of older shows that Netflix bought after spending $17 billion on content, much of it on new shows like “Bridgerton” whose three seasons cost $168 million, only to lose to the estimated $200,000 per episode that it paid for “Suits”.
In 2023, more people were watching “NCIS” reruns than the top two streaming programs combined. And more are watching old episodes of “Friends” than either “Ted Lasso” or Star Wars’ “The Mandalorian” despite an estimated $120 million per season budget.
In 2022, Amazon had spent $500 million to buy the rights to Tolkien’s world in order to produce a woke multicultural version of “The Lord of the Rings”, but twice as many people watched “Seinfeld” reruns (not to mention “The Great British Baking Show”) as “The Rings of Power”.
After an unfathomable $238 billion in Peak TV spending that year, most viewers were comfortable dialing up old episodes of “NCIS”, “Criminal Minds”, “Gilmore Girls”, “Seinfeld”, “Supernatural”, “The Simpsons”, and “Heartland”: a show about a horse ranch set in Canada.
The trend continues with Nielsen numbers for this week showing old school shows Suits, NCIS and Grey’s Anatomy in the top 10.
The issue isn’t just “wokeness”. Apart from ‘Heartland’, the old shows that are popular now are not traditional or conservative, but they were generally popular in their own time. Some of the shows were made with a more male audience in mind, a demographic that is no longer serviced by the current streaming industry with rare exceptions like Amazon’s ‘Reacher’.
(‘Reacher’ now ranks as the number two series on streaming, vastly outperforming anything else on Amazon, suggesting that male audiences have been deprived of programming.)
But another issue is a radical demographic transformation in the industry that began with #MeToo and the BLM hate movement. Hollywood made DEI commitments and carried them out, whether it was locking the Oscars behind racial quotas for participating films or dumping white male talent in favor of affirmative action quotas.
Writers Guild of America numbers show that 64% staff writers had been men in 2011, but by 2020, only a third were men. 71% of staff writers had been white in 2011, but less than half were by 2020. Male story editors declined from 61% to 39% while white story editors fell from 79% to 39%. Professional talent at key points in the production chain likewise declined sharply.
Why are shows from the 1990s beating billion dollar projects at Netflix, Amazon and Disney?
One answer is that Hollywood purged or sidelined a lot of its own talent leading to productions that have ten times the cost of their old forebears, but are badly written, acted and directed. A $200 million fan film may make for an impressive trailer, but minute by minute still remain as fundamentally unprofessional as anything uploaded by a random amateur to YouTube.
The issue is not just wokeness onscreen, but wokeness behind the scenes. A lot of the old movies and shows were woke for the level of the time, but they were also competently written, directed and acted by some of the best talent that money could buy. That is no longer true.
Sam Goldwyn, an immigrant and former glove salesman who never learned to speak proper English, yet was responsible for some of the greatest films of the forties, had a simple formula. “You get yourself a great story. Then you get the best writer available. Then you get the best director. Then you hire a first-class cast, the right cast, and a great cameraman.” Not anymore.
Now you get a story that conveys an important socially relevant message about a minority group. Then you get an inexperienced writer from an oppressed group, a BIPOC director who has done nothing except four music videos, a TikTok BLM influencer as your star and a cameraman who is also the only white male on the set and prays all day not to be fired. 
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