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For decades, the gatekeepers were in Los Angeles and New York. They had offices, development deals, and power lunches. Today, the most influential creator in the world might be a 22-year-old with a ring light in Omaha.

And crucially, we are no longer loyal. In the 90s, NBC could rely on a Friends audience. Today, your favorite show is cancelled before you finish the season premiere. a27hopsonxxx

But here is the hopeful note: Popular media has always been a mess. In the 1950s, they thought television would destroy reading. In the 80s, they thought the VCR would kill cinema. It didn't. It just changed. For decades, the gatekeepers were in Los Angeles

We have entered a strange new phase of popular media. Industry insiders are calling it "The Great Unwind." It is a period of contraction, confusion, and, paradoxically, incredible creativity. After years of bloat, the entertainment landscape is not just changing channels—it is changing the very nature of what a "channel" is. For a moment, let us mourn the streaming bundle. What began as a utopian promise—every movie, every show, every song, for the price of a latte—has collapsed under its own weight. Netflix, Max, Disney+, Peacock, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Prime Video, and a dozen niche players have recreated the exact problem they were built to solve: the cable bundle, just with better algorithms and worse buffering. And crucially, we are no longer loyal

But the industry is adapting. The new buzzword is not "content" but "event." Netflix proved the model with Squid Game ; Disney revived it with The Mandalorian ; and now, everyone is chasing the watercooler moment. Shows are no longer dropped all at once. They are being serialized weekly again, not out of nostalgia, but out of desperation. They want you to talk about the show. They want the memes. They want the discourse. Speaking of discourse: we are living through a revolution in who gets to tell stories.

In 2023 and 2024, the box office was a tale of two cities. On one hand, you had Barbie and Oppenheimer . "Barbenheimer" was a once-in-a-generation cultural collision—a piece of intellectual property (IP) about a plastic doll directed with arthouse flair, paired with a three-hour biopic about a physicist. Both were original-ish, director-driven, and wildly successful.