IMO the best recent TV and film has come from people and teams operating outside the Hollywood development system eg Parasite, Squid, Atlanta, Arcane, Curb, Super Deluxe, Jojo, French Dispatch. I’m sure I’m missing a couple. By “outside the development system” I mean the creators are, I think, largely autonomous and not “getting notes” or making much effort to conform. They can take more chances.
There are a few problems with centralized bureaucratic media development —One is that a network going for popularity will naturally try to avoid bad shows and try to create popular shows -- shows they think a majority of people will rate a “6” or “7”. These will seem like “good” shows. But as a general matter the real opportunity is not to avoid bad. The actual challenge is to avoid good — because good crowds out great, which is the real goal. Great shows get awards and viewership. They become signature achievements and they grow networks.
Development execs have strong incentives to fit in and appease various colleagues and stakeholders. But break out shows tend to be rule breaking and contrarian. Being original and contrarian and being a people pleaser and joiner are contradictory.
Original shows where you think 30% of people might give it a “10” but you fear 70% might give it a “3” often don’t get made. Those are the shows and films that break new ground. Call these Rare shows. They can be scary because they're new and different.
In development, Game of Thrones and Squid Game would have been in this category. Squid kicked around for years as a pilot script in Korea. Those got made but how many great ones didn’t?
Often shows and films that mean the most and change culture — and become the biggest hits — are contrarian role breakers. Thus, rare shows have special importance.
In a pseudonymous defi media system, rare shows could be financed by a group of anonymous wallets (presumably larping as apes on Twitter) that have no social pressures to worry about.
Individual network execs are incented away from perceived risk and toward consensus. Artists and DAOs seeking to make statements and fill market gaps don’t have similar concerns. To reduce systematic bias in favor of $, two tokens could be created. Token (a) is the EVM compatible currency used to fund media. Token (b) = an NFT distributed to film and TV fans allowing them to guide investors by publicly endorsing projects. Essentially this NFT is like a visible character trait that you earn (ala bilibili) and should be portable across metaverse.
The network process would be a sort of NASDAQ of projects seeking funding with various DAOs submitting projects.
Web2: watch shows. Web3: watch shows you own.
Eventually the “head of programming” will just be a smart contract supported by some machine learning algorithms.
The new “martinis at the Grill” will be a wallet ping silently recorded on some validator node running ubuntu 18 after a light speed drift over the trans-pacific cable, flipping some bits before packaging them into the next block
Revenues divided by smart contract and sent to DAOs, then wallets in Dubai, Singapore, Dublin, Memphis …
Popular shows still get financed. But ratio of rare/great shows to good shows ⬆️
Premiere parties in the metaverse.