On the subject of money and ownership: Earlier this year, following the cancellation of several Black TV shows, you wrote“Studios and streamers no longer care about loyalty or eternal legacy.” Why is Hollywood, in 2024, still struggling to align its legacy with its business?
Well, here’s the thing, the legacy business, they feel like they have that work behind them.
But isn’t that what Hollywood is built for?
Yes, but to create new legacy and new entry, to them, that’s less important than extracting every possible dollar from existing IP. It is more “expensive,” quote-unquote, to create something than it is to rest on existing laurels. The beginning of the end of it, for me, was when Warner Brothers and UPN merged with The CW. Now, 20 years later, The CW is a shell of itself. With affiliates, you are no longer competing with someone to create the best content. With the merger of Warner Brothers and Discovery, they own, what, one-fourth of TV? The era of competitive television—over.
Which has a direct impact on the creative side.
The legacy-driven model is now happening in the vanity. So many stars use their own distribution or first appearance deals to get things done. And this is what most people are allowed to create. So what does Hollywood mean when the only people given freedom are those who have done the taxing work—if any—of becoming stars? Hollywood is not in the guarantee business. Everything must be proven before it is even created.
And if that’s the case, a lot of people are left out.
The battle for nostalgia as currency comes at a moment when some of the highest-rated are non-white. That’s not an accident. It’s as if television, media, and filmmaking are manifesting destiny in perverse ways. And there is nothing sadder.
Maybe we need better frameworks.
People lifted industries to chase Netflix. And no one caught it. Everything fell in this chase. What’s happening now, people are just duplicating the best and the most watched. There is no difference in how things are delivered.
You once described “post-2020 Black media as akin to a modern blaxploitation boom.” It got me thinking about platforms like Tubi and AllBlk, which are sometimes derided as a kind of streaming ghetto, but those streamers have also given opportunities to young creators.
Blaxploitation, as I say, paves the way for Spike Lee, it paves the way for the ’80s independent Black movement which, of course, shapes everything we know about modern Black film and modern Black media. In every valley, there is a peak. This is the nature of life. So what do I think lies ahead? We must think about independent models that existed before our present time. There are many ways to create media. With pilot season almost dead, as the studios have announced, what are some ways Black creators can come together to do what they want?
I mean, I don’t know if I have the answers, but I have curiosity. And often curiosity and concern—and leading them—can change how we understand history and the future.
