EPISODE 822: WELCOME TO YOUR TIMELINE
(It's More Sweat and Pain Than Flavor.)
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hi and welcome back to Pop Culture Spirit Wow, the newsletter where a guy who loves pop culture and spirituality looks for wonder in the art and the mess.
Special greetings to those who saw my post this week about me taking a leave from the Jesuits and leaving America Magazine and thought, Hey, I want to keep up with that guy. Thanks for coming! I hope you like what you read.
Often in this newsletter I write about lots of different kinds of things. But this week there’s so much going on around one topic it’s kind of taken over. So let’s ride!
Or in the words of Spock on a recent Strange New Worlds: “I would like for the ship to go now.”
THE WOWND UP
The big news this week: We’re all going to have so much more time for family dinners, because fall network TV is going away.
On Friday morning at midnight the Screen Actors Guild officially went on strike, joining the Writers Guild, which has now been on strike for almost 80 days.
One might think that having the people who write your shows and films and the people who perform in them all refusing to work would lead to a pretty speedy resolution of the issues. But the words of Disney’s chief Bob Iger upon the announcement of the SAG strike do not sound hopeful. “There’s a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic, and they are adding to a set of challenges that this business is already facing, that is quite frankly, very disruptive.”
You know what else is disruptive? Being a TV title designer and seeing Disney give the work for the title sequence of its big new show Secret Invasion to “AI” instead.
I don’t know if you saw SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher’s comments at the announcement of the SAG-AFTRA strike, but wow did she have things to say about the state of labor in our country today, and the absurd contradiction between executives in Hollywood and elsewhere who “plead poverty that they’re losing money left and right while giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs.”
So yeah, get ready for more reruns, reality TV and maybe the occasional awkward Hugh Grant/Nicole Kidman silences.
(On the upside, no doubt a number of the networks with streamers will show content from their streamers. Disney has already announced showing the first season of Ms. Marvel, which is absolutely fantastic.)
Mission Impossible 7, In Which Ethan Is In Trouble with Everyone Again (for the Same Reasons) also debuted this weekend, and to lower box office numbers than Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which wasn’t great to begin with.
(And that’s sad, because Dial of Destiny is a great movie. If you’ve heard otherwise, don’t believe it. It’s a little long, but it’s wonderful.)
Some of this box office doldrumming is the continued post-pandemic slowdown. But I tend to think these strikes and the ways that executives at various companies have been treating their people and their fans are also effecting poisoning their own wells.
What are the stories we read about studios and networks today? They’re pulling beloved programs from their streaming services without warning, firing divisions or decimating valued brands even though those brands and companies are super successful. It’s like when Big Whatever invests in a small town somewhere and then pollutes the hell out of everything, except they’re doing it in their own backyards.
So yeah, the vibe when it comes to Hollywood these days is very much yikes and no thank you, with a soupçon of Huh?
THE MOUSE WHO MADE A HOME IN ME
There’s another big Wow of a story in Iger’s comments last week. He said ABC “may not be core” to Disney going forward.
I KNOW. My first response was a very firm:
Disney has has owned ABC for almost 28 years. More than that, it’s been connected to ABC for almost 70 years. Walt Disney agreed to make shows for ABC in 1955 in exchange for ABC investing in Disneyland. And while eventually that particular arrangement ended, the two have ended up back in each other’s lives so often Nicholas Sparks might as well have written a novel about them.
(I cannot tell you how long I tried to come up with a great Nicholas Sparks novel title about Disney and ABC. I regret nothing.)
Now maybe Iger thinks with Disney+ around Disney doesn’t need a traditional TV network. There are certainly plenty of reasons not to love network TV. Their seasons are usually 22 episodes long (which today seems like just so much), few of their new shows succeed and cord cutting is pretty much de riguer at this point.
So it’s maybe not a great investment any more. Maybe the time of the traditional networks is just about over.
But can anyone really explain the streaming services business model? I think most people right now would say Disney seems like it’s got one of the most successful streaming services, over 150 million subscribers. But Disney+ lost 2.4 million subscribers in the first three months of 2023. I was just an English major, but I’m pretty sure that’s not a good thing.
Network TV: Is it the Chrysler Town & Country-type station wagon that my parents used to drive us around in, which did the job but has no business being on the roads today? Or is it just an old Toyota Camry which actually might be able to run a little bit longer if it’s properly serviced?
Feels more like the first, honestly, but streaming isn’t exactly turning out to be the Rav4 we were promised, either.
(And yes I absolutely did have to look up types of cars to write that last paragraph.)
IF SAN DIEGO COMIC CON FALLS DURING A STRIKE DOES IT STILL MAKE A SOUND
I’m headed out to San Diego Comic Con on Wednesday, and it’s going to be fascinating. As a result of the strikes, Hollywood has pretty much pulled out of the event, which seems like it will be a huge blow. Every year, the major panels (which take place in a room so large I am pretty sure it is actually Limbo) are the panels of stars from all the big movies and TV shows. And this year it sounds like that room, which can hold 6500 people, is going to be empty (just like the real Limbo).
It’s so bad, a number of the big pop culture news agencies are only covering the first two days. Personally I think that’s ridiculous. I don’t know what one hundred thousand people are going to do when they can’t get their Marvel Studios fix, but man do I want to find out.
At its origins, Comic-Con was very much a fan event where people who loved scifi, cinema and comics hung out. For the last 15 or 20 years—since Iron Man was first announced there, for sure—it’s becomes this other thing, half celebration and half intense (and often exhausting) Hollywood marketing strategy.
Don’t get wrong, it’s still wonderful; I find year in, year out it is one of the most positive experiences I have. People there are great. But it can also be nuts. The Marvel stage is always mobbed and there’s a hawker at the front whose job is basically to get people so crazed they’ll go nuts for a Hawkeye pin or Ms. Marvel T-shirts. It can get this close to people shoving each other, which is pretty much the opposite of Comic-Con.
So I don’t know, maybe with Hollywood gone the event will somehow be lighter, sillier or even more friendly. Or gee, maybe it can be more about the creators and stories behind all the Big Hollywood Blockbusters, the ones who did all the work of exploring those strange and interesting lands that we love, rather than the directors who swoop in and take all the credit.
I’ll let you know…
… but not next Sunday, because I will be reporting full time for The Beat and Popverse. So look for me there if you’re interested. I’m fingers crossed, clicking my heels together hoping I get to report on something like this, which was my favorite experience from New York’s Comic Con.
HOWEVER, later this week I am planning to post a couple other things: a piece on Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise as two different images of humanity and America (hint: one of them has some real fascist undertones); and something from my Priest-On-Leave life about cursing and Ottomans, which I have tentatively titled: “How Saying the Word F*** Changed My Life as a Priest, and Maybe Led to Me Living in a One Room Studio Writing a Newsletter.” (It should be fun.)
I mentioned last week that I was going to think about whether or not to add a pay-to-subscribe model to this newsletter, both because I am now out on my own trying to make a living and because weirdly Substack seems to be prompting people to pay for this entirely-free newsletter. (Btw, I have just figured out what exactly Substack has been doing, and I don’t think it will happen any more.)
Here’s what I decided: For those of you who have subscribed—including those who did this week—thank you. It was totally unnecessary, but I appreciate it. I hope you continue to like what you read.
Having said that, I am not going to add a regular subscription option. This newsletter has always been me trying to share things I’ve been thinking about or fun stuff that I found online. Like THIS:
(Is there a whole anti-Garfield Christian community thing? You know it has something do with sex, right? I don’t know how, but I have got to find out.)
Or THIS:
I can’t stop thinking about Jabba the Hutt singing “Chiquita.”
Or THIS, found by Friend of the Wow and Hero of the People Rick Joyce.
Making people pay for stuff like this, I don’t know, it just seems wrong to me.
Having said that, I have friends who work at a piano bar in New York City called Marie’s Crisis. Like many in New York, they live on tips. The piano player has this huge fishbowl that just sits on the piano, where people can drop money.
I thought I’d try something similar. Every issue of the newsletter, I’m going to post my Venmo and Paypal information with the fishbowl icon below. If you like what you read, feel free to drop me a couple shekels (or all the shekels for that matter; I love a shekel). Or you can choose not to, and that’s totally fine, too.
Here’s my Venmo information:
If you’re not familiar with this tech, basically if you point your camera at that graphic, and then click when your camera highlights it, it’ll send you to Venmo, where you can tell them you want to drop me some cash. (This does require you to have a Venmo account, which is totally free and easy to set up.)
If you prefer Paypal, my account is paypal.me/jimmcdsj. If you go to that address, you’ll see an option to send me money.
If you are inspired to send a tip, I do thank you. And if you don’t, I still thank you! This is a wonderful community, and I’m glad to be a part of it.
MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
Recently I logged onto Twitter and found this greeting me. It was, of course, yet another sign of just how broken Twitter is.
But I have to say, I also loved it. I’m not exactly on a new timeline right now, but it is feeling pretty different, and kind of thrilling in exactly that “Oh my God, I just joined a social media platform way.” Like, in this moment when things are new, What will I do? How do I want to be?
And for me, one answer is, Open. I want to be open to the world. I want to try not to hide away or have my guard up (which is hard for me). I want to put myself out there in as vulnerable a way as I can and try to accept what the world wants to give me.
Sometimes it’ll be painful stuff, no doubt. But I want to try and see it all as gift. And adventure!
And if that’s something that resonates, consider this a little message in a bottle for you.
See you soon…
Thanks for another great newsletter! I’m looking forward to reading your dispatches from San Diego.