Episode 168: The Entertainment Media Machine
In Episode 168, “The Entertainment Media Machine,” Flourish and Elizabeth use a recent Business Insider article about Netflix’s editorial strategy—and some subsequent worries in fan spaces—to talk about the shifting dynamics between the entertainment industry, the media, audiences, and fans. Netflix’s Tudum may not affect fans at all in the short term, but what will the entertainment media landscape look like in a few years? They also read a listener letter in response to the “Writing Trans Characters” episode, on exploring gender via femslash A/B/O.
Show notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:01:58] If you haven’t listened yet, our letter-writer is responding to episode 166, “Writing Trans Characters.”
[00:06:10] Gender and queer theorist Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity.
[00:12:10] Elizabeth has written quite a bit of shapeshifter fic….
[00:14:26] Our interstitial music throughout is from “Arcade montage” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:15:56] REMINDER: BRONTOSAURUS BACK IN!!!
(OK so apparently they’ve “officially” decided Littlefoot is an apatosaurus, but they have also said that he’s a brontosaurus, so we are going to Live Our Truth.)
[00:17:48] The article around which this whole episode is framed: “Netflix is hiring Condé Nast and Time Inc. journalists, building a ‘fandom engine’ to market its shows” by Elaine Low and Steven Perlberg. Note that Business Insider has officially rebranded to Insider, but still seems to be referred to by both titles.
[00:19:50] Though the practice is certainly older, the term “astroturf” was coined in 1985 by Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, who said of a flood of fishy-seeming letters to his office, “a fellow from Texas can tell the difference between grass roots and AstroTurf…”
[00:21:38] Netflix’s Tudum, named after their September 2021 “global fan event” of the same name, was launched in beta this past December.
[00:22:12] Disney’s D23 Expo began in 2009, and Disney has been steadily shifting their live, fan-facing programming around big franchises (most notably, Star Wars) there from SDCC. (And now, other studios are following suit.)
[00:22:50] Thin and expensive? Check out Queue for yourself.
[00:24:45] “Oil is good”: as Insider points out immediately following Carter’s quote, Chevron is in fact currently hiring journalists for their “newsroom” (through shadily roundabout methods, as the Los Angeles Times reports.)
[00:25:18] Netflix’s ~voicey~ sub-brands (on Twitter and beyond) include “Strong Black Lead,” “Golden,” and “Geeked.”
[00:26:22]
[00:29:42] A stroll through the homepage of StarTrek.com gives a good sense of the tone and scope of its content.
[00:32:30] This article has a long rundown of the backlash to The Magicians season four finale, including the removal of critical content about the episode on (the now-shuttered) “Syfy Fangrrls” blog.
[00:36:10] Axios has a basic summary of Future; this article from Protocol goes into a bit more depth.
[00:43:55] One of many good threads on the way Adam McKay responded to critiques of Don’t Look Up.
[00:47:30] If Flourish was writing “The Top Five Outfits Scully Ever Wore,” it would start with...
[00:49:48] Fact check for Flourish: this eminently googleable show is from Nat Geo, not Discovery.
[00:52:41]
[00:56:30] One of the all-time greats. “WHAT ARE YOU?!?!?!”
[00:57:24] Apparently the puppy is on Cottonelle, not Charmin; Elizabeth regrets the error.
[00:58:37] If you hadn’t heard about this yet, you probably do not care, but just in case: Michael Schulman’s profile of Succession star Jeremy Strong in the December 13, 2021, issue of The New Yorker.
[01:03:14] We put out episode 113, “Waffle House Is a Reylo,” in November 2019.
[01:07:24]
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #168, “The Entertainment Media Machine.”
FK: Brought to you by…
ELM: [imitating the Netflix sound] Da-dun!
FK: [laughs] Tudum, which I guess is the dumbest name ever, I have to say.
ELM: [singing the Law & Order theme music] Da-dun da da dadun dun!
FK: Wow, yes. [laughs]
ELM: Just wanted to sing one I like more. [laughs]
FK: There we are, that’s a better da-dum thing.
ELM: Do you want me to just imitate a brand? I could do the HBO sound. [makes a static sound]
FK: Wow! This is, I, it’s, we’re, we’re, [ELM laughs] unplumbed depths here, Elizabeth. No, there was a Business Insider article, of all things, about Tudum—
ELM: What do you mean “of all things,” that’s a publication!
FK: I don’t read it most of the time though! Anyway, it was about Tudum.
ELM: Here’s why you don’t read it, we paid $1 to read this article because there’s a paywall, we don’t read this publication—
FK: [overlapping] That is, that is right, that’s why. That’s true.
ELM: [overlapping] …because of a pretty, a pretty hearty paywall, but we paid $1 because people were tweeting about this and we suspected that they were not accurately representing the contents of this article, just based on the headline and like, quote in the tweet.
FK: Right, which is about Tudum, which is Netflix’s new sort of [ELM snorts] news website thing. I know, we’re gonna have to stop laughing at it every time we say the name.
ELM: Every…[laughs] I’ll get there, I’ll get there.
FK: [overlapping] We’re gonna get into that, and obviously, you know, from the title you can tell that we have some critiques and comments and thoughts, but first I think we have a letter to talk about.
ELM: Yeah. So, we got some correspondence on our last episode about pseuds, and we’re going to save that for next time. This is from our prior episode, “Writing Trans Characters.”
FK: All right, shall I read it?
ELM: Sure!
FK: All right, this is from an anonymous person.
“Hi Elizabeth and Flourish!
“I realize this is solidly after the ‘Writing Trans Characters’ episode, but I wanted to write in because the episode finally got me to try to articulate some things I’ve been thinking about for a long time.
“I’m transmasculine, which for me means I was assigned female at birth, and I’m doing various medical interventions to masculinize my body, but don’t think of myself as a binary trans man. I also write a fair amount of fanfic (technically unrelated). However, I don’t usually write many trans (umbrella) characters—I think I can count on two fingers the number of times I’ve posted complete fics about trans characters, with all the meanings and language that entails, and I’ve written over a hundred fics posted on AO3, and lots more unposted (RIP to my work in progress pile).
“But I do spend a lot of time headcanoning various characters as trans in more private spaces with fandom friends (e.g. Discord). And I DO write stories that involve gender fluidity, gender nonconformity, and genderbending, and that for me were really important on my journey as a trans person.
“And those fics are A/B/O.
“A/B/O being, of course, somewhat fraught, especially for trans people, I’ve struggled for a long time to articulate why the genre is so important to me. So, before I go further—the language that I’m going to be using is carefully chosen and I’ve thought a lot about it, but this is a hard topic to talk about, and the language can be a bit difficult to find. So if I manage to say something hurtful, I do apologize—this is just my personal journey, and I’m trying to describe how I’ve experienced it the best I can. I don’t expect it will be the same for other trans people.
“I think there’s a lot of potential in A/B/O in general for conscious genderbending and disruption of embodied gender norms. It’s what drew me to the genre. There is something inherently defiant of a binary system in a tripartite (trinary? ternary? idk) taxonomy, regardless of how the ‘beta’ category is used in the wild. If you're playing with physiology at all, categories of cis-ness break down almost immediately, unless you're writing exclusively M/F. There are elements of worldbuilding and language construction that appeal to me immensely as a spec fic/sci-fi/fantasy nerd and as a gender studies nerd. Non-normative physiologies and pheromones and ‘instincts’ and the interplay of constructed categories with physiology—the Gender of it all! It’s delicious. It’s so ripe for exploration, if one is willing to spend the time and use the tools carefully.
“Anyway.
“I’m familiar with two main strands of trans (umbrella) experience in people who read or write A/B/O: The M/M-to-nonbinary (or M/M-to-mlm-transmasc) experience, and the discourse around F/F A/B/O involving girldick. Neither of those is very proximate to my personal experience, but I've learned a lot from listening to the discussions around those experiences.
“The entire time I’ve been writing, I’ve gravitated towards F/F, and the same has been true for A/B/O. In fact, I find I’m not drawn to M/M or F/M at all when it comes to A/B/O. And that’s as true now, two and a half years into Various Medical Interventions, as it was before I started any medical stuff.
“Part of it, I’m sure, was living as a lesbian for my entire adult life; I was immersed in certain parts of the online culture around wlw and queer women, even while my relationship with the category ‘woman’ was and remains a fraught one. Particularly as an adult, having lived in the lesbian corners of the queer community, and having lived as a butch lesbian, which comes with its own garden of fraught masculinities and fraught relationship with masculinity and maleness.
“The other part of it is that, for me, F/F A/B/O was (and still is) a way of negotiating having a body that was assigned female and yet expresses itself in ways (or wants to embody things) that could be considered masculine or male. It may be a little on-the-nose, but for me, F/F A/B/O with female alphas in conversation with ‘alphalinity’ parallels butch masculinity (or if we’re going with Jack Halberstam’s ‘female masculinity’) and its potentially disruptive relation to hegemonic or normative masculinity.
“It’s gender on the ‘wrong’ body, and at times the mismatch allows one to slip out of (or dial up to eleven, a la drag) well-worn ruts (heh heh) of gendered expectations—”
ELM: [laughs] That…that “ha” is in the letter, just to clarify.
FK: [overlapping] It does say “ha” and not “heh heh” the way that I rendered it. [ELM laughs] So let’s be very clear. OK, back into it.
ELM: “Ha!”
FK: “—of gendered expectations, and at other times, it’s just affirming to me as a transmasculine person.
“This is a fraught thing to say, obviously. The general emphasis in online spaces is on affirming transmascs’ masculinity & manhood (a good thing), sometimes at the cost of being unable to admit to anything less than a completely adversarial or negative relationship with one’s assigned gender at birth (not necessarily a good thing, depending on the person). It also isn’t, shall we say, great to suggest that you’re equating transmasculine experience with womanhood or female embodiment, and it seems like inviting misgendering to admit to having any identification at all with female characters as a transmasculine person.
“But for better or worse, I only have the one meatsuit, and I have to navigate having it somehow. I *did* have to spend time deciding how to navigate my relationship with masculinity, how I was going to express it, and what I wanted it to look like on me. And for a number of years, I *did* live as a woman, and as a result, I have a certain awareness of the world and of masculinity, that I needed to grapple with as it became clear that medical transition was something I wanted.
“I wish I could delve more deeply into why F/F A/B/O works so well as a tool to explore gender identity for me, but ultimately, I don't really know why I find it affirming. I just do.
“I find I’m often drawn to more metaphorical approaches to gender identity, like A/B/O, aliens, shapeshifters, cyborgs, or AI, as well as constructing entire alternate systems of gender or second worlds. As much as I’d like to be the kind of writer who writes about these things more head-on, you generally won’t see the ‘trans’ or ‘nonbinary’ tag on my works. But those stories are still deeply informed by my experience as a trans person, and I do think there is room for a kind of transness in A/B/O.
“Thank you so much for making this episode and putting together so many different perspectives on this topic! I’ve listened to the episode several times and enjoyed it each trip through.
“Best, anonymous.”
ELM: Oh man, anonymous. You know, so, I remember at the end of that episode I was like, “it’s really interesting that no one mentioned A/B/O.”
FK: Yeah!
ELM: And now not only did we get a mention, we got like a, this is so good, so good!
FK: It is wonderful.
ELM: So interesting. You know, I feel like we could spend half this episode [FK laughs] breaking some of it down, and I’m not sure that that would actually, like, I don’t know. I don’t know if we could do that discussion justice.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know what I mean?
FK: I don’t think so either. I mean, I think there’s so much in this letter that our commentary would be gilding the lily! [laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I mean obviously I have a lot of thoughts about this for a variety of reasons, but I mean I think that there’s lots of just really good points in there, and I think it’s really notable and it’s true that people identify with fictional characters in different ways, and across gender and gender expression, and find different pieces, you know, of different characters. And I really sympathize with that fear of the idea that if you identify at all with a gender that you [laughs] you know, may get sucked in, or viewed a certain way by people, I think that’s all really, really real.
ELM: Yeah. I also think this, you know, this paragraph towards the end talking about how they’re drawn to these metaphorical representations and potentially even bringing it into the more theoretical, vibe-wise, right, and then they wouldn’t tag their fics with the tags that Destination Toast came on to talk about. And I was like, slightly embarrassed for myself editing that episode, about the 50,000 times I said [in a fake intellectual tone] “this really shows the limit of what tagging can show us about…”
FK: [laughs] And you were right every time you said it.
ELM: Every— [laughs] By the end it was like, oh God, I get it, I, me, stop talking now about this thing. But once again I will say, not just does it show the limit, but it kind of has me wondering how many people, like this letter-writer, are writing things that are more metaphorical, more theoretical, and would never use a tag like that. You can find the real messiness, and I wonder…
I mean I don’t know, I haven’t read tons and tons of fics where people actually do use trans character tags and nonbinary character tags, but I wonder how much of that is more straightforward or potentially, it’s weird to say normative, but I do think that there are…beliefs within communities online presenting as normative—
FK: Yeah!
ELM: —in these spaces and you always get people being like, “Hey! When you log off, [laughs] and you like, go to a parade or whatever, you’re gonna see that actually there’s a huge expression in the one way you’re saying that it is to be, is actually not correct.”
FK: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah!
ELM: Right? Like, it’s not the only way, right?
FK: Yeah, absolutely, and there’s also, there’s multiple kinds of normative, and it can be hard to challenge any of them, right? I’m just thinking about the way that you…I’m thinking it’s really complicated when you start trying to represent an experience and label that as that experience. [laughs] Because, you know…
ELM: With realism, right?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Whereas say, you know, where it’s like…the language in here that’s so interesting about like, “it’s gender on the ‘wrong’ body,’” you know? And I could see being less willing to tag, to write a very realism-y story with plain old humans and expressing those things.
FK: Yeah, yeah!
ELM: And understanding some online conversations about this kind of stuff. Whereas if it’s a metaphor, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Then I think that there’s more space. And I say this looking at this list of characters, “A/B/O, aliens, shapeshifters, cyborgs, AI,” I have written quite a bit of shapeshifter fic, I know that you have an interest in this as well, and there’s way more space. There’s so many different ways I feel like you can think about that person’s body.
FK: Absolutely. And—
ELM: And the way they feel about their body.
FK: Exactly. And there’s room for, I mean there’s also room for fantasy to some extent. You know? I mean like, in my own reading of A/B/O, the idea of a female alpha is, I don’t know if that’s like a straight-up fantasy situation, but it’s something that sort of touches on fantasy issues, and I think for a lot of nonbinary people that might chime, like, if you have a mixed relationship to your own body, maybe you’re trying on different ideas. You know?
ELM: Mmm hmmm.
FK: In these ways. And I think that shapeshifting and all these things give you the opportunity to sort of try on these, I mean even stories with humans in magic situations or something like that, they give you an opportunity to sort of try ideas out, in a way that realism, that’s tied to how…you know? [laughs] How, like, our bodies actually work.
ELM: Right, right, right.
FK: The limitations of bottom surgery are well known. But! [laughs]
ELM: Right.
FK: So, you know.
ELM: And also like, you can make up, I mean I feel this way about all, I mean, like, all my fanfiction is about mutants, you can just make up the way that society would feel about individual things, you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Like, you can make up that context, and whether you want to create friction with the characters or not about the way they feel versus the way the society feels or whatever. It just, it unfetters you a little bit…
FK: [overlapping] Absolutely.
ELM: …from the constraints, I think, that realism does, so.
FK: All right. Well, thank you very much.
ELM: [overlapping] Cool, we love this letter.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah.
ELM: Yeah, thank you very much.
FK: [overlapping] Anonymous person awesome.
ELM: All right.
FK: All right, should we take a quick break before we get onto the topic?
ELM: [imitating Netflix’s signature sound] Tudum! [FK laughs] Tu-dummm! I’m trying to get it right, is it like, two—
FK: [overlapping, doing the sound but going up in pitch] Tu-DUM! I feel like it’s more like Tu-DUM!
ELM: No, I think it’s the same pitch. Well, we really should have studied, we should have been watching a little more Netflix content to get that just right.
FK: Yeah, I, I don’t currently have a Netflix subscription. [ELM laughs] All right, let’s take our break.
ELM: [laughing] Lucky you. OK, bye.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back!
ELM: We are back. [FK laughs] Yes. Luckily I can delay talking about Netflix for a few more minutes.
FK: Mmhmm.
ELM: So we can quickly talk about the business things.
FK: That’s true! That’s true. What do we want to talk about, Elizabeth Minkel? What’s the biz?
ELM: [laughs] Oh my God. All right. So, ah, we, as always, have to plug our Patreon: patreon.com/fansplaining. The way we pay all our hosting costs, the way we pay our transcriptionists, who are fantastic, I don’t know if everyone caught the show notes for the last episode but our transcriptionist Maria informed us that the brontosaurus is still a thing!
FK: Whoooooo!
ELM: Back in, baby!
FK: Woohoooo!
ELM: Yeahhh. Pretty excited. That’s right! So we gotta, we have to pay Maria for her very important work fact checking us about the Brontosaurus.
FK: [overlapping] Brontosaurus research!
[both laugh]
ELM: So if you have even as little as $1 a month or the equivalent of that in your own local currency, because Patreon now lets you pledge in a variety of currencies, then you get access to all sorts of rewards, including getting the episode on Tuesdays instead of Wednesdays, all our special episodes, we keep saying we’re gonna put out a new one, I’m just gonna need Flourish to commit… [FK laughs] Flourish, is now the moment for you to commit?
FK: I commit! [laughs]
ELM: [laughs] I like how you just were gonna let that hang there.
FK: [laughs] I was, I was, I was gonna wait until you forced me.
ELM: [still laughing] All right, I forced Flourish to commit. You can also get, at $5 a month, a really cute enamel pin in the mail in addition to your name in the credits. $10 a month gets you a really cute tiny zine in addition to everything at a lower tier. So, patreon.com/fansplaining.
FK: Right. But, if you don’t want to or don’t have the money to or whatever you don’t, that’s not the way you’re gonna support us, you can support us in other ways! You can support us by telling people about the podcast, always wonderful, sharing what we post on social media, or you can write in, like our wonderful anonymous person did! Or call us and share your thoughts, your ideas, we value that so much. The way to do that is to call 1-401-526-FANS and leave us a voicemail, or you can write to fansplaining@gmail.com, you can leave an ask in our Tumblr ask box, you can use the form on our website, fansplaining.com, or you can contact us on other social media, we’re Fansplaining everywhere so we’re easy to find.
ELM: All right, business concluded!
FK: All right, it’s time to get on to…Tudum.
ELM: A different…sorry business. [FL laughs] A sorry business.
FK: OK, so tell me about the contents of this article. I read it, and you read it, but not everybody read it. [laughs]
ELM: We did, we paid $1 for it to get a trial to Business Insider, thank you very much Business Insider. Let me take a step back and let me tell you how I encountered this article.
FK: OK.
ELM: It was being shared on social media, but in particular there was one tweet that quote-tweeted the Insider, the one from the official account, saying—I think that the language that Insider had pulled out was something about how Netflix was going to build a “fandom engine.”
FK: Yeah. Yeah.
ELM: Right, so they had this publication…so the tweet was essentially, the way they were sharing, promoting this article was saying that, like, Netflix had been hiring journalists from like, Time Inc. and Condé Nast and stuff to write for their publications. And they were like, “They’re happy!” Which was I think a weird way to say… [laughs] Like OK, great.
FK: [overlapping] The journalists are happy.
ELM: [overlapping] Good for them? Yeah, the journalists who are now, I would not call their current jobs journalism, the writers for these publications are happy.
FK: Right.
ELM: And then it said something about how Netflix was going to use this content to build “fandom engines.” Which was like, a very strange…term, I thought, in this context.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah.
ELM: So this tweet that got very widely shared and I saw other commentary on Tumblr along the same lines, basically said that people were going to be “astroturfing” fandom via this. So, I know that you were really drawn to this term, [laughs] when we were trying to figure out how to title this episode you wanted to zero in on the astroturfing term. Do you have, like, a solid definition of that if people don’t know that phrase?
FK: Yeah, so astroturfing is what happens when some PR wonk, usually, you know, or whatever, goes “I want to control the conversation about this topic, so I’m going to get a bunch of people to write fake comments or talk with other people about how great this thing is, I’m gonna pay them, and we’re not gonna—”
ELM: [overlapping] Like a plant, right?
FK: Yeah, they’re like a plant, “I’m gonna pay them and they’re gonna not tell anybody that they got paid.” So obviously you see astroturfing all the time in like, I don’t know, reviews of products you’re gonna buy, right? [laughs] Like…
ELM: [overlapping] Sure. Right. So OK, astroturf meaning like, that’s fake grass, right, so it’s like, they’re gonna be the fake grass—
FK: [overlapping] It’s not grassroots, it’s fake. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah. [laughs] Ohhhh, ha ha, I got it!
FK: [overlapping] That’s where it comes from!
ELM: [overlapping, laughing] Really? I didn’t know, that’s funny.
FK: Yeah, it’s like, word-of-mouth is grassroots but this is astroturf.
ELM: That’s very funny. OK. Gotcha. All right. So…
FK: So usually though, this is like, applied to little things. Like little comments and things like that, responses, reviews, things like that.
ELM: Yeah. But the implication is like, people going in amongst the real fans, the real audience, whatever, and pretending, you know? They’re doing some sort of creepy FBI sting with their… [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] Yeah. Yep. Yeah yeah yeah. I mean people have also referred to like, influencer marketing as astroturfing sometimes, right? Like here’s a person who really loves all of this sci-fi stuff, and we’re going to just send them gifts!
ELM: Right, right, right.
FK: Right? And that’s obviously, not everybody thinks of it that way, and I think that it’s gotten more acceptable over time for them to do that, but I’ve seen that referred to as astroturfing, too, under some contexts.
ELM: Sure. So, the implication in the commentary here, not just this tweet, I don’t want to pin it all on that, but as I said I saw this on a number of threads on different social media platforms, was I think extrapolating just from the little excerpt and the tweet, and not from the actual article, about how…the suggestion was that Netflix was going to be like, going into fandoms and like…and astroturfing, right?
FK: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
ELM: When we paid that dollar and read that article, [FK laughs] I’m gonna tell you that my biggest critique of pulling that bit out for the promotion of the article is, that was the part of the article that made the least sense, [FK laughs] and here’s my TL;DR: Netflix has a few publications, right, it’s got Tudum, which they launched after they had their like, Tudum Con, which maybe you missed, but… [FK laughs] They did like a virtual con, where they…which you know, is not, they’re not breaking hugely new ground, obviously Star Wars—
FK: There’s D23, like…
ELM: There’s D23, right, you know, and this is increasingly like, Warner Brothers trying to break off into their own thing and all this, and we’ve talked about this in the context of like, what does this mean for something like Comic-Con, if each individual studio or platform or whatever wants to control the entire thing, and doesn’t want to have to jockey with other, you know, for positioning, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And just wants to own all those fans in one space. And so Tudum is…kinda newsy, we’ll include a link in the show notes so you can check out the site for yourself. It’s definitely content, it definitely is meant to kind of look sorta like a news website, I would say, more than some other sites for platforms or for franchises.
FK: Yeah. Sure.
ELM: And then there’s a glossy magazine called Queue, which actually launched a few years ago, I wasn’t familiar with it until now…which, this is what most of the article is about, and most of this article in Insider is Graydon Carter, longtime editor of Vanity Fair until the last few years, who’s, um… [laughs] I was trying to summarize Graydon Carter and I’m not sure I can, so maybe if you’re not familiar with him, he’s, he’s going to say what he’s going to say, right? [FK laughs]
And so, they asked his opinion about Queue, this magazine that has like, behind the scenes, little features about various movies and shows on Netflix, and not just things on Netflix but also like, you know, there’s, if you go over there right now it’s all a bunch of Oscar stuff, right, The Power of the Dog and things like that…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Oh no, that’s a Netflix thing.
FK: They are Netflix things, it’s just, but it doesn’t feel like Netflix things because they’re centering the creators, right, oh here’s an interview with Maggie Gyllenhaal, you know, and the Oscar-ness of it.
ELM: [overlapping] Right, and they’re centering the…right, the very high end A-list stuff, not like here’s an overview of our…
FK: It feels like, if you click on, it feels like you could be on, I don’t know, any glossy web magazine. It feels like I could be linked to one of these articles and just assume that it was…
ELM: Right, they said it was inspired by Empire and Premiere. Premiere is not around anymore, but like, these kind of places where you get a feature that’s a bit more about the production, where you would interview a famous director or something like that, right?
FK: Yeah, I mean I guess I just, you know, I would click on it and I would just think, “Oh, it’s a, it’s a fancy web thing that I just hadn’t happened to see that one before.” You know?
ELM: Right. So Queue is in fact a glossy print magazine first and foremost, apparently, so that’s I think why they got ol’ Graydon to weigh in. [laughs] I think the quotes will give you a sense of Graydon Carter. He said, for this article, “It’s not a magazine, it’s propaganda in magazine form. The oil companies used to do this sort of thing in the 70’s and 80’s. ‘Oil is good.’”
FK: Amazing.
ELM: And then he said, this is the part where I lose my mind, I worked for Condé Nast for quite some time, he said “I looked through the magazine and I thought it was reasonably well done, but it felt thin and expensive.” [both laugh] So, so anyway, that’s Graydon Carter being mean and I love it. So, yeah, it is propaganda, oil is good, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: The article goes on to kind of compare this to StarWars.com and other things like that, right, and then it tries to contextualize Tudum and Queue alongside Netflix’s very vocal social media kind of verticals, right, they have “Strong Black Lead,” and all the, you know, the ones like that. And then the quote that led to the astroturfing discussions—
FK: Right, so this is, this is from a person who’s a cofounder of this digital strategy consultancy, Ana…Milicevic? I’m not sure how to say her last name. So she says, “Netflix is recognizing that there’s a lot of ancillary content that could drive continued consumer interest in their properties and subscription. They can cultivate fandoms around specific shows and build on that direct connection they have with consumers—something media enterprises of previous eras didn't have, and thus needed to rely on third-party trade coverage for promotions, buzz-building, and driving viewers to tune in. It’s a wise strategy. Instead of burning through one-off, title-specific marketing budgets, they’re building a fandom engine.”
Now let me tell you, this sounds so familiar to me. [both laugh] I mean…
ELM: [in a flawless Al Pacino impersonation] Just when you thought you were out! They pull you back in.
FK: Just when I thought I was out. [ELM laughs] But this is where that title comes from, and what she’s saying is not, it’s not like, wrong in any way, except for maybe the “cultivate fandoms” bit.
ELM: Mmm hmm.
FK: But it is true that like, in the past, the way that this would be done would be you might have a few fan magazines or something, but mostly in order to reach the general public, you have to cultivate relationships with journalists, and things like this, to get this information out.
And since there is social media and people, they now see what articles are getting shared and so forth, obviously anybody who works in the entertainment industry is like, “Hey, that article didn’t fit with the narrative we want, why can’t we just write an article that fits with that narrative, and if people care about it they’re gonna share our article instead? Then we control it, we control the narrative.”
ELM: Right.
FK: And that makes sense when people care about whatever you’re talking about, you know? [laughs]
ELM: Sure.
FK: And it makes sense from a business perspective and from a lot of other perspectives. Now, is it gonna work is another set of questions, because there is a big question of who cares and why, about this thing that you just put out.
ELM: Yeah, I think comparing it to Star Wars and to Disney seems a little bananas to me, because yeah, does anyone… Netflix obviously has a few titles that I think have true large genuine fandoms, right? Like Stranger Things is coming back, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: Though I’ll note that they’re doing very specific Stranger Things-specific giant billboards in Times Square right now, you know? They’re still doing that big splashy marketing campaign, and still probably doing a PR blitz trying to get—
FK: Oh, no doubt.
ELM: Place profiles of people in the cast, and you know, trying to get favorable coverage—which I should clarify, is different than critical coverage, right, which is like, TV critics watching it and discussing what they think about episodes. There’s multiple sides of entertainment journalism—there’s entertainment journalism and then there’s entertainment criticism, right?
FK: Right. And I think that ideally people want both those things to happen to their shows [laughs] as long as the criticism is positive, really.
ELM: As long as… Yeah. I mean, that’s the big thing, right? So like, yeah, they’re still engaging in some stuff like that. But I am a little…I think we share a skepticism here that, I don’t know, it’s like there’s an idea of a Netflix fan.
FK: [overlapping] Exactly.
ELM: [overlapping] Just gonna be into like, whatever Netflix puts out, “Oh what’s Netflix’s next thing? Oh, some completely random show that Netflix….I love everything they do! I’m in!” Like, I think we’ve talked about this before, but Netflix in particular, I feel like I do know people who watch a lot of things on Netflix because it’s there, you know?
FK: Yep.
ELM: And they’re like, sure I’ll give it a shot, right? But that to me is very different than, I think, to call that cultivating fandom or to say “fandom engine,” I think that is a bit of an abuse of the word “fandom,” to be honest.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I think that’s a very, a very conflate—feels like it’s conflating “audience” or “customer” or “subscriber” with “fan.”
FK: Yeah, I mean, the conflation of “fan” and “customer” or “audience” is—
ELM: Endemic?
FK: I mean it’s…endemic! [laughs] It’s endemic, yeah. I think…
ELM: [overlapping] Is it a pandemic, or is it endemic? What do you think? [both laugh] We’ve learned to live with it? What do you think?
FK: I think we’ve learned to live with it, although we don’t like it. So what’s interesting about this to me is, it does feel to me like, for instance, StarTrek.com is…I mean, in a lot of ways, it’s doing similar things to this, right? It is a place where they break news about Star Trek. It is a place where all of the content on there is stuff that is approved by the franchise.
However, it is also a place where…I mean I say this as a Star Trek fan and a person who reads things on StarTrek.com all the time, it’s tuned to a particular audience, and it is cultivating fans in a particular way, because it’s engaging with a specific Star Trek-loving audience that exists and has particular quirks and interests and things that like, they’re trying, they feed you because they know that those are the things that their people care about, right?
Whereas when I look at Tudum it feels like it’s a place where it’s like, this could be literally any site. It’s just entertainment news, except only about Netflix.
ELM: “News” is really, you know. OK.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah. [laughs] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ELM: [overlapping] Right? Yeah, one thing I like, one thing I admire about StarTrek.com that I would not say I admire about any other analogous website for any franchise or platform, is it really feels like fans are commissioning.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And, you know, I think that there’s…what a lot of the pieces remind me of are basically like Star Trek meta. Right? You know?
FK: Yeah! Yeah, absolutely.
ELM: And I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the folks who’ve written there, and I know people who’ve written there, also have written meta! And it’s just like—
FK: For sure!
ELM: And you know, it’s not heavily critical, but it’s also not like…some of these pieces…it’s the kind of thing you see in meta, it’s a little bit…
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, some of them are kind of critical.
ELM: Yeah!
FK: Occasionally they do reflect on like, things the franchise has done well or poorly, and sometimes, you know, I mean not like a twisting the knife kind of a way, but I’ve seen them, you know.
ELM: [overlapping] Right, exactly, right. And so like, it’s an interesting strategy, and I think when contrasting it to say, the sites that Syfy has put out over the last like, five, ten years, fall into a much murkier space. Because one thing that’s nice about StarTrek.com is like, it’s StarTrek.com. It’s pieces about Star Trek on StarTrek.com, and you’re not like, hmm, is this independent editorial…? Nope, it’s StarTrek.com, right?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: Whereas Syfy seemed like, some of it seemed like it was meant to have editorial independence, and a lot of it wasn’t about Syfy shows, it was supposed to be like, general science fiction, sci-fi the actual genre news…
FK: [overlapping] And sometimes science interest, right? They had like, some astronomy things and stuff.
ELM: Yeah, right. Right. But I remember like, one famous example was, someone wrote something that was very critical of The Magicians season finale where they killed the protagonist, spoiler, I think that the statute of limitations on that one has passed at this point—
FK: [laughs] It has.
ELM: [laughs] And…they took that down, right?
FK: Yeah. Yup.
ELM: They took down the critical stuff. And so it’s just like, OK, I don’t actually really understand what this is and how it relates, you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: I think that kind of murkiness…maybe it’s just vibes, maybe it’s just me having an instinctive Graydon Carter-esque reaction to Netflix’s editorial content, but to me it doesn’t feel straightforward in the way that Star Trek does. It feels like they’re trying to kind of, masquerade themselves as somewhat more editorially independent, partly because I think they have a lot of journalists-turned-entertainment content writers, right, who are coming at it with a particular set of styles and conventions.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And so it feels like that, but then you think, “Oh, not quite.” You know? And that makes me…sad. [laughs]
FK: Well, and it’s, it is weird, when I look at the Tudum site, you correctly pointed this out to me, that it looks more like a news site. But then on the other hand you scroll down and you look at the stuff they’re writing about, like there’s a little Netflix logo, and you look, like, the top stories right now are “Things Get a Little CarnEvil in ‘The Cuphead Show’ Trailer,” “Your Bloody Guide to the ‘All of Us Are Dead’ Webtoon and TV Show” and “A Complete Timeline of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ Films.” These are the three things that are, like, highlighted right now.
You go down to “Latest News” and it’s like, “New on Netflix: Romantic New Releases to Swoon Over.” “Netflix Book Club: Read ‘Sweet Magnolias’ With the Netflix Book Club.” You know? “News: Your First Look at ‘Russian Doll’ Season 2 is Here and It’s Thursday Again.”
When I look at that I feel like…if I look at the page with all of it together, there’s no way I’m not like, “Wow, this sure is Netflix promoting all the Netflix stuff.” [ELM laughs] The thing that troubles me about it is not like, going onto this website to netflix.com/tudum and thinking anything, it’s more when you look at any individual article.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: ’Cause I think about getting one of these decontextualized in Twitter, with a little, you know, just the little card, and then clicking in, and you click in and it looks like…I mean I might have guessed it wrong, if I wasn’t paying attention to it very hard, I might think it was on any web magazine.
ELM: Right. I guess the counter argument here is, why would you be mad to learn the new details about the second season of Russian Doll from Netflix.com. Right?
FK: Of course! Of course.
ELM: And this is what the article gets into. It’s like, is this stealing ground from places like Variety, and I think that the article misunderstands… Fans are not like, glued to Variety for the latest, you know…?
FK: [laughs] Yeah! And that’s, I think that’s because fans don’t care about…it’s not just that they don’t care about the trade stuff, it’s that they don’t care about 90% of the stuff that’s in Variety because 99.9% of it is about stuff they’re not a fan of.
ELM: Sure. Yeah yeah yeah yeah.
FK: Which is also the case with this Netflix site. [ELM laughs] Even if I really cared about Inventing Anna, there is one article about, I don’t even know what this is. There’s one article about Inventing Anna and the rest of it is about The Cuphead Show. Like, I don’t care!
ELM: I have heard of both of those things, so I guess I’m really plugged in.
FK: Yeah, I mean, I’ve heard of all the things they have here, too, but like, I don’t care, you know? Like…
ELM: Right. So, this is what all this immediately made me—there are, there are two big things that this made me think, all right? I’m gonna keep adding and be like, “Oh actually this brings up three important things.” [FK laughs] I don’t wanna pin all of this on Netflix but I do feel like they’re doing something kind of particular and it feels like a bit of a harbinger of the future that we’re gonna see around entertainment media.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: One thing it immediately made me think of is the publication Future, from Marc Andreesson, like the a16z…you’re shaking your head right now, OK so—
FK: [overlapping] I have no idea, I mean I know what this is a little bit because you sent me a thing about it and I read a little bit, but I had never heard of it before, and I doubt most of our listeners won’t have either.
ELM: [overlapping] Marc Andreesson—yeah, OK. So this is shifting to the tech industry, Marc Andreesson is…a big VC guy, a lot of big VC guys always have been very mad at… [FK laughs] at the tech press, right? Famously Peter Thiel funded a lawsuit to take down Gawker because he was mad about the coverage in Valleywag. But there’s been a big trend in the last few years with the kind of, even further opening up of the communication channels, beyond like Twitter and Medium but now into something like Substack, right, which is extremely VC-funded. Obviously it is VC-funded but they bring that spirit, you know? [laughs]
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Of this kind of idea of, like, “Editors are the enemy, journalists are the enemy, they’re just trying to be critical, they don’t see my vision,” [FK laughs] “I would like to bypass them entirely and just share my vision.” And one thing I’m gonna say is that almost—no, literally all of these people desperately need an editor. [FK laughs] Right? Like, desperately. Or they need people to offer some critical feedback about the way they’re destroying the world.
So, this particular set of VC folks started a publication called Future. And they basically kind of presented it as, it was gonna be tech “news,” but it’s essentially, I mean it’s just…it’s that oil magazine, “oil is good,” right? It’s essentially that. And when I initially saw it—
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Whatever I’m into is gonna make a lot of money and then it will, because I convinced everyone else it would.
ELM: Right, and also it’s about stuff that they are investing in as VCs, right?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: So it’s like, kinda presenting it as news.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Or like, news and commentary. And I remember when this launched, I saw some chatter about it and I was like, “Ugh, this sucks.” [FK laughs] “This is everything I dislike.” [FK awws sympathetically] And then a couple of weeks later, someone sent to “The Rec Center” a suggestion for an article to include from this site.
FK: Aahh!
ELM: And I was just like, I didn’t know what to do. I actually think I may not have responded, and apologies to that person, but I didn’t want to be like, “This is from a propaganda website!” You know? I didn’t want to go on some sort of like, awful…
FK: [overlapping, laughing] Yeah, how do you say this to this poor person who’s just clicking around and read something that they thought was interesting, you know?
ELM: Exactly! And so I think it’s that camouflaging and the decontextualization, and I don’t blame anyone who’s ever shared one of these articles, ’cause how are they supposed to know? Unless they are a journalist or a media scholar or something, and like, pay very careful attention to who’s funding what and like, what individual publications’ editorial, stances on editorial independence are, like how the hell are they supposed to know? You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And the Ev Williams, the Mediums of the world and the Substacks of the world, the argument would be like, “It doesn’t matter where it’s coming from, a good idea should get out in the world.” But like, it’s an infantile—[laughs] like, it’s such an immature response to like, the fact that we’re talking about huge amounts of money going into putting specific messages into the world, whether we’re talking about the tech industry or coming back to Netflix’s output, the entertainment industry.
FK: Right, right. And on one level, I mean, I think that the thing that is interesting to me is, if you do take seriously this idea of, which I think, I mean I think people at Netflix must, because I from my experience know that this is the kind of conversation people have all the time, you can take seriously the idea of, “Well we want to control how we break news about our shows.” Right?
ELM: Sure.
FK: And like, that’s a very real concern, because you…I’ve been through this many times now, where you like, talk to someone at Variety or Deadline usually, that’s usually where you break any news, and there’s an embargo up until a certain point, but then maybe they don’t release it when they said they would, which of course was timed with the hope that you would, you know—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: —you try to time when it comes out, because you know it’s not that fans are reading Variety, it’s the entertainment reporters read Variety. [laughs]
ELM: Sure.
FK: So, you know, then you’ll get like a swath of things, and some fan sites read it, like The Leaky Cauldron or TheOneRing.net, something like that, those people read Variety because they’re like, “I want to know about things that pertain to my thing,” or they’ve got a Google alert on it or whatever.
ELM: Right.
FK: So, you know, I get—that’s a painful process and oftentimes the trade publications kinda screw you, it’s not that they’re trying to, it’s just that like, you don’t control…
ELM: [overlapping] Things happen and things don’t go up at the right time, but it’s like, they don’t work for you, so it’s not like they, you don’t have a contract to say “We’ll do it at 11 am.” [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] Right, exactly, exactly. [laughs] And so with this, I get it that you, you know, it gives you the feeling, as a person working on the entertainment industry side of total control over the way that you put this stuff out, and if people know and care to get their news from this site that’s great, but there’s also a bunch of other stuff. There’s two things, right? Which is one, sometimes people don’t know or care, I guess they want all entertainment journalists to look at Tudum to like, find out about breaking news? But they’re sending out press releases too, presumably. I don’t know. And then two, there’s all this other stuff on here, too, right?
ELM: Right.
FK: Like, “A Guide to All the Scammers and Scam-ees of ‘Inventing Anna.’” OK, you know?
ELM: [overlapping] Right. Well, but that’s, yeah, it’s interesting that that’s sort of presented like…a piece of editorial content, because that just seems like the kind of supplemental content that you might put out, you know, like…
FK: There’s another one that says, that's subtitled “How Real is ‘Inventing Anna?’ A Journalist Explains What’s Fact and Fiction.”
ELM: See, this is where we’re getting into really murky stuff, right?
FK: Right?
ELM: And you know, I gotta say, all of this feels like hashtag-content which I think that a lot of editorially independent news organizations would be…you know, I’m not in love with them putting out this kind of stuff either. [FK laughs] It is what it is, right, this is the state we’re in, it’s just like, a glut of kinda garbagey content, you know, going out into the world.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Does it matter if one of them is coming from the official source? Like, OK.
FK: Right.
ELM: I don't know. I think that what concerns me more is…and I’m not seeing a ton of this on their sites, or on the other ones we’ve been talking about, Star Wars, Star Trek or whatever, their official sort of editorial-y sites, but I think that what we are headed towards is, this feels to me like the first, the foundations being built for a step towards kind of eliminating independent criticism, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So one thing that I really want to talk about in this conversation, and I don’t know if we’ve really articulated it that much on the podcast though it’s something that I’ve certainly talked and thought a lot about on Twitter, [FK laughs] as a journalist, is this like, false dichotomy of the critic versus the fan. Right?
FK: Right.
ELM: Like, I think we have talked about this somewhat because people have said things, like showrunners or directors or whatever, say “Well we didn’t make this for the critics, we made it for the fans.”
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, yeah. Fans!
ELM: Like, “Fans love what I do and critics are a bunch of dumb meanies who have no taste, and it’s not for them. It’s for people—” [laughs] “who apparently are so brainless that they’ll just eat up whatever I do for them.” Right?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: So it’s like, already this bad construction of “fans” as someone who’s gonna just say, “Yes, I love whatever you do, guy.” Right, which…
FK: [overlapping] Right, just accept any…yeah.
ELM: Any old crap. Which is not obviously a fandom experience that we’re familiar with. But there’s been so, so much…I’m just gonna use the word immature over and over again, just like, babyish responses from so many of these content creators, these directors, these showrunners, people at studios.
Obviously always, this has always happened, but I feel like it’s really ratcheted up over the last few years. Any critique, right, like you saw Adam McKay, when people said perhaps his comet movie wasn’t so deep, [FK laughs] going on Twitter into journalists’ mentions being like, “If you don’t like my movie then you don’t think climate change is real.” [FK laughs] I mean this is a paraphrase. I actually heard him talk about the critique of this on the radio, and he suggested that he had been like, piled on and cancel-cultured, and it was just like, bro, fuck off, right?
FK: [overlapping] Oh my God, dude, you have not been cancel-cultured.
ELM: [laughs] It was something.
FK: I mean, I, I, I heard that people liked the movie, a lot of people I know liked the movie, I’m not coming at this from a like, you suck, but dude!
ELM: I heard a lot of firsthand negativity about the movie. Neither of us have seen the big comet movie.
FK: [overlapping, laughing] All right, well maybe…yeah. Yep. No, neither of us have. I, yeah, we have no opinion, but dude, don’t do that, you have not been cancelled.
ELM: Right. Right. So you have people just like, getting furious with critics for not absolutely heaping praise on their movies, and you already had the like, age-old kind of awkwardness of the relationship between the entertainment media and these critics, right?
FK: Yup.
ELM: Because you really want coverage, but you want it to be glowing. And you want profiles of the actors to appear in glossy magazines, or to show up to be guests on late night, and for it all to be glowing.
FK: [overlapping] Right. And you want those to be controlled.
ELM: Exactly.
FK: And the actors want it to be controlled in a different way than the showrunners want it to be controlled, and that creates tension too.
ELM: Right.
FK: ’Cause everybody has their own brand that they’re trying to represent in the best possible way.
ELM: And perhaps, maybe an actor involved in a bad movie doesn’t want their reputation to be dragged down.
FK: Nooo, uh-uh.
ELM: Perhaps.
FK: Perhaps.
ELM: [laughs] So, you already have these tensions, right? And the critics part is the part that, in an ideal world, should be totally independent. It should be like, I don’t know, A. O. Scott goes to the movies and then he tells you how he feels about it, right?
FK: [laughs] Yeah, yeah.
ELM: But I feel like that’s gotten…I mean, I think it’s never been pure like that, right?
FK: [overlapping] No, never.
ELM: It’s always been, there are critics who will be more generous or more lenient for access, right? If they also want to write a celebrity profile, then maybe they’re not gonna pan that person’s last movie.
FK: Right.
ELM: You know, this kinda thing, has always existed but I feel like because the media’s been losing their grip on the narrative in the last ten years, around entertainment, right, because every studio has a widely followed social media presence, because they’re now making these publications themselves, that makes entertainment journalists all the more thirsty to kind of capitulate and not be difficult, and to write the most glowing thing—
FK: Right.
ELM: So they can continue to get access. Because they don’t really have any power in this relationship anymore, whereas 15, 20 years ago, they did.
FK: Right. And I think that’s…to bring it back into sort of the fan experience, and the, when I say the fan experience, I don’t mean that as separate from the critical experience, I mean that as like, when you bring it back to the people who are hanging around, reading about their favorite show, that kinda stinks. Like, as a person who really likes, you know, a variety of entertainment properties, I find it interesting to read intelligent criticism of those things. You know?
ELM: Sure.
FK: Sometimes I agree with it, sometimes I disagree with it. What I don’t particularly find interesting is like, I don’t know, the top five outfits that Scully ever wore. [ELM laughs] Like, I read that, I like that, it fills up some little content hole in my brain sometimes, but that’s not the same thing, you know what I mean? [laughs]
ELM: Well, and there’s also like, fans make that content too, and it’s usually like 100,000 times better, ‘cause it’s like, funny, and they can do whatever they want, right, you know, they could be like, you know…
FK: [overlapping] Times better. But that’s, yeah. Right. That actually sounds like great content, if it was made by the right person, to be clear.
ELM: The right person on Tumblr, the right Tumblr post, that would be delightful, right? They’d be like…
FK: [overlapping] Yeah. It probably exists, actually, there’s like—
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, oh, I’m sure.
FK: But you see what I’m saying though, right? Like, the way that Tudum would do it, I might click, I don’t know, but…
ELM: Probably not, but I also…
FK: [overlapping] That’s not the same thing, you know?
ELM: You know, these are the content mills, right? And this is not unique to entertainment media, there’s listicle upon listicle all the way down from, frankly sort of respectable websites all the way down to the very bottom of the cesspool of the like, Taboola ads bottom and just garbage site, right? And so much of that is about SEO and about getting clicks, and then the hope is that once they get you in with whatever search term led you to those top five outfits, then you’re gonna be on the site and you’re gonna click on something more substantive.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: And that’s the shitty internet media landscape that we’ve created for ourselves. I didn’t do it—
FK: [overlapping] Here we are!
ELM: [overlapping] I didn’t create it for us, but like, you know, it is what it is. But the idea that fans are gonna lap that up doesn’t…
FK: No.
ELM: Doesn’t…
FK: [laughs] No!
ELM: It doesn’t.
FK: No.
ELM: So, I don’t know. I think that the “fandom engine” commentary here is, it’s very muddled to me and I’m a little…I mean I guess my question to you, and you are not even, you’re about six months out of this world, so I think you can still answer for it—
FK: [overlapping] I, I think so.
ELM: [overlapping] I don’t think it’s drastically changed in the last, uh… [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] I don’t think it has, nope. And I still every once in a while get a text from somebody I know from the Before Times being like, “Help, I’m drowning!” and I look at what’s going on and I’m like, “Oh, yep, yep, sorry to you today.” [laughs]
ELM: Look, I mean you offered your commentary when we learned about Super/Natural produced—starring Benedict Cumberbatch. It was too many keywords that are gonna make a bad Google.
FK: [overlapping, groaning] Oh maaaan…oh maaaan…ooohhhh…ohhh, bad plan, The Discovery Channel is doing a show called Super/Natural and I cannot make that up. I couldn’t have made it up.
ELM: [laughs] Narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch!
FK: I know, I know, it’s too much.
ELM: It’s almost Superwholock, all by itself.
FK: I know. I know.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Anyway, anyway. You were gonna ask me a question.
ELM: I was gonna ask you… I guess, putting your job, your old job hat back on, thinking about the way that that analyst framed the fandom engine thing…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: What is your take on that, from the perspective of people working inside Hollywood? Like, when they think about generating fan—I mean is it, is it simply an instance of people just conflating and being very loosey-goosey with “fan,” “audience,” “subscriber,” “viewer,” or is there some belief that by giving fans [in a fake excited tone] direct access to the content they really want, you’ll build a fandom, they’re gonna come! You know? Like, you’re gonna build the biggest fandom because you’re giving them exactly what they want, which is Scully’s top five outfits, right? Is that, these are extreme examples, you know, I’m being a little facetious, but.
FK: Yeah, I think it’s a little bit of both. I think that what you’re having is, you have people who are making decisions about starting initiatives like this, tend to be pretty high up on the ladder. And so they’re looking at things like total viewership numbers and things like that, right? And when they hear about fans really loving something, it’ll often be in the context of…”Look! We gave them x thing, and here are all of the, you know, rhapsodi—rhapsodizing—” I was gonna say “rhapsodous,” but I don’t think that’s a word, you know? All of these over-the-top…
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, like, rapturous? Rapturous?
FK: Rapturous! That’s what I was looking for.
ELM: Yes.
FK: Here’s all these wonderful things that we heard from people, here is like, a page full of selected tweets about this thing that we put out, look at how much they love this thing that we wrote, right?
ELM: Sure. Right. And I just gotta say, I’m familiar with this from other industries too, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: This is something that people do all the time, they pull out the praise and they say, “Look, people love it!”
FK: Right. Because, I mean there’s lots of reasons people do this. But this is, the people who make decisions to put something together like Tudum, are those people. And they’re not really in touch with the moment-to-moment ways that fans interact with the show that they like. So there may be somebody who’s really like this about, I don’t know, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, there’s a Netflix show that I can think of that probably has some very attached fans—
ELM: Wait…do you mean Sabrina?
FK: Yeah, I mean Sabrina, not actually the teenage witch, it’s just Sabrina.
ELM: I was like… [laughs] Oh look, is it back? Is Salem back?
FK: No, not Salem. Anyway, Sabrina, right?
ELM: You mean the show starring Sally Draper.
FK: I do mean the show starring Sally Draper. I’ve seen, I saw the first season, it was good, I enjoyed it. I’m sure there are people who are way, way into it, and the thing is though that, like, those people, the people who made the decision to start Tudum don’t interact with those people ever. Right?
ELM: Sure.
FK: Whereas I feel like the people who made the decision to start StarTrek.com probably have interacted with those people, they’ve probably been those people, you know what I mean?
ELM: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yes.
FK: And that’s partially because they’re actually, you know…I mean one of the things about that is Star Trek is a franchise that’s really old, and everybody who works on it, almost, like everybody has some effective connection to it just because like, you know?
ELM: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
FK: It’s a thing, whereas you can’t, you’re dealing with everything in Netflix, that’s not gonna be the case for like, all of the stuff. Some of the stuff doesn’t have anybody who’s a fan of it to begin with yet, if ever.
ELM: I mean, I think that if you read…you know, like, I love that we’re doing this whole episode on this article that most of our listeners will not have read, so we’re like, “If you read the seventeenth paragraph of this article, you’ll see!”
FK: Yeah, if you pay one dollar to read seventeen paragraphs…
ELM: But you know, they talk throughout the article about all of the folks who had kinda pretty high up editorial roles at various traditional media publications, like Vanity Fair, coming in and being editorial director. If you look at Tudum or some of these other sites, it’s not… Like, I said you could, on StarTrek.com you could tell that it’s fans commissioning, like the editors are fans—
FK: Right! Yeah.
ELM: And they’re commissioning other fans to write fannish things. Whereas this feels like people coming from media background commissioning entertainment journalism, right? You know?
FK: Yep, absolutely, exactly.
ELM: And so it doesn’t really feel like it connects back to fans in that way, and like, yeah, I know as a fan I have certainly read some celebrity profiles of, you know, James McAvoy, to name a random example, of someone I could read a celebrity profile about, right?
FK: Yeah, sure, you might.
ELM: You know, if it’s out there, if one came out tomorrow? Click. Right? You know?
FK: Sure!
ELM: I’m not saying I don’t want that traditional media coverage about the thing that I’m a fan of. But I don’t…that’s, it’s, it’s so easy in my mind to separate that out as media, as entertainment journalism, from the things that fans do. Like, it’s obviously a part of fandom, is consuming that, right, but…
FK: Right. And ironically, that’s not even, that’s not even the thing that Netflix genuinely could give people, right? Netflix does have the ability to give fans some things that fans would want, like, I mean…
ELM: Actual behind-the-scenes stuff…
FK: Actual, right, actual real interviews, like some of the stuff that they have in Queue, I guess, the thing is it’s all very high-end actressy stuff, right, actressy being a term, uh, a term of art, I would say. [laughs]
ELM: Is it? “Actressy?”
FK: Uh, well, it’s a term that gets used an awful lot in my area, which is whenever you see an actor, which was, you know, or actress for that matter, doing a, you know, like, they all want to have like, the cover of Vanity Fair and to give that article that’s like, an article in Vanity Fair in that way. And you’re like, “Uuuuggghhh.” [ELM laughs] “That’s so actressy, that’s so actory, you’re just doing that thing.”
ELM: That’s really funny. That people get annoyed about that. I love it.
FK: [overlapping] It’s, yeah, that’s the term of art, right? And that’s not, like, and by the way that extends also to videos that they make, like I have, there have been some videos that people have made purportedly for the fans that I’ve looked at and been like, “For such a great actor, you have made the worst, you’ve done such bad acting this video.”
ELM: Like things that they film on their own, and so it’s like they’re making social media content? That kind of thing?
FK: Exactly, exactly.
ELM: OK. ‘Cause I thought you were about to insult the only good thing celebrities do, which is like, when they answer googles about themselves, or they stick their hands in a box and like, touch a puppy…
FK: [overlapping] Oh no, that’s, that’s, that’s usually OK. That’s usually OK.
ELM: [overlapping] That stuff is, hands down, unif— I’ve never seen a bad one of those. I’ll watch them for people I barely care about. I could see them sticking their hands in a box and touching a puppy? And not knowing it’s a puppy? Come on.
FK: Sure.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Sure. But anyway, point being, that stuff is the stuff that you can get in—not the touching the puppy, I mean yes the touching the puppy, but the actressy profile—
ELM: [overlapping] Why can’t Tudum do the—Tudum could do puppy-touching, like why not, you know?
FK: It would be more popular, they’ve probably done puppy-touching, right?
ELM: [overlapping, laughing] Say pup…say puppy-touching a few more times…
FK: [laughs] Say that 10,000 times and try not to laugh. No, but—
ELM: Wait, Flourish, remember the other day when we touched a real puppy together?
FK: It was great, it was a cute puppy.
ELM: We met a puppy, and he looked like the puppy on the Charmin toilet paper.
FK: It was charming.
ELM: It was literally him. And he was soft.
FK: OK, but back to the point though, right? [ELM laughs] Netflix, if they wanted to, there’s all sorts of stuff you can ask an actor about, like, dude, they’ll talk about their process from here to eternity.
ELM: They will.
FK: No other publication is going to publish any of that stuff, but a lot of fans would, like, I can imagine a fan of an actor wanting to read that, I think I would want to read like, Harry Styles maundering about his songwriting process, so, you know?
ELM: OK, I’m sorry, uh, first of all.
FK: Uh huh?
ELM: The New Yorker would definitely publish that, as we are very aware.
FK: Yeah but they can’t publish it, they aren’t gonna publish it about like, I don’t know, the actors on…
ELM: Like Jensen Ackles?
FK: Yeah! They aren’t gonna, [ELM laughs] yeah, they aren’t gonna do that, they aren’t gonna publish it about Sabrina, you know? Netflix could publish that about Sabrina. Like, this is genuinely something they could do.
ELM: I could see them doing it, maybe if she has another starring role, I could see them doing a profile of Sally Draper. She’s like, you know…
FK: Sure, OK. But you get what I’m saying though, right? There’s all this kind of content that, like…
ELM: Yeah, people who are not—
FK: [overlapping] …is not interesting to people in the media industry, but it is interesting to fans. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] For context, I was, I was hinting at the recent furor over the Jeremy Strong profile in The New Yorker.
FK: [overlapping, laughing] Yes, obviously.
ELM: Where it described his method acting as, um…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Psychologically damaging to [FK laughs] him and his co-stars. If anyone somehow missed that.
FK: [laughs] It’s true, it’s true, it’s true. But like, there’s only a slim number of shows that are gonna get that treatment.
ELM: Yes, that is fair.
FK: Or whatever, details about prop making, or things like this, like you were saying, real behind-the-scenes stuff.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And they’re not doing any of that because that’s hard, it takes actual work. [laughs] Right? You can’t just hire people who have been doing entertainment journalism in the regular way and say, “Could you just keep, could you keep doing that thing that you were writing before, except now always nice and for us?”
ELM: Right.
FK: Like, it requires more than that. [laughs] And they won’t do it.
ELM: [overlapping] I don’t think they want that, right? I mean that’s all spon-con is, you know? Journalism is literally hemorrhaging—it’s hemorrhaging people, it’s hemorrhaging money, it is a cursed industry that I wouldn’t recommend anyone pursue if they’re a young person, because you’re either going to be grossly underpaid and have a stable job, or you’re going to be fired once every 18 months. [FK laughs] It’s a bad industry and I don’t think it’s good. [laughs] It’s bad.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So, so like, what we’ve seen, particularly in the last ten years, sponsored content has always been a thing, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But like, you know, the oil magazine, “oil is good,” but there’s been a huge explosion in that, right? You have mattress companies and eyeglass companies and…you know? Like, glasses companies, and all this, hiring journalists, giving them twice the salary, which isn’t even that much because they’re so grossly underpaid…
FK: Which is why this is cheap and appealing to do, right? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah!
FK: Like, just hire yourself some journalists, as this article says, they’ll be thrilled to be paid anything. [laughs]
ELM: Oh yeah, I absolutely love, sometimes when you, and now I work in the tech industry, but especially in tech sometimes, you like, you’ll say an amount of money that you think is very high because you’re basing it on the way media salaries are, and they’ll be like, “Oh yeah, whatever. Yeah. That’s easy.”
FK: Yep, yep.
ELM: And you’re like, “That’s easy!” [both laugh] This was like, a battle, you know, back in the media industry.
FK: Yep.
ELM: People insult you for thinking you’d ever be worth that amount of salary, you know? It’s cool, that’s great.
FK: All right, well, we’re probably coming to the end of this. What do you, I mean like, I kinda want to get back to this idea of astroturfing within this though.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: You knew I was gonna bring it there.
ELM: Sure.
FK: Because I do think it’s important to note that this is not talking about classic astroturfing.
ELM: Right.
FK: It’s not talking about, although I wouldn’t put it past places to actually astroturf and hire some people to be cheerful about their show on Twitter or whatever.
ELM: Sure, sure, sure.
FK: I’ve never personally seen it done, to be clear, but I wouldn’t put it past people. But this is not that, right?
ELM: Right. So, one thing I’ve observed in fandom is, and this is like, fandom writ large, I shouldn’t use such a broad term but it is what it is, probably in the last decade, is a real discomfort with the fact that you have people who potentially are in fandom running social media accounts, defining brand language for franchises—the work you used to do—speaking the language of fans. Right?
FK: [laughs] Yup. Live long enough and you become the villain.
ELM: [both laugh] Right. Or, people who are clearly in fandom are like, no, you know, and it’s usually something so obvious, like, “Well, they know that Oscar Isaac is handsome.” Like, yeah, people outside of fandom are aware ’cause they have eyes?
FK: They have noticed his ass! [ELM laughs] You’re not the only one! [laughs] Who saw that large round thing!
ELM: [overlapping] Right, but it’s things like that where people think it’s like, “Only fans, only fandom could be into this,” and it’s like, I’m in fandom and I also have worked as a journalist, and I see…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know, we see people even reblogging our own articles and we’re a podcast called Fansplaining. And they’re like, “Wow, finally a journalist gets it.” And it’s like, [FK laughs] what do I have to do here?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Like, I feel like I’ve proven that I’ve been in fandom for a long time. And so, it’s this like, bafflement, or discomfort, or sometimes glee, you know, excitement, like, “Oh my God, they’re speaking like us!”
FK: Right. Whooo!
ELM: Right? But the discomfort stuff is like, “Oh, I don’t like this, they’re talking like a…” You know, we did an episode a while back called “Waffle House is a Reylo.”
FK: “Waffle House is a Reylo.” [laughs]
ELM: And fans like, a lot of fans not really knowing how to handle these random brands speaking fan language and stuff like that, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And so I sort of feel like it’s a little absurd for fans to think, as some of the commentary I saw, not pinning this on the OP who tweeted the astroturf thing, but some of the subsequent commentary, people saying like, “Oh they’re gonna go into AO3. They’re gonna—”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And it’s just like, no, I guarantee they are not, no one ever suggested this.
FK: [overlapping] No, they are not, no.
ELM: But I think that kind of chimes with this sort of ambivalence and discomfort and confusion a lot of fans have, and this may be somewhat false memory of a really strong kind of fourth wall, or really strong barrier between the things that fans do and say and the references they understand—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And The Man, right? And what the, you know, this sort of firm divide which, I, I think that that’s one of the long-standing themes of this podcast, is us being like, “Maybe the barriers have crumbled more, but maybe the barriers weren’t so strong as your nostalgic brain suggests they were.”
FK: Yep, yep, definitely.
ELM: I don’t know, does this ring true to you? I’m looking at this from a, kind of a pure fan perspective at this point.
FK: Yeah, I think that’s very true, and I understand why people are nervous and weirded out by this. I mean, I’m not thrilled with it existing either. But I do think that there are really good reasons why people are unlikely to actually go and do proper astroturfing, or write stuff on the AO3 [laughs] under fake names or whatever, right? And you know, I mean, I’ll admit, it has sometimes crossed my mind, I’ve worried that people might think, there’s been stuff that I have worked on and therefore not written fanfiction about because I didn’t want anybody to think that I was being two-faced, you know what I mean?
ELM: Right.
FK: Not that they would ever find out, because I’m under 10,000 NDAs. And similarly there’s been stuff that I have not wanted to work on because I’ve been a fan of it, because I’ve felt like, then I’m gonna get, you know, like…
ELM: Yeah, it’ll ruin it.
FK: I get it, I get that anxiety, I just… I don’t know. I think that it’s way more, those crossover places are usually way more organic, and frankly this stuff is not, you’re not gonna read this and think that a fan wrote it. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Like, it’s not, it might fake you out into thinking it’s other journalism, but it’s not gonna fake you out into thinking that it’s, you’re, a random person.
ELM: Right, and I think that if you can tell that a, like, we’ve given examples, not to bring it repeatedly back, but StarTrek.com, where it’s like, yeah, you can tell a fan wrote that, that’s kinda the point. Right? They’re explicit about it.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah! Yeah! And it’s on StarTrek.com! [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, right, exactly.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I don’t feel good about all of this, I don’t love it, but.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s in a different way than I think that people are suggesting we should not feel good about it.
FK: Yeah. I agree with that, and also you know what? I never have to look at any of it again!
ELM: You might accidentally look at it.
FK: I’m going, I’m not going to go back to Tudum. You’re right, someone will probably share me a thing. But I’m not gonna go become a reader of it, and uh…I’m grateful that I have that opportunity to not do it.
ELM: [laughs] You’re not even gonna renew your Netflix subscription.
FK: No! I’ve, I’ve been Netflix-free for several months now, it’s been great.
ELM: [laughs] That’s it? Several months?
FK: Yeah. Six months, at least. Since I stopped having my old job and needing to like, be able to watch all sorts of stuff to keep up on it.
ELM: Fair. I haven’t watched Netflix in months, but it’s because… So I share accounts, I pay for a few accounts and my parents pay for a few accounts so we just share?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And they have the Netflix account, and I got a new Apple TV, because my old one was very, very old, and—I like how I have to justify why I bought a new Apple TV. Sometimes you just have to get a new one. [FK laughs] And I haven’t bothered to hook up, [laughs] to put the Netflix password in, so I just like…
FK: [laughs] Oh my God…
ELM: Just not gonna…
FK: That’s laziness.
ELM: [overlapping] I mean it’s not like there’s anything I wanted to watch on it, like, I’ve got, I’ve got maybe my 65th or 66th viewing of Frasier to do all the way through, so…
FK: Uh huh…yeah.
ELM: There’s always new things to pick up in the rich text that is Frasier.
FK: Well, Elizabeth, I’m gonna leave you to your whatever nth viewing of Frasier you’re going to have. I can’t, I can’t—
ELM: [overlapping, singing the Frasier theme in doo-doo-doos]
FK: Wow, really ending it on the same note we began. Uh, this has been a nice conversation…
ELM: [overlapping] Those are not the same notes, that’s an actual melody, it’s not just a weird sound.
FK: Oh my God, Elizabeth. [both laughing] I’ve had enough of you for today, I will talk to you later.
ELM: Bye Flourish!
[both laugh]
[Outro music]