Episode 215: The Broken Contract
In Episode 215, “The Broken Contract,” Flourish and Elizabeth look at the sorry state of television in 2024, where the streaming revolution has devolved into sudden cancellations, deleted or shelved shows, opaque viewer numbers, and very little stability for audiences—and especially fans—to get invested in something new. How can fans build fandoms—and, for that matter, how can TV creators build the works themselves—when executives are constantly pulling the rug out from under them? Plus: they respond to a pair of letters about the last episode, on AI and dealing with a negative AO3 comment, respectively.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:01:19] Both of these letters are in response to our last episode, “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 18.”
[00:04:21] Some terms mentioned in ~AI Anon’s letter:
LessWrong—if you want to go straight to the source
For that matter, if you have a morbid curiosity about HPMOR…
The Roko’s basilisk thought experiment
A breakdown of longtermism from Vox Media itself
Accelerationism, which…like, all of these have Cult Vibes but this? 😬
[00:05:34] Our most recent conversation with EarlGreyTea68 was late last year, in Episode 211: “The Copyright Conundrum.”
[00:20:16]
[00:22:58] Our interstitial music throughout is “Making the connections” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:23:47] The long-promised arranged marriage episode of the “Tropefest” series has now been recorded and should be out for $3 and up Patrons very soon! As a reminder, these are the previous “Tropefest” installments:
You can get ALL of those—plus two dozen other special episodes—by pledging at patreon.com/fansplaining.
[00:31:09] Hulu did have a few early original web series—like The Morning After in 2011—but East Los High, which Flourish worked on, was its first original television programming starting in 2013. Netflix originals began the same year, with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black premiering. So: more than a decade now!
[00:34:42] One of many examples of creators discussing how frustratingly opaque streamers are with viewing data. Or, as immortalized by Barry:
[00:35:10]
[00:39:54] We talked about the cancellation of The OA at the time—nearly five years ago now!—with OA writer CK Kiechel.
[00:49:45] We talked about James Somerton on Episode 212: “Fandom Truthiness.”
[00:55:16] That’s right, folks. The Tom Hanks of Fansplaining, Javi Grillo-Marxuach, came on right at the start of the WGA strike to strikesplain.
[01:06:45] We talked about this in Episode 203: “Solidarity and SDCC.”
[01:10:24] ARE YOU READY!?!?!
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 #215, “The Broken Contract.”
FK: Dun dun DUUUUUUUUN!
ELM: [laughs] Yep. Yep.
FK: All right, the main point of this episode, we’re going to be talking cancellations of TV shows.
ELM: More than cancellations, like, the point is we’re gonna be talking about the broken contract between the creators of entertainment media and the consumers/fans of those properties.
FK: What contract, you ask? [ELM laughs] We will discuss what contract might possibly exist, either in fans’ minds or creators’ minds, but! First, we have a couple of comments on our previous episodes.
ELM: Yeah, we actually got a bunch of responses, we didn’t have time to read all of them now, so we’re gonna save some for a future episode. But we have two, and the first one is in a follow-up from the person who wrote in to our last AMA about AI, and fandom, and potentially, mmm, hypocritical? Stances from fans [FK laughs] around AI.
FK: All right, should I read it?
ELM: Yeah, yes please.
FK: All right.
“Hi, This is the AI vs fanfic anon again! Thank you very much for answering my question; I think it pretty much did clear up my confusion! It sounds like at the heart of it is a lot of mistrust for outside groups who want to take from but not give back to the well of fandom creativity, which is certainly a healthy impulse.
“I do want to clarify that, upon reflection, I think my concern here is that I see a lot of people on Tumblr in particular discussing AI with a lot of passion but not a lot of specificity. It feels like a lot of attention is getting directed towards the iffy art, software, and prompt engineers, meanwhile there’s an extremely concerning combination of venture capital, doomsday cult, and natural monopoly brewing in the corner!
“I’m concerned especially with how often disdain for AI seems to morph into veneration of IP law and specifically copyright enforcement. I worry that if emotions stay high without directing our ire at the right targets, people could get baited into supporting the very corporate interests they should have the most contempt for.
“Also, I think it’s hilarious that my question was answered right after a discussion of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s fanfic. It definitely put things into perspective for me. When I was first on Tumblr in 2015, I fell into a rationalist-adjacent (rat-adj) sphere, where there was a lot of discussion about him and that fanfic. Allegedly, it was a ploy to introduce people to his philosophy/cult. He himself supposedly had no interest in Harry Potter or fanfic.
“I’m not an expert, just a random lurker, but I want to make the connection between these two topics. My impression of the history is that Eliezer Yudkowsky founded LessWrong, then they became the rationalists (AI doomsday cult) (also known for Roko’s basilisk) (also more than one Bay Area group house), then effective altruism is an offshoot of rationalism (Sam Bankman-Fried goes here) (also Vox Media promotes this) (see also long-termism), then Open AI is another offshoot of rationalism (they’re trying to make an AI messiah) (see also AI alignment) (also some of them are accelerationists who want to make AI doomsday now!).
“Basically, I think you’re spot on that these people are bad-faith actors. In fact, if you look at their origins, they appear to have a history of exploiting fan communities. And they have a shared ideology which justifies the exploitation of others for their ‘greater good.’ And I really, really wish we were talking a lot more about that and them and how insane it is that they’ve amassed so much power.
“Anyway thanks for listening to my TED talk lol, I appreciated your thoughtfulness and I’ve been enjoying the podcast!”
And that’s from our AI anon. They’re not AI. [ELM laughs] You know what I mean. The anon concerned about AI and people’s responses to it. [laughs]
ELM: Thanks—well thank you, AI anon. [FK laughs] Your new name. Great letter. One thing I’ll say is, if anyone didn’t know all those terms, they should look at the show notes. [FK laughs] I’ll be gathering some links. I don’t know if we should just like, I don’t think it’s probably a good use of our time to…
FK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ELM: To define each and every one of those. [FK laughs] But yes.
FK: I will say that having lived this, and having lived it, like, at MIT where I was like, receiving all of this all the time, that history was totally correct, [laughing] as far as I am aware of it.
ELM: Right. So, I am struck by…you know, one thing, I’m not necessarily gonna quibble with it, but I would say like, yes-and, in the sense of…a lot of the things that anon is ascribing to fandom on Tumblr are identical to the way that non-fandom people or people who are also professional creative types are talking about AI on every other social platform.
FK: I think that’s right. Yeah.
ELM: And so, like, you know, it’s been, talked about on Bluesky now, you know, because Twitter…but prior to that, when more people were on Twitter, like a year ago, and all this started poppin’ off…you know, we’ve complained about this in our discussions of AI, that there’s so, such minimal understanding—and you know, I’ve seen people say things like, “It’s basically copy-pasting,” you know…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Like obviously, the, endlessly calling it “a plagiarism machine” or whatever. And I think our conversation with EarlGreyTea was very helpful in this regard, because she has been, obviously, studying this and the way that it intersects with copyright law and trademark law, and this kind of understanding of the speculative-ness of, “Well, it could infringe,” and it’s like, “Well, show me where it’s producing something that is actually a copy.” Right, you know? That kinda thing.
FK: Right. Yep.
ELM: I think that is almost wholly absent from broader conversations about this, and I think that some of it is happening between the fan side and the pro side, because plenty of people are fans and pros.
FK: Yep.
ELM: And also you have some kind of high-profile fan-facing pros, who are very vocal about it. And yeah, I absolutely agree, you know just this morning I saw a response from someone, a fanartist, who had had an anon that said, “Yeah, look at your shitty AI art, huh?” and the person, like, had to go through and defend themselves and explain why they like—they used like, generated, I don’t think it was AI-generated, but they used 3D backgrounds, or photographs, because they didn’t like drawing backgrounds and all this, and they were making all these like, being like, “You know, here’s where it’s hurtful for you to do this.” People definitely, I’ve seen, are weaponizing the kind of “tells” of visual AI art, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And saying, “Look at the bad perspective on this, obviously it’s AI.”
FK: [laughing] Right.
ELM: And it’s like, oh? OK, like, maybe I just didn’t draw it as well as I could’ve, [FK laughs] you know what I mean? But it’s definitely turned into like a policing thing, you have people going around being like—
FK: Yes.
ELM: [in an angry voice] “AI AI AI!” and it’s like, it’s gotten so dogmatic that I think it’s kind of a bummer, because I absolutely agree with AI anon here, that it’s not actually based in reality and it seems more like kind of, a loss of control thing. You know what I mean?
FK: I definitely know what you mean. I also think that this person is correct…so I agree with you that this is a larger conversation, but I think that there is something ironic about fans running to the arms of like, IP, and copyright law. [laughs]
ELM: Well…
FK: You know, sometimes, I mean I know not entirely, and we’ve talked about this more extremely, but I do think that there…you know, it seems to me that I would love it if people who were engaged in grey-area practices around fair use were being a little more thoughtful [laughing] about calling down the copyright overlords to protect them from AI. And I don’t expect that from, you know, people who are writing scripts for TV shows, because those people are, like, deeply engaged in the kind of commercial activity that copyright law is most intended to be effective in. You know what I mean? Like, like, so, it’s…
ELM: Well…yeah, I mean, obviously I think that we were saying this in the EarlGreyTea episode, the people I see defending copyright more than anyone on Earth—obviously like, Disney’s legal team is not tweeting [FK laughs] out their individual opinions—are authors of—
FK: Yeah. Right.
ELM: Especially genre authors, smaller authors, you know, ones who are making some kinda living, but maybe not a whole living.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Definitely far bigger defenders of copyright.
FK: Right.
ELM: Especially in this case, in this particular facet.
FK: [overlapping] Right, which slightly falls into that classic thing of like, “Why do you support Trump?” “Because I could be a billionaire someday.” Well, could you?
ELM: This is what you said last time! [FK laughs] But I’m gonna reiterate, in their defense, they’re protecting the small margins they already have.
FK: That’s also true. That’s also true.
ELM: You know, if you make $10,000 a year from writing a novel, that’s, like, a huge success, right? That should give you a sense of scale, right?
FK: [overlapping] It is. And it’s, and that’s a huge deal, like, that’s actually a lot of money, for most people. [laughs]
ELM: And then you have tech billionaires coming in and saying, “Well, we think copyright law should be abolished, so we can scrape your books so we can add the shittiest features to fuckin’, to fucking Google Docs.” Why…it’s so bad!
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, yeahyeahyeahyeahyeah. You’re not, you’re not wrong either. [laughs]
ELM: I know I’m not.
FK: It can be both. OK. The one thing that I do wanna note is that I think that maybe this is is just because of having been at MIT, that some of this stuff—it was seeing this comment that made me, this reply, that made me go like, yeah, you know, it’s easy to sort of make fun of someone for being “rat-adj,” you know? [both laugh]
But whatever, like, I have dabbled with effective altruism in my life, I gave money to malaria nets, you know, like, some of the arguments, like the ethical arguments that that group of people were making—not all of them, and not the way that I think that they have gone in the long term—but you know, like, there’s reasons why people find some of that appealing, I think, you know? Like, I did find it, I found it appealing when someone was like, “Do you really think that the life of a person in your community is worth more than the life of a person in sub-Saharan Africa?”
ELM: Sure…
FK: You know, so anyway, I just thought that was interesting, because I have been making fun of people who sort of were falling into this, and then I was like, oh wait, actually, [laughs] I, too, have, have dipped my toe in the water of this, you know, like, large delta of movements. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, well, what you’re describing right now is indistinguishable from any other kind of charitable giving, right? Effective altruism—from what I understand of it, correct me if this is not your understanding—part of it is amassing the wealth yourself so then you can redistribute it.
FK: I think that that is…that is one of the parts, but when it first started it was presented to me as the idea that you were—like, the reason it was called “effective” was because you, the whole ethical principle behind it was to figure out like, what…how can the money that you donate make the most ethical good in the world.
ELM: Sure.
FK: And if the most ethical good in the world is saving one human life, what’s the cheapest way to save one human life, and the answer to that is, buy the malaria net, and so you do that, you know?
ELM: [overlapping] Sure, sure, just like, that’s just optimized, you know, charitable giving, right? [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] Right, but then it turned into, right, that’s where, my understanding is that that’s where it started, and then it turned into, well and by the way, I can optimize my earning power—
ELM: [overlapping] Right, and so if I became a billionaire…
FK: [overlapping] Which means that I can save the most people, because my idea of this is obviously correct, because why wouldn’t you follow this ethical thing, so I should optimize my earning power so I can buy all the malaria nets, you know? [laughs] Like…
ELM: I mean also—I should note, this is not about fandom at all, we’re totally off-topic, but like…
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, yeah, sorry. [laughs]
ELM: No, but there’s a very long history of, like, people in marginalized communities being like, “If I amass wealth from these people then I can redistribute it and actually help.” And I don’t wanna diminish that. But these people…
FK: Right. Yeah.
ELM: I mean, what is the marginalized community they’re in, like, being super nerds? Being in a weird polycule?
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, nonononono, that’s not, that is not even a vision of that. And in fact it’s the opposite, right, like, it’s…what you’re describing is, like, “I amass wealth so that I can share it with my people,” and this is like, “My people are not the people I should share it with, I should be finding the most disadvantaged person,” you know what I mean?
ELM: Right. Right. Right.
FK: Which, you know, is…like, you can see why that might be appealing also, right? Because it’s saying, extend your thought of humanity to everybody in the world, and like, take it seriously. So. Anyway, whatever.
ELM: Flourish…come clean now. Did you actually pay money to have yourself put on the Quidditch team [FK laughs] in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality?
FK: Uh, no, because as this person pointed out, even then, everyone in fandom knew Eliezer Yudkowsky did not care about fandom, [ELM laughs] and I am not giving that man a red cent. Not a red cent! That money could go to malaria nets!
ELM: That’s so true. [both laugh] And you could put yourself as seeker in your own Harry Potter story.
FK: Exactly! And all my friends. [both laugh] All right. I think that, uh, that puts that one to bed.
ELM: OK, thank you very much, AI anon, really appreciate and…you know, I am very grateful that AI anon is coming from like, a bit…like, fic-adj, you know? [both laugh] Like…
FK: Yeah!
ELM: And being willing to say like, “I see this group that you guys are a part of and I don’t really get it,” like, I appreciate that, you know? So yeah, anyone else who’s -adj to us…
FK: More comments like that, please, we love that.
ELM: [laughs, overlapping] We appreciate it. OK. And we have a second one, right?
FK: Yeah. So our second letter is about the last thing we talked about in our recent AMA episode, the conversation about, I will use the old-fashioned term: netiquette.
ELM: You love using that term.
FK: I love that term!
ELM: Obsessed.
FK: OK, will you read it?
ELM: Yeah, just, for a little context, we had a pair—we had a letter and a voicemail. One of them was about trying to resist the urge to write a callout post—or not even a callout post, but like, a response post to someone being wrong on the internet—and then the voicemail was about the XKCD cartoon.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: About [laughing] someone being wrong on the internet.
FK: [simultaneous] Wrong on the internet!
ELM: Um…and so, this is in response to that. So they write:
“Hi Elizabeth and Flourish,
“I was so glad to hear the etiquette discussion—” Flourish, note that that’s “etiquette,” there’s no “n” in the front of that.
FK: Thank you, thank you for that clarification.
ELM: OK.
“I was so glad to hear the etiquette discussion in your recent AMA episode, talking about ways to keep from calling out bad takes on the internet. It was so timely for me; I recently got my first Scathing Comment on AO3 from someone who didn’t like something I did in a fic. (Amazing, since I’ve been posting on AO3 for nearly a decade; how I managed to avoid it before now, I’m not sure!)
“They really went off on me about how my take deviated from the intent of the creators in the original language (which I’ve never seen; I was going based off the English translation) and doubled down when I 1) pointed that out and 2) said I didn’t care. I bid them a cheery farewell, and blocked/muted them so I don’t have to see them again, and they don’t have to see me.
“I would like to say I wasn’t offended, but it’s really hard to have someone come into your comments in your own space and tell you how wrong you are. Especially when I was really not wrong. I know people get hung up on the creators’ original intent, and translation is a tricky business, but I’m sure I’m not alone in the English-language fandom, basing my fic on the English translation because that’s what I experienced.
“I had never seen or interacted with this person before, in any space ever, so their beef obviously wasn’t with me; I was just the unlucky person they chose to vent their spleen at. Their dismissive manner of talking to me was never going to convince me to consider their perspective, at all.
“What it DID do was simultaneously make me want to make MORE fics with that same take, out of spite—AND make me think that I never wanted to write a fic with that pairing ever again, if fans of that pairing were going to act like that.
“My parting reply to them basically said that their thinking it was okay to come into someone else’s space to behave that way demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of what fandom and fan community is about. And maybe I was wrong to reply at all; I didn’t owe them anything.
“So seeing you guys discussing suppressing those urges to blast people who are Wrong On The Internet was refreshing; thanks for the reminder!
“Sincerely, Nonny”
FK: [laughs] What a relatable, relatable response. Like…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Yeah. I particularly like that there are two people who could’ve thought about, you know, who—well, one of whom was thinking about not blasting people who are wrong on the internet, and one of whom should have thought about it, right? [laughs] The initial commenter could have resisted, and Nonny is like, “Yeah…what if I just ignored them entirely? Because what possible good can come out of this conversation?”
ELM: I mean, let’s be fair though, Nonny did reply.
FK: No, I know, I know, but Nonny is thinking about it. You know.
ELM: In my fic, in my AU of what happened, Nonny did not reply, and just deleted it immediately.
FK: Yeah, I always, I’m always mixed about that. Because I mean, you know that my strategy on this is to kill people with kindness, and every once in a while…
ELM: [overlapping] It’s so funny.
FK: And every once—and sometimes it bears fruit, people are like, “Oh, you responded to me! Oops!” [both laugh] You know?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Which is, I find so satisfying that I do fall into that trap. I’m always like… [laughs] “Oh, thank you for your perspective!” And then the one time out of ten that somebody’s like, “Oh shit! I was rude, wasn’t I!” I’m like, “Yeah. You were.” [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think that we both have a version of this. Yours is about, like, playing dumb, [FK laughs] like playing nicely dumb, right, you know?
FK: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right, that’s very correct.
ELM: And mine is more about…mmm, what’s the word…? I don’t know, maybe it’s like, if someone tries to concern-troll me I really try to concern-troll them right back? [FK laughs] I would say, you know? Like, “Well maybe you didn’t consider all the things that you were bringing up here,” right?
FK: You say that, but you’re way nicer in your responses than you are in what you consider saying. So, I mean, we do, I have to say that we do sort of, sometimes we workshop these responses with each other.
ELM: Yeah. Oh, it’s not just for Fansplaining things, to be clear.
FK: No, it’s for everything. And I notice that you always want to be really mean, and you say you’re gonna be really mean, and then the thing that you write is not that mean?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: [laughing] And I’m like, you’re way meaner when you just talk to me about this, [ELM laughs] and then the thing you actually write is kind of milquetoast.
ELM: Sure! Well yeah, I’m trying to, I have some feelings, [FK laughs] I wanna say them out loud, but you know, I just say them to you. Again, it’s like the group chat, right?
FK: I, I, I think that you’re right and mature for this, but I also have a secret desire for you to be like, my id that I’m not…
ELM: No.
FK: …releasing, and for you to just be mean! [laughs]
ELM: It’s so funny, because my—first of all, I’ve been mean many times in my life. [FK laughs] But—directly to other people. Um…no, my mother said this for years, because I’ll be like, complaining about some awful situation at a job, and she’ll be like, “Well, if you’re saying all this stuff to them, then obviously that’s why things are going wrong,” and I’m like, “No! I’m just saying it to you! [FK laughs] I don’t say any of this to them, you know? I’m complaining here!” You know, like?
FK: Sure.
ELM: But it’s so funny, because she always winds up having, like, a read on the situation that is more dire, because I’m like, “And I woulda said…” you know? And it’s like, well, I didn’t say any of those things, though.
I mean, to the substance of anon’s message here, too…I don’t really understand what that commenter, the person who was writing the thing…I don’t really, I just don’t really understand that mindset, you know? And I don’t think—I think this specific example of the translation, and there’s multiple versions, and it’s not in English, blah blah blah…I don’t know what the, what it is, but I can think of different regions of the world where stuff like this happens, you know? There’s like, The Witcher, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: Or there’s C-drama stuff, right, that comes from danmei, all these different versions, right.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I’m sure there’s 9,000 other things that you could think of. But like, there’s definitely cross-cultural clashes here. But you know, I’m in a movie fandom that overlaps with a comics fandom, right—
FK: Uh huh.
ELM: And you know, and someone could come into my comments and be like, “This has nothing to do with the comics,” and I’d be like, “Sure doesn’t, buddy.” [FK laughs] What is that, what’s that famous response? “I’m happy for you?” or “I’m sorry about that?”
FK: [laughs] Yes.
ELM: “I ain’t reading it all though” or whatever? [both laugh] That’s how I feel whenever anyone says anything about the comics, like, godspeed to you guys. You know? And I know there’s people that get mad at the movie fandom, and that happens anytime when there’s a comics and a movie fandom, you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: But it’s like, I truly don’t care, and I don’t understand the psychology of the people who go around and complain about it, because, like, I’m not bothering you. [FK laughs] I’m not airing my thoughts about your comics out loud. Even though I have them.
FK: Why, why, I do wonder, why are you reading fic in English, and expecting fic in English to be responsive to the original language? Wouldn’t you read fic in the original language, where people have…you know, understood the—it’s like, it’s as though I went into…
ELM: Are you doing a Captain Kirk impersonation right now?
FK: [laughs] Not intentionally!
ELM: [doing a Captain Kirk impersonation] Why…would you be reading…a fic…in the language…that it’s not originally in?
FK: I’m just thinking about, like, imagine…the last time I read a lot of fic that was written by people who were consuming something not in the original language was way back in Harry Potter world, when there were a lot of Japanese fancomics where people had clearly read this in Japanese, and also were, like, applying very Japanese…you know, there’s, like, a lot of boarding school stories and so forth in Japanese culture, period, and so they were applying a lot of those things to the story, and it just seems wild to me, like, I can’t imagine reading one of those and being like, [laughing] angry that they didn’t get an English language…
ELM: No.
FK: No, you know? They’re doing their thing! They’re adapting it!
ELM: I mean, look at all the Americans writing Harry Potter fic, [laughing] and clearly not really understanding anything about the United Kingdom.
FK: [overlapping] Well, obviously, [laughs] obviously, but—but you know, I mean, this is even, this is even more different, right? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, because they’re truly across a language, rather than just nations not really understanding the cultural differences, even though they share a language, which I will say, also works in reverse, now that I’m in a mostly American fandom.
FK: [laughs] Yeah, exactly. You know, whatever, that’s, that’s a different issue. But it does seem weird to me. Like, stay aware of the context, right? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So…Nonny, thank you for this illustrative tale, I think that whatever branching path that you had taken, whether it was delete outright, or respond and then block, you’re correct. I mean obviously if that happened to me I would have responded. [FK laughs] I say this. I say it in the AU version you just delete it, but I absolutely would’ve, like…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Because I would’ve wanted everyone else in the comments to see that I was right. [laughs]
FK: Yeah, that sounds like you, Elizabeth. [ELM laughs] All right, I think we should take a quick break, and then we should get on to the main part of the episode!
ELM: Uh, OK, let’s do it!
FK: Kay.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back! And you know what that means, it’s time to talk about Patreon!
ELM: That is what that means. Patreon.com/fansplaining.
FK: Mmm hmmm.
ELM: We have a special episode in the works—we actually have two in the docket, is that what that means?
FK: In the planning stages/execution stages.
ELM: In the dugout? First up is the next in our “Tropefest” series, it’s about arranged marriage. I have been reading some arranged marriage fic in preparation, I’m gonna tell you right now, there’s not a lot of arranged marriage fic in my fandom.
FK: [laughs] I need to, I need to brush up, so I’m doin’ that as we speak.
ELM: OK, great! I’m glad I, I’m glad you’re inspired.
FK: Uh huh.
ELM: You’re gonna have some recs, you’re gonna come clean about the things you love in this beloved trope…
FK: I don’t know if I’m gonna have recs, but I’ll definitely have…thought about the trope again.
ELM: [overlapping] Examples.
FK: Yeah, I’ll have examples. Yeah. Recs may be a strong word. [both laugh]
ELM: So that’ll be in the “Tropefest” series—of course, we have I think something like 10 other current “Tropefest” episodes, huge range of tropes: enemies to lovers, trapped together, found family, friendship was our most recent one, which sparked some interesting discussions about gen fic and ace stuff and all this, so. Et cetera. And then the thing we’re gonna do after that, when I finally start rewatching it, is we’re going to be talking about 2000s era network television masterpiece House M.D.
FK: Yeah, and you know what? I’ve already rewatched the entire thing, and I am raring to go.
ELM: Jesus Christ, do you have a social life? What are you doing?
FK: No! [ELM laughs] I haven’t. I haven’t been having a social life, because I’ve been gestating! What I’m doing is gestating.
ELM: You, how many episodes are there?
FK: A lot.
ELM: I’m gonna look it up.
FK: I was—OK, I was finishing a, finishing a quilt, a hand-quilted quilt, and House M.D. is a great thing to watch while you’re hand-quilting.
ELM: Flourish…I’d like you to take a guess at how many episodes there are, don’t look it up!
FK: 170?
ELM: Wow, you were so close! 17—
FK: That’s because the last episode is a documentary and they talk about, like, how they were in 170—I think 177 episodes?
ELM: It’s 177.
FK: I remembered it! [laughs]
ELM: Um, how long do we think they are? 42 minutes each?
FK: Yeah, I watched a lot of TV.
ELM: Um, so that’s 7,434 minutes…uh…I think, of House in the last month. [FK laughs] That’s a lot of minutes.
FK: I may have been watching it like it was my full time job. [both laugh] I had COVID. [ELM laughs] And then I was gestating. It was a lot of—anyway, I’m excited to talk about this, I’d never seen the finale, and let me tell you.
ELM: [overlapping] What?!
FK: It is something—yeah, I never saw the finale, I didn’t finish watching it.
ELM: The finale is, truly, truly redeems some of the not great bits in the last few seasons.
FK: [overlapping] I know! I had only watched—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I only watched it through, like, the first season where Thirteen shows up. And then like, seen bits and pieces of the later ones. But I’d never seen it all the way through.
ELM: I—it’s one of many shows where I feel this way, where it’s like, oh, you really pulled it back together for the end.
FK: [overlapping] They stuck the landing!
ELM: Yeah, yeah. It’s like…I remember, there’s a couple seasons there towards the end where it’s just like, “What happened here? Like, why?” [laughs]
FK: It was better than I remembered it, and I’m interested in finding out whether you also think that. So we’ll talk about that in the special episode!
ELM: I mean, I don’t have 7,000 minutes to watch this in a month, so I don’t know how much I’m gonna watch before we do this. But. Certainly I can watch…
FK: [laughs, overlapping] That’s OK, you obviously watched it more than I did when it was on, so we’ll be fine.
ELM: I just, I just watched every episode in the past, but it was also like, in 2009.
FK: That’s great. This is gonna be a great start. OK. So, you should, in other words, to get back to the point, you should give money to our Patreon so you can listen to this, so that you can receive a cute little pin, Tiny Zines that we make, access to all of our special episodes…uh, you can do that at patreon.com/fansplaining.
And if you don’t have money, or don’t wanna give us your money, you can still help us out by spreading the word about the podcast, spreading the word about our full transcripts, and by writing in! Giving us comments, questions, ideas for episodes, this is how we develop a lot of what we’re gonna do in the podcast. So you can write in at fansplaining at gmail.com; you can use our website, fansplaining.com, there is a little form that you can fill out; you can send us an ask on Tumblr, anon is on, that’s fansplaining.tumblr.com; and we are Fansplaining across many, many social platforms, including X, as long as it exists.
ELM: Why would you call that one out and not say the names of the other ones?
FK: Well, I already said Tumblr. Bluesky, Instagram.
ELM: [overlapping] Insta—Instagram.
FK: Yeah. All right. Is that good? Have we done with Patreon?
ELM: Yeah. That’s good.
FK: OK. In that case…what is this contract that you think exists, this social contract between fans and creators?
ELM: All right.
FK: Tell me about this, because you’re the one who named this episode, and I’m into the name, but I want you to explain.
ELM: Sure. So, we have, uh, hinted at this. Not even hinted, we’ve lightly discussed it in some of our, like, trend episodes, you know, whether it’s the anniversary one or the year in review one. And I think it’s something that we’ve seen over the last few years.
Back in the day, obviously there were risks in getting invest—risks, whatever, it’s not like you’re risking anything like your livelihood or your life or something, right, but you know—there was an emotional risk in getting invested in any television show. Like, setting aside movies, which prior to the past two decades, were—except for Star Wars or whatever—were unlikely to be this multi-year, multi-decade franchise kinda situation, right? So like, if you were feeling fannish about a movie, it may have just been that.
But you know, if you were a fan of a television show, say Buffy the Vampire Slayer, right? You obviously lived with the risk that it would be canceled at the end of every season.
FK: Right.
ELM: And you did have some investment in, in the ratings.
FK: Oh, absolutely. Mmm hmmm.
ELM: [overlapping] Like, I certainly looked at the ratings for Buffy when it was on, I’m sure you looked at that for X-Files. And sometimes it would be canceled, and you would feel really bummed out. Maybe, you know, you’d organize a letter-writing campaign to be like, “No, we want it!” And it’s like…
FK: Yeah, you’d see that it got moved to the Friday night death slot and you’d be like, “Oh no!” [laughs]
ELM: Yeah! Right. So there would be some knowledge, fans would have some knowledge and some investment in the business of the television industry, right? But for the most part, if they were making a season of it, you’d know that you were getting x number of episodes, it would be coming out…
FK: Twenty-something episodes!
ELM: 22 probably, you know? Maybe less, depending on what, what network it was on.
FK: Maybe more, sometimes.
ELM: Sure! But maybe 10 on an HBO show, you know? But you would understand that you’re getting a block of them, and you’d understand the time in which that was coming. Again, not just network, which had a really regular schedule—HBO stuff came at all times, right, but you knew.
FK: Right, and I do think that there was a lot more like, of the rhythm of the network in the ’90s, like in the late ’90s, it was like, you knew that in the summer you were not gonna have your show, and you knew that it would start in the fall, there was, like—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Seasons meant—it’s funny now to think of like, talking about seasons, because seasons back then meant a literal season.
ELM: Right. Right.
FK: You know? Like, the season we’re talking about is the fall, when we watched all these new shows. [both laugh] And the summer was the season in which you watched reruns!
ELM: Right, right, exactly. So, all right. All that’s to say, I’m not gonna sit here and say some of what’s going on right now is, like, totally disconnected from what came before. Right? Because obviously shows got canceled. But we are, what, a decade into streaming at this point, now? Like when did Netflix really start kicking off with original programming? Probably almost a decade, at this point.
FK: No we’re definitely, we’re definitely a decade into streaming at this point. Yeah, like, because the sort of, the first show that I really knew about that did a total—I mean, to me streaming is related also to like, the attempts to change the way that you dropped seasons.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And for me, like, East Los High, the show that I worked on, was the first show that I knew of that dropped all of the episodes at once. I’m sure there were other ones before it, but it was very early, it was like, one of the—
ELM: What year was that, 2014?
FK: Yeah, and it was, it was like, I think it was actually the first Hulu original show.
ELM: Gotcha.
FK: Yeah, like, 2014. So we’re 10 years…
ELM: Orange is the New Black is around 2015 I wanna say, right around that time for Netflix, right?
FK: [overlapping] Right, and so there was some original programming before that, but like, that was sort of the moment that it really kicked off, I feel like.
ELM: Yeah, that’s about a decade ago.
FK: Yep.
ELM: So like, we’re seeing…you know, a huge amount of movement, saturating the market, now there’s this big retraction, blah blah blah. But the thing that we’re seeing from fans—from audiences in general—is absolutely no logic whatsoever, right? [FK laughs] Like, I bring up the way it used to be to say, “Oh, it could be canceled,” right, if the ratings were low, or honestly it could be canceled for other reasons, like if the star didn’t wanna renew their contract, or if everyone hated everyone and the network was like, “We’re done with this,” you know? Obviously they wouldn’t do that if it was a huge success, because they love money. Right?
FK: Right. But!
ELM: But. But! There were other reasons, right? Whereas, you know…we have this flooding the zone, and then the way that shows are canceled, very unceremoniously, seemingly taking all the creators, the people making the shows, by surprise, you know?
FK: Not just, not just seemingly, either. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, no!
FK: Like, when I think about the way that Star Trek: Discovery was canceled, and they had actually already shot the season finale, under the assumption they were getting another season, because everybody thought they were, and then they were like, “Oops, sorry, but we’ll let you do some pickups [laughing] so that you can fix the loose ends.” It was like, oh, thanks guys, I guess.
ELM: [overlapping] Cool.
FK: Cool.
ELM: Right, right. So yeah, you have these, these shows being deleted when they’ve already, they’ve already been in production, or finished production, you know? Renewals being retracted, you have…just utter chaos, and the idea that, like, any show, no matter how popular they say it is… Oh also, sorry, then you have these extraordinarily opaque numbers.
FK: Yes.
ELM: You have Netflix claiming that everyone and their mother watched a show 150,000 times.
FK: Right, there’s no way, there’s no way—in the ’90s you could look at the, you could look at the ratings of the show as it would be published, you could see what the ratings were like.
ELM: Right.
FK: And so you could tell that this season was not doing well, and so by the time you were at like, episode 10, the midway point of the season, you’d be like, “Well we’re probably not getting renewed.” You know? [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Right. Right.
FK: [overlapping] And then you had some time to process that information, to try and get all your friends to watch it, to inevitably fail… [both laugh]
ELM: [overlapping] To get all your friends sad about it…
FK: [overlapping] To have it be canceled and then like, maybe picked up by a lesser network, you know? It went to TNT, right? [both laugh]
ELM: Right. Whereas now, as I’m sure everyone listening to this is aware, and has maybe had personal experience with, maybe it’s not your fandom show but like, a show you liked, just randomly canceled, right? And absolutely no explanations, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And this kind of, extreme black box, you have creators going on the record saying “We weren’t actually given any real numbers, we were given no real explanation.” Like, I’ve mentioned before, that famous scene from Barry where the female protagonist’s show gets canceled like, 12 hours after it premieres.
FK: [laughs] Yes.
ELM: And that the head of the streamer is like, “Well, the algorithm told us.”
FK: Right.
ELM: And she’s like, “What does that mean?” and they’re like, “Mmm, we don’t question it.” You know?
FK: And there’s no attempt to save the shows either, in this process, right? Like, when I think about…you know, thinking about again, shows of the ’90s and even the early 2000s, I think about like…sorry I’m using a lot of Star Trek examples.
ELM: It’s fine.
FK: I’m thinking about Voyager, where the show’s going along, and they’re like, “Well, what if we introduce a new character who’s really sexy, and see if this can save the show?” [both laugh] And that’s how we got Seven of Nine, a beloved character, right? And I mean, obviously there’s a lot of issues with that. The catsuit was…not my favorite thing, but—
ELM: All right, I allowed you this example, but when you start to go down a Star Trek rabbit hole I’m gonna stop you.
FK: No that’s OK, all I was gonna say is that there’s a lot of issues with this example, but leaving aside the, you know…casual misogyny and various other issues of the way that happened, there was an attempt, right? They were like, “The ratings are going down, can we try and do something to make it appeal to more people?” And that’s just not a conversation that happens now, in cancellations, at all.
ELM: Well, I mean, drill down to the actual root of that, right? Networks made money by selling advertisements. If viewership is dropping, then they get less high—you know, they get lower-quality advertisers, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: They’re not gonna get the giant corporations, they’re not gonna get Coca Cola, and that means less money for them. And so it’s extraordinarily—again, there were obviously other factors involved in every one of these shows, whether it’s personalities or et cetera et cetera. But if they see the numbers going down, they’re incentivized to raise them so they can make more money from advertising. The business model of streamers is utterly disconnected from that, and actually not connected to reality, because it’s the logic of Silicon Valley, which is…you know, infinite growth without profit, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: To show potential that you speculate on from investors, which is entirely not based in any material reality.
FK: Right.
ELM: Right? And so like, there’s no incentive to put out another season of A League of Our Own with even sexier ladies, you know? [FK laughs] Because what is that gonna achieve? Because it’s clear that the number of subscribers isn’t actually a metric that means anything monetarily to these companies, especially ones working at that scale. Like, it’s a, it’s only a fraction of the money that…
FK: Right.
ELM: The Amazon example in particular is interesting to me, they were talking about how they’re introducing ads to the regular product now? And they were—and the TV critic on NPR was discussing it, and he was like, they asked him about the other streamers, and he was like, “Well honestly it’s not really relevant, because Amazon, it’s packaged in with your Prime membership—”
FK: Right!
ELM: “—and we really don’t have any indication of whether people are getting this because they wanna watch any of these shows, or if they want next-day delivery,” you know?
FK: [overlapping] A Prime membership and then they happen to have this, yeah.
ELM: Yeah, right? And so obviously Amazon internally knows how many people are watching each individual thing, but is that even relevant to the money they are making from…you know what I mean? It’s so disconnected, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know what I mean?
FK: Well, I think the other thing, as you’ve been talking, that I’ve realized, is from a fan perspective—like, a perspective of a person who’s just like, “I’m just watching this and getting invested in these shows”—I think there’s something else that’s also making it actually even more distressing when shows canceled? Which is the turn from semi-serialized or episodic TV into purely narrative arc—you know, the entire season is, like, a story, and the entire show is going to be a story. Right?
That kind of storytelling really shifts your experience when a show is canceled canceled. Because in the past, you know, I mean I’m thinking about, again, late ’90s, we’re talking about this era where you have…there’s like a light serialization, there’s an overriding story arc that’s happening, but most of the episodes are kind of slice-of-life things that are happening, right? Like, I mean early seasons of Supernatural, it’s like, there’s a monster of the week, and then oh yeah, we’re wondering whether they’re ever going to find—will they ever find what they’re looking for?
ELM: Sure. I mean, you don’t even have to come up with a fannish example, look at, like, I don’t know…any procedural.
FK: Exactly!
ELM: Or look at, like, ER, which I loved, you know? There’s arcs! But it, it’s about each individual episode, right?
FK: Right, exactly. So when a show like that is canceled, number one, it’s fairly easy to write a finale that wraps up the sort of…
ELM: Sure.
FK: Lingering arc bits, because those things are not, it’s not, [laughs] you know, there’s not 20 characters each having an important thing, it’s like, there’s one question, you know? Will…I don’t know…will Olivia Benson ever get together with—OK, that hasn’t ended yet, but you know what I mean.
ELM: I know…somehow.
FK: [overlapping] There’s like, one or two questions that are there. And so it’s easier to wrap up in a way that feels satisfying. And also, you’re not necessarily watching it for the arcs, right? Like, you’re doing that to some extent, but you can enjoy what was there without having all of those questions ultimately answered. Now, when something is written and then canceled, they’re always leaving these big questions unanswered.
ELM: Sure.
FK: Right? Even as people have shifted to try to not have situations like The OA, where, [laughs] you get to the end and you’re like, “Really? Is that it? It’s literally in the middle of the story and we’re just never getting any more?” Even so, you can’t help it because writers are incentivized to make people want to see the next season, which means that they’re going to leave a bunch of stuff undone, and leave a bunch of, you know, story questions, and, and—
ELM: Sure.
FK: So it feels intensely frustrating, it’s like you’re in the middle of a novel, or you’re in the middle of a trilogy and you’ve only gotten the first two books, where’s the third one? It’s never coming!
ELM: Not even—in that case it was like, the equivalent of the first book of a trilogy, right?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: Two seasons out of five.
FK: That’s right.
ELM: And yeah, honestly, I would never recommend The OA to anyone.
FK: Not because it’s not good, but because it’s two seasons out of five, and what the hell? Yeah.
ELM: That’s truly, I actually say that, and when I mention it I say, “I really really like that show, and sadly, I wouldn’t recommend it to you because it’s, it’s left so in the middle of what’s clearly…”
FK: It’s horrifying. [both laugh] I am still angry.
ELM: [overlapping] You know? I mean, whatever, maybe—maybe people get stuff out of it, but I wouldn’t actively sign up for that, right? And again, bringing it to the contract idea, right, like, there’s an individual level, of you say—I’ve seen so many people in the last few years say, “I don’t wanna start that.” You know? Like, “I can’t get invested in something just to know they’re gonna yank the rug out from under me.” Or we’ve, we’ve discussed, when Interview With the Vampire came out, and they announced before we had even seen it that it had been renewed.
FK: [laughs] Yes!
ELM: And I was like, “Why are they doing this?” and you were like, “I think they’re trying to signal that this thing has legs.” Because you told me you thought it was because the reviews had come out, and they were so good. Like the embargo lifted.
FK: [overlapping] I mean I think it’s both, right?
ELM: Right.
FK: I think that the reviews came out and they were really good, and then they were like, you know what? Yeah. [laughs]
ELM: Right, right. And so that’s a signal to me, you know? And you see this all the time, they’re doing this a lot for stuff that is a critical success.
FK: Yep.
ELM: You know, like, “Don’t worry, there’s gonna be more of this, so you should sign up,” right? But most shows don’t get that, and so you say, like, “Why should I get invested in that?” And it’s not just a fan thing. I see this from ordinary people just talking about this online. But certainly more so for a fan thing, because fans need even more space to get invested.
But to the point about, even beyond the individual fan, me saying I wouldn’t recommend The OA to someone, so much of fandom is about word of mouth, and am I gonna recommend to a friend, “Oh, like, there’s one season, and they opened up so many avenues, and I can’t wait to see what happens next. It’s on Max though, so, you know, buyer beware!” [FK laughs] Right? “We’ll see what happens!” I’m much less likely to recommend something to someone—I’m far more likely to recommend a show that is completed.
FK: Right.
ELM: Because I know that it finishes—and if it has completed and it wasn’t, they didn’t get all the seasons they wanted, I could at least say, “Well, they found a way to end it,” et cetera, yeah.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, “Prepare yourself,” yeah yeah.
ELM: Yeah, yeah. So. And that seems very antithetical to television, television is this kind of ongoing story, it is one that you kind of sit with for years, like, it seems like an insult to the medium, [FK laughs] you know what I mean? And then, pair that with fans having shorter and shorter fandom attention spans, right, and it’s like…no one wants to get invested, no one is able to spend much time in places before the show is canceled.
FK: Right.
ELM: And there’s so much stuff that it just feels overwhelming, so there’s not even any way to build a momentum or hang on to stuff, you know what I mean?
FK: I definitely do, and I’m gonna throw in one more thing, which is I think that the other part of this that has led to the moment that we’re in is—[laughs] something that I feel like I was implicated in, making, you know, making the trend happen to some extent—which is having showrunners be so much more available and in conversation with fandom, and talk about their process, and talk about their hopes, and talk about what the thing is. And it really feels like when you’re talking with a showrunner on X, or you know, [laughs] I mean, or wherever you’re getting your information from them, whether that’s a lot of behind-the-scenes content that’s being produced for you where you get to see this, or if they’re going to a con, whatever. It feels like you’re in a relationship with them, and they’re telling you a story. And they’re promising you that they’re gonna keep telling you this story.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And/or, they’re hoping that you and they will get to pursue this story, and that the Big Bad doesn’t come down [laughing] and cancel it on you, right? Sometimes it’s one, sometimes it’s the other, depending on the way that they’ve, like, sort of pitched their relationship to the fans.
ELM: Right.
FK: But it’s a really different relationship to the creators of that show than you had…I think, even in the ’90s and the shows where there was the most interaction, right?
ELM: [overlapping] A hundred percent, yes.
FK: [overlapping] I’m thinking back to Buffy and Joss Whedon being on the forums, and thinking back to The X-Files when Chris Carter and the various writers were all quite interactive with people online. Even then, there was not the same…almost packaged way of, like, interacting with fans. [laughs] You know?
ELM: Mmm. Mmm hmmm.
FK: I’m not saying that some of these notes weren’t hit, but now it feels like you’ve got a show, it’s likely to be a hit with fans, so the creator needs to get online, needs to do these particular things. I have advised people to do these things. [laughs] But that leads further to that sense of betrayal, and/or horror [laughing] when this thing is canceled, right?
ELM: Yeah, that’s really interesting, because I feel like…I mean, it’s a little apples and oranges I guess, to think about it, but it’s like… In a ’90s-era fandom, 2000s even, that kind of inherent, like, fandom was about the oppositional relationship with the showrunner. The like, you know, depending on what flavor of fandom you were in, right, more oppositional than others, right?
FK: [laughs] Yeah, yeah.
ELM: I think for a more affirmational side it might’ve been like, your dad who you’re mad at all the time, right? And like, maybe for this—
FK: [overlapping] I think that, I think that your dad who you’re mad at all the time is actually a great… [both laugh]
ELM: You know? It’s like, “Why does he keep grounding me, oh my God, I hate it when he does these things,” and then you get farther away from that and an even more transformative side and it’s like, “Fuck these people,” you know? [FK laughs] It’s like they’re the government, and you’re like, “I guess I live in this country, but I fuckin’ hate my representatives,” right? And it’s like, well OK, you could move, [FK laughs] but also, sure. And I feel like no one was just vibin’ with the—no one was like, “I love everything they do.” Because fandom is about kind of lovingly complaining about these things. You know what I mean? You like some stuff, but…
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, yeah, even the people who were the most into it were still like, “I don’t know about this choice…” you know? [laughs] Yeah.
ELM: Yeah, yeah. You’d find things to deconstruct or whatever. I think, I absolutely agree with you that what you’re describing has happened over the last decade and a half, and I think it’s paired with…you know, showrunners a) coming from more diverse backgrounds.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And b) like, [laughs] honestly, getting more woke. I don’t know, maybe there’s a less stupid way I could say that, but like…you know, not saying, in response to the idea of a slash ship, not being like “LOL” or like, “Ew, gross” or something, but being like, “We love that. We love fans. We love their passion. That’s such interesting art.” Running the spectrum from that to like, “I’m reading your fic.” [FK laughs] You know? “Cool.”
FK: [laughing, overlapping] Flower crown me, baby! [both laugh]
ELM: And so then you have all of these, all these showrunners in particular, yeah, especially showrunners I think, not just the actors, kind of being in simpatico with fans. And so when the shows get canceled, then they do have the fans on their side. They say, “We’re just as upset as you. We’re all in this together.” And it’s like, that’s a little bit like…yeah, not really. [FK laughs] Everyone [laughing] has different stakes in this.
FK: And different levels of knowledge about what’s going on, and understanding things right…
ELM: [overlapping] Right, exactly.
FK: And there has always been fan speculation about what’s happening, but I feel like it is at a fever pitch, because it seems transparent, just enough, that it feels more than ever like you know what’s going on with that showrunner and what they’re thinking, and like, ya don’t. [laughs]
ELM: You say this, but I once read a, you know, 30,000-word meta about a white paper that was written at the BBC in 2009.
FK: Exactly! [laughs]
ELM: To be clear, I did not actually read that meta, I just, I just looked at it.
FK: Wait, this is in reference to…the…
ELM: It’s one of the founding texts of the Johnlock Conspiracy.
FK: Yeah, exactly.
ELM: [overlapping] Something I’m willing to say on the air in 2024.
FK: Right, which, you know…I mean, at the time, felt so out there, but like, we’re seeing conspiracies shoot up around all sorts of stuff. I mean, Our Flag Means Death has been developing its own conspiracy people.
ELM: Well, you know, interestingly, some of them cite their experiences in TJLC as foundational for, like, shaping their worldview about how television decisions are made. You know, that’s interesting, too, the kind of idea that you can have a, a granddaddy [laughs] conspiracy theory that, like, kind of shaped generations of thinking at this point, you know? In television generations, we’re several on from Sherlock now, right? And…
FK: I can well imagine that if I were a preteen and I read the Johnlock Conspiracy stuff, even if I didn’t really believe all of the stuff in it, I could well have misconceptions about the way that people…choose to do things.
ELM: I love that you just said “preteen” as though the majority of people who were reading that were not like…adults.
FK: No no no, I know they were, but I’m imagining, I’m imagining people now who—like, I’m imagining having…like, I’m thinking about the ways that what I read in X-Files fandom shaped my understanding of what TV was later.
ELM: Sure.
FK: And some of which I had to unlearn when I was in the industry, and then what that would be like if my first encounter with this had been TJLC or whatever, right? Like, it would be a different, a different way of thinking about this. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, sure. I mean, that also makes me [laughing] think about James Somerton, our favorite YouTuber.
FK: [laughs] OK, tell me more.
ELM: Well you know, it makes me think about this kind of idea that we talked about in that episode, which was a few episodes ago—James Somerton, if you didn’t hear that one, he’s a YouTuber who had a series of takedowns because he was a massive plagiarist and also a fabulist and enormous liar. [FK laughs] His videos were about, you know, queer history, particularly gay male history, and they’re full of lies, and a lot of them had these kind of…as, as someone we referenced in that episode had said, “jazzing up history” element to it, right?
FK: Yeah, truthiness. Feels true!
ELM: [overlapping] Truthiness…but you know, the kind of idea of, like, homophobia is real, but not the way you’re describing it, right?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: And I think there’s an element of…with some of these television show conspiracy theories, not just TV but it tends to be mostly in TV, there’s a lot going wrong. And at the, on the outside it can look like this, like this industry seems deeply broken. [FK laughs] But, is it broken in the way that you think it is?
FK: Right! [laughs]
ELM: [laughing] In this organized, strategically planned way?
FK: I think it may be broken in a much dumber way. [both laugh]
ELM: Right. I, I feel like, yeah, I can understand this feels like, just like in the broader world, where things seem chaotic and stupid, I understand why conspiracy theories are running rampant. Like wildfire. They’re really goin’ hog wild. They have been for the better part of the last decade. Because the world is like, crumbling, right, you know? And institutions that had seemed stable are obviously collapsing. It’s very easy to draw parallels between that and the state of, the disrupted state of the television industry, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And so it feels like a very ripe time, because it seems like there’s no order. There’s no rhyme nor reason for the way these things, these decisions are getting made. And yeah, because we used to be able to look at the ratings, and say, “I understand that these have declined, and I understand what they’re gonna do.” And maybe the ratings—maybe there’s some subjectivity there, they didn’t like a show, and it didn’t have the worst ratings, but they were like, “No more.”
FK: Right.
ELM: But for the most part, it was much more transparent and much more transactional, and now…I don’t know what’s going on, right?
FK: Right. And, and, we didn’t have the same level of parasocial relationship with all of the people making the show, you know? I mean, you—again, obviously people did have some level of care and understanding of, like, all of the, the writers or the showrunner or whatever, but not anywhere near to the degree that people do now, right? [laughs]
ELM: Well, I mean, even take the showrunner idea into account, right? You know, the…obviously Joss Whedon, very important in the development of the idea of a showrunner, and the idea that you had this like, auteur kind of, even though it’s absurd, all the good parts of Buffy were obviously the senior female writing staff, you know? [FK laughs] But like, the idea of a showrunner as a director is definitely a relatively recent phenomenon, right?
FK: Right, right, the way that we used to talk about Chris Carter in X-Files fandom, yeah, he was more important than any of the other writers, but it wasn’t like a showrunner concept today.
ELM: Right. And obviously that’s not, you know, I feel like Supernatural’s always interesting to me because it did keep, the entire time, a more classic, episodic writers’ room. Obviously they’ll talk about, like, Kripke, or…
FK: No no, but it was all X-Files—like, it was X-Files alumni, and they kept it, they kept it real the whole time. [laughs]
ELM: But like, I, I mean I don’t, I don’t see tons of Supernatural discourse on my blog because I don’t follow people who are constantly talking about it, but obviously we’re saturated in it and I see a lot of it, and people seem to talk more about “the writers,” right?
FK: That’s right.
ELM: It’s less about like, oh, this one man made one decision.
FK: Precisely, it was always—I think that one aspect of that has to do with, I mean remember how long Supernatural ran, the fandom around it crystallized initially pre-Twitter. So it was before any of that, like, deep parasocial relationship stuff had really started going. Because I do pin that to Twitter.
ELM: Sure.
FK: So, you know, I mean obviously those people who got into Supernatural later, you know, think of it as something that was happening on all of these social platforms, but when I started watching Supernatural, when it started, Facebook was not yet open to the entire public.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: You know, like… [laughs] I had just gotten a Facebook account, and I was at the second round of universities that got it. So it was a completely different universe, and I think that the norms of the way that people were talking about the writing staff and all of this stuff were really established in that era, and there were a lot of hangover aspects of that that continued all the way through its many, many seasons, right down to the con culture there. Like, by the time Supernatural ended, the kinds of conventions that Supernatural was holding were so unusual compared to all other fandoms.
ELM: Yeah, that’s true.
FK: But if you look at it in the context of, like, oh yeah, these were all people who wrote on The X-Files in the ’90s, and it’s like the early mid-2000s and they’re starting Supernatural, of course it’s normative for them to have a bunch of show-specific cons, they’re all looking at like, X-Files and Star Trek and, you know? Buffy—
ELM: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
FK: All of these things which had these show-specific little cons. And they just held on to it. So it was a dinosaur. [laughs]
ELM: Sure, I mean also it was on the air for a very long time, and it didn’t have the same, you know, head writer.
FK: Right.
ELM: There were eras, and different—like, it was a true writers’ room in that sense.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: And I think, you know, if we look at…I think that there was a lot of education done last year by writers, including our friend Javi when he came on to strikesplain, about how…
FK: Whoo, Javi!
ELM: [laughs] That’s right, cheerin’ for Javi! You know, about how the way that writers’ rooms work now is so utterly changed, and a lot of the, a lot of that is, you know, a showrunner and maybe a few writers, and the showrunner has to wind up doing a lot of the work, you know what I mean? Like just the, the actual logistics of the way that shows are made makes it much more falling on the shoulders of a showrunner.
FK: Right.
ELM: In a bad way, it seems like, because no one seems to enjoy that, [FK laughs] even the showrunners. You’d think they would want more power, but in fact it’s just, like, more work for them, and it’s more tedious, it seems like.
FK: Right, and more things that they’re not necessarily good at or have not been trained at, but are having to do.
ELM: Yes. [FK laughs] And like, faster, you know? And to what end? So their show can get canceled a quarter of the way through the big idea they had for it or whatever.
FK: Wow, this is all depressing me so much. I, I, [laughs] I just feel like this episode has, to this point, been like…man, we’re in a weird and bad moment.
ELM: Yes. For entertainment media? Absolutely. It’s bad. I mean, you know, I don’t wanna…I mean, is it stretching it too much? No, I don’t think it is, honestly. So we’re recording this after an extremely bad week for the media industry, [FK laughs] I don’t know if you’ve been following the news, but like…
FK: Yes.
ELM: For the context, uh, a few days ago they fired most of Pitchfork, and they said they were gonna absorb the rest of it into GQ, which like, no offense to GQ [FK laughs] but that is not the same thing…
FK: Nope. Sports Illustrated, they fired everyone…
ELM: And then yesterday they fired almost everyone at Sports Illustrated, and it seems like Sports Illustrated is basically dead as a publication. You know, I can give you 8,000 other examples, but like, in the media, private equity and venture capitalists are buying, sweeping through and basically strip-mining these organizations, and like, selling off the spare parts, right? You know? They don’t care. They don’t think that like, “Oh no, there’s not gonna be a media in 15 years.”
FK: No, why would they care? They don’t care.
ELM: They literally don’t care, right? And it’s about extreme, quick gains, and absolutely you can see a version of this in the visual entertainment media industry. You know?
FK: Yes.
ELM: Who cares? Who cares if you just shove a bunch of money, make a ton of stuff, get a bunch of subscribers all at once, and then just continue to nickel and dime them and pull all the rug out from under them until finally they give up and they walk away defeated.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: They don’t care about television, obviously. They don’t care about films. David Zaslav clearly does not like these mediums.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I refuse to believe that man likes movies. [FK laughs] Like, I don’t think he just goes to the movies for pleasure.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I don’t get that sense from him, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And you know, you have these famous directors, desperately trying to save basic parts of their industry, because they have the clout to do that, but no one else even has the ability to do that.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And like, to what end? So that these can be like, three mega-corporations that produce nothing but reality television in 20 years? I don’t know, Flourish, I don’t know! I made it worse, right? Did I make you more sad than five minutes ago?
FK: Yeah, you did! [ELM laughs] You really did. You, you know what you actually did, you made me feel glad that I left the entertainment industry, and am now doing something totally different so I don’t have to suffer through this moment in my work as well as my personal life.
ELM: Yeah, but you do have to suffer through it in your personal life. Right?
FK: I know! Fifty percent less pain. Good job me.
ELM: I mean, I don’t know what to make of this, you know? And like…
FK: I don’t either, and I don’t know what to make of it with regard to fandom. Because fan culture exists in response—not only in response, but in response to these media. So as the media disintegrate, fan culture has to also change, in a…in ways that maybe I’m, maybe I’m a dinosaur. Maybe I’m not prepared for.
ELM: I don’t think that most fans are prepared for it! That’s not, that’s what I see when I am out and about on the internet—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: As I jaunt around the internet, as I do, you know…I see people talking about this, I see a lot of distress, you know? Obviously people are getting their shows canceled. Like, Our Flag Means Death was not gonna last forever.
FK: No.
ELM: But it certainly does seem to be a bit of a rug-pulling situation, because HBO Max, Max I guess, Max, it’s a Max show, like, certainly bragged about how successful it was, right?
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: And now they’re coming back and saying, “Oh, it just didn’t have the numbers, just wasn’t workin’ out, sorry guys, bye, see yaaa,” you know?
FK: Right, it feels like, it just feels wrong, it’s like how can both these things be true?
ELM: And the idea, too, that they would be proud of it, and say, “Look at this gay show we made for you, gays! Here you go! It’s so successful, everyone loves it,” and then kinda flip the switch like that, is very… I don’t know, it feels, obviously it feels cheap. But it just, you know, this isn’t my fandom even remotely, but I have a lot of sympathy for everyone involved.
And I don’t know what’s gonna happen in the next week until we put this out, but I do see them kind of petitioning Warner Bros., and I’m kinda like, I don’t, I don’t know why you would do that. [FK laughs] Because this corporation clearly doesn’t like any of its content, right? I don’t think it’s suddenly gonna have a change of heart. It’s putting, it’s throwing away things that people haven’t even had a chance to get to know yet, or fall in love with, you know?
FK: Right. And there was a golden age of Save Our Show campaigns, and I don’t think that we’re in…like, I believe there could be a good Save Our Show campaign, but I think that before that happens, fans need to identify the levers, and right now we have such, it’s so opaque that we cannot identify the levers that need to be pushed or pulled in order to achieve that, right? The reason that Save Our Show campaigns were successful was that they targeted advertisers.
ELM: Right.
FK: And that is not the case anymore, and I don’t know how…and for a while, you know, people were succeeding in streaming era, talking about, “Well, move to a different streamer and we’re all going to sign up,” and that was working for a while, but that’s also sort of taken away. So…
ELM: Well, yeah, and there was a period where they, the streamers—especially the newer ones—did need content, right? So there was this kind of idea that, like, “Oh, there’d be an existing fanbase that would come over here to this,” and now…
FK: [overlapping] Exactly. Right. That would, that would join our whatever it’s called, Nonsense Pants streamer for this purpose.
ELM: Paracock. Tubvi. I’m just gonna make some up.
FK: [overlapping] Yes, the, you know. And I’ll always be grateful that, like, this is how we got Twin Peaks: The Return, is because Showtime was just like, “Yeah, you know what, it will get people to sign up, and that’s all we care about!” [laughs] Like, all right!
ELM: Sure.
FK: Just give David Lynch a license to be weird, but that moment is over. So, what’s next, I don’t know.
ELM: I mean, yeah, in that example too, for Showtime or something like HBO itself, it’s also like…talking a lot in the beginning about the network model or whatever, but that just seems to totally have destroyed—like, they’ve exploded that too, right? This idea that you would sign up for HBO because you’re like, “This is the best programming on television, this is gonna be the highest quality,” and now Warner Bros. has diluted it so much that it’s like, I don’t even know what… It’s even kind of hard to tell—we’ve talked about this before, but like—it’s hard to tell what kind of show things are now.
FK: Yes it is!
ELM: You know what I mean?
FK: It so is! I get served these ads on Amazon or whatever, and I’m like, “What?” [laughs]
ELM: Is it CW vibes? Is this like AMC vibes? I don’t know, right? And it’s like…I just watched the first episode of an Apple show that’s coming out soon, and I thought it was abysmally bad, and like, from the gloss of it and from Apple, you’d be like, “Oh, they put a lot of money in this, I bet it’s gonna be…uh…oh…no?” [FK laughs] It’s hard to tell, right? Obviously networks have always had misses.
FK: Right.
ELM: But it’s like, I can’t even tell from the level of the—they’re getting movie stars to be in these things, and they’re not good. Or on the flip side, if you just want a CW show and you’re like, “I know what I’m signing up for,” and now you can’t even tell if something is working in that mode or not.
FK: Right. All right. [ELM sighs deeply] Well. I think we probably have to wrap up.
ELM: No, let’s complain a little more about how everything is fundamentally broken and there is no actual fix. Broken contract! Broken contract! [both laugh]
FK: Uh…
ELM: Actually though, contract. Like, let’s, that seems like a good place to kind of lead towards in a wrapping up.
FK: Yeah, you know, OK. I’m gonna propose that one of the ways that any kind of a sort of social ecosystem—which I would say fandoms are, and audiences for shows are, in general, not just fandom—the way that that functions relates to social contracts between people, period.
ELM: Sure.
FK: And the disruption that has happened, as the industry has changed, through new technologies, which have then led to new economic realities and, you know, such business-end upheaval, has effectively broken those contracts repeatedly.
ELM: Yeah!
FK: And just as you think that there’s a new contract that you’ve gotten into, basically, right, like…just as you think, “OK, well, advertising is no longer it, but now we know that it’s eyeballs, and people signing up for the streamer, so that’s how we’re gonna do everything, and that’s the new world in which we’re living,” then that goes away. So there is no contract, it’s not—like, there have been broken contracts enough that at this point we have to acknowledge that there is, there’s no bond of…of expectation between audiences and the thing they’re watching. And that is…so destructive to any kind of, like, building anything.
ELM: Yeah. No, I think that’s exactly right. I mean like—and I’m glad you’ve now embraced my choice of the broken contract as a title—
FK: I always, I always thought it was good, I just wanted you to get into it. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] You embraced it at the beginning. Yeah. Yeah, but I think that’s a very good summation. And it’s kind of like…there’s three parties involved here, right? There is the viewer, the fan. There’s the creative-side creator, and then there’s the, the business people.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And you know, I’m not gonna say the creator side is, like, totally blameless and never aligns with the business people on this stuff, but you know what I mean, there’s plenty of reasons why things’ll get canceled that are totally about them. But I just feel like there are…kind of sacrifices that are made for art to be created, right, and the biggest one is that it’s not free.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And, you know what I mean? And whatever the—whatever the way that that gets paid for. But it has to kind of exist in a balance, because if it was all business-side stuff, then there wouldn’t actually be any art there, right? And they’re already talking about this—to make it even more depressing—they’re saying “If we develop these AI tools, then we’re not even gonna have a need for scripted television, because you can just be in the story and it could be totally personalized, you could just be a character, and talk to, be in your favorite movie that already exists because you’re a dummy and you only wanna see things that you already know, because we think you’re that basic.” Right? We talked about it with Comic-Con, this idea that they represented the future where there was only a fan and the corporation.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And they got rid of everyone in between.
FK: Yup.
ELM: And like, the deal that we make to get this stuff is the kind of idea of, “Oh, I’ll be a subscriber. Oh, I’ll watch your ad. Oh, I understand this is not free.” And exactly what you were saying, now I can’t even give you my money? [FK laughs] To keep making this show? We’re all here to give you the money, you know? There was a brief period, I think 10 years ago, people thought that could literally be it, “Oh, we could do Kickstarter to bring back…”
FK: Yes.
ELM: Et cetera, maybe that worked for a couple of things, like the Veronica Mars stuff, but like…extremely rare and no one ever really did that again.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And it’s like… [sighs deeply] Sorry, I have no concluding—I’m just gonna end on a sad sigh.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: It sucks, Flourish! It sucks!
FK: It sucks. I mean, I hope that something’s gonna come out of this, there’s gonna be a new contract, there’s gonna be a new normal, there’s gonna be something that stabilizes. But it’s really hard to see it right now.
ELM: I mean…again, look at the people destroying the media. They don’t care.
FK: Great. Well. This has been… [ELM laughs] your depressing episode of Fansplaining.
ELM: I didn’t actually anticipate this would be so depressing as it is, but we have literally no…there’s nothing actionable.
FK: No.
ELM: There’s nothing, like, oh here’s a possible new paradigm shift… I think we literally both have got nothin’.
FK: I mean like…which is why I’ve just completed watching House MD, [ELM laughs] and now I’m rewatching The X-Files, because I…
ELM: [overlapping] We used to be a real country, when House MD was on the air.
FK: I, yeah, I truly can’t figure out whether it’s because I’m just like, getting elderly and wanting to go back to the things that I am familiar with and like? [laughing]
ELM: No! I think—
FK: Or whether it’s because everything stinks right now! Or both!
ELM: It’s a kinda—yeah, it’s a kind of television that has been done away with too, there was a lot of media coverage of this when Suits was so hot over the summer last year too.
FK: It’s not just us, Gen Z and even the youths are into this stuff, they’re all rewatching too. Or, watching for the first time, the old things.
ELM: Oh, impressed that you just managed to call Gen Z not “the youths,” sorry guys. Sorry…
FK: [overlapping] Oh yeah, they’re not the youths anymore, sorry Gen Z…you’re out.
ELM: Yeah, and you know, also I will say, as a closing note, maybe this is not a hopeful note, but like, it does make me think about YouTube. Which as you know, I know a lot more now than I used to a year ago. [both laugh]
FK: Yeah, it’s true, though.
ELM: And you know, nothing…the only thing that’s stopping people from making more things on YouTube is, like, people’s money and time.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: There’s no, I mean, removing that middle man, and for better or for worse, right, so many great things have been created through the traditional model—whatever you’re, whether we’re talking the ’90s, or prestige, Mad Men-era, or the beginning of streaming, even now—wonderful television is being made, and through that collaborative, iterative process, that really doesn’t happen on YouTube for the most part, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s just more, you know, stripped-down in that way. Like, truly incredible works of art have been made, and also things that are super fun and enjoyable to watch, that have, like, 20 seasons or whatever, it doesn’t all have to be a masterpiece.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And so, I don’t know, maybe like…that’s not a silver lining, that’s just a counterpoint. There’s YouTube also. [both laugh]
FK: All right, great. I’m gonna call it now, because we keep trying to find something good and we can’t find something good.
ELM: Desperately grasping at things like, “Uh…well, Interview With the Vampire is coming back in a few weeks.” [laughs]
FK: That is good, that is good. That, that is a bright spot.
ELM: But then what if they break the contract with me and they don’t give me The Vampire Lestat for season three, I’m gonna cry so much!
FK: [overlapping] Nooooooooo… OK, all right, great. Uh, well…
ELM: I’ll be takin’ out Times Square billboards if that happens. Even if I know there’ll be 0% effectiveness, you’ll see me doin’ that. [laughs]
FK: [overlapping, laughing] Yes, we, we march at dawn. OK. All right. Elizabeth, we’re gonna make the next episode somehow more cheerful, I don’t know how, but we have to, because, yeah.
ELM: [overlapping] Oh, God, I…I don’t know. All right, well, that’s a good mission for us. That’s great.
FK: All right. I will talk to you later.
ELM: OK, bye Flourish.
FK: [laughing] Bye.
[Outro music]