Too Much TV: Hollywood Is Stuck In A Confirmation News Bubble

Here’s everything you need to know about the world of television for Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026:

THE DANGER OF BELIEVING THE THINGS THAT 'EVERYONE KNOWS' IS TRUE
People frequently ask me why I cover the topics I do and what I hope to accomplish with this newsletter.

I've thought a lot about those questions a lot in recent months, and I keep going back to a quote from my earliest writing inspiration, famed rock critic Lester Bangs:

You *cannot* make friends with the rock stars... If you're going to be a true journalist, you know, a rock journalist - first, you never get paid much. But, you will get free records from the record company. Fuckin' nothin' about you that is controversial. God, it's gonna get ugly. And they're gonna buy you drinks, you're gonna meet girls, they're gonna try to fly you places for free, offer you drugs. I know, it sounds great. But, these people are not your friends. You know, these are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of the rock stars and they will *ruin* rock 'n' roll and strangle everything we love about it. Right? And then it just becomes an industry of - cool.

While I'm not that extreme, I think being an outsider who covers a very insular business is what makes my work resonate with readers. It's not that I don't have friends in the industry. I spent a decade as a stand-up, and quite a few old buddies work in the industry. And I have met a number of creatives I consider friends. But I don't live in Hollywood. I live just south of St. Paul, Minnesota, although I have lived in both L.A. and San Francisco in the past.

That means I don't spend much time attending swanky parties. I'm not concerned with burning a bridge and not being invited to some screening or industry function. When I have downtime with friends, we don't discuss deal points or network interference. I think because of my age and experience, I have the requisite amount of knowledge about the industry and spend a lot of time speaking with people off the record in order to stay in the loop. But I have a distance from Hollywood that I believe provide a useful perspective.

And I have a lot of experience working in professions that have undergone massive changes. I was a stand-up until the comedy boom dissipated almost overnight. I was a syndicated talk show host who ran into the buzzsaw of consolidation that was Clear Channel. I've been a journalist at a time when that profession has the average lifespan of a WWI trench breaching soldier.

Knowing what disruption feels like brings a certain clarity to the way I see the industry. I miss the old days, but I also know that you can't stop change. You can only try and shape it in a way that is survivable. That perspective is useful when covering the media industry in 2026.

One of the things that has become increasingly clear to me is that Hollywood is stuck in a number of belief bubbles. People know a certain slice of the business extremely well, and that focus has served them well until now. But with the industry's revenue streams collapsing and reforming in all sorts of ways at the same time the audience is fragmenting across multiple platforms, arguing we should all go back to the way things used to be done is a recipe for unemployment.

This observation was reinforced in me after watching a keynote presentation Evan Shapiro recently gave at the Lisbon StreamTV Conference. (And yes, I wish I could have figured out a way to attend). Shapiro is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning producer, creating series such as Portlandia and This Film Is Not Yet Rated. He was a top media executive at IFC, Sundance Channel, Pivot, NBC, and Seeso. And at the age of 50, he was fired from his own innovation lab at Comcast.

Shapiro is now described as a "thought leader," which means he is one of the people who consults with media companies and attends conferences/industry events where he talks about the future of media. While I don't always agree with him, I am always struck by how his take on the industry is so distinctly different than the one you'll hear from many experienced industry professionals and journalists. There is an entire vision of the industry that exists apart from conventional wisdom, and that fact is wreaking havoc with Hollywood. Which is why one of my goals this year was to attend more industry events that focus on the nuts and bolts of streaming and the entertainment industry. I'll be at StreamTV Denver in June, and I expect to be at more events later this year.

While that example of divergent belief bubbles in Hollywood is pretty clear, here are a couple of other ones I've noticed in recent days. And there are plenty more I could have highlighted:

The Importance Of The Theatrical Window
Another example of this "if you're a hammer, everything you see is a nail" philosophy is the discussion over theatrical windows. The length of theatrical windows was a primary talking point when Netflix was attempting to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. Because when it comes to people in the movie business - and the journalists who cover it - their primary focus for the business is the health of movie theaters.

For instance, David A. Gross's FranchiseRE Movie Industry Newsletter just took an in-depth look at the current state of the theatrical window. And despite his optimism, he is still unhappy that there isn't a larger window being carved out for video-on-demand and digital sales. To be clear, I think David is a very smart guy, and that is the reason why I read his newsletter. But his reasoning for carving out a longer VOD and digital sales window isn't because he's arguing the studios are leaving money on the table. It's because the shorter window arguably has an impact on the theatrical experience.

I see this stance from a lot of movie industry journalists, and few people seem to address what seems to be the primary question of windowing. Why have the studios made these decisions? The reasons are generally attributed to things such as the studio executives being morons, hating the theatrical business, or somehow doing the bidding of tech industry executives, who are believed to, of course, hate Hollywood.

Because they are siloed in their own belief bubble, many studio executives, movie creatives and industry journalists haven't been able to step back and look at the industry through the lens of someone striving to keep their company profitable in the midst of a changing industry. And none of that is helped by a system which offers up little transparency for the digital components of the movie business. Even though those parts are the fastest growing and, in many cases, more reliably profitable.

This is what happens when no outsiders know how much revenue is coming from VOD and digital sales. And from what I've observed, almost no one in Hollywood understands how revenue happens in the streaming world. This leads to a situation where everyone focuses on the theatrical window, and few people seem concerned about the ability of studios to maximize revenue. Even if that leads to a negative impact on theatrical films. An old show business axiom is that tradition and nostalgia doesn't pay the bills, and this is a prime example of that saying.

How YouTube Stations Will Strangle The Future Of Linear Television
Gavin Bridge used to write about the FAST industry for Variety, and he was the head of FAST at Amazon MGM Studios. He now consults on FAST industry issues, and his newsletter The FASTMaster is a must-read for people interested in the FAST business.

He recently wrote about YouTube's Stations project, which hasn't received a lot of attention in Hollywood or the Hollywood trades. But given the size of YouTube's audience, this certainly sounds like a disruptive idea:

A 22-year-old creator in their childhood bedroom will soon be able to launch a 24/7 linear television channel in under three minutes. One click inside YouTube Studio, a curated playlist of existing videos, and YouTube’s servers handle the rest — automatically stitching pre-recorded clips into an endless livestream with live audience chat and seamless CTV rendering. No broadcasting software. No encoder. No carriage negotiation.

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