Mike Schur

I think they genuinely, a lot of them have a genuine affection for Hollywood.

I think it's probably the only reason Hollywood still exists at some level is because these folks still think that it's cool.

And it seems like a wild thing to say, but it is a prerequisite of owning one of these companies.

You have to like it.

You have to think that movies and TV shows are cool and want to genuinely keep making them.

What gets in the way is their sort of ruthless business sense of how can we make everything as efficient as it can possibly be.

And

Hollywood is, by definition, an inefficient business.

You're trying a bunch of stuff and you're throwing a bunch of ideas at the wall.

You never really know what is going to stick.

And the whole world that we're in now of algorithms and predictive AI and all that stuff is their attempt to apply a sort of tech ethos to an industry that is fundamentally not receptive to that ethos because...

No one can predict how, like when The Sopranos came out or Breaking Bad or Mad Men or any of those shows that we now consider to be classics, Seinfeld or Cheers or any of those things, like no one watched them at first and then slowly the creative teams behind them turned them into these wonderful, beloved things.

That's the kind of thing that like ruthlessness and efficiency and AI will...

will drum out of Hollywood because it'll be like, well, the completion rate for the first four episodes of Cheers or Seinfeld or Breaking Bad was very low and we're going to cancel it and move on and try to find something that has a higher completion rate.

That's the fear that we all have.

Yeah, that's the fear.

And that's why that's my personal fear about the world that we're in is because they are, as you put it, like sort of retro engineering, they're going out to the audience and they're gaining data about the audience's viewing habits.

And they are then making things that they think will comport with what they have said they already like.

And the whole point of Hollywood in its history and storytelling in general is that people push the envelope outwards.

And if everything is retro-engineered from what has already been approved, you don't get that.