Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the Hollywood problem being discussed in this episode?
What's up, guys? Welcome to the show and happy Friday. So happy to be here with you guys. Today, I didn't know what we were going to get into, but I keep seeing this theme pop up in the things that I'm witnessing online, things that I'm seeing in media. And I figured today we would check back in on Hollywood and the Hollywood problem, or
the copycat animation, the girl bosses, and the hating your audience. So we're going to get around to a lot of different Hollywood-focused stories and just have a conversation about culture and media. When the culture shifted, that's going to be a big part of today's show. But before we get into all of that, of course, we've got Taylor in Nashville.
What's up, guys? Yeah, I'm looking forward to this. More of a chill topic stream today. And I love talking about, I mean, we talk about this off camera all the time, just like what the heck's going on with modern media and Hollywood and also some nostalgia for days which we know were better. So looking forward to getting into it.
Yeah, it's really interesting because the sort of, I guess, precipice for getting this topic together is a thing that Taylor sent me, actually, on X. And I'll show you that here. Now, it says here, it's difficult to explain to anyone under 30 that we elder millennials and Gen Xers really did live in a melting pot. Diversity wasn't a virtue. It just happened.
Film, TV, music, schoolwork, it was unremarkable. It was just America.
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Chapter 2: How did the cultural landscape of Hollywood change over the years?
We shared life because we shared culture. And of course, there's some examples here. Most notably for me, Saved by the Bell. I loved Saved by the Bell. I was watching that show all the time. And interestingly enough, I'm 25. So I'm Gen Z. So I feel like Gen Z got a good taste of just normal life.
America, normal diversity, what some may call like the golden age or the golden era of media and entertainment, as far as TV broadcasting was concerned and movies. And I remember that being a part of my childhood. Although Taylor, you got a prolonged, I think, experience of those things.
Well, I guess. I mean, I saw that tweet and I really related to the author of the post because he's speaking as an elder millennial. I'm 35. I'm kind of smack dab in the middle of the millennial generation. And I do like the America of my childhood feels very different from the America of today culturally. And it's not completely lost. I don't want to be like super doom.
And I feel like on some level, I have to admit, everyone probably feels that way. Like my grandma felt that way about how she grew up. So, but, but I do feel like there was sort of a different level of cultural change and evolution that was really evident in media and in Hollywood, uh,
Chapter 3: What examples illustrate the shift in Hollywood storytelling?
post maybe we were trying to locate the year before we started the show maybe like around 2013 14 15 somewhere kind of in that range things started to feel just just different and the the diversity you saw on screen you know pre woke times was something that just kind of organically happened it didn't feel like force it didn't feel like there was an agenda didn't feel preachy it just felt like hey we're making uh we're making american stories and
We're putting out things that we believe the audience will respond to. We're appealing to human universals and just kind of reflecting what our culture is, what our values are, what our struggles are. And of course, nothing was perfect. And that's not to say that race relations were totally utopian pre that time. But it just means that there was more of an honesty and more of just...
know sincerity and neutrality about stuff that was coming out of hollywood and i feel like that's definitely shifted for the worse in recent decades yeah and i was thinking when that happened because for me i remember so much diversity in my childhood when i think back on it which is so crazy because when i was a leftist so i was like there's no diversity there's no representation we need to get xyz marginalized group into media we need it now we need to start race swapping all these characters and i think back to my childhood and i'm like okay
I was watching Nickelodeon and Disney. There were shows that were packed full of diversity. I grew up on things like Family Matters, My Wife and Kids, George Lopez, like everything that was happening on Nick at Night. As a child, I was consuming You Had Married with Children and Home Improvement and
Family Matters and all these different shows that if you sit down to think about it long enough, we're packed full of diverse cast members and a lot of representation and a lot of different discussions of just different backgrounds, lifestyles. And we lost that. And I don't know when we lost that, but there was definitely a shift. Taylor says 13, 14, 15, 16. I saw Nerd Roddick recently.
Shout out Nerd Roddick if you don't follow him on YouTube. say that 15-16 was the major shift. A lot of people contribute this to Obama and some of his messaging and what was happening politically around 2008 and then having people go to university and sort of be indoctrinated and then come out of it to enter media and entertainment.
to create this huge pendulum swing in the direction of DEI and representation and diversity.
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Chapter 4: How do remakes and reboots affect audience engagement?
But there truly was a golden era, and I think people are feeling that now more so than ever. Another post that sparked this whole discussion was this by Nicki Minaj. Now, she recently posted the Beauty and the Beat music video, which if you grew up in my time... You know how important Justin Bieber was. And I'm gonna I'm not even embarrassed by this.
Let me just tell you how obsessed I was how much of a believer Okay, Amala was, I would buy every single teen magazine that ever existed anywhere, I would force my mother to buy them because inside these teen magazines, they would do these like full scale posters of Justin Bieber and these layouts of like suits and interviews or whatever. And I shared a room with my little sister.
I did not give a damn. I bought every single magazine that had Justin Bieber in it. I covered my entire wall. So if you walked into my bedroom when I was a kid, I don't know what many of you thought you might be expecting, but it would be Justin Bieber's face on every single part of my wall, despite the fact that my sister did not really care for that boy at all.
It's so, it's so, uh, I don't know. It's, it feels so not you, but it's also like, that's such a, I feel like that's a ubiquitous experience to like preteens, you know, Americans that probably anywhere in the Western world that you, you kind of have these for my generation.
It was, uh, it was like you had the Britney Spears and then you had like the NSYNC or Backstreet Boys or 98 degrees if you wanted to be a little bit extra out there or whatever. But, uh, yeah, I was more of, I was an NSYNC guy. I knew like all the lyrics to the first album and was, uh,
was really into that so people go crazy in their in their teen years bieber by the time he came around i was like too old for bieber and i was like who's this little kid with the swoopy hair and all the girls are fawning over but then when he kind of grew up and came out with that purpose album i was like okay okay i see you a little respect there and i kind of like some of this stuff since so
That's so funny. I feel like it was just a time that everybody had their thing.
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Chapter 5: What criticisms are made about modern female characters in media?
Everybody had their niche. We were all sort of consuming culture collectively. And I'll say it again, there was diversity and there was representation. But, you know, besides on the Justin Bieber thing, we'll move on from that. Nicki Minaj posted this and was talking about this sort of era for music and entertainment.
And she said, we didn't know it then, but this was a golden age for a certain generation. Every song felt this big and magical. The writers, producers, artists, labels, everyone took this genuine, unquantifiable energy for granted. It's a lesson on appreciating what you have before it's gone.
And you know, everybody gets into like their nostalgic phase in every single generation, but it does truly feel a little bit different, especially when we start to juxtapose it with what's coming out of Hollywood, what's coming out of the music industry now. And it seems like it's just slop, right?
Remakes, political agendas, things that are trying to tell you what to think and feel, things that are truly made for the moment that they're made in rather than this sort of transcendent energy that is supposed to stand the test of time. Now, recently, Lisa Kudrow of Friends, which another show that I think a lot of us grew up on, I wasn't really a Friends person.
It was just sort of in the background. It was one of those shows that, you know, if it's on, it's on. You're doing stuff around the house, whatever. But she remarked on sitcoms as they stand today and said, but I'm not drawn to new sitcoms that are multi-camera in front of an audience because I'm not buying it. I don't know if that's just because I've seen too many single camera sitcoms.
I think we need to get back to being able to tell jokes.
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Chapter 6: How is nostalgia influencing current media consumption?
I feel like we've been too afraid to make jokes that make people uncomfortable. Which I was shocked by. And I think a lot of people were shocked by because I think many view a show like Friends as something that would still be palatable in today's generation and with today's audience. And I find myself asking whether or not that's true.
Now, Taylor has more of a frame of reference, I think, for Friends than I do. But going back and thinking about what they spoke about, I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, I know, I guess in some ways against the back, like I wasn't a Friends watcher. I was more I mean, 90s. Gosh, I wasn't really watching sitcoms back then. I did watch a lot of Seinfeld and then like The Office. But Friends did have like, you know, Chandler's dad was like a trans performer or like a crossdressing performer. And he Ross's wife divorced him to be with a woman.
And they had that whole thing. Which is, you know, funny, but I think at the time for like mid-90s, that was a little bit edgy. So maybe that's what she was referring to. And, you know, like the people point to like Joey being this womanizing, promiscuous person and that being something that was just kind of accepted. Yeah.
But it's hard to differentiate between like, were they really pushing the envelope or were they, a lot of people view Friends as kind of like the safe, sanitized, you know, comedy outlet from back then. So it was kind of a strange thing to come from Lisa Kudrow.
But of course, she is right that like the comedy landscape right now, there are PC police out there and there are a lot of, you know, there is an unwillingness to joke about certain things.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of the upcoming film 'Yesteryear'?
Like we just did the Dave Chappelle video this week where reacting to him being NPR was taking him to task years later now over his transgender jokes in a comedy set. And he kind of clapped back on the comedy police. So there's truth to what she's saying, but I don't know that she's the best vessel for it.
Yeah, I just think back and I can think in sort of blips of shows that I watched in the same sort of realm as Friends. So you had Family Matters and Full House, Roseanne. I see some of you commenting in the chat. And there were fat jokes and gay jokes.
and cross-dressing jokes and jokes about masculinity and jokes about women and them being emotional and all these different things that were very casually tossed out on screen. And I don't know that you could recreate a lot of those moments without significant pushback from a modern day audience.
So I don't think you can be as casual about those sorts of things when in reality, that's what people are joking about in their typical lives, like people who are not in this sort of
woke or woke adjacent space i don't know that you could comfortably remake a lot of what friends had to say on a screen today and i think the same can be said for a lot of these other shows in the topics that they got into but that's what sort of balanced them is they could make these i don't mean well if we want to call them harsh or edgy they certainly like
didn't seem to be that much for the time, but then they balanced it with real-life storylines and real-life conflicts that the average American family was thinking about or dealing with, or they looped in the news somehow in the storylines, and it created just... a balance of, I think, comedy and universal truth or universal experience that you just don't see anymore.
And I remember old episodes of Roseanne or Family Matters where they would present a topic, let's say like bullying, police brutality, making fun of fat people, whatever the case may be, and they would truly give you...
two opposing characters on the topic who were well-rounded and who you could buy into either narrative and not feel like you were being judged or told you were a piece of shit for agreeing with one or the other. And while the show would land you in a particular message or theme or like a moral value to take home with you, it didn't ever tell you exactly how you should think or feel.
And it always presented the opposing view as something that was natural to think and feel. And now that's not happening at all, whatsoever.
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Chapter 8: How do the hosts feel about the future of Hollywood content?
It seems like modern, and this is true in and outside of comedy, but just with comedy, for example, there is a certain, there's a right way to think. And there are certain groups that are untouchable and it's punching down to talk about them or joke about them. But then if you're punching up, then we can make as many jokes as we want about that.
And it seems like everything that's being put out now is kind of filtered through that lens. And it just doesn't
ring as true to our experience in real life as people and there's there's so much humor in the differences that naturally manifest themselves uh between men and women between different racial groups and all this stuff and uh it's natural in comedy to you know call out the things that are a little bit taboo to call out or or kind of push the envelope and a little bit
But when you have this overarching, you know, preconceived pre commitment to an orthodoxy or a right way to joke or what's what who's off limits, who's on limits, it just kills the whole comedic environment and the storytelling landscape. And you end up with something that's like this sanitized product that works. It's like a late night TV, we the jokes are only ever in one direction.
I think they did a study on it recently, where It's like 90 something percent of the jokes are anti-conservative, anti-Republican, anti-Trump, whatever. It's only ever one thing over and over again. And it's kind of oriented toward this clapture where you got this audience that's in there and they'll laugh and clap for you because they agree with you because they share this narrow worldview.
But it's not representative of what the country at large finds funny or feels connected to in any way. And I think that that is just indicative. You see it. On these late night shows, you see it in the big films, you see it in sitcoms. And that's, again, just this weird rut we're in that we've gotten into in the last decade or so that no one is happy with.
Yeah, and you see, of course, there are examples of things that fall outside of this, that there are exceptions to the rule.
There's, like, the Family Guys and the South Park, and I think a lot of people bring that up when you're having discussions about, like, comedy not being allowed or us not having to talk about certain topics, but it does sort of feel like those shows got grandfathered into the space and that if you came to the table with a new sort of iteration of these things, you'd probably... It probably wouldn't fly.
It probably wouldn't be allowed. And I don't know if it's because it's getting shut down in the writers' room and people aren't willing to put money into these things. It's getting... Redam-diculous.
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