Everyone—and I use that word loosely because realistically it’s probably twice that number — has been asking for my take on the new docuseries trend. Well “everyone” can stop asking because here’s my take. Some are good and some are bad. It all has something to do with “Peak TV”… I’m not sure what this is – maybe a subscription service? But because of Peak TV … we need content… which is apparently king. SO what “streamers” have decided to do is A. Take a regular documentary that used to be an hour and a half and make it ten hours long. And B. Take what used to be trashy reality shows and re-package them as classier “docuseries.”
An example of A. is McMillions.. It’s pretty good. We enjoyed this and it was well enough done… BUT is this a story that takes 6 hours to tell? The McDonald’s Monopoly game was rigged. There I just told it … in whatever amount of time that took you to read that sentence. Let’s say five minutes. No offense but a lot of you are SLOOOOW readers. Watching examples of this A. trend, make one feel like content is being made to just fill time on a dying planet – not tell stories… like we have to kill as much time as possible somehow so we might as well just keep staring at this thing for ten hours. In the old days you would stare at something for a couple hours. THEN pick something else to stare at. You could stare at 5 whole movies in the time it now takes you to stare at one docuseries. OR you could stare at 10 whole Brady Bunches or The Jeffersons. Well, it’s your choice how you want to spend time waiting for it all to end.
An example of B. is Tiger King. It’s also pretty good. But it’s also very close to binging Duck Dynasty or Pawn Kings or whatever that Danny Bonaduce reality show was (which we did) … or one of those Fox “news” shows like Hard Copy from the 90s. It’s actually kind of like binging ten shows at once – and if you couple a viewing with a sleeve of leftover Girlscout cookies – it gets pretty interesting – like some kind of a new drug (Huey are your reading this? This could be big for you.) BUT also it signifies a new trend – TREND ALERT! – that we’re gonna see a lot of as we live through the next great recession/depression… Meth Porn! Two words that when spoken on their own conjure long afternoons of super fun times… but somehow when put together sound a little gross. The recipe for Tiger King is – find a bunch of crazy meth heads and just film. See what crazy crap they do then put it on TV. If they have guns or lions even better. You couldn’t write this show. You probably wouldn’t. No one is gonna buy a make-believe show where actors dress up like meth heads and shoot lions and each other. What makes this “fun?” is that it is real. Reality TV is back but in a fancy package. Sorry writers, but what is bad news for you is good news for Meth heads – you’re in hot demand! I don’t know if you read the trades… the “trades” are showbiz magazines about the business that we Hollywood types steal occasionally from our dentist’s office and then read with increasing anger as we peruse the successes of other Hollywood types. And then we recycle them. Always recycle. ANYWAY if you read the trades this week you’d see that Tiger King has spawned a meth gold rush… with major studios giving over 45,000 meth addicts overall deals in the past week alone! Meth heads are being swept up and given lucrative deals everywhere you look. I saw that one dude got a “ten tiger” deal with the WB. Damn! That’s FU tigers! All I know is I need to stop focusing on writing made up stuff and start focusing on finding the few meth heads who are still tech avail. It’s not gonna be easy of course — I’ll be lucky if I can find even one good meth head to follow around with my phone camera for a job in the new reality, post-Corona – reality rush. Sidenote – most of these deals so far are with WHITE meth heads. Don’t forget your diversity Hollywood!
I guess the good news with the big global recession/depression is that the meth talent pool is set to grow exponentially! And not to be a conspiracy guy – but it’s a little convenient that we randomly have a global pandemic that just HAPPENS to make all the meth heads in the world mega wealthy reality stars when we have a reality star in the White House. Has anyone checked Trump’s teeth? If he’s on meth, that would explain almost everything.

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