Some ideas just snap into the world like AirPods are sucked into their case. They fit the moment. The ghost kitchen is just such a thing for me. Last week, news broke that former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick had raised $400 million from Saudi Arabia for his new company CloudKitchens. CloudKitchens is essentially a real estate company, buying space in city centers where older businesses are moving out and newer economies are moving in, specifically offices full of young knowledge workers who eat at their desks during the day and don’t cook when they’re at home. The company then builds kitchens in those spaces and rents them out to new restaurants-in-name-only who make food exclusively for delivery apps. These app-only restaurants, the ghost kitchens, have names like “Excuse My French Toast, Egg the F Out, and Btch Don’t Grill My Cheese.”But the idea of the ghost kitchen feels like it rhymes with so much of what’s going on around us because it evokes a feeling of an industry gone autonomous, an insatiable process with no one behind the wheel. It’s not food made for people to love to eat it. It’s food made because of a land grab. The ghost kitchens are forgettable and convenient.
Something you choose because you were led you to them, the easiest choice but not necessarily anyone’s favorite choice. It may have felt particularly resonant last week, though, it being right in the middle of the 12-day pause between the launches of Apple TV+ and Disney+. Both are the results of a land grab, a real estate gold rush more psychological and economic than physical. As the number of cable subscribers dips below the number of streaming subscribers, tech and entertainment giants are spending tens of billions of dollars to claim space where viewers are now. The product of this spending is ghost content. Like ghost kitchens, ghost content is convenient and forgettable. Ghost content is content made specifically to claim some chunk of the media real estate made available in streaming’s wake and to be as convenient and easy to choose as possible when browsing. The Morning Show is just one piece of Apple’s $6 billion push into streaming.
According to the Financial Times, Apple paid $250 million for the show, which “equates to about $12m per hourly episode, higher than the $8m-$10m for HBO’s Game of Thrones.” Even more astonishing, the show costs six times as much per episode as Friends. It’s ghost content because it’s convenient. Apple is just giving it away. Turn on your Apple TV, and there it is. Apple, by the way, is not the only one solving for convenience and customer-friendliness. From the same FT piece, AT&T “doubled the volume of content that comes with an HBO streaming subscription for the same price: $15 a month.” And Disney+ will be free to customers of Verizon’s unlimited phone plan. And it’s ghost content because no one seems to really want it. Like a fake restaurant with the right dish popping up into your face at the exact right moment for you to just click on it, The Morning Show seems to be a success despite its blandness. An analysis published by Variety showed that The Morning Show had the lowest demand of all new streaming series across platforms immediately after its release. Don't worry, though. Ghost content sticks around. It multiplies. And it gets more money pumped into it.
The Morning Show has alreadybeen greenlit for a second season.
The shorter stuff
Jason Zinoman, the Times critic with whom Dave Chappelle became obsessed for giving his show a bad review before it hit Netflix, says Louis CK's "new show made me laugh very hard." (NYT)
Is Marriage Story, which is getting a longer theatrical window than The Irishman, Netflix's best bet for Oscar? (THR)
My only guess as to how this Chinese military band knows the song "Toast" by dancehall artist Koffee is that it was included on Obama's summer playlist. (Twitter)
HBO is one of the best brands ever to me and the SNL book was actually really good. Adding this oral history to my list of books I buy and then feel guilty about not reading. (Recode)
I click immediately when a Nellie Bowles piece is out. This is one of those "lol San Francisco" stories where the subjects are set up to be mocked, but I actually like these guys! (NYT)
Eleven thousand people illegally watched the Logan Paul boxing match through the reflection in some dude's glasses. (SBNation)
Thinking about going all in on something called Gardner's Law: every single show within living memory will get rebooted eventually. (Variety)
King Crimson gets a 10 on Pitchfork. The correct score. (Pitchfork)