The minutiae of the media business is not supposed to be any of your business unless you work in the business. And at the beginning of the decade, it wasn’t yet. When "Billy On The Street" premiered on Tru TV in 2011, the hype of inconsequential entertainment and Hollywood news items reached only those insiders and obsessives who refreshed Deadline or Variety all day. This news consisted of the rearranging of stars and shows and it was not only not interesting, it was not memorable at all. There were too many pseudo-stars and forgettable shows then, and the number of scripted shows on TV yearly has nearly doubled since 2011. Eichner and his team, including brilliant writers like Julie Klausner, Max Silvestri, Jon Daly, Katie Berlant, John Early and Jake Fogelnest, saw early on in the decade the absurdity of treating each and every bit of pop culture ephemera as seismically important events. They worked in the biz, but had enough to distance from it to identify the disproportionality of the hype to its real world impact. They were patient zero for a disease of entertainment news fatigue we’d all suffer later in the decade.
Back then there were only so many headlines about new shows being greenlit, new deals being signed by stars, and only so many stars and shows to actually care about. But then the number of shows and stars we had to pretend we cared about or even had heard of exponentially rose thanks to a newly infinite number of hours for media companies to fill with streaming content. At the same time, around the middle of the decade, there became an infinite number of clicks to generate from news about these shows and stars and the useless information surrounding every single move involving even the most fleeting stars and the most niche shows. It was this social media-entertainment complex that fueled the spread of that pop culture news derangement syndrome Eichner and his writing staff had, exploding from a small group of insiders to all of us who have no business knowing about or caring about a "Mad About You" reboot for Spectrum Originals. The brilliance of the show is how it rips the fatigue from an individual experience, something we feel alone while looking at our screens while very bored, to something we can see on someone else’s face.
In the best recurring segment on the show, "For A Dollar," Billy startles New Yorkers with hyper-specific news ripped straight from the trades and demands they respond immediately:“Miss, the Coen Brothers are up to their old tricks!”“Miss, is 'The New Girl' having a rennaisance?” “Miss, put yourself in Demi Lovato’s shoes.”“Sir, is Tobey Maguire happy?”Of course, it’s impossible to care about any of these news items. And Billy is not really asking us to care. But for some reason the PR-entertainment-social media cycle is asking us to care, and you can see on these poor people’s faces that we just do not have it in us to pretend.
“Wow, I’m exhausted just listening to that, Billy!” In one sense, the literal sense, that was is Katie Couric’s response to Billy Eichner’s robotically enthusiastic and frighteningly detailed description of the premise of now-forgotten Showtime drama "United States of Tara" from one Season 4 episode of "Billy On The Street."But in another sense, this is a perfectly understandable response to anything related to pop culture or media news in 2019.That it was written for Couric in an episode in 2015 proves how prescient the "Billy On The Street" team is and was and why the show was the best of this decade. Because being exhausted by hyped up minutiae defined the 2010s.
The shorter stuff
Pitchfork's Steely Dan day was extremely tight, but The Royal Scam continues to be underrated. (Pitchfork)
A few weeks ago I coined Gardners' Law: every TV show will be rebooted on a long enough timeline. But I'm considering adding this to the law: every company will have a streaming service on a long enough timeline. (The Information)
A couple weeks ago I discussed ghost content, media made for no one and for no reason other than to soak up new streaming real estate. Is there a better definition of it than the "Mad About You" reboot for Spectrum Originals? (NPR)
I do not care at all about "natural wines," but I loved the anecdote buried in this piece about a spiritual collective called the Fellowship of Friends that used to recruit new members by placing bookmarks into New Age books in the 1970s in San Francisco. (New Yorker)
This story about a Venetian glass artist and his Prosecco-making brood features one of the most photogenic Italian castle-dwelling families I've ever seen in my life. (FT How To Spend It)
Sean Clements, of the best podcast in the world, "Hollywood Handbook," will write a show starring Steph Curry and Will Arnett. (THR)
People in China are playing a game with facial recognition cameras to determine who pays for drinks. (Twitter)
Last week, this newsletter declared Nick Ciarelli and Brad Evans' Twitter sketches the best show currently going. On Monday, The Ringer did a profile. (The Ringer)