Way back in September of 2022, I noted that Prime Video’s addition of Thursday Night Football helped turn it into one of the most versatile streaming services around. Yes, the package was expensive—nearly $67 million per game—but it feels like that gamble has paid off for Prime Video in terms of activations and viewership. According to the Entertainment Strategy Guy’s latest streaming ratings report, Thursday Night Football did six million more hours streamed in a single night than the next closest entry (nine episodes of Monsters: The Erik and Lyle Menendez Story on Netflix) and more than twice the third place entry (six episodes of Netflix’s The Perfect Couple).
As I noted in that 2022 newsletter, live sports were one of two legs still supporting linear cable. That leg is about to snap: Prime Video has also picked up rights to the NBA; regional sports networks are collapsing; and in the world of pro wrestling, WWE’s Monday Night Raw rights have gone to Netflix while AEW rights are headed to Max.
The other leg was live news. Lots of people hold on to cable because they want to be able to watch MSNBC or Fox News or CNN, and aren’t entirely sure how to replace that experience. But Amazon’s latest move—the hiring of Brian Williams to anchor election night coverage—is another blow aimed directly at the heart of the cable bundle. Reports Variety:
Williams, who left NBC News in 2021 after a nearly three-decade run, will lead a one-night special called “Election Night Live with Brian Williams.” The show, which will begin at 5 p.m. eastern on November 5, will be made available to all Amazon customers via Prime Video, regardless of whether they subscribe to the streaming outlet itself.
I’m fascinated by this move because it suggests a willingness on Amazon’s part to get involved in the live news game, which most of the streaming companies have avoided. (The big exception is Max, which is where I personally watch CNN on big news nights; Peacock has some MSNBC coverage, including the vaunted Kornacki Cam; Fox, meanwhile, I think is only available via cable and cable-light bundles like Hulu Live and Sling. I assume Paramount Plus will rely mostly on CBS?) This is a move that is not without risks.
The biggest of them, of course, is that news coverage tends to be incredibly polarizing. People want to be told what they want to hear, and they tend to get mad if they do not hear what they want to hear. This creates a whole host of problems for even rigorously nonpartisan news outlets, and any effort to create “balance”—particularly in the age of Trump, an incredibly unbalanced figure in his own right—is likely to invite more vitriol. Amazon has a stellar reputation among consumers of all classes and all ages, and I’m kind of surprised they would risk it with election night coverage.
Also, though, I wonder if it’s just too late for the streamers to really break into the live news game. YouTube—where I imagine many Bulwark readers and viewers and listeners will be watching JVL, Tim, Sarah, and Sam (maybe even me, from time to time) on election night—has created a whole ecosystem for folks looking to find news and views that align with their own. Voices and faces they trust, streaming live; communities found and bolstered in the comments and live chats. As Nielsen reminds us every month, YouTube’s audience is enormous—at 10.6 percent of total TV streaming, YouTube’s audience is almost half of all broadcast TV and bigger than any individual streaming service by far—and getting bigger.
Anyway, I’ll be curious to see what Brian Williams is up to on election night as I hop from Jake Tapper on CNN to Steve Kornacki on Peacock to Sam Stein at The Bulwark’s YouTube page. Let us know your plans in the comments.
On this week’s episode of Across the Movie Aisle, we reviewed a book, not a movie. Whoa! Neal Stephenson’s Polostan. It’s good! You should read it. And listen to our podcast! It is also good! On today’s bonus episode, we talked scary books we enjoy. Shocker: Stephen King gets a mention. But so do some other interesting names!
Venom: The Last Dance Review
A good rule of thumb is that if a movie repeats very basic information for the audience three times, that movie has had a … rough time at a basic storytelling level.
I mention this because there are three (3) different sequences in Venom: The Last Dance where we are informed that the alien “symbiotes” (basically: sentient, parasitical goo that grants superpowers) have a god named Knull, this Knull fellow lives in some sort of interdimensional prison created by the symbiotes, and that a key to release him known as “the codex” has been discovered and is on Earth. In two of those sequences, we are told in nearly identical language that “the codex” is located within Eddie Brock/Venom (Tom Hardy), and it was created when Eddie died and Venom brought him back to life.
Now. If you make a big deal out of a shadowy villain who has been imprisoned in a terrible place and could potentially escape to make our hero pay for the sins of his … whatever the symbiotes are, you’d think that we’d, possibly, see this villain wreak his terrible vengeance. You would be sure that the film wouldn’t build to a terrible anticlimax that teases more adventures from this shadowy figure that no one recognizes and has never before appeared onscreen. And, kind reader, you would be wrong about this. Oh, so wrong.
I guess what I’m saying is that Venom: The Last Dance is a bit of a mess, structurally—it feels like the whole film exists in the furtherance of future installations featuring characters no one cares about, given that this is, nominally, the final film in the Venom Trilogy, which I don’t think anyone realized was a trilogy until we started being told it was a trilogy during the marketing of The Last Dance. Lord knows there’s no coherence from the first entry (in which a group of alien symbiotes crash to Earth and Venom/Eddie have to fight them off for some reason or another) to the last (in which Eddie teams up with a bunch of symbiotes who may or may not be the same symbiotes from the first film, I couldn’t quite tell, to fight off nigh-on invincible creatures dispatched by Knull to, yes, capture The Codex).
That said, I’m not sure it matters that the story is almost entirely superfluous to the onscreen action, because the appeal of these films has never been the plot. We’re not watching these movies to see if Venom can punch the other aliens hard enough to win his fights. We’re watching them because they are, frankly, bizarrely fascinating acting exercises by Tom Hardy, who plays the Brock/Venom relationship like a schizophrenic fighting off inner demons while learning to love himself for who he is.
There’s just something so charmingly weird about whatever it is he’s doing in this movie that you can’t help but admire it. It’s a one-man buddy comedy, where he gets to do two distinct voices and lots of physical humor. He’s clearly having a blast, even if the movies don’t make a lick of sense and bear no relation whatsoever to reality. I mean, at one point Eddie/Venom beat a guy up and steal his tuxedo because a doorman at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas informs him that they have a dress code, and let me tell you, as someone who has spent a fair amount of time in the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas, nothing could be further from the truth. Crocs and a tee shirt and $150 will get you ten hands of blackjack, seven nights out of seven.
Like its predecessors, Venom: The Last Dance isn’t particularly good; also like its predecessors, however, it’s strangely watchable. And that counts for something.
Given Bezos's stifling of the WaPo endorsement of Harris, I can't help but wonder if he'll put his thumb on the scales w/r/t Prime's election night coverage.
Well thanks to Bezos not permitting the WP to endorse Harris I won't be watching this