The Future of Media Is Passive

Plus: an artificial assignment!

The Criterion Channel—which I am a charter subscriber, with a fancy metal ID tag to prove it—rolled out a new feature this week: “Criterion24/7.” What is “Criterion24/7”? I’ll let them explain: “Don’t know what to watch? Let us choose! Click on Criterion24/7 and drop into a steady stream of must-see movies, any time you want.”

Exciting! Basically, it’s … a cable channel. Like Turner Classic Movies, or HBO Classic. Ad-free, unceasing, and curated manually, one presumes, by a goblin who lives in the famed Criterion Closet. Criterion24/7 is not without bugs; for instance, as I type this, there’s no way to see what movie is actually playing on the channel, which is a mild problem if you hop into a film midway, love it, and decide you’d like to start it over from the beginning. But maybe this is designed to mimic the movie houses of Martin Scorsese’s youth, where he’d wander into a western midway through, sit through the end, and watch the beginning as it began to replay.

I’m ambivalent about whether or not the Criterion Channel should put together a listing, a la TCM, so people can plan their viewing—surprise is part of the charm!—but they definitely need to figure out a way to let people know what precisely they’re watching while they’re watching it.

That said, I’m fascinated by this development because it echoes something I discussed with The Entertainment Strategy Guy last weekend on the podcast, namely, the trend streaming services are making toward more linear-style options for folks who are overwhelmed by options and just want to throw something on. I think streaming customers are faced with option overload, leading to analysis paralysis, leading to annoyed scrolling that culminates in them just turning on something they’ve seen a hundred times before. Streamers, particularly the free ad-supported streaming services like Pluto or Tubi, understand that what some folks are looking for is a return to the days of basic cable when you could throw on TBS and watch Demolition Man from the midway point or some random episode of Seinfeld or MASH.

At least part of what’s happening here is the streamers' desire for their programming to represent something like the background noise TV used to represent, something you have on while you’re cooking or sending emails or fiddling around on your phone. This is why you occasionally hear stories from creators who are asked by Netflix to make their shows a little less complicated, so folks can follow along while they’re scrolling Instagram.

“I’ve heard from showrunners who are given notes from the streamers that 'This isn’t second screen enough,’” Justine Bateman told the Hollywood Reporter last year during the strikes. “Meaning, the viewer’s primary screen is their phone and the laptop and they don’t want anything on your show to distract them from their primary screen because if they get distracted, they might look up, be confused, and go turn it off.”

Now, obviously, I am not comparing the Criterion Channel to Netflix; I imagine the sort of person who tunes in to a linear stream in the hopes of catching a random Ozu is different form the sort of person who tunes into a linear stream in order to hear someone shout “Bazinga!” But I do think there’s a latent yearning out there for a removal of control, a voice in the dark just giving us something to watch rather than asking us to choose what to watch. The future resembles the past a little more every day.

---

Peter, Alyssa, and I had a great time at the Across the Movie Aisle live show on Tuesday. We said hi to a bunch of listeners, chatted about one of our favorite films, and had some tasty food and beverages courtesy of the Alamo Drafthouse. A big win, all around! We’ll be posting that episode on Tuesday; today’s members-only episode is on a couple of HBO shows Alyssa and I have really enjoyed, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Tokyo Vice. I hope you give it a listen!

---

Links!

I reviewed Civil War this week. It’s a doozy, folks, you’re going to want to see it big and loud.

O.J. Simpson, the star of The Naked Gun and Capricorn One, has died at the age of 76.

CinemaCon, the national trade show for America’s theater chains, is going on this week, and my friend Richard Rushfield reports that they were a little flummoxed by Crunchyroll’s presentation, which just leads me to believe that theater owners don’t want theaters to survive. As I discussed with Crunchyroll’s Mitchel Bergera couple of years ago, anime has a big audience and theaters would do well to take advantage of their excitement.

Bill Ryan’s essay on Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels is excellent, I hope you check it out.

Every six months or so, Zack Snyder notes in an interview that there’s another, longer cut of Sucker Punch to be released, and every six months or so I say “please give it to me now, on 4K disc, I has to have it.”

---

Assigned Viewing: Ex Machina (Max)

Alex Garland’s masterpiece and an efficient bit of cerebral sci-fi. The central premise, in which a low-level tech employee is invited to test out his company’s founder’s AI obsession, is sometimes described as a Turing Test—the effort to discover whether or not an AI is sufficiently advanced to pass for human—but it’s not that. Rather, it’s an AI-box experiment. It’s an important distinction, as the greatest danger mankind faces from true AI isn’t the ability for it to replicate chat prompts but for an actual thinking machine to convince some unsuspecting fool to unleash it on the world. And if that doesn’t interest you, maybe Oscar Isaac dancing will?