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Hey, before we get into this week’s newsletter, I just wanted to highlight a new thing we’re trying out and I’m having a lot of fun with that’s tentatively being called Bulwark Movie Club. Proper name pending.
Anyway, JVL, Sarah, and I watch a movie and then talk about both it and how it’s resonant (or not!) in our moment. First up last weekend was The Death of Stalin, which, I swear to God, we had been planning on doing even before all the rumors on social media about, you know. But it’s one of the best comedies of the 2010s, just an absolute peach from start to finish and if you can’t see the humor in reordering reality to the whims of a madman, well, you’re not the head of the BLS who got fired for a bad jobs report.
You can watch the first episode on YouTube here:
And it’s available for ad-free for Bulwark+ members here. CLICK IT NOW AND SIGN UP, COMRADES!
We’ve already taped the second episode; we did Idiocracy. Honestly: A little more subdued than I expected! JVL is in a dark place. Send him some love, would you? But it’s streaming on Hulu, just like The Death of Stalin. Maybe we’ll just do stuff we can find on Hulu. Anyone at Hulu want to sponsor this bad boy? Hit me up, we’ll work something out.
Speaking of sponsorships!
The Brief, Glorious, Ad-Free Moment
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The news that NFL Red Zone would be adding a small number of ads to their programming—which has been introduced every Sunday as seven hours of ad-free football by strong-bladdered host Scott Hanson—after being purchased by ESPN was kind of a bummer. Yes, sure: There will only be 1–2 minutes of ads over the 420 minutes of airtime. But, like: c’mon. We’re not dumb. We all have experienced the ongoing enshittification of the web. We know that two minutes will be 20 before too long. We’re not dumb.
The reality is that ads and television go hand in hand. Ads were what powered network TV. Then people paid for cable, and ads came to cable; slowly, at first, just $45 million in 1980 according to a 1981 New York Times story. But only the Home Box Office, which cost an additional $15 or so, was committed to giving consumers an entirely ad-free experience. By the time I was a regular consumer of basic cable, the only ad-free experience I had outside of HBO was on Turner Classic Movies. Everywhere else, as far as the eye could see, there were ads. It’s why TiVo and other DVR solutions exploded in popularity, and I’ve always contended it’s why AMC, FX, and other basic cable channels could compete with HBO in terms of popularity: the DVR allowed an HBO-like experience on basic cable, a new innovation that radically improved the viewing experience for programs like The Shield or Mad Men.
And then streaming really did seem to upend the ad-based paradigm. Subscriptions to Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, Disney+: all ad-free. Peacock had a free, ad-driven tier when it launched in 2020, and that tickled the back of the neck in an ugly way: opening the door to advertising revenue is like opening a door at the top of a slippery slope. You edge out that door and your feet fall out from under you and soon you’re paying $15 a month for the ad-supported version of something you had been paying that much to watch without ads wondering what the hell happened.¹
That blessed period in the early 2020s was something else, though. And Red Zone’s abandonment of Scott Hanson’s weekly ad-free promise is just another reminder that nothing gold can stay.
On this week’s Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, I talked to Rep. Laura Friedman (D.-Calif.) about the effort to create a national film production tax credit to compete with those offered by nations like the United Kingdom and Canada. Yes, some American states, like California, Georgia, and Michigan, offer healthy tax credits to film companies looking to save a few bucks on production. But a national tax credit would stack on top of those and allow America to attract productions that have fled overseas over the last few years.