Welcome to Reverse-Wrexham
"It’s not hard to imagine this wave of corporate studios churning out exploitative content."
Good morning everyone, it’s another beautiful day in New York City and on the internet. There are certain weeks of the year that really propel time, and I think this last one was one of them. I woke up last Thursday to three Save The Dates for holiday parties (and locked in on a date for my own). Two people texted me about New Year’s Eve plans. Emails started to add “or early in 2025” when deciding on a date for plans — telling you right now, if you’re including that as an option, you've immediately de-prioritized whatever you’re trying to meet me for.
Some housekeeping:
I’m heading to D.C. tomorrow for a few days of meetings. If there is someone important with Feed Me-worthy stories who I should meet, email me.
We’re discussing New York magazine’s latest Power Issue about media elite (which includes a few Emily Sundberg mentions) over in the Feed Me chat.
Yesterday, I saw and ’s brilliant new film, OR SOMETHING, at Bushwick Film Festival yesterday. One of the biggest takeaways I got from the Q+A from the cast was that there’s no better time than now to make a guerilla-style film with your friends in New York City. Last week, I re-watched Lost In Translation and I thought OR SOMETHING had a similar theme. In a Charlie Rose interview about the movie in 2003 she said, "I wanted to do an intimate story between two characters and the idea that you can meet someone and spend two days with them and that can be just as important as someone you’ve known for years."
STAY TUNED: Welcome to Reverse-Wrexham
Stay Tuned is a series we’re trying out on Feed Me, written by . In this series, Teddy will be writing about when entertainment comes in contact with tech — and the implications of that. Teddy is a screenwriter turned startup founder, who also writes the newsletter, first Derivative. In his pre-covid life, he worked at places like UTA and Netflix and on shows such as Beef and The Perfect Couple. We met through a series of tiny coincidences when I was 20, and have reconnected since.
Two of the odder pieces of news that I’ve come across recently are that: 1) Chik-Fil-A is starting a streaming studio and making original content and 2) Northwell Health, New York’s largest health care system, is launching Northwell Studios to develop both scripted and unscripted TV and film content. Most of the reactions I’ve heard range from finding it hilarious to viewing it as dystopian, like a Black Mirror episode come to life. But in a time when a majority of kids say they want to become a social media influencer when they grow up, is it really surprising that corporations want to get in on the fun? After all, a wise man once said that corporations were people too.
“Chik-Fil-A and Northwell Health are making a bet that they can do the same thing, but without a Ryan Reynolds at all, essentially pulling a reverse-Wrexham.
They’ll start with their businesses, develop shows and content on top of that, and then ultimately hope to produce their own “Ryan Reynolds,” corporate celebrities that can attract business, attention, and ultimately money to their bottom line.”
To step back a bit, the close relationship between entertainment content and corporate sponsorship is nothing new. The term “soap opera” after all comes from pre-TV radio shows sponsored by soap manufacturers. Back in the 40s and 50s we had explicitly corporate-owned shows like The Colgate Comedy Hour on NBC or The Lucky Strike Hour (which you got a glimpse of if you stuck out the 206 minutes of Killers of the Flower Moon). At some point, that relationship shifted to one where networks owned the hour but the programming was supported by companies advertising their wares next to the shows.
Fast-forward to the present, and we’re living in an interesting time of reconciliation. Streaming is exiting its rebellious adolescent phase and its dislike for ads and rediscovering, nudged on by Wall Street, that advertising is actually a great business if you want to make money from all the shows and movies you make. Amazon’s Prime Video, which was originally a premium perk part of the Prime bundle, is now quickly becoming an ad-supported basic tier where you have to pay even more for the ad-free versions. Streamers across the board are finding that their ARPU (average revenue per user) is actually higher for their ad tiers than their ad-free tiers and pricing accordingly. It’s not hard to see a future where not only is the content perfectly personalized to your tastes, the prices will be too. Tubi, or not Tubi.
The future isn’t just going to be Netflix + ads though, not if Chik-Fil-A and the execs at Northwell Health have anything to say about it. Ads have never been the exclusive way corporations use film and TV to sell us products. Product placement for one. Barbie last year had a whole sequence that was basically a Chevrolet ad.
“It’s not hard to imagine this wave of corporate production studios churning out cringeworthy and exploitative content, especially when it comes to people’s health and life-and-death decisions.”
But we’re also deep into a phase of derivative IP content, whose primary purpose over monetization is to channel attention and new fans to the underlying entertainment franchises: Drive to Survive for F1, Receiver and Quarterback for the NFL, and most recently Starting 5 for the NBA (although it’s not clear how well Starting 5 is doing. We might be at the end of this phase of the trend.)
Then we got Ryan Reynolds (the master of doing this) and Rob McElhenney who decided to turn the formula on its head and bought Wrexham A.F.C., a small Welsh soccer team fallen on hard times, and lent their celebrity to basically meme it back into existence with Welcome to Wrexham.
Chik-Fil-A and Northwell Health are making a bet that they can do the same thing, but without a Ryan Reynolds at all, essentially pulling a reverse-Wrexham. They’ll start with their businesses, develop shows and content on top of that, and then ultimately hope to produce their own “Ryan Reynolds,” corporate celebrities that can attract business, attention, and ultimately money to their bottom line. To adapt a phrase from Alex Rampell, the incumbents are trying to become celebrities before the celebrities become incumbents.
If you’re skeptical on how this turns out, well so am I. It’s not hard to imagine this wave of corporate production studios churning out cringeworthy and exploitative content, especially when it comes to people’s health and life-and-death decisions. But at the same time, it’s also not hard to see people responding to the storylines of doctors and patients and the real-life drama of Grey’s Anatomy or the real-life comedy of Scrubs. In any case, you don’t have to wait to find out. Check out Lenox Hill or Emergency: NYC, two successful Northwell Health shows on Netflix that no doubt inspired their decision to go ahead with an entire production studio. I haven’t seen it but friends, including therapists, have told me Couples Therapy is a show that exceeds expectations of exploitation and performativeness and actually achieves an intimate and caring portrayal of relationships at work.
One of my favorite quotes is from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
Not to pervert the romantic sentiment, but I think that’s sort of like happening here, in the best case. If you want to reach your customer, don’t just show them an ad. Tell them compelling stories about and around your products, services, and people.
In other news
Lionsgate, which is having a horrible 2024, is looking to the future by partnering with AI startup Runway to develop a custom model the studio can use for things like preproduction, previsualiztion, and visual effects. Runway will get access to the studio’s content library to build the Lionsgate tool.
Runway, in turn, is funding filmmakers that use its AI tools with grants from its $5 million Hundred Film Fund
Movie recs
In theaters – Saturday Night, Anora, The Apprentice
Streaming – three films from master Korean director Lee Chang-dong: Oasis, Peppermint Candy, Green Fish (on Metrograph)
This concludes the first edition of Stay Tuned by Teddy Kim.
If we had a water cooler, I’d talk to you about:
Alright I’m going to say something that a lot of you might get annoyed by: the Substack URL gold rush begins now, with
claiming giftguide.substack.com right as the holiday season begins.A lot more American men (18% in 2021, vs. 11% in 1989) are staying home to facilitate the complex juggle of family life and their wives’ high-powered careers. I’m super interested in this conversation, and what high-earning women think about it.
This was a really nice read, and not only because of my Public Records-induced hangover yesterday:
The trend towards minimal kids decor is taking the design world by storm. “The intense public reaction might lead people to believe that Roman had filmed a collection of razor blades or rattles filled with rat poisoning. But no, the mother had only shared videos of her daughter’s neutral-colored baby toys.”
I had the breakfast burrito at La Taq in Park Slope on Saturday and it was life-changing.
“So much of my mental and emotional energy was always going to men and sex. Now I don’t have those things occupying my mind, I feel I’m on a whole other level of thinking.” A great interview with Julia Fox in Air Mail.
Looks like Fishwife is launching caviar.
Jeremy O. Harris interviewed Paul Schrader for Interview magazine. My friends and I were debating last night whether a good screenwriter needs, “some fabric of queerness” in their psyche.
Some anonymous Hollywood gossip: “I haven’t seen anyone be willing to say that podcaster Erin Foster was fired as the show runner for Nobody Wants This because she was terrible at it, and the crew didn’t get along with her. It’s been framed as them mutually agreeing to bring Jenni Konner and Bruce Kaplan on as show runners to make the show better, but that’s definitely not the case.”
Some anonymous New York gossip: “I’m still processing if this was real or a Sims game. I need to tell you about a bizarre “social club” party I went to this weekend. It was two social clubs having this event together — Parlor & CX. I had never heard of either. My friend met this guy at a party last week who we think was one of the hosts and invited her. It’s was in this strange townhouse that really felt more like a frat house since their were not traditional rooms. We would walk into a room and there would just be people laying all over. Everyone we talked to asked how long we were Parlor or CX members for, it was like the opening line. It felt like we were going to be inducted into a cult, or that an orgy was going to break out at any minute. Someone told me that last year their Halloween party was clothing optional. We then found this dark staircase with red lights that went to two different floors of basement. In the very bottom floor was totally different vibe party happening, there was a DJ, people were dancing, and it felt more normal club vibe in comparison to everything else.”
Eddie Huang joined Substack (and really didn’t like that Carbone review that The New York Times just ran).
I liked the Teddy Kim feature. Turning on someone to a movie or TV show they wouldn't otherwise see is an underrated gift.
I didn't watch Nobody Wants This - not my kind of thing - but there was real offense taken by a lot of Jewish women about how Jewish women were portrayed - I read an excellent Op Ed in Time about it. Erin Foster is not an experienced showrunner - and showrunning is a gigantic job, delivering episodes on time and on budget and running a writer's room and hiring designers, etc etc - so in Jenni Konner they get someone who has done quite a bit of that and she's Jewish so she's maybe much more likely to put more attuned care in to characters and dynamics.