<\/p>\n
It\u2019s no secret that the way we consume media these days is different than it was 10 years ago. Who doesn\u2019t like to be on their phone while they\u2019re watching TV? Well, Hollywood has noticed your attention is split. And as a result, individuals like Kris Jenner and companies like Disney are investing in new forms of entertainment<\/a>.<\/p>\n Enter: the vertical micro-drama<\/a>. Filmed quickly and with scrolling in mind, they are short episodes, sometimes as short as 45 seconds, intended to grab the viewer with over-the-top premises.<\/p>\n But that isn\u2019t the only change. The magazine n+1 reported earlier this year<\/a> that Netflix executives are asking their screenwriters to \u201chave this character announce what they\u2019re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along\u201d \u2014 in other words, dumb down the script so that inattentive viewers can still follow along.<\/p>\n So, is<\/em> what we\u2019re watching getting worse? Today, Explained<\/em> co-host Noel King brought that question to Puck News correspondent Julia Alexander.<\/p>\n Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There\u2019s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained<\/em> wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts<\/a>, Pandora<\/a>, and Spotify<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n When people in the industry talk about the second screen problem, what do they mean?<\/strong><\/p>\n If you talk to creatives, the second screen \u2014 meaning, the phone that you\u2019re watching TikToks on while watching a movie on your big TV \u2014 is just a lack of attention that is being paid to the main movie or film on the television.<\/p>\n But, if you talk to executives, the question of the second screen is one of: Does the adoration for TikTok, and Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts mean that people will spend less time with our streaming services that they\u2019ll cancel, and we have to fight back for those subscribers? Before the phone came around, people would do this with magazines, and they would do it with books, and they would do it with other things. We\u2019ve just never had as many things competing for such tiny slices of the attention pie.<\/p>\n There was reporting in n+1 saying that Netflix executives are telling writers to dumb down the writing in TV shows and movies. Do people who cover the industry, did they know that this was happening?<\/strong><\/p>\n I think it\u2019s important to clarify that no one, no executive is out [there] saying, \u201cDumb this down.\u201d No executive is out in the town saying, \u201cHey, by the way, make shittier television that\u2019s really going to help us when we increase prices again,\u201d right?<\/p>\n What they\u2019re saying, if this is being said to people \u2014 and I have personally never heard it in my reporting \u2014 what they would be saying is, \u201cWe understand that our audience has less attention than they might have 10 years ago, and our audience has more opportunities to put that attention on another video format, whether they\u2019re watching Reels or TikTok. And we understand that that is our direct competitor in a way that someone flipping through a magazine while watching a movie was not going to be a direct competitor.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not about dumbing down, it\u2019s about acknowledging where the future of competition is coming from.<\/p>\n Why do you think the idea of dumbing TV writing down makes us angry?<\/strong><\/p>\n We all want to believe that we are of higher-quality caliber than in fact we are. I mean, I\u2019d be outraged if someone came out and said, \u201cNetflix is purposely dumbing stuff down.\u201d<\/p>\n But, in reality, I was watching Frankenstein<\/em> the other night with my fiance, and he was playing Candy Crush the entire time, and then, in a group chat the next day, he\u2019s complaining about the quality of films. But, the quality of the film, such as Frankenstein<\/em>, a beautiful Guillermo del Toro movie, has nothing to do with a Netflix executive coming out and saying, \u201cYou\u2019ve got to dumb this down.\u201d It has everything to do with the fact that they\u2019re responding to what people are saying with their actions.<\/p>\n The Lindsay Lohan Christmas movies, for example, and all those other Netflix fare that we associate with a specific trope are heavily watched. One of the effects of what you\u2019re seeing play out is that we had a golden age of television about 15 years ago, a lot of the bigger movie stars, and the writers, and directors in film who didn\u2019t want to make Marvel movies and didn\u2019t want to make big sci-fi blockbusters moved to TV. We had a great moment of well-written, gorgeous television.<\/p>\n Then, what happened was the competition for eyeballs on the TV screen started to really speed up, and you had YouTube come in, and you had Mr. Beast, and all of a sudden, people were watching them on their television screens, and that meant that they were watching less Netflix or less Hulu. So, all of the prestige TV that worked on cable 20 years ago stopped working as much today. So, you\u2019re getting a lot more unintentional slop, but it\u2019s not because they\u2019re trying to produce it, it\u2019s that they\u2019re trying to produce just more content than ever before.<\/p>\n Could you envision a world where viewers say, \u201cWe don\u2019t want the slop, we want prestige,\u201d or is that unlikely?<\/strong><\/p>\n I actually think that\u2019s exactly what\u2019s going to happen. The amount of generative AI content, even these micro-dramas a little bit, which, in part, are being made because of generative AI technologies that are allowing them to make things cheaper and faster, is going to increase the amount of content. We\u2019re going to enter an infinite content era, and a lot of it\u2019s going to be sloppy.<\/p>\n As humans who love good storytelling, we\u2019re going to have to go figure out where it is. And we\u2019re going to pay for it. And so, you might have an Apple TV plus or a Netflix in 20 years, 25 years, be $40, $50 a month, but you\u2019ll pay for it, because they will end up leaning into higher-quality programming and backing away from some of the slop as it takes over all of our other content viewing. But, in order to get to that breaking point, things have to break a little bit further.<\/p>\n It is incredible to me that your take is so optimistic.<\/strong><\/p>\n There is a world where YouTube will eat everyone\u2019s lunch. It\u2019s been happening; it\u2019ll continue to happen. But, it\u2019s never going to replace the need to watch a really good movie or a really good TV show.<\/p>\n Now, I think the number of those titles will come down, and I think that\u2019s going to be really cataclysmic for people who work in this industry, because you\u2019ll have fewer jobs. But, really, high-quality art has always stayed, and people have always sought it out. I really do believe that there\u2019s a world for some of these streaming services \u2014 not all \u2014 some of these directors, and actors to continue to leave a really strong mark, but it\u2019s going to be a much smaller industry than it has been over the last hundred years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s no secret that the way we consume media these days is different than it was 10 years ago. Who doesn\u2019t like to be on their phone while they\u2019re watching TV? Well, Hollywood has noticed your attention is split. And as a result, individuals like Kris Jenner and companies like Disney are investing in new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2176191,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[355990,23191,418838],"class_list":["post-2176190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-instagram-reels","tag-netflix","tag-watching-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/How-TikTok-micro-dramas-and-distracted-viewers-are-reshaping-TV.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2176190"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2176192,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176190\/revisions\/2176192"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2176191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2176190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2176190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2176190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}