The LA fires are a national trust emergency
Also, HBO is dying on Max; zoomers love Michael McDonald, and a ridiculous pseudoscience podcast goes supernova
I don’t understand any of this, but the last issue of Rangelife was the second-most widely read edition yet, only trailing the one about John Hughes’ horrifying racist comics in National Lampoon.
Anyway, thanks for reading and sharing, and welcome to our new subscribers! This newsletter will always be free (and worth it).
It’s a somber weekend, and not just because Monday starts the next chaos and instability phase. You may have seen that Los Angeles is on fire. It’s been devastating for thousands of families, and it will have ripple effects well beyond the fire zones.
The LA hills famously burn all the time. A friend recently shared this excerpt from Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem, which 56 years ago described LA’s cycle of apocalypse more starkly and poetically than almost anything you’d read today.
But the regularity of the burns doesn’t soften the blow. Everyone in California knows people whom this has displaced or worse. Also Madlib lost all his recordings and instruments. I’m trying to be as generous with the GoFundMe’s as a temporarily jobless dude can.
At this point, most people outside the vicinity of the fires are primarily getting misinformation about them. Probably half of Americans believe the fires would have been prevented or extinguished by now if not for DEI, or the mayor’s international travel, or Gavin Newsom being so focused on straws. Trump has dusted off some of his 2016-era environmental policy fictions about “protecting fish” and “dumping water into the ocean” (i.e., rivers).
Gavin, meanwhile, has been trying to do the “right” thing, which is not engage in politics.
Newsom told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that “one can’t even respond” to Trump’s attacks. “People are literally fleeing, people have lost their lives, kids lost their schools, families completely torn asunder, churches burned down – this guy wanted to politicize it.”
“I have a lot of thoughts about what I want to say, and I won’t,” the governor added.
In the 2020s you have to engage in the information war while you’re also fighting fires. “I’m not playing politics” is worse than a surrender, because it invites your opponents to keep throwing haymakers at you while you insist you’re too busy to punch back. I can’t tell if Newsom is leading effectively, but he has the spotlight now, and he doesn’t seem to be shining in it.
Newsom could say, “The president-elect should be focusing on how he can use the tremendous powers of the federal government to help the tens of thousands of Americans who are being ravaged by these wildfires.”
If we’ve learned anything from the past decade, it’s that nobody will give you credit for your results, but only for the noise you make, Gavin. And if you don’t get the credit, then you lose, and so do we.
Max is TV
A few years ago, back when most people still watched HBO on HBO, the network started including after-the-show segments to take you inside the episode. You’d see behind-the-scenes shots, maybe understand a little about the creative decisions and how the episode was made.
But more recently, HBO has evolved these after-show segments to review and explain the episode you just watched. Usually you’ll see the showrunner and actors praising themselves and then recapping the major developments to assure you’re keeping up.
Why did HBO, at some point, decide it needed to include a segment that explained each episode, after decades of programming some of the most narratively complex stories in popular culture? I think it has a little to do with mass cognitive decline, but a lot more with how we’re letting technology change us.
We’ll come back to this. Let’s talk about Max first.
In early 2023, Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD) made an announcement that set off hackles around the media and marketing worlds. WBD the parent company of HBO, WB studios, DC comics, Discovery, Turner, CNN, and a bunch of other properties you know, announced that they would rename their combined mega-streaming service from HBO Max to just Max.
The general reaction was “HBO is the premium brand in the television industry. Why would you take HBO out of your name? Are you stupid or something?”
I disagreed with that reaction, and wrote about it here in Rangelife. After all, the person lording over this was CEO David Zaslav, and he was very much a basic cable guy trying to navigate a new and unfamiliar world. Max was not HBO.
As predicted, the app today is a mess and most people can’t distinguish HBO content from everything else in it. But I did not predict what HBO itself would become, even if it’s completely predictable in hindsight.
From its origin, HBO had to answer a really hard question: What could convince people to pay an extra $8/month on top of their $30 cable bill? The answer was a premium mix that started with Hollywood movies, and then layered in comedy specials, boxing and tennis, original series, music videos, and live concerts. My family had HBO when I was a kid, and it was probably where I spent most of my TV time, not just for all of the above but also uncensored rated-R movies.
It was at the start of this century that The Sopranos brought us the concept of “prestige TV,” meaning television that had the dramatic weight and production values of cinema (and so much explicit sex). The Sopranos was an ensemble show with multiple narrative and character arcs running simultaneously. In his book Everything Bad is Good for You, author Stephen Berlin Johnson mapped the many storylines of an episode of The Sopranos against an episode of a standard cop show, and the contrast was stark. He provided this as evidence that the media that people once considered wastelands — like TV or video games — had adapted to audiences that demanded more complex and challenging materials.
But prestige TV really found itself with Mad Men, not just because it was one of the greatest shows in history, but because it rescued AMC, a channel for dusty movies, from being canceled by cable systems.
Mad Men wasn’t just narratively brilliant and visually sumptuous. It also took place in the world of advertising, and so everybody in the advertising industry watched Mad Men the night it aired. Interest was so intense that ad industry trades and blogs featured episode recaps and discussions. Premium brands all wanted to be on AMC because their agencies were recommending it. Mad Men not only saved AMC; it transformed basic cable.
This attention permitted AMC to launch more prestige shows like Breaking Bad, another all-time-top-100 prestige drama. And as AMC’s reputation grew, they were able to launch more mainstream shows like The Walking Dead. This is hard to believe, but at one point the very gory The Walking Dead was the most popular show on television, period, including broadcast network shows.
But prestige really belonged to HBO in the 2010s. In the waning years of cable, before Netflix started the mad scramble to streaming, HBO swept the Emmys every year and owned Sunday night the way NBC used to own Thursday “Must-See TV.” Game of Thrones became the most watched show around the world, even bigger than Baywatch ever was.
So when Zaslav took over the newly-formed WBD, he applied a Wall Street formula to HBO. It would no longer be about creating prestige, but about monetizing the Game of Thrones Universe and WBD’s other intellectual property. Much as the top 14 movies of 2024 were all franchise installments, HBO is increasingly a factory for dry, expensive-looking spinoffs and prequels like House of the Dragon, The Penguin, and Dune: Prophecy.
But it’s getting hard even to distinguish HBO from other stuff in the app. When you open the app, you may instead see a “Max Original,” which is from a different studio. I think if you asked most people to identify which shows from the past three years were HBO vs. Max, they probably couldn’t.
But it gets worse, because most of the content on Max is actually cheap basic-cable filler about fixing up crappy businesses, crappy houses, and crappy relationships. So, you see, they shouldn’t call this app “HBO” anything!
Imagine if the New York Times were to merge with, say, Barstool Sports and a network of teenage gaming YouTubers. Then they replace the NY Times app with a new app called “Maximum Video,” and when you open it you see NY Times news coverage interspersed with Barstool’s ugly sports commentary and Portnoy’s pizza reviews, and also thousands of Minecraft videos.
But the gamers bitch about DEI in their videos as they’re building their Minecraft strip clubs. So the Maximum Video app collects and smushes these gamer grievances next to NY Times coverage of the debt ceiling. It’s all on the “Maximum Politics” tab.
Eventually nobody except for newsprint subscribers can tell what the NY Times is anymore. Everyone else wonders why the Times is employing and promoting a 19-year-old Norwegian gamer who thinks women should be arrested for making their boobs look bigger than they are.
And then if you’re like Zaslav and WBD, maybe you notice that your serious NY Times content doesn’t get the millions of eyeballs that the gamers do, so you push the NY Times to look more like the gaming content. Full coverage of Senate confirmation hearings while the reporters play Subway Surfer.
This brings us back to the post-show segments where they explain the episode you just watched. “In this scene, Rhaynera comes to realize that her position in the castle is even weaker than she feared, and I just thought that was brilliant, how I wrote that.”
I suspect this new format isn’t about people being too dumb to understand subtext on television anymore. The great shows of the Prestige Era attracted diverse audiences — some watched The Wire for the unflinching examination of institutional collapse, and others because they thought the drug dealers were sexy.
I think this evolution is more about our ability and desire to pay attention to TV, or literally anything. Facebook did an eye-tracking study of TV watchers in 2019, and found that almost everybody had their phone in front of them while watching TV, and that people only actually looked at the TV screen for 53% of the time they were watching. The second screen effect is probably even more detrimental to TV attention today than 2019, given how the tweets, Instagrams, and Facebook posts have been supplanted by TikToks, Reels, and other short video.
TV networks are fully aware of this phenomenon and have thus been developing shows for audiences that are only 53% paying attention. So it only makes sense that the purveyors of formerly-prestige TV would seek not only to tone down the subtext, but to explain what’s left of it.
Some people have opined that the reason why Squid Game and Shogun have been so popular with the prestige crowd is that unless you understand Korean or period Japanese, the subtitles require your attention to the main screen. You can apparently watch either show dubbed into your home language, though. That used to be for the “I don’t like to read” crowd, but now it’s more for the “I don’t want to stop playing Candy Crush” crowd. And that, increasingly, is all of us.
Rangelife Shorts
To Catch an Assault Charge: People are so into shows like “To Catch a Predator,” that they’ve been recently DIYing their own amateur stings without support of law enforcement, in the service of creating content. This was bound eventually to cause a disaster, and a group of college students did exactly that. A freshman (an adult) created a profile on Tinder (posing as, again, an 18-year-old adult), and then matched with an older man. When he arrived at her dorm, the rest of the group confronted him as a predator, and it spiraled into mob violence, for which several students were arrested. All for the clicks!
My daughter, who is the age of these students, recently brought up to me that “predator” can include anyone who exploits a power disadvantage to manipulate someone else. For example, a middle-aged guy trying to pick up an 18-year-old could be considered a predator, even if they’re not engaging in anything illegal. (She thinks the age of consent should actually be higher than 18. Given what I know about Gen Z, I bet a lot of her peers would agree, especially given the explosion of online methods for meeting weirdos.)
Don’t get distracted. As we prepare for Trump 47 — and it’s going to be chaotic — we have to learn the lessons from Trump 45.
Trump’s defenders in 2020 said we needed to focus on what he did and not what he said. By this, they meant giving him credit for, say, his renegotiated North American trade deal and rising middle-class wages, but not the constant fights, racist insults, and petty grievances. (“Focus on the deets, not the tweets.”)
His defenders are actually onto something, because people have seemingly spent 100x more energy analyzing our potential Greenland expansion than the actual wholesale oligarchy he’s installing, including the enormous bribe pool that he’s collected. (And the laundered bribes we accept as bad but normal now.)
For more on how to think about this: The “Annex Canada” Stuff is a Test and You’re Failing.
One exception to this: Trump has appointed Mel “I hope you get r***d by a pack of n******s” Gibson, Sly Stallone, and Jon Voight to be White House emissaries to Hollywood so that maybe the studios will start making movies that Trump likes. This may be the funniest thing he or any president has ever done, especially because he apparently didn’t ask them first.
Americans are tipping less at restaurants: The average tip rate has declined about 4% since its post-pandemic peak. This probably reflects both higher prices at restaurants, and maybe fatigue with being machine-asked for tips nearly every time you buy any kind of food or beverage.
Tipping is a particularly odious form of American exceptionalism, and it’s so built into our economic system that we actually allow employers to pay a lower minimum wage for those employees. This effectively leaves these employees’ livelihood up to the whims of customers, and research repeatedly shows that tipping reflects the emotional biases of consumers rather than effort or quality of service.
Trump promised “no tax on tips” in his 2024 campaign, which was a brilliant political promise that Kamala Harris was forced to match. It’s also inherently unfair to un-tipped employees, and it makes no economic sense whatsoever.
Anyway, please tip well until we fix this system, which is probably never.
It’s not the misinformation, it’s the fantasy. I think people overreacted to Zuck’s “relocate the fact checkers to Texas where they’ll be objective” move. Meta’s fact-checking wasn’t persuading anyone, and itcan’t possibly keep up with the river of AI slop being uploaded. As we’ve covered here obsessively, the larger issue is that people are coalescing around entire fictional universes.
Look, today’s real news is tomorrow’s “oops, we fucked up.” Did you throw away your black plastic spatulas, only to find out that the panic was really a math error? I did! Did you waste you time with thinkpieces about declining college enrollment, only to learn that they missed thousands of freshmen? I did!
These are just simple alternative facts, though. The larger problem is that the American public has always been susceptible to fantasies, and the internet has made it easy for communities to form around flat earth-style nonsense. The latest one: the most popular podcast in the US last month was one that “proves” that non-verbal autistic children are actually telepathic. It’s grim as hell.
Bonus brainworm tragic ending: Remember the OG Pizzagate guy who drove to DC with his assault rifle to rescue the trafficked children from the back of Comet Ping Pong? Iconic, right? He was killed by cops in a traffic stop last week.
Let’s eliminate a few states. While DOGE is looking at federal waste, maybe they could back the states, which almost entirely reflect defunct historical interests. If the US were a business, we would have gone through dozens of cycles of consolidation and decentralization by now. Let’s think creatively about this. We could probably get it down to 20 states TBH.
Everything corny is cool again. One of the most charming genres of YouTube videos is where young people discover amazing old stuff. I love even the ones that seem not fully on the level. (Oh, you’re a 25-year-old guitarist, and you’ve never heard Led Zeppelin?)
This is one of my recent favorites: Four zoomers listening to Michael McDonald’s “I Keep Forgetting.” Like a lot of people my age, I knew this song as Warren G’s “Regulate,” but it took a decade until I even knew that beat was a liberal sample. These guys in this video are so young they only barely know “Regulate” (as “that Nate Dogg tune”), but they bug out when Mike starts wailing.
Living with the protocol. Finally, I suppose it’s a ritual in Morocco that people have to greet royalty with a hand kiss. Well, the prince has a solution to this. He’s like the Barry Sanders of avoiding lips!
Madlib has given me hours and hours of joy. Sharing this from Gilles Peterson. https://www.instagram.com/p/DE7jmaKM_Fh/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==