Category: media

NIna Wolarsky, who was VP of original series – drama, is out. “The Wolarsky news comes just a week after president of originals Jane Wiseman was shown the door. The ongoing senior management exodus from Netflix also includes Channing Dungey, to whom Wolarsky previously reported. Dungey stepped down from her vice president of original content role to succeed Peter Roth as chairman of Warner Bros. Television Group.” – Variety

After producing everything from The Talented Mr. Ripley to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Lydia Pilcher started looking for a project of her own. “Being on the inside of the industry as a producer and really being able to see all aspects of how decisions get made — Who decides what stories get told? How did the directors get chosen? — it made me understand that there was something being missed on the Hollywood end. It’s not just that the stories were being shut out. A lot of money was being left on the table.” – Variety

The series comes so close. And yet. “Perhaps, in more deft hands, this storyline could be a transgressive investigation of the ways in which women, and particularly mothers, are forced to carry terrible burdens, as well as, perhaps, provocative commentary on femme identity, queerness, and found family.” – BuzzFeed

Well, probably not, says an expert. “Becker found that audiences tended to react to those situations along party lines: If they already believed what they were being told, they were likely to find the comedy credible. If they don’t hold the same beliefs, the opposite effect can be seen.” – CBC

“There has been a lot of progress for women and people of colour in front of the camera,” Darnell Hunt, dean of the school’s social sciences division and the study’s co-author, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, there has not been the same level of progress behind the camera.“ – Toronto Star (AP)

Within a couple years of starting his newsletter, this random guy was able to quit his day job and become, for lack of a better word, a full-time expert, his pod-related opinions and observations quoted in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. His newsletter Hot Pod now has between 20,000 and 25,000 subscribers (a combination of paid and free) and earns six figures, he says — a substantial figure for what amounts to a trade journal written almost like a personal zine, mixing the latest pod news with commentary and asides. – Medium

How so? Like New Coke, it was “product not enough real people wanted, a solution to a problem that didn’t really exist,” writes Josef Adalian. “There is an audience for bite-size entertainment with production values closer to Netflix than what you’ll find on social media, but I’m not so sure there’s a market for it.” – Vulture

Moving picture clips by Georges Méliès and Alice Guy-Blaché from the 1890s, long thought lost, were discovered over the last decade in the form of flipbooks, originally produced for people who couldn’t get to or afford tickets for a picture show. Now researchers have gathered some of those books and restored their images to film. – The Guardian

Less than two weeks before our quadrennial democratic experiment in terror, division, heartbreak and the art of the possible, our home screens are sending wildly mixed messages about democracy in action — how it was, how it is, how it should be and how we might save America from itself. – Chicago Tribune

Katzenberg: “There was no question that keeping us going was not going to have a different outcome, it was just going to spend a whole lot more money without any value to show for it.” Whitman: “Most entrepreneurs just keep on going [until] they literally run out of money and we just didn’t think that was the right thing to do.” – Deadline