I want to be supportive of you. I feel your pain. I agree with you completely both when it comes to streaming as a Ponzi scheme and the corporations taking over. I feel realistically everything that you say.

But.

Hollywood is not about making art. If it does, it is incidental. The great movies, the great TV shows, all of the things that you and your colleagues spend your life pouring your heart into are and have always been a commodity. I think you know this, you got paid for your work and you certainly would never have done it for free.

The problem is the fact that Hollywood is the only industry in existence that presents at image that it is not a business. It has created several subsidiaries businesses around it to prop this up: criticism, publicity, journalism. Even the performers go on these shows and do everything in their power to convince millions of people that thei job they spent months of their life working on and recieved a salary for was art and give the perception they would have done it for free.

And work of meida - film, TV, music - is onlu worht what people are willing to pay for it. Critics seem to have been working in their field for such a long time that I think many of them believe that there should be no correlation between commerce and art. Indeed, many think the fewer people who can see a work of art, the higher quality it is.

Yes art can not be achieved the same way profits can be achieved. But it is only through those profits that art has a chance of being created at all. To be clear it is tragic none of the studio bosses are among the ones who have been fired. It's not surprising though: the bosses of studios are not unlike corporate raiders, pilliaging every last cent that can be milked dry and then leaving a husk behind.

Yes studios are guilty of hubris. So is every critic who thought that the Golden Age of TV could last. THere was always going to be a point when the fragmented audiences became so small that it would become unprofitable for most networks to keep going. It's not just streaming that's feeling the pinch, cable channels are becoming husks and network audiences are getting much older.

There are many things to blame for the situation were in, and I don't pretend to have a solution. But it has to start with us as an audience recognizing that capittalism and art are eternally locked together: one can't have one without the other. You must also add a the other fact of capitalism: the buyer wants to pay as little as possible for the product as possible. And for the record, the partnership between investor and artist has always been master and slave, from the Renaissance to Broadway. It is only my fellow critics who want you to believe otherwise.