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You're listening to Fox News Radio. I'm Ben Domenech. At the close of a year that has been very eventful when it comes to world events, politics and the like, I wanted to take a bit of a moment to look back at some of the cultural trends, the things that we don't often talk about.
but are also things that are a lot more important in the great scheme of things in terms of directing the future of the country and organizing the way that people think about the world. I want to go through the top 10 things that I think really mattered when it comes to the cultural space in 2023. But first, let's deal with some honorable mentions. First, the NIL era in sports and ESPN going hard into the gambling space.
I think that we forget how much this was something that changed overnight. It's something that was really avoided intentionally by the networks.
Anything having to do with gambling was left out of the conversation, pushed aside. Something that really was left to Brent Musburger and Al Michaels to make various nods to. But now it's right at the center of sports. It's being advertised when it comes to whether you watch the Red Zone Network, the NFL Network, ESPN or the like.
They are all branded with various associations and affiliations with sports betting apps. That's something that's only going to continue to increase in the wake of a Supreme Court decision that allowed states to make determinations about whether they would allow such gambling to take place.
And it's also going to raise a lot of questions about various sports and the decisions that are made at the end of games and that could decide basically whether you hit the over or end up in the under or if you have an outcome that is diametrically opposed. We just saw the fact that this played out in the Detroit Lions and Dallas Cowboys game just the other night.
And then, of course, the NIL era is obviously going to change a lot of things regarding college football, where various players go, how they are treated more and more like pros in the making as opposed to college athletes.
athletes and people who are going to be in some way prevented from using their likenesses to gain not just money for their families, but to accrue a certain degree of celebrity. You know, it's one thing to think about this in terms of the potential going forward. But I think that what you're going to see is more and more athletes who basically decide to make their career a four year career in college.
Not necessarily hoping to even make the pros given the limitations of their physical ability or their skill. It's something that I think is going to change a lot of things regarding college football.
You know, there's all sorts of quarterbacks who could be reliable third stringers in the NFL, but could go off in the right environment and with the right offense in an NIL era that could allow them to make to turn that into a lot of money for them and for their families. I think another honorable mention has to be the upheaval surrounding X.
Twitter, obviously, was something that was at the center of the conversation a few years ago. It seems to me to have become less relevant in the post-Trump banning era. Jack Dorsey having left and Elon Musk having taken over the place.
It certainly has changed the way that a lot of people view the app and use it. They may decry it as being a source now for misinformation, disinformation alike, government crackdowns, journalists leaving, etc.,
I certainly think that it matters, but I don't think that this actually rates in the top 10 because I don't think that X or Twitter is as important as journalists and media types think it is. I think it drives the way that they may view the world, but not the way that average people do. And then I would say TikTok. TikTok absolutely had an impact in 2023, 2020.
because it survived the kind of attacks that it was receiving from a number of different key sources. Democrats and Republicans started the year pretty much unanimously opposed to TikTok, but the disagreements about what that opposition meant were significant. Republicans generally wanted to ban TikTok entirely. Democrats, certainly those on Capitol Hill, were open to forcing them to make a sale.
But at the end of the day, TikTok, thanks to a massive lobbying campaign, enormous amounts of money spent, influence peddling of a variety that we rarely see on the level of, you know, tax involvement in D.C., ended up in a space where they basically survived what they thought might have been a real threat from a Republican House that might have forced the issue on Democrats.
Now, it's not over. I think it still remains to be seen whether this is something that comes up, and it particularly could come up within an election year as being a hot-button issue. But when the White House basically decided to make peace with TikTok, lean into TikTok, in fact, then it sent a message to Democrats that they really ought not go down the road of fighting it. And for the next generation of Democrats who are even more beholden to China, gaslighting
Gavin Newsom being China's favorite governor, basically, in America. That's something that I think is now going to become less of a bipartisan issue. One thing to keep in mind is something like, how often do you think about the Roman Empire? A meme that I think a lot of people took up within 2023. That started on TikTok. So it definitely has an effect in terms of driving the conversation.
Obviously, the number one in terms of the influence in America in 2023 culturally has to be considered.
the ubiquitous presence of Taylor Swift. The ERAs tour, which blew everything away in terms of people coming out to attend it, the ticket prices, a movie which obviously almost made as much as the Michael Jackson movie, though she didn't have to pass away in order to have that kind of prestige event.
was something that I think really brought out how significant she is in an era in which artists are generally considered to be pretty ephemeral and passing. And I think that this is something that
Whether you like Taylor Swift or not, whether you like her music or not, it just has to be acknowledged that in an era in which a lot of other artists are viewed as corporate properties who only engage in corporate crafted music, she's someone who is pretty much uniquely an individual and has her own creative background in terms of the writing and in terms of her approach.
And so I think that's something that is worthy of note. And regardless of what you think of her politics or her influence on the culture, regardless of what you think of her presence within the shots at NFL stadiums as she cheers on Travis Kelsey, I do think that it's impossible to remember 2023 without remembering the constant presence of Taylor Swift and how much she dominated the attention of people. She's definitely a worthy selection.
uh, for times person of the year, even though that's obviously a craving bid, uh, to sell magazines. I think we also have to remember the phenomenon of Barbenheimer. It's something that's so weird. It's an odd, you know, a connection, uh, that was made between the, you know, one of the last directorial auteurs in, uh, Christopher Nolan and, you know, his nuclear focused, uh, you know, very dark and intellectual, uh,
approach to looking at the figure of Oppenheimer compared to Greta Gerwig's, you know, very impressive, I would say, take on a Mattel property. You had this weird confluence there that obviously boosted both movies. You had more men going to see Barbie probably because of it. And you had more women going to see Oppenheimer just to be able to say that they checked the box.
And that is such a weird thing, but it also got people to go back to movie theaters, which is itself an impressive achievement in an era in which so many people were tuning out the movies and have decided to basically watch everything at home or on their phones and that that's perfectly fine. These were two movies that people decided that they wanted to see in theaters together as an actual event. And I think we have to remember 2023 for that.
Next, I think we have to acknowledge, you know, one of the reasons that the American audience is so difficult to reach is because they've tuned out the thing that has been most dominant within the theater space for so many years now, namely the superhero genre. You saw the failures of The Flash, of Marvel's, of Aquaman. You saw...
Basically, a coherent case being made that this was the end of the superhero era in terms of its, maybe not in terms of the genre, but certainly in terms of its dominance within the theater space. And that's something that I think can be made as an honest point, but also is somewhat exaggerated. Here's what I wrote when we were rounding up the films of the year over at the Spectator.
There are certain ideas taken as obvious statements of fact about current trends in Hollywood. Above all, that everyone's tired of superhero movies. They're bland dreck with predictable twists, repetitive soundtracks, and budget CGI that hasn't been updated in a decade. The misguided push for representation has become a poor substitute for the weakness of plots.
The more diverse the characters, the weaker the story. The more it leans on a message as monotonous as a corporate DEI session. And if there's one crutch audiences are particularly tired of, it's the multiverse trope where Easter eggs for fans are used to fill time in between other forms of product placement.
Yet somehow Spider-Man across the spider verse, the followup to 2018 is monumentally successful into the spider verse manages to dodge all of these pitfalls. It is visually incredible, emotionally mature, and even ends with a cliffhanger that feels surprising and earned.
So is the superhero era ending? I think it probably is.
But I also think that that era of dominance was something that is an exception and not the rule generally. And we'll see superhero movies that are the exception to the rule, I think, going forward. Another major story within the cultural space...
was Netflix's resurgence. It's easy to forget that Netflix had a number of really bad quarters in terms of the way people viewed it as something that was perhaps on the downslide, given the fact that there were all these other entities getting into the streaming wars and that they were going to be armed with an enormous amount of IP from their libraries that Netflix simply couldn't compete with. The idea was that they were going to be able to
really catch up with Netflix very fast. And so Wall Street and others seem to sour a little bit on the OG streamer. But Netflix had a resurgence in 2023 that was driven by a number of different factors. One, of course, was this completely random obsession with the show Suits, which is not a good show and I don't like it.
but Americans apparently do, and they watched quite a lot of it. Netflix also cracked down on passwords being shared across multiple different family members with barely a peep from people who were upset about it. There was just sort of
glowering admission that, well, you know, I've been stealing this for long enough. I guess I ought to pay for it. And that's something that I think is a testament to their strength. And the other thing that I think Netflix had going for it is that it actually had some really good shows this year. One in particular that I would cite for you is the fall of the House of Usher.
which continues this chain of creations from the same ensemble team that has done Haunting of Hill House and others before. It's an excellent depiction that is basically influenced by Edgar Allan Poe stories, but not trapped by their kind of strictures. And it's something that I certainly recommend as being a bingeable show. But really, overall, I think that what Netflix proved is that
The fact that they are only about streaming as opposed to all these other streamers, you know, Disney being about theme parks, Apple being about selling phones, it gives them the ability to really focus on it and to make decisions that are not influenced necessarily by other factors. You know, if you want to look at a comparison between
Think about the total failure of Amazon's Citadel show, which was hyped up by them, a Russo Brothers creation that was supposed to be this globe-spanning kind of phenomenon, and no one really found it of interest. So I just think there are a lot of other entities that are getting into streaming already.
are, and this is not an original point, others have made this, they're basically trying to make up for the vast advantages that Netflix has by being in this game for so long and understanding it so much better than they do. More of the Ben Domenech podcast right after this. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Whether you're selling a little or a lot.
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Another interesting cultural moment was Disney bending its knee to its critics. And you can read this in certain different ways. You can view it as just kind of a craven attempt to win people back. You can view it as an admission of something that was true. But basically, Bob Iger closed out the year by acknowledging that Disney
Disney maybe had gotten a bit too woke, that it maybe had lost its connection with its audience and that that was something they would need to look at going forward. It's certainly something that I think, you know, is surprising in the sense that Disney has resisted so much of that for so long.
I certainly think that elements like the criticism contained within the satirical South Park episode, which lambasted Kathleen Kennedy, you know, has to be part of this. But, you know, also, of course, the failure or the decline of a number of its Star Wars related properties. And certainly, I think, you know, the failure of the Indiana Jones movie, which I believe is driven by.
primarily because of Phoebe Waller-Bridge's presence within that context, is something that speaks to the disadvantages that Disney has in an environment where so many of the people who work within Disney certainly share that ideology, share that very typical and predictable mindset.
of the cultural variety, but they are trying to speak to a broad audience that is very attuned, I think now to the very, to the signals that they can give and to the fact that there are a lot of things being shoehorned in to what they do that simply don't connect with
Their failure when it came to a movie like Wish is part of this as well. Disney just needs a real reset. And I don't know what Iger is going to do in the coming year. But it certainly seems like they need a creative boost in order to get back to the kind of dominance that they had. Which I'm sure they can do given the amount of IP that they own.
Another obvious cultural story, and it's not just a media story, is the collapse of CNN. And we're not just talking about ratings. So those ratings are terrible. I think that the Chris Licht story written by Tim Alberta that led to his exit, perhaps helped along the way by certain other figures, is something that has to be considered very significant culturally because it's
CNN has occupied this odd position for quite a while within the American media landscape.
And it's something that I think has held on to its pomposity, its authority. It's the idea that it dictates things from a kind of centrist position that is more lofty and that is more respectable than others. That's just something that isn't true, obviously, but it's something that they've held on to for a long time. The fact that they experienced such a decline so rapidly in
in such a clear way is, I think, very telling about the current media landscape. And we'll see what happens with them going forward in 2024 as they attempt to cover this upcoming presidential cycle. We will see if they're able to rebound at all or if this has basically been the beginning of the end for CNN.
And that's something that I think is very much more possible than people give credit to. It's not like media entities just get to last forever, necessarily. Sometimes they die, and we might have seen the beginning of the end for CNN.
The Hollywood writers strike and fallout from it, I think, is definitely something that merits attention in 2023. The strike obviously went longer than, you know, it hit a lot of different historical marks and contained a lot more feuds than I think people necessarily understand. It's the kind of thing that I would be interested, having listened to a lot of podcasts,
and read a bunch of essays about this, I would be interested in reading a book eventually about what everything that played out. But one of the things that I think is a key takeaway from it is that demands for more transparency within the context of this strike are
were things that led to a lot of hard, honest attention being paid to how much viewers are actually watching some of these things that cost an enormous amount of money to make and produce. And while the writers' side of things sort of has said that they won this showdown, it
I don't think that's actually the case. I don't think that it's actually that cut and dry. And in fact, I think that one of the things that we're going to see is writers rooms continue to shrink and not have the kind of creative power that these people would like. It's something that I think is just inevitable given the fact that viewers are more narrowly focused on
you know, in terms of their own priorities, you know, at the same time that Amazon was having this failure with the Citadel side of things, Reacher was their number one show for 2023, according to their own announcements. So that's something that I think is telling in terms of this. This is not the kind of show that Hollywood writers would necessarily want to write, but it is the kind of show that viewers want to see. The
of TV's number one show at the hands of its star happened in 2023. Um,
I don't know how much you pay attention to this, but if you are a fan of Yellowstone, you know what I'm talking about. Kevin Costner got into a dispute with Taylor Sheridan, the show's creator, and obviously the key creator in the Paramount universe, which may itself be sold in the coming weeks. If reports are accurate, uh, potentially to Warner brothers and, and, uh, we'll see how that shakes out. That's a very interesting story. Uh,
but costner basically wanted to leave the show and for a number of different reasons he
that the creative side was taking too long. He wanted to engage more with his Horizon project, which is going to lead to two Western films that are supposed to come out here in the coming year. We'll see how that does. It's a passion project for him, something he's been working on for a while. If you look at the cast list, it has basically every person you could possibly imagine being in a Western genre movie in it.
And we'll see whether that's something that actually turns out to be creative genius or if it's just pomposity and his own pride about what he wanted to create there. But Costner wanted to head to the exits and he became caught in a feud over the amount of time that he would have to spend on set. He demanded a ton of money and the outcome of this was that
Essentially, Taylor Sheridan announced that he could go screw. And so because of that, the fifth season, the second half of the fifth season of Yellowstone will be the last part of Yellowstone that exists. They'll have potentially a spinoff. Maybe we'll see. I'm sure that they probably will because there's just too much money on the table. But, you know, basically this show is not ending the way that that people thought it
thought it would necessarily end. And one thing to keep in mind here is that when it was originally announced as a show, the fact that Costner was a part of it was a big deal. He was not a TV actor in his stature. And so including him was significant. But it became an ensemble piece. And obviously, the people who are central to it now are not Costner. And so the kind of writing around him or writing other characters
more heavily was I think something that was probably a factor in him wanting to exit as well. So you rarely see a TV show that's at the top of
just kind of end because a star refuses to go along with what the creators want to do. But it's apparently going to happen. And so that's something that bears watching, but it's also a big story coming out of 2023 and is itself, I think, a story about the power of
streaming to drive, you know, additional eyeballs, additional views to various properties, even after they've initially premiered. And then I think that we shouldn't escape this year without paying notice to kind of the contrast between outside groups that have entered the media creation landscape versus established players. And the contrast I would make
is between the disastrous movie failures of Apple and
Obviously, you know, the world's first trillion dollar company, one that, you know, is certainly interested in creating very expensive, big budget shows. It has had some successes, but this year had two clear failures with their investment in Killers of the Flower Moon from Martin Scorsese, starring obviously Leo DiCaprio.
And then Napoleon, which they backed with Ridley Scott directing Joaquin Phoenix. These are two very, you know,
These are all kind of a talent, a list, you know, directors and actors and people, you know, who certainly know how to make movies. And Apple is certainly a company that, you know, has a ton of money to play with within this space. But they really fail to connect with audiences or people didn't like them as much as Apple had hoped. The flip side of that being the runaway success of.
sound of freedom, which obviously is a very interesting property, something that, you know, captured the minds of a lot of Americans, particularly American churchgoers across the country, you know, their whole pay it forward, ticket buying and et cetera, is a major story, I think, and perhaps a model for future Kickstarter based projects.
approaches to making movies. And then obviously you have the entry of somebody like the Daily Wire with their bent key projects into making more original content or to packaging it together. I don't know if that's going to be successful. I've yet to see their work really as being all that impressive. But I do think that there is something there, the idea that
small budget efforts that connect with an audience are going to become more and more appealing in an era when big budget efforts that don't connect with audiences seem to be, you know, dying out. Essentially, there's no way that you can justify these things going forward, given the trend lines and given the performances that we've seen at the box office and with various viewers who just...
aren't interested in content that, you know, is, is in that space. They don't want the kind of things that Hollywood is pushing out and that these new attempts to enter into streaming are pushing out. They tend to gravitate more toward traditional types or formats, or they also, I think, you know, are just, you know, not interested in the pieces that are driven more by egotistical directors who think that they can, you know,
just put anything on the screen and that people will watch it. The turgid lengthy Killers of the Flower Moon is something that, you know, is the example of someone who has passed the point where they really are able to be edited in the same way that, you know, it's like late Stephen King where the books just run for 250 pages longer than they need to.
And then finally, to close things out, I think 2023 really was the year where we can say that millennial nostalgia overtook boomer nostalgia. Now, you can go back to maybe the year before and say that the Super Bowl and that kind of thing was part of this. But I do...
really think that, you know, millennial nostalgia is something that is driving a lot of the elements in media today, particularly for late 90s situations. I mean, you look at something
that is as popular among kids at this moment as this latest Trolls movie, which is driven by the attention paid to boy band phenomenons. You look at the attention paid to the Britney Spears bio that got so many different forms of attention. You look at the way that people are kind of returning to look back at the 90s, the late 90s and the early 2000s.
in terms of culture as being a time worth considering or reconsidering. And that's something that I think is itself a displacement. You have this new huge generation of people who have reached a point in their lives where they are nostalgic for a point in their past. And that's something that I think is going to be a driving force, not just this year, but within years to come. So with that,
Let's look forward to 2024, where we'll have plenty of time to talk about politics and the different conflicts within it, what's going on around the world. But these, to me, are some of the biggest trends in 2023, and they're worth considering. So with that.
I'm Ben Domenech. You've been listening to Fox News Radio. We'll be back next week with more to dive back into the fray. Listen ad-free with a Fox News Podcast Plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app.
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