From Variety:
Six days before the debut of “Shōgun” last February, John Landgraf was worried about the “Endless Scroll.”
The “endless scroll” is not a talisman from “Shōgun” or an artifact of the Middle Ages but rather a symptom of our times. It refers to the never-ending stream of content that so many of us now have at our fingertips.
When asked if he was worried viewers wouldn’t turn out for the most expensive production in the 30-year history of FX, Landgraf paused to think. Any butterflies he had about the show’s launch, he said finally, were wrapped up in his larger concern about the “endless scroll” effect that may be training us to have shorter and shorter attention spans. “You get 10, 15, maybe 25 seconds of somebody’s attention before they make a decision whether this is for them or not for them,” Landgraf said. “That’s the thing that I worry about most.”
“The technologies enabled by computers and the internet are orders of magnitude bigger than almost any disruption we’ve ever seen, because they’re not just economic — they’re cognitive. They’re cultural,” Landgraf said. “They’re fundamentally transforming the way we live and the way we think and the way we learn.”
Moreover, FX’s rebound started just when its parent company, The Walt Disney Company, needed some good news. “Shōgun” not only paid off on Disney’s considerable investment — estimated to be around $200 million for the production of Season 1 alone — but the show’s impact in the U.S. and key overseas territories helped quiet CEO Bob Iger’s critics as Disney’s stock price slumped.
Beyond award-season bragging rights, the success of “Shogun” helped reinforce FX’s role as a content engine driving Disney’s adult #streaming strategy for Hulu and Disney+.
“You couldn’t make ‘Shōgun’ for anything other than a global streaming platform. You need a global audience to amortize the cost,” Landgraf says.
One indisputable result of the quickening pace of innovation is the increasing amount of global economic activity that revolves around engaging consumers in some form of #media — whether a #TV show or a TikTok feed or a live virtual concert staged within a Fortnite video game. Will the soft power of media eventually become the most valuable commodity of all? The global economy seems to think so. And that also really worries Landgraf, as the largest of what he calls the “trillion-dollar companies” move deeper into the business he knows best.
“There’s something really strange in an economy where there are 500 companies in the S&P and seven of them account for 70% of the growth in the U.S. economy. That’s different,” he says, referring to the group of companies dubbed the “Magnificent Seven” by Wall Street: Apple, Alphabet Inc. (Google), Amazon, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Meta and Tesla.
“I’m not making any value judgment on what they do or what they don’t do. But I can tell you, they’re not long-form storytelling companies,” he says.
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