Entertainment doesn’t have an answer for this.
I no longer believe the entertainment business has solutions for the problem we at Seed&Spark have long been interested in solving — helping films to shift culture. If you want them to shift culture, they can’t just shift perception, they have to shift behavior. And if you want to shift behavior, you have to be a lot more intentional than just showing people a movie and hoping something magical happens.
This article was co-authored by Julie Haberstick.
Finally, movies and shows by creators and about characters who have been left out since the dawn of the medium are the toast of the town. But unlike their whitewashed predecessors they’re not getting the same opportunity to dominate cultural conversation.
Let’s back up.
Once upon a time, watching movies and shows was an experience.
An episode of I Love Lucy or American Idol was an event you shared with your friends and family. The TV appointment included a venue (your living room), a date, and time. As for movies, the only way you could see them, at one point in history, was in the theater. And if you missed it, well, then you missed it.
My grandmother took a riverboat from Greenville, Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee to see Gone With the Wind in theaters because it was all her friends were talking about. They loved this film. Soon after she was, in her words, “socially ignored” (this was a precursor to ‘cancel culture’) for telling her friends it was racist propaganda. In 1939.
We had limited avenues to watch limited content for a limited time, making the audience of years past concentrated and robust. One movie could be literally all everyone in your town was talking about. Nearly 53 million people watched one episode of Friends in 1996. If you were in high school then, you either were the girl with the Rachel haircut or you were friends with that girl (or you hated that girl and her narrow representation of American women). Either way, she was part of the conversation. We can estimate (with a little math) around half the U.S. population saw E.T. the first year of its release. Half!
While our limited options certainly homogenized our media, it also ensured we, as a society, had a common vernacular: our movies and shows. And because of that, media-makers of the time influenced not only one audience member’s perspective, but an entire society’s. So if that media is primarily centered around the cis/white/male/able-bodied experience and perspective, that is what dominates our vernacular, and what creates our shared vision of what a “normal American” looks like. But the vast majority of even mainstream media simply doesn’t have the reach it used to.
Check out some numbers. The most-watched episodes of TV in 1996 and 2020 followed the Super Bowl:
1996: Friends “The One After The Super Bowl” (52.9 million, 19.8% of the 1995 U.S. population).
2020: The Masked Singer post-Super Bowl Season 3 Premiere (27.4 million, 8.2% of the 2020 U.S. population).
And if you think The Masked Singer’s 27.4 million viewers are something to write home about, here’s food for thought — In 1995, 27.3 million people watched a rerun of Grace Under Fire (a sitcom about a single mom, for those who never saw it).
Did more folks watch The Masked Singer premiere later, via streaming? Sure (though that data is guarded and also this show is terrifying why is anyone watching it). But numbers aren’t the whole story. Even if you’re watching the same show as your coworker, when we can schedule media to suit ourselves, conversations can’t flow freely. (“Spoiler alert!”)
We’re simply not sitting down and watching the same things together anymore. And how could we? With the advent of omnipresent streaming media that has turned content into a utility, we have access to watch shows like the electricity it’s plugged in to (over 500 scripted shows on the market, more than quadrupled in four years).
But while we may be watching more media than ever, there are only so many audience members, and only so many hours in a day. In order to “help” us navigate this media tundra, streaming and social media platforms use algorithms. You need to decide what to watch? Here’s a screen of available films and episodes, tailored to your ‘preferences’ (wait, I don’t remember setting preferences!) by algorithm. Got a recommendation from a friend, maybe on social media? Algorithms run those platforms too. In fact, algorithms determine at least 80% of what we watch on Netflix and even influence what new content gets produced. (At Seed&Spark we’ve taken many swings at this problem over the years.)
By the way, I’m not arguing here that content segregation is altogether new. In fact, during that same Friends season referenced above, of the 50 top-rated shows, only one, coming in at number 50, starred a person of color: Family Matters. (And even though it was #50, any young person during that time was doing Urkel impressions.) Martin and Living Single — shows that are considered cultural touchstones for the Black community — weren’t in the top 100. Even when choices were more limited, we were already having a segregated viewing experience. However, shows like Living Single had a wide enough reach even at #100 (similar to Game of Thrones, to be specific) it could have a massive cultural impact we still feel today: its characters directly inspired women of color to move into law and politics (Maxine Shaw!) at a faster rate than ever before in history.
Algorithms basically do at scale for their platforms what a really homogeneous group of friends used to do (and still does): suggest content similar to something you already like to keep you comfortable. It’s in an effort to keep your eyes on their platform, where they can keep you subscribed — or collect your data so they (or their partners) can advertise to you more efficiently. These impersonal algorithms reinforce our old perspectives, tastes, and experiences, all in the name of their bottom line. And we pay for it: By limiting our exposure to novel, diverse, or dissenting work, algorithms can slowly, quietly make us less interesting, and, collectively, less empathetic.
Want proof? Look at the spread of some of the most streamed shows of 2020. Anything look, ya know…familiar?
So I’m obviously not making an argument for somehow regressing to the media landscape of the past (streaming algorithms are doing a fine job at that — see above graph again), but to think more deeply about how we leverage technology to do more of what storytellers really want to do: move the culture forward by building bridges, building empathy, changing minds, and changing people’s behavior. Today’s robust content landscape provides more platforms for women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, and “others” to be seen and heard, an opportunity long past due (and we have a lot more work to do). But with thousands of movies and shows available to watch when you want, where you want, and algorithms navigating the way, today’s audience is more fragmented and siloed than ever before.
Getting a massive, unified audience may be a thing of the past. But we’re not giving up.
Movies and television have great power. Sure they can make us feel good (Great British Baking Show, anyone?). But the role of story is to unify us, to challenge us, to guide us through an adventure from the comfort of our living room (or wherever you watch). Movies and television shows have the power to help us better understand our world, and to share that understanding with others. Which means if you’re a creator who is trying to move the culture forward by changing minds, you have to have a way to reach people who do not already think like you or look like you. And that’s hard when audiences don’t even know they’re missing out on important stories that just aren’t making it into their feed.
Seed&Spark’s mission has always been to shift power to communities through creativity. Power comes in the form of representation, to be sure — to be able to tell your own story or the story of your community so that everyone has a chance to see themselves and their stories represented on screen. But that can’t be the end of the line: representation has to reach people who are different from you, whose minds and behavior can change because of the story you told. And because you’re able to reach a wider audience, building community and empathy where it did not exist before, you can shift power in the form of resources (money, jobs, industry, political power) to your community, too.
So how do we leverage the power of media in this ultra-fragmented landscape to shift power to communities? We have to have tools to reach the audiences most like us, and most not like us at our disposal. Which is why Seed&Spark has shifted our focus to the most diverse place in many people’s lives — the workplace. And because the workplace is the most diverse place most people are in their lives, it’s also where they have to learn to work across differences in personality, cultural background, style, language, class and more. The workplace gathers groups of people who no algorithm would ever seek out. It’s a place where storytelling can help connect people who have a reason to really try.
For most of the past decade, Seed&Spark has cultivated equity and inclusion in entertainment, building a pipeline of stories from unique perspectives. In order to actively support provocative work and foster horizon-expanding conversations, we have launched two new offerings: Film Forward, a first-of-its-kind inclusive workplace culture program, and Impact Screening Experiences, customized virtual screenings curated to drive change. For both products, we pair custom curricula to drive curiosity and empathy and to hone personal and interpersonal skills to help people connect and understand each other across differences of all kinds.
We not only provide tools for organizations to build more psychologically safe workplaces — we share revenue with the creators whose work powers these programs, and we gather data about how, specifically, the films on our program are changing minds and behavior — both individual and organizational. This is not a silver bullet for a problem the entertainment business has spent a century creating and refining. This is a new approach to both distribution and corporate education across which we hope we can create values alignment (and appropriate value transfer) among organizations, their employees, creators and their communities.
The entertainment industry is reckoning (albeit very slowly) with its part in normalizing white as the default race. With male as the default hero. With binary gender roles. The list goes on. The great technology innovations in the entertainment industry have, by and large, not been put to use to repair this damage but instead to consolidate IP, data and money for just a few major players. At the same time, creators everywhere are making work to move our culture forward across all media and formats. If we say we are dedicated to these creators and this work, it’s our responsibility to offer them new models and pathways to achieve their goals. Even if it means building beyond the film business altogether.
If you’d like to join us for events or learn more about what we’re doing check out this page or email us.
