 at this moment, when everybody needs a hit, people in Hollywood are almost religiously, conscientious objectors against reaching the kinds of mass audiences that they once coveted. And we want to run a clip from Roseanne, which the reboot of Roseanne, which is basically the most successful broadcast reboot, and certainly in recent memory, came out in 2017. Let's look at a clip from this and talk about why Hollywood doesn't want to make giant hits anymore. She promised that she would get along and knowing the both of you. I'm guessing you're the one keeping this feud alive. What's up, deplorable? First, let's say Grace. Jackie, would you like to take a knee? Thank you for this food and for bringing our son, DJ, home safe from Syria. But most of all, Lord, thank you for making America great again. It's okay, darling. How could you have voted for him, Roseanne? He talked about jobs, Jackie. He said he'd shake things up. I mean, this might come as a complete shock to you, but we almost lost our house the way things are going. Have you looked at the news because now things are worse? Not on the real news. Oh, police! So, you know, this came out in 2017. Roseanne's character is a Trump voter and Trump supporter. Her sister, Jackie, is, you know, wearing a pussy hat is a Hillary Clinton supporter. Yeah, you know, why did this show do so well and why aren't there more of these shows? I don't know. I can't answer the second question because it's a giant mystery to me and there's a corollary to that also in the feature side. Yeah, and just to put the, before you get into it, I'll just read for the people listening the slide that we just pulled up showing that the first two episodes drew 17.7 million viewers. The second episode, 18.6 million viewers. This scored the highest rated today entertainment telecast in six years among adults 18 to 49 and TV's highest rated comedy telecast on any night in three and a half years since September, 2014. Yeah, giant, right? I mean, creatively, I'd say it's because that was a family talking about JIT that families all across the country were talking about and they were doing it in a funny way. And that is, like, that's it. Just put a pin in it. You're done. I'm talking about what people are talking about in a funny way and making sure it's funny, right? Cause it was funny. That's it, that's the whole job. That's all you have to do. You don't have to think, I mean, that is hard enough, by the way, but that used to be kind of what show business was supposed to television anyway, was supposed to do was to kind of bring a funny or a scary version or a heightened version of what you saw outside your window in here onto the TV. That's what it was supposed to do. And that's when it was at its best. It was doing that, whether it was telling you a story about people living in a city or telling you a little bit of aspirational to what it was telling you a story about trying to raise your kids and, you know, I don't know, a little Ritchie Petrie or something in New Rochelle or whether it's telling you about how horrible it is to have a stupid meathead hippie son-in-law in your house, eating your food, not all that stuff. And it could be really funny. It's just that it's also terrifying for the executives, because they've been living in, you know, if you drive to work every day in a Prius or a Tesla, listen to NPR and you get there, it's like gonna be hard for you to understand what Roseanne's even saying, let alone in that clip, especially, let alone, like, are you allowed to say it? And once you do that, then you're not, once you do that, you're not in a mass media, you're not gonna get a 20 share, you know, you're gonna get 800,000 people, you're gonna get basically a very, very elaborate podcast, which is what most TV is now, just a really nicely done podcast. Can you take us back to- I mean, are you expecting a- Yep. Oh, no, I was just gonna ask, are you expecting a course correction on that, just given the massive number or something, like, you know, there's a whole story that we don't have to get into as to why Roseanne got canceled, but the fact that for the brief time that she came back, that it was huge, indicates there's an appetite. So do you expect some sort of markets correction? You'd think. You'd think, I mean, just this week, I think it was just yesterday, the day before, maybe it was yesterday, I don't know, this week anyway, the Connors, which by the way, without her is still a hit. Yeah, yeah. It's, I don't know, it's not what season it's in, it's in like, I don't know, death season, that's about it. It has a, now it has an output deal, I mean, it has a second light, has a, has a syndication deal, it's a licensing deal signed with Lionsgate, which is a small studio, and the company Debar Mercury and Tom Warners, one of the people who put it together, he was the original guy behind the Cosby show and also Roseanne. And so they're gonna sell it to the global distribution, which is streaming video on demand and all the kinds of rights, cable rights, fast rights, all that stuff. And someone's gonna buy it, probably Netflix is gonna want it, maybe who's gonna want it, maybe all these people are gonna want it because these shows are popular. The number one show on Netflix is Suits. And Suits is a kind of a, I know it has the Duchess of Sussex on it, but it also is like a kind of a- It was originally on like the USA Network. USA Network, it was what they called their blue sky during their blue sky period where the shows were kind of light and funny, but interesting, but you could just watch one and then you could go on your way. You know, nobody pays for homework. And so you'd think that they would understand that in the feature business, right? Do you remember, like, we've just been through a summer, even last summer, when the movie business is back. Yeah. Where's the big comedy? Like, there was not like, it should be like a big Ben Stiller comedy and a Will Ferrell comedy, it would be like five or six of those all summer. And some of them were dumb and died and some of them were great. And the people talked about them for, they dressed as those characters and how many Ron Burgundy's were there in Halloween after Anchorman came out. So Barbie doesn't scratch that itch. A little bit, but you know, the reason we talked about Barbie so much because there was only Barbie and also Barbie's kind of artsy, you know, has an idea behind it. There was no idea behind Anchorman, it was just funny. Can I ask, is it a, is it a failure of imagination on the part of the studios or and lower, you know, the creators who, you know, ultimately, you know, release their stuff through the system? Or, you know, I mean, is that just what it comes down to? Because, you know, it seems Roseanne shows this, various movies, you know, Top Gun Maverick, which I personally thought was horrible. Did he- You didn't like Maverick? I tested it even more than the original one, but- What the hell, what's your problem? I got a lot of problems, Rob. You do, yeah. This is something for our next session. No, mostly with the, I have a lot of problems with, you know, a movie- With America. That it's about the, it's about the enemy, but it can't be named. Is it Iran? Is it Russia? Is it China? Is it, you know- China. The office stand? Who knows, right? It's like, you know, it's a shadowy republic, breakaway republic, I don't know, you know, but no, but is it, I mean, so it's not that the audience, it's not that the mass audience has disappeared. It's that nobody is interested in reaching the mass audience. Well, they're terrified of them. They're terrified of them. The mass audience, if you're in show business, you think, when somebody says the mass audience, all you can think of is those people at those Trump rallies. People who believe that John F. Kennedy is alive, that they think that Bill Gates is inside the vaccine. Yeah, that's what you think. Instead of thinking that, well, just make it funny. Just make it funny or scary. You don't have to, it, I have a small answer for you, and I then have like a big think answer, which you can, you know, take out later if you think it sounds too crazy. Yeah, we don't want to insult our audience. Right, okay, yeah, right. The small answer is that really for the first time, the people making TV and movies don't really like TV and movies. They kind of begrudgingly think it's a kind of okay, but it's a little bit, I don't know, really, like you're all gonna line up to a movie where the robots come from outer space or really you're gonna go see, you know, the Connors living room is fake, right? You know that. Like nobody enters and leaves the room with a joke. That doesn't happen. There's just a little, they're a little too good. They're a little too smart, too cool for school really. And that's usually what you can tell. We used to say that about when I was doing half hour comedy in front of an audience that there's a certain discipline to that. Like the audience, you can't make the audience laugh at something that's not funny. Like as much as you want to, so that you can go home, you can't. So if you write a joke and it stays there the whole week and the audience doesn't laugh, you gotta cut the joke because they didn't laugh because it's died. But if you're shooting single camera with no audience there, you could just say, well, I wasn't going for a laugh there. I was going for some kind of whimsical light whimsy, something quirky, and then moving on. We used to say about people who did the single camera shows is the great thing about those is you get to go home at 5.15. Like you don't have to stay late because what the hell, there's no audience there. There's no market, in other words, right? So there's that. They're too cool for school. But there's also kind of a larger issue culturally, which is this is going too far. So, you know, which is that we kind of, I mean, I've tried to work this out as theory. I think it's brilliant. So I'm kind of hoping that it's brilliant, but it may just be dumb. So this is your focus. You'll tell by whether or not we laugh. Yeah, exactly. The smart people at the top of all of the big American industries or world industries really, smart people in general have just entered this age of blunder where smart people are doing just insanely dumb things that they should know better because they're just too smart. I mean, it takes smart people to invade Iraq. Dumb people wouldn't do it. It takes smart people to build entire financial models around whether somebody in Riverside County can afford to pay the mortgage on 5,000 at once. Only a smart person could come up with that. Dumpers would never do that. It takes a smart person to say, we're going to close all the schools and all the businesses because we figured out COVID and would tell you how it's going to work. Only a smart person would do that. Only a smart person, I think would invade Ukraine. Putin's not dumb. He's just like, we sit in this age of like, only a smart person would buy Twitter and change its name to X, right? Like you have to be smart to be really stupid. And so only the smart people who are running Netflix or the smartest people from Silicon Valley, only they could make mistakes this like colossally dumb. Only Bob Iger could add pieces to a business that where the pieces don't belong. So that means tomorrow morning we're going to wake up and Anthony Fauci has been named the new head of Disney, right? Well, it would be in the operation or well, notice how all those people tend to like support each other because like, right? You know, like, well, you know, it's hard. Like we're really smart. We're the smart people. Yeah. I think this is pretty good theory, right? I like that theory. The age of blunder. That was an excerpt of our reason live stream with Rob Long talking about the writer's guilt strike and the SAG after strikes. If you want to watch another excerpt, go here. And if you want to watch the whole thing, go here and make sure to come back next Thursday at 1 PM Eastern time when reasons live stream will be talking with somebody who's very interesting saying stuff that you definitely want to hear.