Year-end roundtable: Warner Bros. Discovery’s 12 months on fire
Under the leadership of CEO David Zaslav, Warner Bros. Discovery has made some interesting choices, to say the least
Aux Features Warner Bros
In a series of special year-end roundtable discussions, The A.V. Club looks back at the stories that made the biggest impact on pop culture in 2023.
If you’ve paid attention to the state of TV, film, and media in general in 2023, you already know that Warner Bros. Discovery has been defined, as they were in 2022, by decisions that general audiences have not taken kindly to. 2022 saw the shelving of the completed Batgirl; in 2023, there was the shelving of the completed Acme v. Coyote. But 2023 also saw beloved streaming platform HBO Max becoming the un-Googlable Max, and a general trend of good shows vanishing off streaming services. On top of it all, a dual writer and actor strike stressed the entire entertainment industry.
Here, A.V. Club staffers Sam Barsanti, William Hughes, and Cindy White share their impressions of the year of WB Discovery, and any hopes they may have going forward.
Sam Barsanti: I mean, the low point of the year for Warner Bros. Discover has to be the launch of Max, right? Worse things have probably happened, but—as snarky people say on social media—name a bigger downgrade. It’s just emblematic of every stupid, greedy thing the company has done since its recent inception, and it speaks to a general and depressing disinterest and disregard for the legacies of Warner Bros. and HBO.
If WBD faced a bigger backlash this year from its stupid decision-making, I’d chalk it up to just general frustration with bad corporations and bad executives (and bad politicians and bad … school administrators? I was trying to think of another authority figure people are sick of). That was one of the talking points around the strikes, right? That the studios were surprised that everyone was unified against them and that everyone supported the striking writers and actors and automotive workers? We’re all sick of getting jerked around, and I think, to a lot of people, WBD represents a lot of the jerks responsible.
If you had asked me the day before the switchover, I would’ve said that HBO Max was maybe my favorite of all the streaming services. The Xbox app worked like a dream, it had Teen Titans Go! and Westworld on it (I have layers, like an onion), and I got it for free from my internet provider. Now I still get it for free, but it doesn’t load right, the HBO and Studio Ghibli categories are regularly insulted by their proximity to Discovery crap about home renovating psychics or whatever, and every time I do watch something it recommends it makes me feel like a sucker for the algorithm—which is a terrible feeling that I also get from Netflix, the only streaming service that still might be worse than Max.
William Hughes: As I’m writing this, news has just broken that Warner Bros. and Paramount are at least giving some serious thought to merging—an idea less horrifying for the involvement of any particular figure (for all that David Zaslav has mounted an absolutely fascinating anti-PR campaign for himself over the past two years) than for the general homogenization of all media that it represents. Nobody but the money-men benefit when companies this big end up schlorping together, and the thought of Max devouring Paramount+ next is genuinely unsettling. Because that’s what Max represents: More voices, fighting for less space.
Heresy as it might be, I think there’s actually a core of correctness to some of Zaslav’s thinking on streaming—everyone in the industry, including his WB predecessors, went obsessively nuts on the topic for a few years, to the point that it was one of the key reasons Christopher Nolan jumped ship from his long-time studio home and took Oppenheimer over to Universal. (None of which excuses Zaslav’s aggressively anti-art responses to that overcorrection, which are currently denying the world a perfectly good Will Forte-Wile E. Coyote team-up.)
But Warner is simply the worst at managing the public-facing part of the ugly reality of the streaming landscape: The big companies don’t need to give us everything anymore – they just have to give us enough breadcrumbs to keep us from unsubscribing. The bigger they get, paradoxically, the less they need to offer; Warner merged HBO Max with Discovery+ because they want to be all things to all people, which means they need to offer way less to any one individual fan. We can rage about it, call Zaslav all the names we can think of, but they have the money and, more importantly, the mindset: In an “any content is good content” world, there’s increasingly little room for prizing one particular piece of art.
Cindy White: One of my favorite summaries of the WB Discovery situation this year was this video by YouTuber ProZD:
We still quote it in our house whenever we wonder why any big corporation does anything: “MONEY!”
I won’t deny that one of the highlights of my year was watching David Zaslav get booed at the Boston University commencement ceremony and grimacing as people chanted “Pay your writers” at him. But to be fair, he is an easy target. As the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with the corporatized entertainment industrial complex that has gobbled up the studios—indifferent to art, hostile to creatives, beholden to shareholders, and obscenely overpaid—he’s just a symbol. For a while now it’s felt like fans have mattered less and less in the constant push for growth by appealing to the widest audience possible. This year it felt more true than ever that those at the top live in a bubble where they don’t have to be in touch with their actual audience or care what people think of them.
It’s kind of amazing that we’re at the end of 2023 and still no one has figured out streaming yet. The Max rebrand was handled very badly, but it wasn’t the worst idea to combine HBO and Discovery shows onto one platform. HBO is still HBO, even when you have prestige shows like Succession sitting next to home renovation shows or, like, Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.
However, I do think the shelving issues and disappearing content from Max are worrying trends. If they really have been buried forever just for the sake of a tax break then we need to start lobbying for legislation to curb this practice. But I have hope that we might see those movies and shows pop up on Netflix in the future, or some other streaming service. The big trend I predict for 2024, and it’s already starting, is that we’ll see more cross-pollination between the services. You may not find every DC show on Max anymore, but Netflix might have it. The downside is that it’s going to be even harder to figure out where to find anything you want to watch at any given time than it already is. In the meantime, I’m still buying physical media and I’m not planning to stop anytime soon.
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As mentioned: Warner absorbing Paramount. So does all of Star Trek get cancelled and buried for a quick tax break?
MAX has destroyed the HBO brand by mixing peak TV, which they’re excellent at, with “reality” programming dreck – which seems to be an unending undulating mass of sewage flooding all streamers. Diluting of the HBO brand with MAX doesn’t add “class” to such programming – it drags the whole ship down into the morass of crap. We all get it – “reality” programming is ridiculously less expensive to make than high quality, or even bad drama or comedy. Interestingly, this type of programming has accelerated whenever there was a strike from the filmmaking trades – also the reason why, after this year’s strikes, we’re seeing a ton of foreign programming streaming, often burying it’s non-English speaking situation. (This isn’t a judgment on quality of foreign shows, merely of the practice of burying the lede until you’ve watched the commercials and find out).This trend toward Lowest Common Denominator viewing has affected all streamers – and most of those subscriptions that offer lower rates for commercials have adopted the inelegant “solution” of dropping ads often mid-sentence in a scene, destroying the flow of the show. Interestingly, free channels, like Tubi and Roku, are careful where they place their ads, as well as Peacock and, in the rarest and most commendable act – Paramount+ actually gives you a stream of ads at the beginning of a movie or long show, and then you can watch the rest uninterrupted.The prevalent theme in the actions of most of these streamers is an almost tacit admission that they don’t value their customers. Last time I checked, Stockholm syndrome wasn’t the main business model for success. And yet…
Interestingly, free channels, like Tubi and Roku, are careful where they place their adsI created a Tubi account last year to watch the original Dark Shadows series in memory of my mother, who loved the show when she was a kid. I actually found it refreshing, not only that the ads were placed more like traditional TV commercials used to be, but also that the ads seemed to lean more heavily towards, like, laundry detergents and pasta sauces, rather than whatever the latest generative AI crypto sh*t is usually being pushed on YouTube or web sites.
“Zaslov might not be good for the viewers, but he’s damn good for AV club!”
FYI: Having three people write a couple of paragraphs each is not a “roundtable.” A roundtable involves an in-depth, usually lengthy, discussion of a topic where the participants (usually in the same room at the same time) go back and forth really examining a topic.
This is just a dressed up e-mail thread.
“Heresy as it might be, I think there’s actually a core of correctness to some of Zaslav’s thinking on streaming… The big companies don’t need to give us everything anymore – they just have to give us enough breadcrumbs to keep us from unsubscribing”
Unfortunately, you’re probably right about this, at least in the short term. It’s a deeply cynical, short-sighted way of looking at things, but dropping quality to the absolute bare minimum needed string customers along is the basic strategy of most companies nowadays.
I don’t think it’ll work in the long-term, because people will get tired of paying for less and less shit, and it will wither the industry until it dies. They’re going to kill their own golden goose that could provide for years, just to get a couple of extra eggs right fucking now. But what do the execs and shareholders care? They’ll get their money out of this, and they’ll just move to the next company or industry that they can scoop out the core from.
After watching Station Eleven, I subscribed for a full year of HBO Max, because I supported all the great programming HBO was creating.Six months later, they announced the rebranding, started all the cost-cutting, and generally became one of the worst streaming services. I had never before signed up voluntarily for a full year with any service, but I never expected HBO to tank like it has. Lesson learned. Now I take all streaming month-by-month, and spread my subs around – watch as much as I can on a service, cancel, then move on to another. Paramount has always offered me free months or pretty decent discounts to continue an extra month or two. Of course, I expect the merger to eventually go through, and for Paramount to cancel most of its Atar Trek offerings, or at the very least severely slash their budgets. Max did it to themselves. Consumers can only get jerked around so long.