Author: Sam Allcock

May in Los Angeles had a certain spirit for decades. Executives from the network arrived by plane from New York. Waiting by their phones were showrunners. While rooms full of executives debated whether to order more, writers who had spent months creating a single episode—the pilot, the proof of concept, the audition tape for a show that didn’t yet exist—held their breath. There was a theatrical sense to the entire procedure, almost like a separate season. Most of that season is now past. While it hasn’t quite disappeared, the typical pilot episode has been gradually declining, and its rate of…

The line outside a mid-sized cinema on a Tuesday night in the Covent Garden neighborhood is longer than the box office employees anticipated. For weeks, the show has been sold out. The draw isn’t a long-running musical with a recognizable brand on the marquee; rather, it’s an eight-week-long play starring a person whose last work was a big-budget studio movie that was viewed by tens of millions of people. That combo used to feel like an infrequent curiosity—a serious movie name on a modest stage in London. It seems like a pattern now. Hollywood talent has long been drawn to…

A translator is viewing the same three-minute scenario five times in an apartment in Madrid, Seoul, or São Paulo, attempting to condense a culturally sensitive line into a two-second subtitle window without losing the meaning of the character. It’s almost midnight. Tomorrow am is the deadline. The entire episode’s compensation is less than minimum wage, and they are not even allowed to identify the show under the terms of the NDA they signed. For many of the folks who make worldwide streaming possible, this is their everyday life. Every foreign-language series that an English-speaking audience binge-watches over the weekend has…

On a weeknight, you can probably find Netflix or Amazon Prime on the TV in any living room in Toronto or Vancouver. Disney+, perhaps. Technically, the Canadian shows—those made in Halifax or Winnipeg, those with Indigenous perspectives or French-language tales from Quebec—remain. However, they are becoming more difficult to locate, appearing several scrolls below algorithmically pushed American content that is more expensive to produce and easier to sell internationally. The entire issue can be summed up in that silent funeral of regional storytelling. Although Canadian broadcasters have been raising this issue for years, the discussion has been much more heated…

For more than a century, the water hyacinth has been among the world’s most damaging plants. In tropical and subtropical lakes and streams, it grows in thick, tangled mats that prevent sunlight from reaching underwater habitats, deplete oxygen, kill fish, obstruct boats, and ruin the lives of fishing people in South America, Asia, and Africa. It spreads quickly. It is almost tough to get rid of. Additionally, Joseph Nguthiru, a young businessman in Kenya, made the decision to gather it and use it to make packaging. Nguthiru founded Hiopac, a company that extracts cellulose from water hyacinth that was taken…

A graph that compares a 22-second clip of an idol fixing her hair prior to a performance to a clip of the same idol laughing with her dancers is being examined somewhere in the analytics dashboard of a management business. On separate days, both were posted simultaneously. On saves, the hair clip performed 40% better. More people commented on the amusing video, but fewer people followed it. A note is made by someone. There will be more hair clips in the upcoming content bundle. This isn’t speculative. It describes the typical methods used to manage, mold, and present the current…

There are about two hundred people in the room on a Thursday night at a Marrickville community venue, and it smells like someone’s fog machine and spilled beer. The band performing on stage had four hundred followers on Bandcamp and a self-released EP that cost them about the same as a weekend in Byron Bay. The majority of the songs are familiar to the audience. It’s not because the band is well-known—by any measure that a music business spreadsheet would recognize—but rather because this specific audience has seen these specific musicians perform in these specific venues long enough for the…

The British period drama held a rather steady cultural position for a considerable amount of time. It was what your parents watched on Sunday nights: meticulously planned costumes, flawless location filming on a National Trust property, and conversation that viewed the past as a source of social education and moral clarity. Downton Abbey. Cranford. Dickens, Hardy, and Austen adaptations. Gorgeous, dependable, and increasingly viewed by the same older audience that had always watched it while younger people turned their attention to other things. The genre has been changing over the past few years, and this change is more intentional than…

Somewhere in Washington in 1830, a secretary took up a French diplomatic message and started translating it into English. “Le gouvernement à demande…” was the customary opening line of the French government’s communication. “The French government demands…” the secretary wrote. It was read by the US government. The bilateral relationship between two nations that had been allies since before the United States formally existed then became noticeably heated over a single verb for a period that must have seemed far longer than it actually was. The term was “demander.” Nothing more forceful than asking, requesting, or inquiring is what it…

Everyone used to accept that a single woman could represent a cultural moment. Not due to a vote by a committee. Not because a chosen population saw her article through an algorithm. Because the gatekeepers of the editorial world had collectively and authoritatively determined that she was it after seeing her on the cover of a magazine that was available on every coffee table and airport kiosk. There was no voting for the It Girl. She was proclaimed. The infrastructure needed for that declaration is no longer available on a large scale. print publications with a nationwide readership and authentic…