Member-only story
More Vanilla, Please
How the Netflix series Messiah demonstrates our preference for what we’ve already had a thousand times before
As anyone who’s ever attended a scriptwriting class or seen a Hollywood writer’s group in action will know, the essence of popular entertainment is to dish up the same old formula but with miniscule cosmetic changes that will simultaneously enable the audience to believe (i) they’re getting something excitingly new, and (ii) there won’t be any unwelcome surprises to disturb their semi-somnolent viewing pleasure.
Story arcs and character arcs are so predictable that the day is not far off when popular entertainments will be auto-generated by cheap AI programs running on a producer’s laptop. Dialog is likewise so obvious that at some stage Hollywood will get a Nobel Prize for its outstanding success in recycling. The illusion of novelty is largely sustained by the fact that the two-dimensional characters get to have different names and different clothes, and are occasionally even played by different actors. But strip away the surface and what we see is simply more of the same vanilla entertainment the industry has been pumping out for more than half a century.
And that is precisely what people want.
