which phenomenally popular american entertainment institution would you most like to see come to a sudden end by 2023

poster dressed as ned raggett in cold open to thread live! from new answers!

people loving to watch torturously unfunny comedy shows is a mystery to me every time

in the MCU, dr strange scans an incomprehensibly large number of possible futures for music consumption, desperately searching for timelines that restrain Hot Hot Heat to obscurity -- there's only one.

Need a choice for "all of the above" but nuke the NFL once and for all.

It's really easy for me to ignore all of these completely except social media and streaming music, and streaming music adds value to my life. I guess social media occasionally does too but also a lot of misery for that little bit of value.

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Well I guess I know how Elon voted

This is very much the NFL or social media

Missing out on megachurches here.

I still wish to write-in cable news.

NFL easily

the absolute glut of SNL alumni across popular media since its inception

Absolute glut? I dunno. Popular media burns through talent like India burns coal. In the 48 years since SNL started that list of about fifty actors is just a tiny group among the five thousand or so entertainers who had media careers during that time that were at least as successful as, oh, Jenny Slate, Chris Elliot, Ana Gasteyer, Kevin Nealon or Christine Ebersole. As for the A-listers like Julia Louis-Dreyfus or Tina Fey, their talent more than justifies their high profile careers.

Write-in for SNL. Pass away peacefully in your sleep, please, it is time now.

― Gimme some skin! Because I don't have any skin. (Old Lunch), Monday, October 18, 2021

SNL is fine!

Reality TV on the other hand has encouraged spoiled bad behavior, unhealthy relationships, mindless scene-following, and worship of a lowest common-denominator aesthetic, and elevated a game show host to president

It's easily one of the first two, and since most of the people in my circle successfully ignore the NFL, it's for sure MCU

Wound up voting for the MCU, but I am very curious to see what's gonna happen if/when social media (read: Facebook and Twitter) melt down and disappear. People have built entire lives, and entire ecosystems and ways of running businesses, on those two platforms. The ripple effects are going to be massive.

Someone said the idea of social media going away was exciting and I agree, at this point it would be satisfying in the way it would be to idk watch Lumen Corp get destroyed in the series finale of severance. Like just such an awful thing in life emphasizing the worst aspects of people. My friends I keep in touch with there, well I’d keep in touch with them anyway and probably keep in touch with them better, and the rest are the ones who in earlier times wouldn’t have been crawling out of the woodwork with friend requests, they were meant to naturally fade away and be forgotten. Which is just how life works. Or how it did work.

adele album’s gonna save the monoculture

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Saturday, October 16, 2021 10:14 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

let's reflect a moment

podcasts... this option has to be far less of a thing than the others, right? amirong?

From what I read here and in the press, Twitter seems capable of becoming so crippled by Musk's clueless management that its investors decide to mercy kill it rather than pouring good money after bad. otoh, the Facebook-dependent small business ecosystem is why FB won't melt down and disappear with anything like the speed that Twitter could fold up its tent. Meta's decline is going to be more gradual as FB slides into revenue stagnation and then negative growth and Meta can't prop up all the money-losing spin-offs Zuckerberg is trying to pump artificial life into. It feels like it is headed into a long slide into the marginal relevance.

Undated article from a site I never heard of really puts things in perspective

https://musicwithflavor.com/adeles-worst-selling-album/

Amazed no-one has suggested The Simpsons (I'm an agnostic, haven't seen an episode since the 90s). Maybe it's so diminished now no-one thinks of it as major?

yeah it's been pretty easy to ignore for 20+ years e.g. none of the many popular memes its generated seem to come from that time period

I was going to counter with old man yells at cloud but it's from fucking 2002 and that's probably the newest

This is very much the NFL or social media

― castanuts (DJP), Thursday, December 29, 2022

I find these all pretty inoffensive at worst. I suppose I'll vote for musical theater, since it seems to have crowded out any other sort of theater.

I'm only aesthetically irked by the MCU whereas I'm kinda morally irked by the True Crime business

true crime podcasts seem the most insidious to me since the ones I hear ads for tend to brand themselves as feminist and social justice oriented while perpetuating stranger danger and other conservative bullshit, and people actually seem to take them seriously as guides for how-not-to-be-murdered which is fucked up in all sorts of ways

Mind you aesthetics is morality so lemme chew it over

xp I think maybe some of them might meet that description, Left, but there are others that take a much more thoughtful and nuanced approach. One of the OGs, "Criminal," comes to mind.

sure and not all westerns are manifest destiny apologism but you know

the NFL is indefensible but I still like it, so I can't vote for that

have no clue about True Crime or Broadway

social media is bad in a thousand ways but I admit I find Twitter to be incredibly amusing sometimes, and Facebook is legitimately useful for keeping up with old friends and family members if you are inclined to do so. I use Facebook Messenger a lot though I suppose that could be easily replaced

Streaming...idk why people would want to get rid of that. we're not going back to the era of DVDs and CDs. IMO it was a good thing before Disney and Paramount wanted to make their own exclusive services, which has basically put us back to the era of expensive cable packages.

I voted MCU, no real reason, but I think having a particular genre of very expensive blockbuster movie become this popular is really bad for the industry as a whole. I liken it a bit to Michael Jackson's Thriller, yeah it's a good album (and the MCU movies I've seen are pretty entertaining) but they did so well that it shaped the whole industry in a pretty negative way.

I was happier before social media allowed people to comment on your statuses.

I don't need my non-existent Aunt Ida's comments on why it's problematic that I listen to Bathtub Shitter or a cousin revealing to me that he supports National Burn a Koran day in response to me talking about the show Brooklyn 99

There are a lot of good true crime podcasts and books out there, but the ones that seem to view crime as pure entertainment fodder are not among those.

For example on the bad side of true crime is something like the subreddits that were devoted to the recent murders that took place in Moscow Idaho, and weeks were spent pointing the finger at various people and discussing conspiracy theories and it turned out of course everybody was wrong.

Fuck the NFL:

Pay to play: How 21 NFL stadiums have been financed

and

Taxpayers are paying billions for the renovations and construction of NFL stadiums. Here’s how

In 2022, the Tennessee Titans of the NFL unveiled their plans for a new stadium in the heart of Nashville. The 1.7 million-square-foot stadium can house 60,000 screaming football fans and is estimated to cost $2.1 billion.

The public would fund more than half of the stadium through a one-time contribution from the state of $500 million and $760 million through revenue bonds issued by Nashville’s Metropolitan Sports Authority.

Since 2000, public funds diverted to helping build professional sports stadiums and arenas have cost taxpayers $4.3 billion. While the NFL and team owners contend that building stadiums will provide economic growth for a city, economists and urban planners think otherwise.

The impact of a stadium can be something that leads to really great placemaking, and that is a catalyst for community gathering and other small businesses in a neighborhood. Yet a typical football stadium has a really different design, the impact on the surrounding community is really more just that the stadium is kind of like a big spaceship that is parked there.

The reason cities end up paying for stadiums begins with the issuance of tax-exempt bonds from state and local governments that the federal government has signed off on for decades.

These tax exemptions help lower the burden of high debt through low-interest municipal bonds used by cities and teams to pay for stadiums. Since 1913, municipal bonds have been a popular financing option for airports, roads, hospitals and schools. Private entities could still access these bonds but were subject to a volume cap limiting how many public bonds are issued annually.

As for stadiums, well, they weren’t subject to that cap. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 wanted to end the exemptions for private use, including stadiums. Instead, the bill inadvertently created a loophole allowing stadiums to be backed by tax-free public bonds.

The loophole works by creating an artificial financing structure through tax-exempt municipal bonds. To gain access to those bonds, private companies must fail one of two tests stipulated by the Tax Reform Bill of 1986.

The private use-case test states that a private entity can use no more than 10% of the money from a bond, a test that NFL teams will most certainly pass. Then there’s the private-payment test which states that no more than 10% of the bond’s debt service is backed by the stadium itself.

So if a state or local government is willing to finance at least 90% of the stadium’s cost, it fails the private-payment test — meaning the stadium will get tax-exempt financing through municipal bonds.

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