Bakish to the Future
The good news about the Paramount Plus launch is it shows how far we’ve come in the Great Streaming War (aka The Great Entertainment Semi-Finals).
A few weeks ago, the world pointed to the HBO Max launch as the most braindead, phone-it-in, PowerPoint-driven piece of misguided marketing in entertainment history. A few weeks later: It’s the template!
Hey, “Max” might not be much, but at least HBO thought up using it for a streaming service all on their very own.
With Viacom Grande, it seems as though they looked at all the existing services out there and took that as their run of choices: “Do we want to be a Max, or a Plus,..or a Prime? Can we be Paramountlix?”
They are leading with the “Peak” thing, because . . . Paramount is a mountain, get it? But the “Peak TV” moniker was not meant as a compliment. It wasn’t about “Wow, can you believe how good TV has gotten!?” THR recorded
FX CEO John Landgraf famously coined the term “Peak TV” half a decade ago to describe the sheer number of television shows available to viewers.
The point was, we are drowning in stuff, most of it not very good. So go on and celebrate you’re part of that avalanche, Viacom, which is another thing that happens on a mountain.
Now we’ve got another one of these services that’s a big grab bag of Viacom stuff put under the now equally meaningless Paramount label. Interesting to think how, way back at the dawn of Hollywood, Paramount under Adolf Zukor was the studio that stood for high-end elegance and quality. That reputation didn’t even survive Zukor’s day, and of course has been squandered by so many generations in so many ways, not least of all by the Redstone family such that it is now as meaningless as General Mills.
And can you imagine General Mills launching a new cereal and calling it “General Mills Crunch?” Not to mention “General Mills Plus.”
Paramount Plus, however, unlike HBO Max, is leaning into its existing identity, which is actually CBS’ Moonves-crafted identity, as the non-cool place for normal, older, middle-Americans. Which was fantastically successful as a broadcast network strategy, as every other network went desperately chasing the same core of over-educated young urbanites so that their friends would think they worked someplace cool.
Now that cable-cutting is “a thing,” there’s no reason such a niche shouldn’t be a majority force in streaming, too. Except there’s one difference this time: Whatever their corporate smarm, the competitors haven’t raced after cool points as slavishly as the network bosses of yore. Disney, is of course, Disney and lives and dies by its hallowed place in familydom. HBO is running as fast as it can away from its upscale corner, hence the “Max.” Peacock is the Law and Order service. Jeff Bezos overthrew the first Amazon regime that seemed to be programming for Silver Lake exclusively. And Netflix in its announcements and public persona may waltz on the edge of wokeitude, but if you follow its Top-10 lists, it’s very much making its bread and butter with the Adam Sandler movie of the month.
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