So far, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by Donald Trump. His cabinet picks indicate he’s serious about reducing the regulatory state, one of the great threats to our freedom. But here’s a piece from the Hollywood Reporter suggesting he may have already accomplished more than that;
In the days following Donald Trump’s stunning presidential win, ABC Studios chief Patrick Moran called Black-ish creator Kenya Barris. The men had a project at ABC about a pair of politically divided pundits who fall in love. Suddenly it felt more relevant.
But now Moran wanted to be sure both sides of the spectrum were being presented with equal credibility. “In years past, it would be very easy to let one side feel like the cartoon and have the show assume that the audience is siding with the other,” Moran says of the liberal slant that often permeates Hollywood output. Barris agreed and has begun courting right-wing voices for his writers room: “There was no way I wanted to do something that was going to further the divide in this country.” On Dec. 6, the project was ordered to pilot.
That exchange came on the heels of what Moran describes as a “wake-up call.” Over at ABC, entertainment chief Channing Dungey acknowledges that the rise of Trump and his blue-collar support forced her to question whether her programming was too focused on upper-income brackets. Similar check-ins have taken place across the TV industry as executives try to better understand and appeal to a demographic to which many hadn’t paid enough attention. “[The election] made the ground shake underneath media,” TLC president Nancy Daniels tells THR, “and now everybody is taking a hard look: Are we telling the right stories? Are we reaching the right people?”
Read the whole thing here.
It is almost unfathomable that Trump’s election could convince people in Hollywood that there are people outside Hollywood. But if it does, it would be a major, major improvement to our entertainment industry and our culture in general. We live in hope.
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