All of this makes complete sense, it just felt shocking because HBO has such greater cultural cachet and prestige than Discovery, which I didn’t even know owns

All of this makes complete sense, it just felt shocking because HBO has such greater cultural cachet and prestige than Discovery, which I didn’t even know owns an empire of reality shows aside the ones on its channel. Guess that really illustrates how what is seen as good TV is increasingly decoupled from what is actually watched on TV. There was a recent meme about how the “little-known” ABC drama The Good Doctor was obscure to the Twitterati but is, in reality, a long-running series with viewership that dwarfs the Succession set. And on the subject of reality TV, this is a good retrospective of how many cable channels from MTV to Bravo have drifted from their once lofty, even high-brow identities into domination by reality television. It really is a ubiquitous trend. https://youtu.be/Vd1gqLVHZWo https://youtu.be/Vd1gqLVHZWo I wonder what genre will succeed reality television. Maybe they’ll find a way to adapt Twitch streaming or vlogging for television, and then they will have to pay even fewer people. > We may all want to watch Ballers or some other a tv show starring The Rock As an aside, apparently not, judging by what happened to Young Rock. :p