Is the streaming bubble going to burst? According to a new, sprawling piece by Vulture, probably, eventually. In the last decade, the entertainment industry has tried to ditch the old-fashioned way — movies in movie theaters, TV with ads — for an online approach with a highly uncertain future. Surprise! Streaming isn’t remotely as profitable as the old ways and everyone who isn’t an overpaid CEO is underpaid and miserable. And if there’s a better symbol of what streaming has wrought than an abandoned baseball field for an aborted remake of Field of Dreams, we’d like to see it.
In a bit teased out by The AV Club, Michael Schur — co-creator of Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine and sole creator of The Good Place – talks about what befell his Peacock TV remake of the 1989 Kevin Costner baseball classic. The project was announced about two years back and, well, it never happened — because Peacock abruptly and whimsically pulled the plug, but only after it was in deep pre-production.
“They just changed their mind,” Schur recalled. “They didn’t want to spend the money anymore.”
People may never find out what the sports weepie fave looks like when Stretch Armstronged out to 10 episodes (plus maybe a spin-off season about, say, cult author Terence Mann, originally played by James Earl Jones, hanging out in the after life or wherever everyone goes at the end). But there is one lasting remnant of what never came to be.
“We built a baseball stadium in a cornfield in Iowa that’s still sitting there as we speak,” Schur said.
Or as Vulture reporters Josef Adalian and Lane Brown put it, “They built it, and nobody came.”
It’s a discouraging report, revealing an industry already long held together by Scotch tape and bubblegum ready to fall apart — all the moreso thanks to the ongoing WGA strike, whose throngs may soon be joined by SAG-AFTRA. A disused Field of Dreams baseball field may be the perfect metaphor for what’s become of streaming, but perhaps the best description comes from Steven Soderbergh, who says it’s “absolutely conceivable that the streaming subscription model is the crypto of the entertainment business.”
In the meantime, if you wish to revisit Field of Dreams — one of the most potent looks at the counter-culture reckoning in the Bush I era with their abandoned ideals, only to embrace the American tradition beloved by the elders by teaming up with a gang of busted baseball cheaters — it lives (where else?) on Peacock.
(Via Vulture and The AV Club)
