The Two-Screen Trap

Why Fiction Entertainment Isn’t Dying — It’s Moving to YouTube

A Medium in Crisis

We’re in a time of great change for scripted fiction entertainment.

5 years ago, there were 600 scripted shows on TV. But since the streaming bubble burst, back-to-back strikes and an achingly slow return to “normal”, that number has plummeted and people are starting to doubt that fiction will come back to the entertainment industry.

Like… ever, at least based on some of my recent conversations.

This fiction doom-saying has happened before in different mediums. In the literary world, fiction lit has been declared dead on numerous occasions. In reality, fiction book sales increased 23% the four years between 2018 and 2022.

Still, in the world of film and TV, there’s good reason to be bearish on the future of fiction. In TV, in the Fall of 2024, only 41 scripted series total aired on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and The CW, a 50% drop from seven years prior.

Similar things are happening in the world of streaming.

I’ve heard people place the burden of blame on new technologies: Namely Social Media and the Infinite Scroll. You’ve probably heard someone say one of the following:

• “People don’t want real stories anymore.”

• “Attention spans are plummeting.”

• “No one can sit through an episode of TV without pulling out their phone.”

Perhaps you’ve witnessed someone pulling out their phone in the middle of a TV episode and been forced to reckon with their attention span in real time as you scold them to put their phone down and pay attention cuz they’re missing something really important, KATIE¹.

While yes, people are more distractible and their phones are almost certainly to blame, I’m here to argue that we’ve got it entirely backwards:

Fiction storytelling isn’t doomed.

In fact, I believe we’re on the cusp of a golden age for fiction storytellers. One where creatives capture audiences so completely that they’ll forget their phones even exist.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

“This isn’t Very Two-Screen Friendly”

I was talking to a friend of mine who had sold a pitch to a major streamer and after delivering a script (or outline, I forget, sorry friend), the Exec told them:

“This isn’t very two-screen friendly.”

My friend was confused until the exec explained that audiences are distracted. Between their home life and work notifications and social media, people’s attention is split, so they need to be told what’s happening on the screen.

Just a line here and there: “I can’t believe you’re still doing XYZ thing.” “Did you just get home from 123?” “Tell me why we’re doing this again?”

Side note: That last one needs to die.

I swear to God, I’m going to build an app that goes into your script and does a find and replace that swaps that line of dialogue with a randomized racial epithet that you may forget to remove before sending it out. Hopefully that will get you to think twice about using what I consider the most egregious cliché in human history.

An Executive reading your script if you don’t do what I say.

Rant over.

In any case, after a handful of years getting beaten to shit by content on social media, these executives had a distorted view of how people consume entertainment.

These execs were fixated on accommodating one of the symptoms instead of addressing the root cause.

The Cardinal Sin of Storytelling

A while back, I was watching a high fantasy show and I was struck by the proportion of scenes where characters were speaking in the third person past tense.

“The war between so and so has been raging for such and such length of time and XYZ person is responsible.”

This happened multiple times in the episode. They tried to obscure these obvious data dumps within walk and talks, which, as I describe in my ruthless hit piece on Aaron Sorkin², is more motion than action.

Mind you: This is a world full of monsters, inter-species political intrigue, war and strife.

And here we were, in a room with two people… talking.

The first rule you learn when you get started in storytelling for visual mediums is “Show, don’t tell.” This is TV writing 101, and this major show on a major streaming platform was doing the exact opposite: Over-indexing on exposition.

I don’t know whether the blame lies with the writers or the studio execs or contracting streaming budgets or some other external force.

But I do know that as an audience member, I lost interest very quickly. I probably pulled out my phone or switched to something else.

And while I can’t back this up with data (because such data simply doesn’t exist), my gut tells me that more and more stories on TV are being “told” instead of “shown”.

And to a large extent, I see this phenomenon as the cause of people turning to their “second screen” not the effect.

An assumption of what the average TV viewer looks like.

In other words, we should not blame audiences for their disinterest. As creatives, it’s our job to write shows (and movies, and novels) so compelling that audiences aren’t even thinking about their phones.

Severance: A Masterclass in Visual Storytelling

In case you missed it, Severance is having a moment.

In the Apple TV+ thriller (with moments of dark comedy), Adam Scott plays a character who has his consciousness split between his work life and his personal life, and the Big Bad is a shady corporation with ulterior motives and dark secrets.

It’s really fun, and after 2 years of the first season being out, interest is suddenly surging.

Apart from the unique premise, the characters are well-developed and original, and the story - despite taking place largely in a single location (an underground, uncanny valley corporate office) - is viscerally visual.

There are physical altercations and bizarre locations and moments of claustrophobia, panic and terror. And mystery. My god the mystery.

Severance has become a global phenomenon exactly because they refuse to be “two-screen friendly.”

If you’re not watching, you’re going to miss something, and the story is so compelling that you do not want to miss a damn thing.

---

---

Meanwhile, as two-screen friendly content gets normalized by executives, the aforementioned execs are essentially digging their own grave.

They’ve essentially created a recursive loop: They assume audiences are disinterested in fiction entertainment because social media. And so they demand that stories be told through dialogue and exposition dumps. And so people lose interest because that’s inherently a less compelling way to tell a story. And the execs see this loss of interest and demand more dialogue and more exposition.

The recursive loop of pandering to a distracted audience.

And on and on until we get headlines insisting that film and TV fiction is dead.

When in reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

While the medium might be changing and the storytellers themselves are definitely changing, there’s reason to believe that fiction storytelling is about to experience a huge resurgence on platforms like YouTube.

And as Jen Topping states in her post on the future of scripted entertainment:

“Futurology is dangerous.”

But since we’re here anyway, let’s give ourselves space for some rampant speculation.

The Evolution of Platform Storytelling​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

In my piece on Social Media’s Future being Feature Length, I said this:

“As a medium evolves, so too does the content on that medium. Cheaply-created content gets more expensive, short-form content gets longer, and content goes from spontaneous and unstructured to scripted and story-like, with all sorts of narrative bells and whistles that scratch our hind brain in that good way.”

Essentially, the bulk of a medium’s early content is nonfiction and as it evolves and grows, the amount of fiction material grows along with it. And I think this same trend is coming for YouTube.

True: As of the time of this writing, the entertainment that people watch on YouTube is primarily nonfiction.

The biggest names on the platform don’t really do fiction content. Mark Rober, MrBeast, Dude Perfect… While I wouldn’t call their content unscripted (oftentimes it is scripted within an inch of its life), it is most certainly not fiction.

While there are exceptions to this rule, like Alan’s Universe and Dhar Mann Studios, the majority of successful creators like Cleo Abram or Andy Cooks or Kurzgesagt (these are my personal favorites) reside squarely in nonfiction territory.

These creators are essentially competing with factual entertainment on PBS or Discovery Channel, not high-concept dramas on Max.

But this is going to change dramatically in coming years as creatives from traditional entertainment seek a home for their scripted material.

Legacy networks (and even streamers) have stopped seeking out dramatic content the same way they were 10 years ago. From the above Hollywood Reporter story:

“‘No one is ditching high-end drama completely, but it’s obviously less important,’ says Bisson. ‘The spend levels, not just from the streamers, but globally, is broadly flat. And the cost of production is going up, so the volume is down. You are getting fewer shows for the same money.’”

Yet there’s no shortage of talented creatives with wonderful, compelling stories to tell from the film and TV ecosystem. Even successful, established Showrunners are striking out when pitching to streamers and networks.

If the economics aren’t changing and the supply of creative talent isn’t changing, what then happens?

I think - I believe - these talented creatives will start moving to other storytelling mediums - including YouTube.

And I’m not alone in that belief.

Beth: A UK Case Study

This scripted move to YouTube has already begun in the UK.

The aforementioned Business of TV post cited a C21 Media story that reported on a Channel 4 drama series called Beth that is releasing on YouTube in 3x 15-minute pieces alongside the pilot releasing on linear.

This is a big deal because it validates YouTube as a distribution mechanism to be taken seriously instead of being just for independent creators.

“It does feel that in the next year or two we will see more of this type of activity, especially perhaps bigger budgets and longer episodes. Maybe even established TV showrunners originating for YouTube?”

Jen Topping is equivocating a bit here, but I hold no reservations about making bold predictions with reckless overconfidence:

I don’t think this trend is just going to continue. I think it’s going to accelerate. More Showrunners and talented creatives from TV & film are going to see YouTube as an attractive outlet for their stories, and all they need is an unapologetic, fearless production company to back them.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: All it takes is one big success story before everyone else jumps in the pool.

Haven’t We Seen This Already?

What about the YouTubers who got their start in film and TV by producing web series and gaining an audience on the (then nascent) platform?

Surely we’ve seen this song and dance before, and it will play out the same way. Right?

No. Not at all.

The 2010’s YouTube web series trend was born of people seeking a new way to establish a name for themselves as writers/directors/actors. Think Issa Rae’s Awkward Black Girl, which could be called a proto version of Rae’s HBO series Insecure.

Not surprisingly, after a couple successful web series got offers from establishment Hollywood, people piled on and, for a stretch, YouTube web series were seen as a launchpad to “real careers” in TV.

So what’s changed since then?

Instead of merely being a springboard towards a “real career,” building an audience on YouTube is entirely the point.

Okay, so this lacks some nuance, but you get my point.

Now that big brands like MrBeast have broken out and become studios of their own, I think people need to consider the possibility that YouTube / UGC could be the home for the next wave of scripted fiction content.

Individuals and companies will produce content for YouTube as an end unto itself, replete with monetization strategies like brand partnerships and merchandising.

What About YouTube Originals?

They tried this though, right?

Wasn’t YouTube Originals a failed experiment, proving that people don’t want to consume their entertainment on the UGC platform?

True, YouTube Originals didn’t do great after they launched their first original series in 2016. But a lot has changed, including people’s relationship with YouTube.

9 years ago, YouTube was primarily a website living on a browser on peoples’ laptops (and maybe their phones). Now, YouTube is integrated into just about every home entertainment device on the planet. Not only has YouTube viewing on TV sets surpassed viewing on mobile devices, YouTube has consistently been the most watched thing on TV sets period in recent months.

There’s a reason audiences are connecting with YouTube:

1. Creators on YouTube understand the power of niche content. By appealing to a relatively narrow audience, their content is specialized and purposeful, and they avoid the trap of trying to appeal to everyone (thereby appealing to no one).

2. Partially because of this nichification and partially because of the reduced number of development people with their fingers in the pie, these creators create content that hasn’t had all the rough edges sanded off. Their graphics may be slick and they may be very camera-ready when they present, but the content itself still has all the pointy bits that make it more exciting and special.

3. No matter what you think of the stuff they make, that stuff is unabashedly them. To borrow the buzziest buzz word of the social media age, it’s their authenticity that keeps people coming back.

Fiction storytellers and folks from traditional media could definitely take a page or two out of this playbook. No amount of Tinseltown gloss can compete with creators that audiences can relate to.

This is applicable to fiction stories for the reasons cited above in the section on Severance: Character relatability and “unique and different” do well on these new platforms.

---

---

So What Does that Mean for Creatives?

Putting my irresponsible speculation hat on, I see a bright future for creatives who maintain intellectual flexibility.

In order to take advantage of this new paradigm, creatives will need to keep an open mind. It may require working in a new medium using storytelling methods adapted to the limitations of that medium.

At least initially, one such limitation will be budgets. YouTube’s budgets will not match or exceed typical rates in TV & film. Not yet at least. That’s just the nature of working in an emerging medium. Recall that in the early 1900’s, film budgets were much much smaller than those for stage performances… That is, until they weren’t.

But as I mention in my post on embracing risk, constraints can often enhance the creative process:

“Do you think The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity would have been half as successful if they had hundred million dollar budgets? Just look at the sequels.”

YouTube’s limitations extend to the length and scope of the stories being told as well. Audiences that live on YouTube are used to shorter, simpler stories.

Also, if you’ve been working in film and TV for a while, there’s still a ton of stigma surrounding a career move to producing for YouTube.

I expect this stigma, along with budgetary and length constraints, will dissipate once more money starts to enter the space. This money will arrive via:

1. Production companies that are willing to get creative about distribution and monetization.

2. Brands that recognize the value of partnerships with influential fiction creators.

3. Individual fiction creators who are able to capitalize on relationships with their audiences through merchandizing and other revenue structures.

And as goes the money, so goes the depth - and length - of storytelling.

There are always exceptions to the rule, but you can’t build a career on exceptions.

An Optimistic Outlook

This new reality is undoubtedly a scary prospect for established production companies and creatives. Many may interpret these shifting tides as the end of entertainment as we know it.

And in a way, they’re right.

But for those who are willing to adapt, there is a lot to like about the future: Fewer creative cooks in the kitchen, greater creative control and a direct line with your audience, to name a few.

Look: Maybe I’m a toxic optimist. Maybe I’m ignoring some critical flaw in this line of thinking. Maybe I’m unaware of some macro forces outside of the entertainment industry that invalidate this entire post.

But if you’re an emerging creative, I see this as the start of a very exciting era where you’ll be able to showcase your skills and build an audience without needing to ask permission.

If you’re not an emerging creative - that is, if you have a storied career in entertainment - I see this as an opportunity to reinvent yourself: Try new things that the establishment studio system never gave you space to try before.

Because medium is so much less important than that primal desire of storytellers to tell stories, and because even after the massive incursion of smartphones and social media, the fundamental rules of good storytelling remain unchanged: Show us something worth watching, and we’ll put our phones down.

That means you, Katie.

Stay tuned,

Jon

1. My wife doesn’t actually do this that much, it just happened once or twice recently.

2. Okay, maybe it’s not a hit piece, and it’s certainly quite short of ruthless, but you get the point.