You have to give it to Mike McMahan, he's not pulling punches. With the end of Star Trek: Lower Decks, the series creator has been very vocal of a trending topic that recently caught headlines. Apparently, Netflix is now instructing creators that scripts should have explanations of what's happening so that those who are only partially watching can still keep up with the program they're watching.
Even though they're really not. It's stupid and shows the disconnect that millionaires and billionaires have compared to the people who are watching their products. If people wanted to really pay attention to something, they would. No amount of hand-wringing is going to get someone to pay more attention to some slop that you made on the cheap.
And McMahan agrees. When the trending topic broke online, McMahan chimed in via his Bluesky account, saying;
"Back in 2019: was told while making Lower Decks that “too much happens in each episode, what if someone watching is making spaghetti and only half paying attention? I told them that the person making spaghetti would have had to have gone to the app, clicked “play,” THEN started to ignore it- and that there was no amount of hand-holding I could do to help them."
He's absolutely correct in his statements. You can't force someone to care about something. Instead of accepting that some people just want background noise while they're shuffling about (a common trend of the cable era), executives think they can further fix what's not broken.
Some people would rather hear the hustle and bustle of a narrative unfolding around them as opposed to music or silence. Forcing something that could diminish the quality of a project to cater to people who aren't asking to be catered to is just shortsighted rubbish.
It's also why Netflix is in the hole that it is financially.
While I lament applications like Paramount+, it does have a lot of positives to Netflix. It doesn't have the same subscriber base, and if you're not on free TV, putting your content behind a paywall just doesn't make sense. Still, they at least are more tailored to the viewing habits of more modern viewers.
They release things weekly, they allow live-viewing of major events and they seem to be willing to work with creators far more than Netflix. It's not perfect, they're still in this for the money and are willing to ax shows like Star Trek: Prodigy to bolster their bottom line. But they do at least avoid some of the pitfalls that plague Netflix.
Thankfully we have creators like McMahan who are willing to push back against network executives who are out of touch with reality.