#and cancelling their MAX subscriptions/threatening to boycott WBD products

[black-klok-youth-pastor]

I mean this is a good update at least. Still not exactly in the best spirits but if they do this right we can at least be on speaking terms with WBD again.

Okay, I don’t know how true this is, but if it is, we only barely dodged a bullet.

I don’t believe for a picosecond that David Zaslav and his yes-men ever intended to bring back the shows they pulled; the fact that they went out of their way to go through all their websites and social media profiles to memory-hole every last piece of evidence that those shows ever existed should have made that loud and clear.

I can just tell how confident they were that nobody would notice or care. “It’s just a bunch of cartoons; it’s not like we’re canceling stuff people actually watch like White People Renovating Houses or Rednecks Doing Nothing in Particular.” They were so confident about their decision that they didn’t even do it professionally, just announcing it out of the blue without telling anyone beforehand and wording the announcement so vaguely that nobody had any way of knowing that the shows would specifically be deleted later that same day.

This shouldn’t have come as a surprise, since Mr. Zaslav has long epitomized the idea of “failing upward”; he’s the brain trust that restructured the once-aptly named Discovery and Learning Channels to center around trashy, exploitative reality shows, prioritizing short-term profits over any kind of stable model.

He spent years scoffing at other entertainment giants for daring to focus on scripted content which he smugly dismissed as a thing of the past, confident that his primary focus, a niche built on fleeting trends and pandering to very specific audiences to the exclusion of everyone else, would be the future of entertainment and the focal point of all pop culture.

After decades of creating nothing of substance, skating by on the moderate successes of low-risk-low-reward crap, and endlessly patting himself on the back for so doing, Zaslav suddenly had one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world foisted on him by the corporate robots at AT&T desperate to offload an unwise investment, and like a bear cub being handed a PlayStation controller, he didn’t have the first clue what to do with it.

Warner Bros was defined by scripted content that required actual talent and effort to make, and those were nowhere near Zaslav’s wheelhouse. Could this, people thought, be the day that he actually puts in the work to have his company create something of worthy impact to our culture? FUCK NO! Instead, he took the easy route by, quoth John Oliver, “burning down my company for the insurance money.”

Unfortunately, he was so used to nobody knowing or caring who he is that he never once considered that people would actually have reason pay attention to him this time, that if he goes out of his way to destroy the hard work of so many talented people purely out of arrogant refusal to admit he was wrong, of fucking course we’ll all notice!

If the above tweet is telling the truth, we can at least be glad that our voices are being heard and the people at the top can take notice. The HBO Max Purge wound up being such a PR nightmare and made the folks at Discovery so hated among the public that they actually caved and walked back their disastrous decision that they had been so adamant in achieving just the previous day. You can absolutely fuck off if that doesn’t prove that protesting works.