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Two of entertainment’s surest money machines have stalled. Broadway producers are conceding that the big musical can no longer reliably find audiences large enough to cover what it now costs to run one (The Hollywood Reporter). And Netflix’s investors have discovered that viewers aren’t returning for second seasons of even its biggest hits (Slate) — a subscription business built on renewal that now seems not to be. The audience didn’t vanish, though: microseries, those vertical dramas made for phones and increasingly by AI, are now a $150 billion industry outside China (TheWrap).
What’s collapsing isn’t demand, it may be the delivery models. Philadelphia’s theatres have spread pay-what-you-choose ticketing across the city and are now comparing notes on what actually works (Broad Street Review). A year after Congress killed the CPB, South Dakota Public Broadcasting laid off journalists, canceled shows — and then, surprisingly, began bouncing back (NPR). Even cinema’s supposedly lost decade turns out to be one of its most inventive, powered by technology and desperation in roughly equal measure (The Guardian).
And scholars have finally studied the short story Alan Turing left unfinished: the father of computing, it turns out, was playful, literary, and considerably racier than his reputation (The Guardian).
All of our stories below.