No, David Chase, People Aren't Too Dumb for ‘Challenging’ Television

The people behind your favourite TV shows think you're stupid. 

Sopranos creator David Chase says audiences are too distracted to understand thought-out plot lines and Poor Things star Willem Dafoe says challenging movies don't do well on streaming services, because people aren't paying attention. But that's wrong. 

“Audiences can’t keep their minds on things,” Chase told The Times in an interview to mark the 25th anniversary of everyone’s favourite existentially tormented New Jersey mafia show, “so we can’t make anything that makes too much sense.”

Clearly the guy hasn’t seen Beef, an existential thriller about two very sad people confronting one another. Or The Bear, which also features a similarly complicated chef taking over his dead brother’s failing restaurant. Both cleared the floor at this year’s Golden Globes, raking in six awards between them and picking up seven at the recent Critics Choice Awards.

Chase said he was warned not to create a series that “would require an audience to focus.” Whoever sent him that warning must have missed White Lotus’s take on the complexities of wealth, Atlanta’s surrealist Black existentialism and Michaela Coel’s sexual consent drama I May Destroy You – three shows that offered original TV screenplays and won Emmy after Emmy. (To be fair to Chase, he did mention Succession.)

Dafoe says people watch movies differently now (i.e. in their living rooms and/or bedrooms and not in the cinema). “People now go home, they say, ‘Hey, honey, let’s watch something stupid tonight,’ and they flip through and they watch five minutes of 10 movies, and they say, ‘Forget it, let’s go to bed,’” he laments to the Guardian. This is true. but he also correlates this with a notion that “more difficult movies” can’t do as well when streamed as audiences give them less attention than they would in the cinema.

A fair point, but one that Saltburn, May December and Maestro, which all landed on streaming either on or soon after their cinema release, all go against it. They’ve been so thoroughly dissected to the point I hope I never have to read a Saltburn tweet again. 

Big old-time directors and actors batting for old Hollywood are right. At the same time, the idea that TV and films aren’t complicated, or the audience doesn’t care, isn’t true. Dafoe’s point is that streaming monopolies have changed the films and television that get made. 

But as for Chase – can’t believe I’m saying this – but if you wanna find the stuff worth watching, consider upping your screen time and touching less grass.