Entertainment Is Broken is a weekly podcast produced by Brittlestar.
🎧 Listen to the full episode of Entertainment Is Broken wherever you get your podcasts
📺 Watch on YouTube if you want to see our faces (one of which is healing nicely, thank you)
Every once in a while, a conversation about entertainment turns into a conversation about… everything else.
This week’s episode of Entertainment Is Broken starts with something we don’t usually talk about when we’re arguing over movies and algorithms… losing control of your own face.
Richard opens the show by talking about recovering from Bell’s palsy. Not in a dramatic, TED Talk way. In a practical, unsettling way. One side of your face just… stops cooperating. Smiling becomes a project. Cheeks go on strike. Eyebrows refuse to negotiate.
And suddenly you realize how much of your life is built on things you never once thanked for showing up.
Which, weirdly, turns out to be a pretty good place to talk about culture.
Because when something stops working… whether it’s your face, a touring model, or the entire concept of “television” … you don’t immediately panic. First, you notice. Then you reassess. Then you start asking uncomfortable questions like: Why did we think this was the only way it could work?
From there, the conversation widens… into legacy. Into the idea that some people don’t really leave when they go. They stick around as flickering images. As lines of dialogue you’ve accidentally memorized. As catchphrases that have fully moved into your brain without paying rent.
Pop culture has always done that. It sneaks past your defenses. You think you’re just watching a sitcom… and twenty years later you realize it taught you how not to be a terrible person.
Which is why the timing of all this disruption feels… loaded.
The Oscars are heading to YouTube. Podcasts are becoming television. Instagram wants to live on your TV. Netflix is flirting with radio. Everything is blending, collapsing, remixing itself into something that doesn’t have a clean name yet.
And the reflex reaction is to say, Well that’s the end of old media.
Maybe it is.
Or maybe it’s just the end of pretending there was ever a clean line between “serious culture” and “new platforms.” People didn’t stop caring about stories… they just changed how they find them. The audience didn’t disappear. It moved to the couch. Then the phone. Then the TV again… somehow.
We also talk about aging artists. Musicians whose bodies are quietly filing HR complaints. Performers who still love the stage but maybe not the buses, the schedules, or the expectation that passion should hurt.
There’s a real tension there. Between can I still do this? and should I still do this the same way?
And maybe the answer isn’t bigger stages or louder speakers. Maybe it’s smaller rooms. Concert films. New formats. Intimacy over spectacle. Art that adapts instead of insisting on reenactment.
Because nothing meaningful stays frozen.
Fans want comfort food. Artists want evolution. Platforms want your attention. Bodies want rest. Culture wants to keep going… just not like it used to.
Which brings us back to where the episode starts.
Loss doesn’t always announce itself with sirens. Sometimes it shows up quietly, makes you rethink what you assumed was permanent, and then hands you a strange gift… perspective.
Entertainment is broken.
But maybe it’s not broken in the way we think.
Maybe it’s just changing shape… again.
🎧 Listen to the full episode of Entertainment Is Broken wherever you get your podcasts
📺 Watch on YouTube if you want to see our faces (one of which is healing nicely, thank you)
💬 And as always… tell us what’s breaking next
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Entertainment Is Broken is a weekly podcast produced by Brittlestar.
