From Taylor Swift to the Emmys, lessons in celebrity

JANICE MIN: How many stars can withstand a message from Trump on Truth Social saying, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!!” No, like very few stars can psychically handle that or would feel that their business could handle that. I think the risks are being made clear whether you’re a CEO or whether you’re a star.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Janice Min, co-founder and CEO of the Ankler, the insider business media covering Hollywood and celebrity. Janice and I caught up the morning after the Emmy Awards to talk about what ‘TV’s biggest night’ revealed about the entertainment business, and we also talked about Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and how the shifting pressure on celebrities to take political positions echoes the pressure on CEOs. Along the way, we touched on Disney’s evolving strategy, the decline in HBO’s brand, and why stars like Patrick Mahomes and Caitlin Clark may be hesitant to follow in Taylor’s political footsteps. Plus, Janice explores the vagaries of what makes something a hit — whether that’s a politician like Kamala Harris, or an Emmy-winning darling like Netflix’s Baby Reindeer. It’s fun and revealing, so let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Janice Min of The Ankler. Janice, thanks for coming back to Rapid Response.

MIN: Thanks for having me again.

Copy LinkRecapping The Emmys

SAFIAN: We’re recording on Monday. Last night were the Emmys — TV’s biggest awards. It was kind of an unusual night in a bunch of ways, not the least because the last Emmys were just eight months ago.

MIN: Like everyone remembers that, right? Nobody remembers that, but it is that. Remember, we were coming off the strikes, so they couldn’t have the Emmys last year. So in this world of franchises and sequels and universes, we got a whole Emmys universe this year of not one, but two ceremonies.

SAFIAN: We had a different host than earlier this year, right? Instead of Anthony Anderson, we had the father and son team of Eugene Levy and Dan Levy.

MIN: Bob, the fact that you knew it was Anthony Anderson, you alone in America remember that fact. Though I think your producer looked it up for you and gave it to you. There’s no way you remembered that.

SAFIAN: Guilty, guilty there. Not to give Anthony a hard time, but you know, they’re not the most exciting shows. They’re more exciting to talk about than they are to watch.

MIN: Well, the Emmys are notoriously long and boring, and it’s been this staple on broadcast television. For your audience who isn’t aware, it rotates on the broadcast network—so ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC — every single year. This is not one of these shows that has a bidding war like the Oscars to get it on air to broadcast. It’s very important to the people who work in TV. Everyone knows Hollywood loves to award itself, but the show’s long, it’s bloated, it’s boring.

As a reflection of these streaming times we live in, you have an audience watching television, watching the show if they indeed tuned in, lots of over 65-year-olds tuning into their broadcast channel to watch it live to see a bunch of shows they probably haven’t seen get awarded. That’s kind of the story of television in 2024. I will remind you: I’m sure you remember this. The moment in 2023 when Bob Iger was at Sun Valley and made the comment, “television is not core to Disney’s business.”’” And there were the Emmy awards on ABC last night owned by Disney. So there you go.

SAFIAN: With him there in the audience, right? Smiling away.

MIN: Yes, yes. Everyone still loves a red carpet, no matter what, and being on television. So there you go.

Copy LinkWhat The Emmys reveals about the entertainment industry

SAFIAN: Is there a way that you evaluate the night? I mean, Shōgun made history with a slate of wins. The Bear got a lot of love. And then you have these sort of sleepers in Hacks and Baby Reindeer, which I will confess I have not seen either of, win a bunch of awards — like, I’m watching the wrong things!

MIN: No, you are the representative of the American viewer, right? What’s a mass show with… If they could award NFL broadcasts, that would be something that maybe would please the crowd.

And so what’s the takeaway? I think from a business perspective, it’s a little bit about the shifting tides of who’s doing well in television right now. No matter how meaningless and empty, and they’ll all tell you awards don’t matter — blah, blah, blah. They all care about the awards. Part of it is just the bragging rights and the narcissism of Hollywood, of course, but a bigger part of it is you want to prove that you are a home for the best creators in town. If you can’t attract the best people in town, then you aren’t going to have the most swings at bat.

Let’s just talk about FX for a second. So FX, which made Shōgun; Shōgun was this enormous swing. It was 10 years in development. By the way, no one would spend 10 minutes in development on a show today. So 10 years in development, largely Japanese language, unknown to Americans cast. It was the dedication of the creative executive in charge of FX, John Landgraf.

The Bear, which did not take home the big prize; it was in contention for best comedy. Remind me how many times you laughed during The Bear? Like zero. They made the unusual move of submitting as a comedy, and they lost to Hacks. So there’s some applause in town today: ‘Ah, you can’t trick our categories. You weren’t a comedy.’ But the thing that I think is important for listeners to think about is that you’re not going to see shows like this for several years now. That’s because the industry in the last two years has changed to the point where, so this idea of prestige television right now is like a dirty word. Like, ew, we’re not going to make these big swings and spend all this money to make your precious show. No, we need either like crazy huge swings on known IP or we’re going to do cheap shows that we can just churn out and still get eyeballs.

SAFIAN: And when Richard Gadd of Baby Reindeer gets up there in one of his multiple acceptance speeches and points out that Hollywood doesn’t need to invest in existing IP to succeed, that’s what he’s poking to spur change with.

MIN: Yeah. This is not dissimilar to, if you recall at the Oscars when Cord Jefferson, the writer of American Fiction, got up and made a speech and said, “instead of doing…”, I’m gonna mangle this a little bit, but “instead of doing one $50 million project, do 10 $5 million projects, and Hollywood will be the better for it.” Granted, he’s saying this as the person whose project was financed by Amazon MGM, so take that as you will. So I think there’s something parallel to what Richard Gadd was communicating also.

Copy Link“Shouldn’t the TV awards people know how to make better TV?”

SAFIAN: But it doesn’t sound like you think this is really going to change anytime soon. Do winning Emmys like this really change the business?

MIN: We’re in too fearful of a time for it to change the business right now. I will note that Baby Reindeer took Netflix by surprise. That’s a little bit like the audience telling them what worked, and they were not prepared to do an Emmys campaign for Baby Reindeer. This was not something they were going to prioritize, and they pulled it together at the last minute once they saw the reception it got.

SAFIAN: It is ironic though, right? That a TV awards show about TV is the worst TV of all the award shows. Like, shouldn’t the TV people know how to make better TV?

MIN: It’s like, this is like going to the dental supply convention in Las Vegas and they’re doing their trade award show. Like to pretend it’s for anyone who is not in the industry is a mistake. I mean, it’s literally meant to service the however many people can fit in the theater to make them feel good, to fluff the executives.

SAFIAN: Are Emmy after-parties like the same as Oscar after-parties? Or it’s not the same thing?

MIN: It is not the same thing. I think most notably this year there was an HBO after-party. In the days of old, let’s remember when Richard Plepler was running HBO, and they would be these splashy, unbelievably extravagant affairs. That was the hot ticket. People would be clamoring to get in, and every star would show up and HBO was inhaling Oscars faster than they could digest them. This year it was a very small affair. They refused access to a ton of journalists.

I’m sure you might have seen, some people might’ve been following some of the headlines around HBO, around the Emmys. In this crazy twist of how TV works, HBO is going to become basically basic cable for charter subscribers. This very premium channel that people used to pay $15 a month for on their cable bill is becoming free to a wide swath of the cable audience. I think a lot of people are horrified. It’s a dilution of the HBO brand. But HBO, its dilution began when Discovery and Warner Brothers merged and…

Copy LinkHBO’s transformation: From premium to basic cable

SAFIAN: It’s confusing. Like what’s HBO? What’s Max?

MIN: Who knows? And the thing with HBO, the big show they have coming out is The Penguin, which is a spinoff of the DC universe of superheroes, which makes a lot of people throw up, even though I think it’s supposed to be good. That’s a far cry from the White Lotus or Sopranos.

SAFIAN: It’s leveraging IP again.

MIN: Leveraging IP. But just to hammer that point home in terms of Emmy nominations, HBO used to be the big daddy, like they would get all the Emmy nominations, and this year I think it ranked behind FX, Netflix, then HBO, maybe a distant third.

Richard Plepler’s HBO wanted to kill Netflix every single day, and if they killed them once a day, it wasn’t enough. That sort of fierce competition ended. If you’re following this game at all, David Zasloff even went so far recently to start selling HBO programming and Warner Brothers programming back to Netflix, which felt like the game had been won by Netflix in the end.

SAFIAN: Yeah, which in point of fact, as we’ve talked about before, is true. They are winning.

MIN: It’s not perception. It’s fact.

SAFIAN: Janice does not mince her words, which is both refreshing and necessary when it comes to the entertainment business. Personally, I’m dismayed if the age of “prestige television,” as she calls it, is coming to an end. But maybe I’m just a snob. These projects have to be sustainable, and that means building a vibrant, paying audience — as in any other business. Next up, Janice and I go into new territory, courtesy of Taylor Swift. Stay with us.

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Before the break, the Ankler’s Janice Min took us inside the lessons from this year’s TV Emmy awards. Now we talk about Taylor Swift, her foray into politics, and the pressure to endorse a presidential candidate for celebrities and for business leaders. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkInside Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris

Got to talk about Taylor Swift and her endorsement of Kamala Harris, which sort of set off a media frenzy. Then Trump posts in all caps, ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!’ Can you describe Taylor’s first endorsement post and your reaction?

MIN: Well, for starters, to think that that was spontaneously done after the debate, that she spontaneously wrote out that Instagram post is comical. I also don’t believe for a second that it wasn’t coordinated with the Harris campaign. But whatever, maybe I’m wrong.

She talked about watching the debate, her decision was made, she was distressed by the fake AI endorsement that had come out where someone had created her endorsing Donald Trump, and Donald Trump had posted it on Truth Social. Then, of course, her ultimate trolling signature on the whole Instagram post was signed from ‘a childless cat lady.’ She also didn’t post it on X notably. I have to presume given the Elon Musk environment that has been created and as your listeners know, Elon Musk has endorsed Trump. So if you thought Kamala Harris won that debate, it made it very extra that night, I guess I would say.

SAFIAN: You’ve covered the celebrity world through a bunch of election cycles. Is the way celebrities act in politics different this time around? I mean, I’m thinking about how so many business leaders have pulled back. They seem to be like, afraid of alienating the marketplace.

MIN: It’s definitely quieter, I think. We did an interview at the Ankler with Mike Murphy, the Republican political strategist who was a never Trumper, who has talked about how celebrities have gotten smarter. They’ve wisened up, and at the Democratic National Convention, this was also a theme. We had sent one of our reporters there, and it was about you don’t say stupid things, like you don’t do it. Some of your listeners might remember when Obama was running for president, and Scarlett Johansson was saying things like, “Oh, he’s my boyfriend.” I mean, you don’t say things like that.

Mike Murphy had said to us that politicians endlessly have had to listen to celebrities try to tell them how to do nuclear arms deployment or their thoughts about high-level policy issues. That kind of has, I feel, dissipated to some degree too. If you recall, when Hillary Clinton was running for president, it was like the Emmys, it was a little bit tedious: ‘here are my famous friends, here’s another, and another, and another, and another….’ And it just felt like…

SAFIAN: Well, and it didn’t really work, right?

MIN: I mean, clearly it didn’t work.

SAFIAN: So does Taylor Swift work? Is it different because of who she is?

MIN: Yes. I mean, Taylor Swift is one of a kind. I’m sure that if you believe that reporting that young women are becoming more left, and a lot of it around the abortion issue. If you could just pour kerosene on a group of voters to get them to take action, that was it. There’s also the cynicism among younger people about politics, like ‘neither side can get anything done. I don’t like them. I’m going to sit this out.’ If you can get people to fly to Amsterdam and save all their money to go see Taylor Swift in concert, imagine how much easier it might be to get them to go vote or even register to vote as the first step.

Copy LinkViewer fatigue of politics right now

SAFIAN: I mean, the other fuel that I’ve been looking at and noticing, I mean, the late night TV hosts — Jimmy Kimmel has been brutal towards Trump, totally savaging him. Stephen Colbert has been a little bit more subtle in his digs, although only kind of slightly so. And then Jimmy Fallon has tried to kind of steer clear of the whole thing. Is that like a reflection of Trump? Corporate ownership at ABC versus CBS versus NBC or maybe a reaction to Fox’s Gutfeld! show? Like, I don’t know.

MIN: I suspect that somewhere these conversations are happening all the time. There’s whatever the number is… Is it 40 million people who love Trump and are immovable, right? Like, why would you leave off 50, 48 percent of the population? Also knowing that these viewers… Your kids are not watching late night television. They’re not even watching the clips of late night television anymore. So who’s watching these shows? It’s largely older, white Americans. I have to imagine that there are some advertisers who over the past, let’s say eight years, have said they don’t want to be part of this political conversation. It’s caustic. It’s exhausting.

We’re taping today, Monday, September 16. Yesterday, there was a second assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Like, no one even texted me about it. With the first one, nine weeks before, I had a thousand text chains going. I think there’s a fatigue among the populace of politics and talking about politics. Kamala Harris has caught on because she’s new, she’s fresh. But I think the exhaustion and also with Trump, it’s been the same political joke for eight years. The story really doesn’t change, and you saw Kamala Harris able to exploit those things incredibly well on the debate stage because she’s been training for this for eight years. She knows all his tics, like the crowd-size joke is still going.

Copy LinkHollywood’s fear of supporting Trump

SAFIAN: There’s the impression that Hollywood in the celebrity world is sort of more democratic, more anti-Trump. Does the media underestimate celebrity support for Republicans for Trump? Or is it really that much of a one-horse town?

MIN: I think it’s a one-horse town with a very quiet hidden pony — people really do fear they will get blacklisted for being overtly supportive of Donald Trump. That contingent absolutely exists here. I mean, Donald Trump comes to Los Angeles and has fundraisers. I think that the powers that be in Hollywood, the most powerful people in Hollywood, whether it’s Dana Walden at Disney or Ted Sarandos at Netflix, the Democrats are in power, I guess I would say. People can’t get jobs or work in Hollywood right now unless you’re at the very, very top, and no one’s gonna put that at risk. I think Hollywood was very sensitive about issues around racism. I think anyone in Hollywood looking at this stuff going on with the supposed dog and cat eating in Springfield, Ohio. It’s like it would be very hard to sell your public support of a candidate like that when you are overseeing an HR department that has invested 10 years in this idea of safe workplaces and all of that. I just think there’s no incentive to come out and publicly support Trump. Obviously, you see who he gets as his supporters like Kid Rock, Scott Baio, Dana White, that he gets wrestlers and certain musicians and certain sort of on-the-fringe people. He’s able to sort of build his own celebrity coalition out of that. Jon Voight. But by and large, these are not people who are the bread and butter, A-list of Hollywood.

Copy LinkWhy some stars are refusing to take political stances

SAFIAN: You also see celebrities who kind of refuse to say who they’re supporting. I’m thinking of the hubbub around Patrick Mahomes, the Chief’s quarterback. Like his wife, I guess maybe made some posts that people said sounded like she supported Trump, and then he’s declining. People are saying, “Oh, he doesn’t want to cross his wife.” I’m just thinking he doesn’t want to cross his sponsors at State Farm, right? I mean, isn’t that really what it’s about?

MIN: I mean, NFL, right? Already, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce had become subjects of crazy conspiracies and QAnon and all this nutty stuff in the last NFL season. I’m very curious to see if there’s blowback or how it blows back on him.

The NFL is very broad. It’s in all states. It doesn’t care if it’s blue or red, and it’s very red meat. There’s always been that strange conflation of NFL and patriotism that, and until Kamala Harris took the stage, patriotism has been owned by the Republicans factually or not factually, but they’ve made it their message. Kamala Harris has with some skill managed to flip that message, and we’ll see how that plays out.

SAFIAN: Are you hearing anything about the corporate world demanding neutrality from spokespeople more than they used to? I’m thinking about Caitlin Clark liking Taylor Swift’s endorsement but then declining to say anything about her position. I just keep thinking, is that all about the corporate world? Or are they really just wanting to stay private?

MIN: Both. I mean, I think that the incentives to come out and state your political position are so small now. What do you gain? Are you so impassioned that you have to say something? Fine. That’s fine. But I think the risks are being made clear to both whether you’re a CEO or whether you’re a star. I think there are very few people who are willing to take that risk these days. How many stars can withstand a message from Trump on Truth Social, like saying, ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!,” capital letters, exclamation points? Very few stars can psychically handle that or would feel that their business could handle that.

Being a star is like being an elected official in your own right, like you’re trying to stay in office as long as possible. I have to presume that for a lot of them, taking a political stance doesn’t help that.

Copy LinkThe emergence of stars in Hollywood & politics

SAFIAN: As you know, the political coverage intensifies as we move closer to the election. We’ve asked ourselves on this show how much do we lean into that obsession in our coverage versus kind of counter-programming, going the other way. I’m curious if there’s a playbook that works for media companies, ‘cause leaning in can help ratings at least in some ways, but then sometimes there are things you have to do hyperbolically to maximize that attention.

MIN: I always feel like, fish where the fish are. People are obsessed with it. I think that in the way that in 2015, when Trump was running for president, politics became the new entertainment. I would say this summer, when you have George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s movie on Apple TV being taken out of theaters and sent direct to streaming, like we have a new star system this summer and to lean into it.

It just speaks to the point that you can’t fabricate stardom in the way that it was maddening for some people to see Trump capture the imagination in 2015, 2016, that you’re seeing that with Kamala Harris too. That’s something you can’t fabricate. I think the problem that we were seeing with Biden is that he did not have star power. He didn’t have star power in 1976, and he did not have star power in 2024.

SAFIAN: Well, we were unsure that Kamala Harris had star power certainly four years ago, but she does now.

MIN: It’s so crazy. I think some of it is like, how do you meet the moment? So I’ll use some Hollywood analogies here since I’m your Hollywood person today. So let’s talk about the actor Glen Powell, who was a sort of solid working actor. You didn’t know his name, and then suddenly he became the biggest thing in the world in his thirties. That’s very unusual. That’s someone just hitting for some reason at a certain time. This is the thing that makes people in L.A. also lose their minds, right? Like you see these people become famous and you’re like, but why? How did that happen? I would say the same goes for television shows, for movies. Like why that and not this? It’s one of the last unexplainable things in a world that’s trying to game the system with algorithms and recommendations. To have an intangible left in the world is sort of fun and sort of crazy-making.

Did you ever think that a politician from California from San Francisco, a woman of color, would capture the nation’s imagination and have a horse race in swing states? That, to me, is again, sort of the thing that makes politics or Hollywood so engaging. You just don’t know where the star is going to come from. You cannot make this up. I cannot wait to see how history looks back on 2024.

SAFIAN: Well, thank you so much for doing this, Janice. Always great to chat.

MIN: Talk to you soon.

SAFIAN: Listening to Janice talk about the art of hitmaking, you can understand why some people get so frustrated, whether we’re talking TV, movies, or presidential candidates. However intangible it may be, you can’t ignore what connects in a marketplace. So much is about timing and context, and we have to stay attuned to the cultural currents around us. Will Taylor Swift shift the political landscape? I don’t know. It would certainly be dramatic if she did. But hey, she’s already shifted the NFL, which may have a bigger fan base than any candidate. For any business person — and remember, Taylor is definitely a business person — you should act according to your own principles. We want to be proud of our choices, whether they ultimately carry the day or not. After all, that’s what leadership is all about. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.