JANUARY 16, 2025

… And we’re back! I know it’s a bit late, but as this is the first Buffering of 2025, let me be the last to wish you and yours a Happy New Year. Of course, depending on your political leanings, the “happy” part might be about to get a bit more difficult given who’s moving back to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. on Monday. Perhaps unavoidably, this week’s newsletter is mostly all about you-know-who. Don’t say I didn’t warn you! 

—Joe Adalian, West Coast editor, Vulture

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Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images, (Kevin Dietsch, Scott Kowalchyk/CBS), Mike Taing/Disney

In less than 100 hours, the former host of NBC’s The Apprentice is set to return to that other part for which he’s become internationally famous: President of the United States of America. Donald Trump is officially back, and despite talk of a fading “resistance,” it’s not a stretch to say that most of Hollywood is absolutely dreading a reboot of his first four years in office. The people who make your favorite TV shows and movies are expecting that, like most sequels, this one will be much worse than the original. 

Immediately after November’s election, I wrote that it was too soon to begin making predictions about what Trump’s return would mean for the entertainment industry and instead offered up some broad questions I had about the next four years. Ten weeks later, I’m still not sure if trying to guess the future of Hollywood under Trump is all that wise. But as a journalist who gets paid to write his (somewhat) informed opinions about things, I also realize that Trump: The Revenge Tour is going to offer up a spectacular smorgasbord of Things to Get Mad About. It probably makes sense to start warming up now, even if I’d much rather reserve my anger for whatever great series Netflix kills next after just one season. And so, after a transition period marked by endless knee-bending, media normalization and so … much … stupidity, I’ve decided to offer these four fearless (or are they fear-filled?) forecasts for the next four years. To quote the great Dan Rather: Courage. 

Days after Trump won the 2024 election, I wrote about the ominous words coming from Brendan Carr, a Project 2025 contributor and MAGA faithful who’s also a current FCC commissioner. This was the guy who used Occupied Twitter to whip up fake outrage over Kamala Harris doing a very standard pre-election cameo on SNL, painting it as some Lamestream Media attempt to ignore equal time rules and tilt the election toward Democrats. It was utterly ridiculous, and in a previous era, Carr would have been roundly condemned for partisan hackery. Now, he’s Trump’s choice to head the FCC.

In theory, folks concerned about the concentration of media power absolutely want an FCC leader who’s willing to stand up to legitimate misuses of the public airwaves. In the past, that might have meant making sure networks and local stations lived up to the obligations of their broadcast licenses to act for the general good of viewers by offering news and educational content for kids. But so far, what Carr seems interested in is finding ways to curry favor with Trump by going after his perceived enemies. The president-elect was upset that 60 Minutes didn’t air a completely unedited interview with Harris because he thinks it would’ve made her look bad — even though the show always edits interviews to fit into a tight package. It’s a completely made-up controversy, and yet Carr told Fox News in November that he expects the show’s editing choices to play into the FCC’s review of the pending Skydance acquisition of CBS parent Paramount Global. That’s insanity, and yet, it’s being treated as routine by some media outlets (though thankfully, not all), which makes me fear what else Carr might try to get away with in his new role. 

Just today, current FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel attempted to draw attention to what a Carr-led commission might do by dismissing a trio of MAGA-backed complaints aimed at curbing free speech, as well as one that took aim (indirectly) at Rupert Murdoch and Fox News. She did so in part because her likely replacement, Carr, has made sure the industry knows he will use his government pulpit to bully any platforms which don’t toe the MAGA line. Anyone who cares about free speech should be scared.

Network and streaming execs are forever in search of finding programming that speaks to the zeitgeist — or at least the zeitgeist as they read it. And right now the conventional wisdom seems to be that the country has taken a rightward tilt. While I’m not convinced that’s entirely accurate, I think the folks who make such decisions absolutely are reading things this way. Back in November, I wondered whether Trump’s return would prompt programmers to pull back on programming aimed at diverse audiences and maybe even try to suck up to Trump and his voters. Given what’s happened since then, I’m pretty certain that’s what’s in store — and that many of them have probably already tasked their development teams with finding shows that reflect the 2025 vibe shift. In fact, this has already been happening to some degree over the past year or two.

For example, Disney’s ABC/Hulu unit last week launched a half-hour comedy, Shifting Gears, starring Famous Hollywood Conservative Tim Allen, in which he plays yet another version of his cranky Boomer persona lamenting the kids today and their crazy politics. Fox this month also premiered a half-hour comedy, Going Dutch, starring a cranky (though not notoriously right-wing) actor — Denis Leary — that revolves around characters in the military. Neither show is focused on politics, nor for that matter is NBC’s freshman hit Happy’s Place, toplined by country music icon Reba McEntire. What all three shows have in common, however, is that they’re all pretty obviously aimed, at least in part, at heartland audiences who might have felt a bit overlooked in much of the Peak TV prestige programming wave of the last decade. It’s hard to not see that trend continuing, particularly since the industry is also producing more traditional, network-style programming. More uncertain is just how far right Hollywood will bend in pursuit of ratings and box office. If you suddenly read about MAGA-pilled celebs like Roseanne or Rob Schneider booking gigs on mainstream platforms, you’ll know the answer: pretty far.

As I wrote in November, it’s not likely we’ll be seeing major networks or platforms such as Netflix or Amazon fund a whole bunch of programming aimed at the very large number of Americans who voted against Trump’s return, at least not in the first few years of his second term. I miss having Samantha Bee on TV regularly, too, and I wish someone would give her another platform to riff on all the awful things Trump is likely about to do. And who knows, perhaps I’ll be wrong and Comedy Central is about to announce it’s giving her the slot after The Daily Show, or even just letting her host TDS one night per week like Jon Stewart. 

But unfortunately, the new Trump Derangement Syndrome among media companies is doing everything possible to avoid looking too progressive or diverse —  too “woke” — lest your company gets on the radar of the Trump machine. Yes, there’s definitely some truth to the idea that anti-Trump viewers have burned out on reading, watching or basically thinking about the president-elect, but that will almost certainly change once he begins executing his agenda (or, you know, just…executing). And since it seems unlikely major platforms will try to capitalize on that interest as they did during Trump the First, I’m betting whatever successful 2025 version of a resistance we see will have to rethink how to get heard this time. 

YouTube and podcasts are obvious possibilities, though that will mean fighting the algorithms for attention. But don’t count out over-the-air digital broadcast, what’s left of the cable bundle, and free ad-supported streaming (FAST) platforms, which for years have offered a home to right-wing viewpoints not welcome in traditional media. Those are how we got One America News Network, NewsMax, Real America’s Voice, and so much worse. It’s startling to me that we haven’t seen progressive groups try to launch their own versions of these platforms (unless you count The Young Turks Network, but that’s not so much a progressive channel as it is…well, I honestly don’t know what it is anymore, or whether it’s at all relevant). The last Trump administration should have been the wakeup call for left-leaners to get into the same spaces where the aforementioned conservative outlets are, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t. With traditional media companies currently in coward mode, I am optimistic (perhaps foolishly so) that this will change, perhaps via newer outlets such as Mehdi Hasan’s progressive Zeteo or the centrist-leaning The Contrarian.

Back in June, when I was still regularly posting on Occupied Twitter, I mused that it would have made a lot of sense for MSNBC’s star anchor to return to a nightly show for at least a few months, given how meh the network’s ratings had become. I was wrong that Maddow would do so in order to cover the 2024 campaign, but this week, MSNBC said she will return to a Monday-Friday schedule — but only for the first 100 days of Trump’s second administration. Recall, however, that Comedy Central initially said that Jon Stewart’s return to The Daily Show was a limited engagement to cover the race for the White House, before finally announcing he had signed on to continue doing so in 2025. I think something similar could be going on here: I don’t know if Maddow will ever want to go back to a full five-nights-per-week grind, but I will be gobsmacked if she reverts to her Mondays-only work schedule come May. 

Fact is, even if you think MSNBC’s ratings will recover a bit from their recent post-election slump — and there’s already a tiny bit of evidence hinting they’ve started to do just that — Maddow’s presence is essential to the network regaining momentum. Her weekly show averaged 2.4 million viewers last year, according to the network, basically doubling the audience for MSNBC’s next-biggest evening programs (and well ahead of the roughly one million who watched the 6 a.m. hour of Morning Joe). What’s more, her presence on Mondays regularly boosts Lawrence O’Donnell’s 10 p.m. program and, in the past, has had a halo effect that’s even helped 8 p.m. hour All In with Chris Hayes. Maddow agreeing to return to a nightly show is a way of shocking the network’s primetime ratings back to life, and maybe even returning them to where they were back when Trump was last in office, or at least a lot closer.

This would be a goal of MSNBC management at any time, of course, but it’s crucial now given the network is part of the temporarily titled SpinCo, which is in the process of uncoupling itself from NBCUniversal. SpinCo management needs MSNBC to be as strong as possible because it will soon be negotiating new cable carriage deals and looking to demonstrate strength as a solo endeavor. Plus, just this week, respected MSNBC boss Rashida Jones announced she’s leaving the network, introducing even more uncertainty into the mix. In other words, with so much change, MSNBC and SpinCo brass will no doubt be highly motivated to do whatever it takes to keep Maddow on the air more than once a week come spring. And while I doubt that at this point Maddow is motivated by offers of more millions or even more editorial freedom — she already has both — I do think she’s someone who cares about keeping MSNBC vibrant and healthy. Taken together, both parties have reason to work something out.

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