THIS year’s Top 10 Serial TV Series unfolds against a background of continually rising inequality as Thomas Piketty, and company, released figures charting global disparities exacerbated by Covid that made Le Monde’s front page but were ignored in the US.

Billionaires have captured much more of the global wealth since the onset of Covid and part of the increase in profits is from that enormous moneymaker the streaming services, expected to generate £53 billion in revenue in 2021 with almost half of all of the global profits going to US streamers.
 
The need to produce constant weekly product to match streaming competitors reached a level of frenzy this year to the point where the pressure put on industry workers resulted in even a traditionally “sweetheart” union like the IATSE sanctioning a strike.

Three parables illustrate the nature of this profit lust, heightened by the persistent presence of the virus.
 
The first story involves what used to be, as Theodor Adorno termed it, “a mark of suffering,” now reduced to simple branding as the level of daily commodification also reaches new heights.

Netflix’s reality series Coming Out Colton pretends to be the painful story of Colton Underwood, the NFL linebacker turned star of ABC’s The Bachelor — a heterosexual Cinderella fantasy which two seasons ago starred Colton as the prince.

Colton acknowledged, after the fact, that he is gay, and thus that the whole season, and perhaps the whole idea of the show, was a farce. In the Netflix series, Colton “comes out” to his parents but does it on-camera in a way that is, rather than an authentic moment, just a step in his further enlistment under the rubric of the star-making machine.

The most cynical aspect of the show though involves Netflix’s use of the series to take a swipe at one of the biggest moneymakers of its most contentious streaming rival Disney, which owns ABC where The Bachelor has been one of its major hits.

The pain of the homosexual experience and the joy of its normalisation both take a back seat to personal aggrandisement and industry competition.

The streamer is using the documentary to attempt to show up the populist simplicity of the network while calling attention to its own supposed sophistication, while, in actuality, simply laying bare the cut-throat nature of the business.

The second revelation also involves Disney, which recently hired as the new guardian of its image and public relations Geoff Morrell.

Morrell is currently still working with British Petroleum, trying to burnish its image after the Deepwater Horizon spill which devastated the Louisiana Gulf Coast environment and economy.

His previous position was as Pentagon press secretary in charge of putting a smiling face on the illegal and murderous US invasion of Iraq.

This hiring then casts in concrete the military-industrial-entertainment complex with Morrell now keeping the Disney skeletons in the closet just as he has done for the polluter BP and the Pentagon war criminals.

The US dominates the streaming industry the way it dominates the war industry with a defence budget greater than that of the next 11 countries combined. And the problem is China?

The third item puts to bed the lie, perpetuated by both the Obama and Trump presidencies, that the industrial economy is returning to the West.

Since the announcement of the Disney Plus streaming service, that is the move of entertainment to a symbolic, virtual or digital economy, the company has generated more worth on the stock market than Ford or General Motors, the former engines of US growth.
 
Is there hope within this bleak news? Yes, indubitably, there were a number of series this year which rose above their labels and companies and struck blows aimed at illuminating social problems. They will be featured next time.