GLOBALIZATION IS ANGLOFICATION:

America is now all about the one, not the two, so the most massive corporations lack competition. Marvel, too, is conforming to the rest of Disney and turning to magical fantasy stories, shedding any interest in science fiction. And now our new technology companies have also become entertainment companies, collapsing yet another distinction that must be collapsed in order to achieve oneness, or identity, the highest dream of democracy.

Disney and Amazon are therefore likely to ruin Netflix and drive Warner Bros. (owned by AT&T) into irrelevance. They are far wealthier and more connected to the American home. Meanwhile, Netflix's own attempts at family stories, Stranger Things and Lost in Space, don't seem to have much of a future or any relevance, though the former was much applauded for a few years.

Family values ultimately win in American entertainment, for the most part, and it's worth wondering what shape this entertainment will have. This makes The Mandalorian, a very banal show, quite important. It is a revelation of what is coming in the near future. What we can see already is that characters will be simplistic to the point of caricature, plots will be simple and almost entirely bereft of imagination, and dialogue will be spare and sparse.

The show's success is owed to this lack of complexity more than to anything else--we know immediately who the good guys are and who the bad guys are and in each episode the good guys win. The faceless hero and the cute animal prevail every time and never pay a price for their victory. We win along with them, as does morality. Every week, we can enjoy a bit more certainty about the inevitable victory of good over evil.

Until recently, self-styled sophisticates were telling us that TV has finally become sophisticated, even more so than the movies. Anti-heroes of various kinds dominated TV until recently, so more and more money, talent, and prestige was poured into this form of entertainment. But of course, even anti-heroes depend on exclusivity for their allure, on glamour of a kind TV used to be able to bestow--and so flooding the market cheapens everything.

That short age of seemingly sophisticated storytelling dominating entertainment, epitomized by Game of Thrones, now looks like an accident, a matter of luck. Star Wars above all shows that moral simplicity and bad plots are what the largest audiences pay most for, and since the Internet democratized TV, there is no talking back to success--there are no more oligarchic gatekeepers or success makers who might control what audiences see.

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