JULIO TORRES: When I set out to make Fantasmas, I didn’t have an overarching theme in mind. I just had different stories that I wanted to explore. And when I listed them, I saw that the common denominator was sort of very specific lonely characters who had very specific trials and tribulations that they felt alone in and that felt very ghostly.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome to We Disrupt This Broadcast, I’m your host Gabe González. Have you ever wondered what happens to lost earrings in a gay bar run by hamsters? Would it surprise you to learn the answer includes a devastating examination of loneliness under capitalism, or Santa’s elves suing their boss?
Today we’re talking about Fantasmas, a series created by Julio Torres that is set in an abstracted version of New York City. It follows Julio, alongside various characters as they navigate life in a place that’s being devoured by the absurd bureaucracies of late capitalism.
Julio is a writer, comedian and actor best known for writing on Saturday Night Live, his film Problemista and for both of his original HBO series, which are also Peabody winners, Los Espookys and Fantasmas.
Later on, to talk more about how artistry and culture pay the price for an increasing corporate presence in the media landscape – we’ll hear from Professor Andrew deWaard – author of Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture. So after you devour these ads we’ll be right back.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back. We’re here with Julio Torres, creator and star of the Peabody award-winning series Fantasmas. We’re talking about creating art in a profit-driven industry, and why The Sims has had such a big impact on his work.
Hey, everyone. Please welcome our guest today, Julio Torres. How are you doing?
JULIO TORRES: Hello. Hi. I’m good.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Amazing. So I’m curious on the show, you sort of describe what makes a “Julio.” But I’m curious, in real life, what is the job description for being Julio? What are the qualifications?
JULIO TORRES: I’ve been really feeling like I wish I could split up into different selves and assign a project or a task to each one of those selves and have a little workshop of different me’s working on different ideas while the real me is napping.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Perfect. Now, online and in the series, the phrase “little consumers” comes up and I believe you do call your followers online, “little consumers.”
JULIO TORRES: My little consumers. Yes.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. I’m wondering how you settled on that nickname for them and if there were any other nicknames in the running?
JULIO TORRES: Well, I feel like “little consumers” doesn’t shy away from the elephant in the room which is that the work that I make is intertwined with capitalism, and that’s sort of not a choice or an opinion. It’s a fact. So I think that calling people that like my work little consumers is… If they take on that name, they also are willing to look at the facts and be able to find joy nevertheless.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: It is a constant reminder of the oppressive circumstances under which we live. But also, yeah, it’s their nickname. Yeah.
JULIO TORRES: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I do like that. In a way then, the name chose you. You didn’t really choose what to name them. It was always there.
JULIO TORRES: Exactly.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Now, in the series, Fantasmas, you depict this kind of abstracted, almost dystopic New York. So I’m wondering how you came about that decision and how you got the ideas for these very elaborate, kind of impressionistic sets?
JULIO TORRES: So Fantasmas was, creatively it was the result of me missing doing short form pieces which I was lucky enough to do several of at Saturday Night Live. But I do find that limitations and parameters, in my case, can be very fruitful creatively. So I mean, the first one was obviously budget. We had a budget that was perfectly adequate for a sketch series, but this is not a show in which the vignettes were mostly like conference rooms or like living rooms. It has so many little worlds that if every one of those vignettes were a location, it’d be completely impossible. And also, HBO agreed to do this show in January 2020.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Oh, wow.
JULIO TORRES: And then we went through that long period where I feel like so many creative people were in this circumstance where we kept trying to reinvent or compromise the way in which we did things to see if there was a way of making things work. So I decided, playing around with the idea of what if everything took place in different impressionistic sets that were merely a suggestion of locations. As it turns out, that’s not any cheaper or safer. That is not any more COVID-safe or cost-effective than the alternative.
But we liked the idea. And… especially because I’ve always been a fan of the film, Dogville, and Mishima, the production design there is a very obvious reference, Corral, and all these very theatrical, operatic films, and I felt like… That and a little bit of The Sims and also a little bit of the computer game, Age of Empires.
I constantly imagine New York as this sort of video game grid where I am moving around and have only illuminated for myself, even partially, the paths that I have crossed. And I think that we all live that way where our reality is contained within our limitations and I felt like this production design was very intentional about that. And our production designer, Tommaso Ortino, really nailed it. And we talked a lot about the – what we call – the overhead shots and these sorts of the bird’s eye view shots. And if you look at the corners of several of the sets, the floorboards are disintegrating in the corners. Just sort of suggesting that that is as far as that character has gone.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: It is so wild that you just told me it’s a little bit Lars Von Trier and a little bit The Sims and that made perfect sense. To me, looking back, I’m like, “Yes, of course. It’s Dogville meets The Sims.” In a way, it also kind of feels like you are also inviting the audience in, to participate in filling out that darkness as well like, what lies beyond? What could this character illuminate over there?
JULIO TORRES: Yeah. I’ve always been fascinated by characters that are limited. And sometimes, I mean those limitations to be literal because my experience in the U.S. has always felt bureaucratically constricted. You know? It’s like you come here as an international student and there are certain jobs you can take, certain jobs you cannot take. There are certain things you can do, certain things you cannot do. You are like your peers, but not like your peers. Jumping from lily pad to lily pad immigration-wise, visa-wise, it feels like you are constantly attempting to make a bigger bubble for yourself. Make a little more leeway with what you are able to legally do. And so, it’s this constant feeling of being here but being not here, and that feels quite ghostly.
That is why the show is called Fantasmas, it’s ghosts in Spanish. And I love the mythology of the ghosts. They can walk through walls but they can’t open a door. They can be seen sometimes and sometimes they can’t be seen. And of course, this is completely a man-made, Hollywood-ized idea of that but I do find those traits to be very similar to bureaucratic restrictions of any kind. And for some people, that might be work, that might be insurance things, whatever it might be.
Which is why when I set out to make Fantasmas, I didn’t have an overarching theme in mind. I just had different stories that I wanted to explore. And when I listed them, I saw that the common denominator was sort of very specific, lonely characters who had very specific trials and tribulations that they felt alone in. And that felt very ghostly.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: And I do want to talk a bit about this bureaucratic process you brought up because it’s one you explore in Problemista, and you literally depict it as a labyrinth with tiny doors, that all kind like of don’t open and the thing you need is across the door you can’t open. And in Fantasmas, you kind of revisit this theme through the idea of “proof of existence,” which coincidentally came right before everybody was revamping their Real IDs-
JULIO TORRES: The Real ID.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah.
JULIO TORRES: The Real ID, yes-
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Prophetic.
JULIO TORRES: I saw the Real ID at the airport and I was like, “What? What?” So originally, when I was… I mean, I was writing Fantasmas for a very long time. But in one of the moments when I was writing it, when it seemed like the show where we were actually going to make it, I was looking for apartments. And my proof of existence in that case was credit and my lack of credit. And how I am very fortunate enough to be in a position where I could afford the apartments that I wanted. I had future proof of income. I had proof that I was willing and capable of paying things on time. But none of these things matter because a number that comes up when you type someone’s name in a database says that that person shouldn’t be a tenant.
You know, it’s like you bring up these grievances around you and your friends are like, “Well, just get a credit card and put your Netflix on it.” And it’s just like, “Well, I don’t want to just get a credit card and put my Netflix on it because that is bowing down to a system that I did not consent to participate in.” So Problemista, I think, is autobiographic in the sense that it’s someone desperately trying to be a part of the system, but feels like they’re outside of the system. Fantasmas is someone who is a part of the system, but resents it.
And so, that journey really informed the apartment problems that my avatar in Fantasmas has. And my friend who was working on the show, Neha, said something that was very, very illuminating, which is that by coming up with something like proof of existence, which she encouraged me to do, that would keep things sort of lifted in a metaphorical realm, which I think is brilliant. Because if I’m talking about not wanting to get a credit score, that might feel like people can’t connect to that or relate to that because people that have bad credit scores wish they didn’t. And also, No one wants to see someone who is doing fine complaining about money, right? Yeah. So proof of existence, I felt was… really was a brilliant suggestion and really made us lean even further into the ghostly aspects of the show.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely. You know it is the idea that it is not just a sort of metaphorical stand-in for these things. But even the name sounds so vague, proof of existence…
CLIP: Fantasmas
Well, to sign you up we just need your credit card to put on file and a copy of your proof of existence…
Wait, I need to prove that I exist so I can stop existing?
It’ll be real fast, we’ll swipe it. All you need is proof. That’s it.
No, I don’t have it because I don’t want it, is the issue.
Wait, so…How do you have an apartment? How do you take out a loan? They’re going to be asking you for it soon to get on the subway…
JULIO TORRES: It’s getting to the point–we’re not quite there yet. But it’s getting to the point where unless you have a smartphone, you can’t move. Which I feel like most people would say, “Well, who doesn’t have a smartphone?” And my answer is, “Actually, a lot of people.” Because it’s not only having a smartphone, it’s having a bank and it’s having a smartphone that’s working always. It’s taking more and more privilege to be able to have the bare minimum in a city like New York. And I feel like those are the anxieties that are at the forefront of Fantasmas. And frankly, the anxieties that we are finally reckoning with here.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, absolutely.
JULIO TORRES: I do think that bureaucracy strips people of humanity. And then, whatever broker or whomever will be like, “Oh, just go with this one because what I’ve been taught is that this is what matters.” And so, you surrender logic and humanity.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. And these things are named such funny things, too. They’re so bizarre, right? This “Alien of Extraordinary Ability” Visa, I think you’ve talked about this before.
JULIO TORRES: Yes
GABE GONZÁLEZ: How do you feel about the way we name the things in this bureaucracy? What does that name say to you?
JULIO TORRES: Well, alien is definitely a name that has been tossed around even more and more recently, right? Where “unwelcomed alien. Dangerous alien. Or alien of extraordinary ability”. Obviously, it otherizes and it’s such an aggressive term. It’s a very aggressive term. It’s just like you’re reading the news and it just feels so dystopian and it feels like sci-fi.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I think watching elements of Fantasmas, there are parts of New York that feel so abstract. And then, there are other parts that feel like they are just pulled from our present, our right now, like a thing that could have happened yesterday just in a parallel world. I think something you mentioned a bit and I think that you explore beautifully in Fantasmas is this constant tension between being an artist and needing to stay alive in a capitalist society. And I think you talked a bit about feeling that tension in your life as a person, even shaping the story of Fantasmas. Are people going to want to watch me complain about a credit score when I’m well-off, right? How present is that tension in your artistic process and why do you think it’s so important to be open about that tension?
JULIO TORRES: I work in the entertainment industry. It’s show business, and half of it is show, half of it is business. And I feel like artists at different stages feel that tension because the systems that we live in feel inescapable.
And I feel like that actually like echoes your question about little consumers, there’s a few options, right? You either double down on it and do your sponsored posts and cashing the checks and sort of compartmentalize, which…I’m talking about myself, I never want to sound like I have moral high ground or a more keen awareness of the world than anyone else. But my choices, given the way that I am wired, my choices are, either I double down on it and become a little influencer, I walk away from it all and find whatever the purest form of artistic expression is, that will likely not be a TV show or a film, or I mock it. And that is sort of the imperfect place where I have landed.
CLIP: Fantasmas
Hi consumers! Today is Bi Visibility Day. And to celebrate all the bis around the world, I have teamed up with Chlorox, the all gender inclusive Germ Killer.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I think the common theme throughout your work or the sketches or films, you have this kind incredible way of making the everyday feel magical. In fact, in a recent interview, I believe you said, “New York garbage piles feel like sculptures to you.” Is that correct?
JULIO TORRES: Yes, like still life installations.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yes, they are. They look like some installations I’ve seen too. But I’m wondering how do you preserve and nurture that creative instinct in an industry that, as you mentioned, is art but also business and often very driven by the business side?
JULIO TORRES: I don’t think about the business side. I don’t think about the sellability or marketability of anything. I just do work that is interesting to me and it either happens or doesn’t happen. Because I don’t work well trying to guess what people might like. I don’t work well trying to reverse engineer from a market want or need.
I feel like my work is constantly reacting to the world around me, but I’m never going to be like, “Oh, Monsters are really in right now,” or whatever. I feel like I have been able to dissociate from that a little bit, which means it’s a double-edged sword, right? Because that means that the work that I do feels true to me but it also will likely mean that I get to do less work than other people that are more malleable, but I’m fine with that.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. Absolutely. You hate credit scores. We’re not even going to start talking about ad sales. Come on now. We’re not a numbers crowd.
JULIO TORRES: No.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: So, moving on to a question that’s been gnawing away at me since watching Fantasmas. Is the Hamster CVS still open?
JULIO TORRES: The Hamster CVS, I believe, is still operational, yes.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Okay. How do you feel about that? Are you all right with the Hamster CVS still being there?
JULIO TORRES: I mean, I wish it hadn’t taken the spot of a small business. But what are you going to do? It’s there.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I love that. When we elect a new mayor, hopefully we can take that up with him. I think it would be lovely. Yeah.
JULIO TORRES: Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. What is he going to do to bring hamster pride back?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely. Please. That’s what we should be talking about this June. I love that. That was a very fun way to start the series and I think cued audiences so much into your sensibility, this idea of a hamster gay bar being replaced by a hamster CVS.
JULIO TORRES: Yeah, I feel like that encapsulates a lot of my work.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: All right. Well, Julio, I’ve had a really great time talking to you. I really appreciate your time. Before we wrap this up, though, I am curious if there are any closing thoughts you’d like to leave us with or anything we didn’t get to talk about that you really wanted to mention?
JULIO TORRES: No, not really. I mean, other than thanking you guys for championing work that you genuinely like. Thank you.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely. We are obviously all obsessed with Fantasmas. We had an absolutely wonderful time watching it. So excited to sit down and talk with you about it for sure.
JULIO TORRES: Until next time.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Until next time.
GABE GONZÁLEZ:I hope you enjoyed that adventure with Julio Torres and learning more about his latest series Fantasmas. Before I leave to pitch a shoe company on a NEW podcast, I want to talk about the vibes here because Julio’s intention is so clear with this series. In its tone, visual style, and quite explicitly in the script, Fantasmas subversively questions the tiny indignities we’ve accepted as the cost of living comfortably.
Now, despite happening in some not-too-distant future, the realities of capitalism in Fantasmas might be even closer than they appear. So we’ll talk to our next guest, Andrew deWaard, to explore how making art has changed over the years, and why the financial industry has its sights set on profiting from creatives.
We’ll be right back.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back. We’re here with Andrew deWaard, Assistant Professor of Media and Popular Culture at the University of California, San Diego, and author of Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture. Yummy, let’s get into it. Hey Andrew, how you doing?
ANDREW DEWAARD: I’m excellent. Thanks for having me.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I am really excited to talk to you today, because Andrew, you wrote Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture, which feels, uh, like it is a very natural continuation of the conversation we’ve been having with Julio. But for those who haven’t checked out the book, could you explain a bit what it’s about and why you wrote it now?
ANDREW DEWAARD: Yes. So Derivative Media is about the last 20/25 years of the cultural industries and how Wall Street has dramatically transformed how they operate. I trace, you know, the entrance of lots of different financial firms and strategies: hedge funds, asset managers, private equity firms, venture capital, derivative traders, all these like strange abstract strategies, but they have really tangible effects.
I think everyone is aware of how unoriginal and derivative so much content is today. And what the book argues is, that is directly related to the financialization of the cultural industries. You know, there’s a sort of like double meaning with the book title. We’re used to all this derivative content. I would say this is actually directly related to the concept of the derivative, a financial instrument that is used to speculate on risk, that it’s like those contracts, like futures, and shorts, and options.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely. And that connection between the way the term is used financially and creatively feels so salient. Because I think part of the idea of reviving IP, right, of rebooting something, of bringing something back with a twist is to reduce the risk, right?
ANDREW DEWAARD: Yeah. You know, and that’s another meaning of the word derivative, is that when you sign a contract, you sign away your derivative rights. In fact, I had to sign away my derivative rights to this interview. That was a funny aspect of the contract.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Andrew, we didn’t wanna tell you, but we’re making mugs with your face on them. I’m so sorry. I apologize.
ANDREW DEWAARD: I’m looking forward to the cartoon version for kids. That is just standard practice. And that’s because the derivative rights are so potentially profitable and the rehashing of intellectual property. Yeah, it’s far less risky. They’re proven sort of formulas that people like.
Financial firms. Yeah, they’re trying to like hedge risk. They’re trying to, uh, alleviate all the riskiness of, you know, taste and fickle audiences and all these things. And so they’ve like sort of trained consumers now in a sense to expect these worlds full of the same IP, the same characters, just new stories within it. And a lot of folks will point to the internet or digital media or big tech and like, it’s definitely a part of it. But I don’t think that’s the whole story. And in fact, I don’t think it’s actually the foundational part of it either.
I think it’s this rise in the financial sector. Which I chart in the book is like, you know, since the seventies, just this decline in profitability and GDP growth rates that leads the American political economy to like become more and more reliant on financialization, on speculation, on turning things into assets in charging rent rather than like production rather than services. And so it was sort of inevitable that it would come to culture.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I’m curious in the impact of some of the things you’ve talked about. We’ve both seen Fantasmas, it satirizes the corporate consolidation your book discusses. For example, Julio tries to sell a TV series to Zappos, which seems absurd on its face, but maybe not, not that far off from what our future looks like. Why is it that monopolization is so destructive to creativity?
ANDREW DEWAARD: Homogenization is the main one, right? We have this. Tremendous lack of variety and diversity and radical ideas. Instead, we get this reliance on intellectual property, comic book movies, video game adaptations, all these procedurals about the police and the law and medicine, right?
I think that’s one of the main takeaways from the financialization of culture. As recently as 1988, more than 40% of theatrical US box office sales were achieved with original stories, like almost half, and in 2019 that share had fell to 6%. Meanwhile, the establishment and continuation of franchises, which used to occupy about a quarter of the market, has since risen to occupy nearly three quarters, with other types of adaptations, accounting for most of the rest.
Right. So like in my lifetime we have had, um, a movie system built on original stories and that has, you know, just faded away. It’s one of the great like paradoxes of culture of our time, which is that like there’s more TV shows and more movies and more music than ever before, and there’s all this excellent, radical, independent, diverse art, but very few people are seeing it, right? Actual viewing and listening time is spent with fewer and fewer things. Enormous franchises with immense marketing budgets. All the eggs are being put into one basket, right?
We should think about art, but we should also think about worker conditions, which are just worsening, you know, across the board. And again, that’s, you know, precarious creative workers, I think, can find common cause with precarious nurses, can find common cause with precarious Amazon warehouse workers. What Julio’s character is subjected to are the same things that we are.
And this is really significant, right? It’s something that, you know, came up during the writers and actors strike, you know, a couple years back. These people also can’t afford healthcare or rent, right? Teacher strikes, nurses strikes, Amazon warehouse unions, and creative workers, right? We’re all precarious. We’re all in this class struggle together. And I think people can increasingly identify that, you know, we are all precarious workers to various degrees.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, absolutely. You use a term called the financialization of the creative arts. We’ve used it a bit during this interview. Could you dive into what that really means and kind of how that functions today?
ANDREW DEWAARD: Yes. So you can put almost any word after the phrase, “the financialization of the…blank”, right? The worst ones are like the environment or healthcare or real estate, right? The financialization of these things are like particularly horrific, right? They’ve made futures markets for water.
Hospitals run by private equity are literally lethal. They have statistically proven higher death rates. The rent is so damn high because of Wall Street, right? This is financialization. It’s the growing influence of financial firms, instruments and logic. And these firms operate based on speculation, on leveraged debt and on risk as we mentioned, right?
They’re all dismantling the creative capacity of the cultural industries. They all consolidate corporate media. They all harm the working conditions of creative labor, and they all restrict our collective media culture. We are left with less. So I’ll just give some examples. Like private equity, I think is a word or a phrase we hear more and more.
Toys R’ Us, Red Lobster, Bed, Bath & Beyond. Countless other examples, right? Like, why did that company dissolve, go bankrupt? Because it was just mismanaged, uh, saddled with debt by a private equity company, right? And this has been devastating to the cultural industries.
Since around 1998 it started happening and we have Warner Music, EMI, iHeartMedia, AMC –the theatrical chain. Dreamworks and dozens more. These have all been bought out by private equity, you know, taken, from public markets into private. They face severe layoffs, they’re saddled with debt and they are left worse off than they were.
So that’s private equity. Another one is asset managers, like BlackRock, Fidelity, State Street. They are just slowly buying up huge equity stakes in all companies. And so in the past, like people were picking and choosing which companies they thought would be more competitive than others, but now they are just buying all of them in the same industry, just slowly building from 5, 10, 15, 20%. And so there’s this like complete disincentive to compete if you’re all owned by this block of BlackRock Fidelity, State Street, Vanguard, et cetera.
So that’s one, or it’s another one of like clear disincentive for competition, which the corresponding result is like pushing down labor costs, pushing up costs to consumers, right? Ticket prices are way above inflation. You know this, if you’ve ever tried to go to a Taylor Swift concert, or Beyonce or any big musician, right?
And the last example I’ll give is hedge funds, right? They use pressure tactics to extract money through dividends and stock buybacks, right? A dividend is when a company rewards its investors with a little bonus payment, right? “Thanks for being an investor. We did great this year. Here’s a hundred bucks.” Or they do a stock buyback. That’s when a company just buys its own stock to inflate the price of that stock. Right? There’s less stock available. So now whoever has stock, it’s worth more. And that’s just enriching wealthy investors and they are very successful, including the company that put out Fantasmas, right? Warner Discovery was for a few years there, owned by AT&T, who had a hedge fund activist come to it and say, “fire a bunch of employees, fire your CEO, give us dividends and buybacks.” They did all of that, including firing 42,000 employees. Hedge fund activists, as they call themselves, are just ruthless people who extract money.
Let’s look at how the cultural industries redistribute wealth. Right now, I did the calculations, the biggest media companies cumulatively spent over $320 billion on dividends and buybacks in the last 20 years. You know, that could have been spent on workers, right? Would’ve made more film and TV and music that would’ve made them more money, like it would’ve been productive for them too. They could have paid 400,000 creative workers a living wage for 20 years. Instead, they just rewarded their already wealthy investors, right? Like those are the choices that are being made. Those are like what our regulations are allowing media companies to do.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We could regulate all of this away. Hedge funds are actually a relatively recent phenomenon. It was Bill Clinton in ‘96 who deregulated them. There used to be strict rules against buying back your own stock for obvious reasons. It has perverse incentives. There are very specific private equity regulations that make a lot of sense. We could do all this, we could give more money to the Julio Torres of the world. And all the other great creatives who are stuck in these like dead end jobs, driving cars to chauffeur someone else’s burrito around.
Instead, you know, we’re paying for David Zaslav’s, you know, third or fourth yacht or whatever, you know. Does not have to be this way. I don’t think it will happen under capitalism, but there could certainly be a far more redistributive, creative, diverse, radical, independent media system, and we should agitate for it.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Andrew, thank you so much for joining us and helping us unpack some of these big picture themes that we feel watching Fantasmas,but might not be able to think about as clearly. So thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate having you here.
ANDREW DEWAARD: Thank you, Gabe. It was a pleasure.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Alright little consumers, that’s the end of your show. Hope you made dinner ‘cause Wall Street’s hungry. Thanks again for joining us this episode. It was so great to have Julio Torres with us to share more about his process and his experiences navigating the most dehumanizing parts of trying to be a happy human – including credit scores.
And thank you to Andrew, for helping us digest how the totality of corporate control over the media, journalism, and art we consume impacts our lives in ways not even Fantasmas could prepare us for.
What happens when we make art – music, performance, writing – abide by the rules of profit margins and “sound investments?” It’s a question both Andrew and Julio try to answer in their work – Andrew through research and exploration of industry trends, and Julio through an influencer’s existential crisis or a robot’s meltdown in acting class.
The world can seem cold and calculating when we feel like tiny cogs in a really heartless machine. But we’re left with a little hope – organizing, investigating, rebelling – on a big or small scale. It all adds to the collective push toward something more humane. Because sometimes revolutions have a massive impact, and sometimes they happen on a tiny TV screen in the back of Chester’s Car. Thanks again for joining us.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: The Peabody Awards are decided unanimously, so to close out our episode, I bring you We Disrupt This Broadcast’s Unanimous Decision, where we unanimously pick the most disruptive line of the day:
Andrew, we did wanna tell you, but we’re making mugs with your face on them. I’m so sorry. I apologize.
Join us next time when we’ll be talking to Patrick Spence, Gwenyth Hughes and Nick Wallis about Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office, the peabody-award winning show based on the shocking true story of The Post Office Scandal in the UK.
PATRICK SPENCE: The effect of this program, and actually the effect of the nation’s response to this program, was unprecedented. It’s never happened in British history before. We don’t feel that we as program makers changed the law. We feel that the British people did that. They got so angry that this had happened on their watch, that they stood up as one and demanded action, and the prime Minister had no choice but to listen to that.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: We Disrupt This Broadcast is a Peabody and Center for Media and Social Impact production hosted by me, Gabe González, with on air contributions from Caty Borum and Jeffrey Jones. The show is brought to you by executive producers, Caty Borum, Jeffrey Jones, and Bethany Hall. Producer Jordana Jason. Writers: Sasha Stewart, Jordana Jason, Bethany Hall, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, and myself, Gabe González. Consulting producer: Jennifer Keishin Armstrong. Associate producer, Bella Green. Graphic designer: Olivia Klaus. Operations producer: Varsha Ramani. The marketing and communications team: Christine Dreyer and Tunishia Singleton. From PRX: the team is Terrence Bernardo, Jennie Cataldo, Edwin Ochoa and Amber Walker. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.