Algorithmic recommendations are designed to keep you on the platform, not to broaden your horizons. Follow human curators. Subscribe to a film critic’s newsletter. Ask your weirdest friend for a recommendation. Use services like Letterboxd or Goodreads to find tastemakers who hate the same things you hate.
The most significant movement toward better entertainment is the slow, painful death of the monolithic franchise. For a decade, Hollywood survived on Marvel, Star Wars, and DC sequels. But post-Endgame and The Rise of Skywalker, the law of diminishing returns has kicked in. Audiences are experiencing "superhero fatigue" not because they hate heroes, but because they hate formula.
The hunger for original IP is back.
Look at the recent successes that defied expectations:
These are proofs of concept. They demonstrate that popular media does not have to be stupid to be popular. The "mass audience" is far more intelligent than studio executives give them credit for. Better entertainment trusts the audience to keep up.
What does "better" actually look like? It is not merely "highbrow" or "slow." Succession is better entertainment; so is Paddington 2. Quality transcends genre. It rests on three distinct pillars:
A common defense of mediocre media is that it is "just entertainment"—an escape from the rigors of reality. There is validity to the need for respite. However, we have conflated escapism (fleeing reality) with transcendence (rising above it).
True art does not allow us to escape our lives; it allows us to endure them. It provides a framework for processing grief, understanding love, and contextualizing injustice. When popular media reduces complex human emotions to three-act structures and predictable character arcs, it robs us of the opportunity for catharsis.
Better entertainment seeks emotional truth rather than emotional comfort. Consider the difference between a film that resolves every plot hole with a deus ex machina, leaving the viewer satisfied but unchallenged, and a film that leaves ambiguity and scar tissue. The former is a sedative; the latter is a stimulant. A better media landscape values the messy, unquantifiable aspects of the human experience over the clean, marketable resolutions of a focus group.
To understand how to make entertainment better, we must first understand the mechanism of the current system. The dominant business model of the last decade has been the "attention economy." In this model, the consumer is not the customer; the consumer is the product. Platforms are designed to harvest time, serving content that maximizes engagement rather than enrichment.
This economic imperative has birthed the era of the "Safe Bet." The calculation is simple: pre-existing intellectual property (IP), formulaic storytelling, and nostalgia are safer investments than originality. Consequently, popular media has become obsessed with the past—reboots, sequels, and prequels dominate the box office. This creates a recursive loop: the industry feeds us what we already know we like, and in doing so, it atrophies our collective appetite for the unknown.
"Better" content cannot exist within a system that prioritizes risk mitigation above all else. The first step toward improvement is a willingness to embrace the risk of the new.
For those on the production side—scriptwriters, YouTubers, podcasters, indie filmmakers—the quest for better entertainment has never been more viable. The barriers to distribution have collapsed. You no longer need a network deal.
However, you need a point of view. In a saturated market, specificity is the new scalability.
Platforms like Nebula, Dropout, and even niche Substack newsletters are proving that audiences will pay a premium for media that is ad-free, uncensored, and intellectually honest. The creator economy is shifting from "influencer" (selling a lifestyle) to "artist" (selling a vision).
The word "content" is revealing. It is a utilitarian term, suggesting a substance to fill a container. It implies that one piece of entertainment is interchangeable with another. But we do not remember "content." We remember moments. We remember the way a song felt when we were heartbroken, or the way a film reshaped our worldview.
To move toward better entertainment, we must reclaim the distinction between "content" and "art."
In an era where TikTok has shortened attention spans to 30 seconds, better entertainment fights back by demanding visual literacy. It is the framing of a shot in The Bear, the color palette of Atlanta, or the sound design of Dune. Craft signals respect for the viewer. It says, "Put your phone down. This matters."