The cover story of the August 19 National Review is Jonah Goldberg’s analysis of AMC’s Breaking Bad. Jonah begins by remarking that the “golden age” of television is happening right now, which is true. In fact, it’s something that I’ve heard people say about every decade since the 1970s, and correctly each time. Television just keeps getting better.

Compare that with Kevin Williamson’s piece on the decline of Hollywood — the physical place as well as the industry it symbolizes. As Kevin points out, there is no longer any reason for the movie industry to be centered in Southern California, or indeed in any one spot. A century ago moviemakers set up shop there, even though the acting talent was in New York, because land was cheap and you could film outdoors year round. They built huge, integrated studios to churn out films, with everyone from actors to horse trainers to camera operators on the payroll. And they acquired their own chains of theaters to show their product. When the Supreme Court declared that arrangement illegal in 1948, the studio system began to unravel, a process that continues in slow motion today.

Kevin writes:

The days of the tightly integrated corporation are largely behind us. Rather than the corporate juggernauts of the 19th and 20th centuries, 21st-century enterprises more closely resemble ad hoc associations of people and capital working on ever-shorter timelines toward ever-more-specific goals.

This reminded me of a recent book, written by a good leftist friend of mine, which says that Barack Obama is establishing an entirely new style of American government. The argument, greatly oversimplified, is this: Instead of running either a large, top-down, control-freak state or a small, standoffish, fend-for-yourself state, Obama has tried to establish an interactive state, characterized not by lines of authority (or their absence) but by patterns of cooperation. Instead of being run by politicians who court the leaders of large, durable identity-group blocs, this system generates ever-shifting coalitions that spontaneously form, dissolve, and combine, depending on the issue.

Whether this is a good description of Obama’s actual governing style is open to question, but the book’s larger point is that neither the traditional big-state model nor the traditional small-state model will work without modification in the 21st century. Instead, a state has to be nimble and flexible and responsive — like what Kevin said above about corporations.

That being the case, why is the American entertainment industry so good at making TV shows and so bad at making movies? The Economist explains:

Film and TV are very different businesses, though studios like Warner Bros and Fox do both. TV is relatively stable and currently lucrative. TV networks earn money from advertising and from the fees that cable and satellite operators pay to carry their programmes. These fees amount to some $32 billion a year in America, and are growing by about 7% annually. People love watching TV, and, per hour, it is one of the cheapest forms of entertainment.
In contrast, film revenues are volatile. . . . In 2011 American cinemas sold 1.28 billion tickets, the smallest number since 1995. Last year, ticket sales rose back to 1.36 billion and box-office revenues to a record $10.8 billion, thanks to blockbusters like “The Avengers”. But film-going in America is not a growth business, especially now that people have so many media to distract them at home. The share of Americans who attend a cinema at least once a month declined from 30% in 2000 to 10% in 2011. . . .

In other words, most people routinely spend most of their free time watching television, whereas they only go to the movies if there’s something they really want to see. So television is thought of as a necessity (though its business model is being revolutionized too), while movies are a discretionary purchase. What the movie industry feared in the 1950s — that people wouldn’t bother going out to a cinema when they could watch at home for free — has finally come to pass, and this time, instead of responding with 3D, Cinerama, and Smell-O-Vision, they are responding with CGI and sequels to sequels to sequels.

The result is that film studios feel ever more pressure to make mega-budget blockbusters that will sell tickets everywhere in the world. Obviously, this puts a premium on fancy special effects and blowing stuff up, and discourages any sort of culture-specific subtlety or verbal sophistication. Only certain types of stories will work under these restrictions, and audience response has shown that it’s entirely possible to get tired of them.

The lesson in all this for government in the 21st century is that it should make TV instead of movies. That is, if it does things on a modest scale, does them well, lets creativity flourish, and cancels them if they don’t work out, the customers will be happy. But if it gets ambitious and tries to craft universal super-hits with massive budgets, the results will usually be dire. Compare the assassination of Osama Bin Laden (a small-scale and tightly focused mission, but one that drew on all our military, financial, and intelligence resources) or the Internet (which the government invented and built but has, on the whole, not tried too hard to micromanage) with the NSA, Obamacare, the stimulus, nation building . . .

As is true with Hollywood, the complex web of interactions that characterizes today’s government means that most large-scale projects will cost too much and require too many compromises to be effective. Just as there is no Jack Warner who can pick up the phone and instantly approve or cancel a picture, there is also no FDR who can bring a few important men to the White House, hash out a deal, and have the program up and running in days or weeks. The world doesn’t work like that anymore (as Obama found out when he discovered the lack of “shovel ready” projects). The screenwriter William Goldman famously wrote that in Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything.” The problem with Obama’s grandiose schemes is that they all assume an elite corps of bureaucrats who know everything.