Famous for Fifteen Episodes

Do you ever worry that TV and cinema are going to run out of content?  Or rather, run out of sources for their content?  As I've noted before, the explosion of streaming outlets has created a massive demand for original content with which to keep their subscribers loyal, but the strain is already showing in terms of their inspiration for this programming.  The exploitation of existing properties is really beginning to run out of stream, as original premises are spread ever thinner.  How many more Star Trek series can Paramount come up with, for God's sake?   We've now entered the realm of spin offs of spin offs with this particular franchise.  Over Disney we've got apparently endless expansions of the Star Wars universe being ground out, as they seize on supporting characters or locations or any loose thread they can grasp at from the original films and serve up hour after hour of their (not very interesting) adventures.  I look forward eagerly to the ten part series chronicling the adventures of Greedo before Han Solo shot him in the first film.  Then there's the whole Marvel cycle spreading itself across films and TV series, as they dredge up ever more obscure comic book heroes to base TV shows around, or find gaps in the narrative of the film series to fill in with eight part TV series.  Not to forget adaptations of video games into TV shows or the remaking of ninety minute movies from the sixties or seventies as ponderous TV series in which every nuance and subtlety of the original is made explicit and tediously explained in boring detail.

It's reminiscent of the days of Hollywood studios, when they'd grind out a whole series of B-movies, with ever lower budgets, based around a character who had originally appeared in an A-picture or mid-budget programmer, gradually coarsening and diluting the original concept.  But hey, there are original productions not based on the exploitation of existing properties - although I fear that the strain of finding new inspiration for these is already showing.  Just this evening, for instance, I saw a trailer for a new series on one of the streamers based around the creation of the Chippendales male strippers.  If I'm to believe this trailer, their origins lie in a hotbed of rivalry, deception and (hinted at) violence.  Frankly, it sounds pretty desperate to me, as if producers are clutching at any real life situation to hang a sensational drama upon.  Not that this is confined to the streaming channels, even on the terrestrial channels, just about anything is being turned into a drama now - only recently we had one based on the utterly trivial 'Wagatha Christie' trial, for God's sake.  Obviously, there are only a finite number of such stories to be dramatised - they'll soon exhaust all the sensational (or even mildly interesting) ones involving celebrities and public figures, so where next?  Perhaps Warhol's claim that one day we'll all be 'famous for fifteen minutes' will come true, with overblown TV series being based upon the lives of ordinary people, no matter how mundane those lives might be.  'Famous for fifteen episodes' maybe.  So, brace yourselves to be played by some on the skids movie star desperate for a star turn in a fictionalised version of your life which tries to sensationalise visits to the laundry or shopping in Aldi.  It's only a matter of time.