L'il Johnny won't eat anything but Cheerios, his parents tried everything and that is all he will eat. Guess what L'il Johnny gets to eat?
The challenge in TV is realizing just who they're creating the show for and who they have to please to get renewed. I am not part of the TV crowd, especially when it comes to sitcoms, which I detest.
Most movies made are DTV because they can't get released to the theaters because they only make money on concessions and small turnout, small revenue and that's why we see so many get dumped fast and head straight to video.
The risk ratio is mitigated by who is involved with the film, actors and directors, and taking a chance on unknowns takes deep pockets. The Tom's sell, Cruise and Hanks but Tom Hardy, a terrific actor, has to do a remake of Road Warrior for people to remember his name.
I do not like TV and do not watch much of it but I do have a soft spot for NBC. They tried an experiment with an unknown director/producer, Steven Bochco, and the concept of an ensemble cast of faces that might be borderline recognizable but no names. Hill St. Blues blew me away with everything they did from camera angles to content and story lines and the ratings sucked. But due to the reaction of the small but fervent audience's reaction, they decided to give it another shot and not only had a hit on their hands but had created a new form of casting. One that is still successful today.
Then they have an idea for a comedy but they need writers to pull it off. They bought Taxi to get the staff, ran it for one year and Cheers was born. They applied the talent to a different format and won big.
Larry Gelbart took advice from two of his actors in MASH and experimented with dumping the ubiquitous laugh track which allowed him to stretch the boundaries of content and tell a more biting story about war. That helped him create the most successful TV series in history,
I do believe there is just as much creativity out there as there has always been, it's the audience that baffles those that are creative, what do they want? Are most of them L'il Johnny's and just want what they've always had? Art without success isn't business and these companies are all about business. ROI rules both industries.
But I agree with the frustration because I long for films with scripts like The Usual Suspects, Memento and Inception. 3 Billboards is close along those lines with the script but there are too few scripts that challenge the audiences and that brings up the question just what % of the audience wants to be challenged to think? I'll just sit here, like my avatar, and you entertain me.
But this isn't new. In the 60's, the Beatles, Dave Clark Five and Stones had to do covers to get noticed before they could become who they would be. We didn't want new back then, we wanted a twist on familiarity. There are far fewer creative people out there than people who want creative.