We're Solving for Format When the Real Issue Is Capacity

By LaNeé Griffin

While everyone’s posting throwback photos from 2016 in 2026, I can’t help but think about Hollywood—and the way we told stories back then. Stranger Things dropped. This Is Us made us cry every Tuesday. Atlanta premiered on FX. The Crown launched on Netflix. Oscar-nominated director Ava DuVernay was launching Queen Sugar on OWN. Cable still mattered.

There was a model. Audiences had programmers—people curating what we watched and when. Guide channels. Water cooler conversations. Someone thinking about the flow, the pacing, what we could handle.

The Industry Shifted

Fast forward to now. Netflix announced it's buying Warner Bros for $72 billion. Disney invested $1 billion in OpenAI. Over 17,000 entertainment jobs cut in 2025. 300,000 Black women no longer in the workforce.

If you're an executive right now, you're being asked to greenlight more with less—and the old playbook doesn't work anymore. Audiences are programming themselves from infinite options, inside the algorithm, more depleted than ever.

The Industry's Response

The industry's responding: Micro-dramas hitting $7.8 billion. Faith-based content up 204%. AI optimization everywhere. But after 20 years in production, here's what I keep noticing: We're solving for format when the real issue is capacity.

What Audiences Actually Need

Audiences aren't choosing by genre or rating. They're choosing by: Can I handle this right now? Will this help me regulate or will it drain me?

Sometimes that's a 90-second micro-drama. Sometimes it's a faith-based film. Sometimes it's a Christmas movie in July. The content that works isn't shorter or more wholesome—it's usable.

This is the intersection of mental health and media, two worlds that have rarely been in conversation at the programming level. Produce The Life You Want™ exists to bridge that gap. This is a space we’ve been tracking for years, where audience behavior, emotional load, and media systems collide. PTL brings behavioral science upstream of production decisions. We design for how and why audiences actually consume, not just clicks.

The industry is being remade. But are we designing for the human experience, or just feeding the machine?

If you're navigating this, let's talk.

LaNeé Griffin is an Emmy-nominated producer and founder of Produce The Life You Want™. With nearly 20 years in production (across broadcast, cable, and streaming), she bridges human behavior and media strategy to help executives design content for audience capacity.