Familytherapyxxx 23 08 22 | Renee Rose And Venus
While theaters held legacy IP, streaming services were fighting for time-on-device.
Perhaps the most defining aspect of 23 08 22 was the meta-narrative: Who gets to make entertainment content?
Let’s rewind the tape. What was actually trending on that day?
1. The “Strange Planet” Anomaly (Apple TV+) On August 22, 2023, Apple TV+ released the final three episodes of Strange Planet, the gentle, blue-aliens adaptation of Nathan W. Pyle’s webcomics. The show wasn't a ratings juggernaut by traditional metrics (Nielsen barely registered it). Yet, it dominated TikTok.
Clips of the “Beinglings” overthinking mundane tasks generated over 200 million views in 24 hours. Why? Because the show wasn’t written for TV; it was written for a feed. The episodic structure was secondary to the memetic moments. Hollywood learned that day: a show can “flop” on linear and still own the culture. familytherapyxxx 23 08 22 renee rose and venus
2. The “Hawk Tuah” Predecessor (Podcasting) While the famous viral moment came later in 2024, August 22, 2023 was the peak of the “unpolished interview” trend. A clip from a low-budget podcast called The Basement Yard went nuclear—not for a celebrity interview, but for a 45-second tangent about why automatic soap dispensers are “passive aggressive.”
The clip looked like it was filmed on a 2010 webcam. It had no intro, no sponsorship, and no editing. It got 50 million cross-platform views. The lesson: Audiences now trust imperfection. Over-produced content feels like a commercial. Raw footage feels like a friend.
3. The Celebrity “Unlisting” (Music) On this day, a B-list pop star (whose name we’ll omit to avoid a lawsuit) did something radical. She didn’t drop an album. She didn’t go on tour. She unlisted her entire discography from YouTube, re-uploading every video with a 15-second “commentary track” at the end, where she reacted to her own old videos.
Critics called it narcissistic. The numbers said otherwise. Her streams jumped 400% because she turned passive listening into an interactive event. Content about content became the primary product. While theaters held legacy IP, streaming services were
Behind the scenes, August 23 was a pivotal day for the business of content distribution. The major headline driving industry conversation was the announcement by Disney regarding its pricing strategy.
On this date, news circulated widely regarding Disney+ implementing an ad-supported tier and significant price hikes for ad-free subscriptions. This signaled the end of the "growth at all costs" era of streaming. The focus shifted from acquiring subscribers to achieving profitability.
Furthermore, the media landscape was reeling from the cancellation of high-profile projects (such as Batgirl at Warner Bros. Discovery earlier that month). By August 23, content creators and consumers alike were realizing that streaming libraries were no longer permanent archives; content was becoming fluid, taxable, and removable. This created a sense of instability in popular media, where the availability of entertainment was suddenly uncertain.
Released at the beginning of August 2023, Baldur’s Gate 3 was the critical darling of this date. Unlike the predatory monetization of other AAA titles, Larian Studios’ RPG was celebrated for being "complete." What was actually trending on that day
With the WGA on strike, studios floated the idea of using generative AI (ChatGPT-4, Claude 2) to produce "franken-scripts"—mashing up existing screenplays to create new drafts.
Embedded in that August 2023 date is the ghost of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. By late August, Hollywood had been shut down for nearly four months. The picket lines weren’t just about residuals or AI—they were about the definition of entertainment content.
The studios wanted “shorter windows, lower costs, and data-driven greenlights.” The writers and actors wanted “livable wages and creative dignity in a streaming world where a hit show can disappear overnight.”
The strike’s resolution in late September 2023 set a precedent: entertainment is now a data commodity, not a cultural artifact. The term “content” (once a dirty word to filmmakers) has won. A Netflix series, a YouTube makeup tutorial, and a Spotify algorithmic playlist are now the same category of thing: units of attention.