Meghan Markle’s Netflix cancellation shows the streaming bubble has burst

True, in show business, there will always be misses as well as hits, and no one expects every programme commissioned to work out. Even so, there is a bigger issue here than just one or two flops. As the Tesla founder Elon Musk has rightly identified, the streaming giants have been captured by a brand of preachy, politically correct, woke programming that is at risk of driving away audiences. “The Woke mind is making Netflix unwatchable,” he tweeted a few days ago.

As with his takeover of the equally left-leaning Twitter, Musk is onto something. There are three big issues here. First, there has been too much easy money around. Netflix may have 222 million subscribers, although that total is starting to fall, but it is also sitting on $US14 billion ($19.9 billion) of debt. It has borrowed a tonne of money, poured it into expensive programmes, and kept its fingers crossed that somehow a profitable business would emerge.

The first part has been a great success, but the second is proving a lot harder. Next, its debt-fuelled expansion has meant that it has not had to worry too much about what consumers actually want to watch. It simply made so much content that some of it – Bridgerton, Emily in Paris – was bound to stick. When every show has to justify itself it will be a lot harder.

Finally, the tech industry, with a few notable exceptions, has been captured by a cadre of millennial employees who have grown up in a culture that has become hyper-politicised, obsessed with wellness and work-life balance, and engaged in a full-on culture war with normal society. Along the way, it has drifted further away from where the mass market actually is.

Meghan’s dire-sounding Pearl was a perfect example. Dull, worthy and sermonising (what were the chances the inspiring female leaders would include an animated Mrs Thatcher discussing inflation, or a CGI Queen Elizabeth I on Tudor England?), it embodied the worst of Woke-flix.

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But it goes a lot deeper than that. Very soon the entertainment industry will have to get back to being what it should have always remained: an entertainment industry. Its values should be neither right or left of centre, and with a few obvious boundaries such as preventing racism or sexism, it shouldn’t promote any political agenda.

Nor should it be committed to a worldview other than accuracy. And most of all, it should value creativity, laughter and drama, qualities more important than diversity or wellness.

Who knows, it might even start making some money – if not for the royals and fading celebrities on huge deals, then at least for shareholders.