Some creators are pushing back. The surprise hit Shogun (FX/Hulu) offered honor, duty, and restraint as dramatic engines, and audiences devoured it. The Bear , for all its anxiety, ultimately values loyalty and craftsmanship over backstabbing. Even Poker Face , Rian Johnson’s Columbo-like mystery show, gives you a heroine who is morally legible: she lies, but only to catch killers.
One former Netflix development executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me: “We ran the data. A morally straightforward hero generates a 4.2 average completion rate. A protagonist who cheats, steals, or manipulates—but is sad about it—generates a 6.8. Add a sex scene that feels slightly coercive but is shot like a perfume ad? You’re at 8.5.” Sex Industry XXX -2025-01-06- -Dirty Adventures-
Consider the "eat the rich" genre. The White Lotus , Triangle of Sadness , Glass Onion —these are shows and films that pretend to be Marxist critiques of the 1%. Yet, the camera lingers on the five-star resorts, the designer wardrobes, the perfectly plated seafood towers. The audience gets to consume the very luxury they are being told to despise. It is a dirty adventure: you wade through moral filth, but you emerge with the souvenir of a tan. Industry insiders admit (off the record) that "clean" storytelling no longer retains viewers. In the streaming wars, retention is the only god. And nothing retains like outrage mixed with arousal. Some creators are pushing back
When Netflix released Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story , the backlash was swift from victims’ families, who said the show re-traumatized them. But the backlash didn't stop 115 million households from watching. The dirty adventure, it turns out, has no shame. The recent trainwreck of HBO’s The Idol (created by Sam Levinson, Abel "The Weeknd" Tesfaye, and Reza Fahim) offered a case study in the genre’s collapse into self-parody. Marketed as a "sleazy Hollywood fairy tale," the show featured a pop star (Lily-Rose Depp) falling under the spell of a sleazy club owner/cult leader. It was supposed to be a provocation about the music industry’s exploitation of young women. Even Poker Face , Rian Johnson’s Columbo-like mystery
But these feel like exceptions. The economic gravity of streaming still pulls toward the dirty adventure. Because it’s cheaper to write cynicism than hope. It’s easier to shock than to move. And it’s far more profitable to make the audience feel like sinners than saints. So where does this leave the viewer? Addicted, probably. But aware.
Instead, it was simply exploitation. The dirty adventure requires a critical distance —a wink that says "we know this is bad." The Idol had no wink. It had a grimace. The audience didn’t feel transgressive; they felt gross. The show was canceled after one season, but not before becoming a viral punching bag. The lesson? Audiences will tolerate a dirty adventure. They will not tolerate being gaslit into thinking filth is art. The problem is not that popular media depicts bad behavior. Literature from the Greeks to Breaking Bad has always done that. The problem is the industrialization of that behavior—the assembly-line production of moral gray zones designed not to illuminate, but to hook.
From Succession ’s backstabbing billionaires to Euphoria ’s glamorized trauma, from The Idol ’s toxic power plays to the true-crime obsession with serial killers as folk heroes—pop media is currently addicted to the grime. What exactly constitutes a "dirty adventure"? It is not merely violence or sex. It is the aestheticization of transgression . The industry has mastered the art of making the unethical look expensive, fun, or psychologically profound.
