One of the differentiators for you guys is that, pretty consistently, you've leaned into original programming, which a lot of the competitors aren't doing. And can you talk a little bit about that, because, I know Elkhorn did really well, but you've had some other things as well that seemed like they were very targeted for your audience. Things like Legends Of The Pony Express and Blue Ridge.

Well, what, you know, it's an interesting original strategy, because what we looked at, we looked at what parts of the stories our audience likes, and we always say we're Western and Western adjacent, so classic Western, is going to be the Gunsmoke or Bonanza. The best example of Western adjacent I can give you is a Walker,Texas Ranger.

He lives in Texas, he wears a cowboy hat, it's sort of modern, but it's a small town crime drama where good wins in the end. And so we took that approach with our originals, and with our series, we focused on a couple of different things. One is the small town crime drama, so, for example, our series Blue Ridge, it's a modern day crime drama with a heroic protagonist who helps solve issues and challenges that deals with modern day problems.

But then we also looked at the characters that people know from the West, and so we started creating series based on those characters. We did not want to do documentaries with stills, and that doesn't interest me. We wanted to recreate stories, dramas, and so if you think about Wild West Chronicles and some of those series, we're really focused on trying to identify characters that people knew, but tell the real story.

And so even when we do one-off specials we take that approach. And you mentioned Elkhorn, which is another step in the progression. That is based on a true story. Lots of people know a little about Theodore Roosevelt, that he was essentially an assemblyman in New York, rather well-to-do, very sickly, lost his mother and his wife on February 14th, 1884.

He just sort of lost it, and he went to the Dakotas. He became a cowboy for two years. And so what we wanted to chronicle that, because ultimately that changed his life.

You know, he never had asthma when he left the Dakotas, never again, went on to lead the Rough Riders, was a "Republican" who unionized all of the other ranchers to fight the cattle traders in Chicago. Ultimately he had a passion for the national parks and established all those parks, but all of that was born out of those two to three years in the Dakotas. And so for us, as a Western Washington DC network, it seemed like a very logical fit.

Let's tell that story.

My last stop was a site called HitFix, which I edited. It was a consumer entertainment news site — kind of like [Entertainment Weekly], but it had a few very notable critics, including Drew McWeeny, Alan Sepinwall, and Dan Fienberg. It was a very talented group, but it was a very challenging time to grow revenue for a website. You needed tens of millions of users every month just to keep your head above water against the declining Google ad dollar. They ended up being acquired by a company that basically folded in HitFix’s numbers to make it look like they had a big leap in audience, raised money off that news, and then shut HitFix down — all within 90 days.

After that, I said, “I’m not going to do another one of these.” And that was what led to me going out on my own.

For me, the importance was always the integrity of what I wrote and what had my own name on it. That’s always been — because I’m an egomaniac — what really matters to me, more than The Ankler name. And there was never any question about that. Nobody was saying, “Why don’t you start doing red carpet coverage?” I was still doing what I wanted to do, driven by my own interests. Still am. Having a bigger business built around that was nothing but good for me.

Being a member of Gen X, my natural instinct is: how do I alienate my audience and push away as many people as I can, and make this product as unattractive and unpalatable to any kind of success as possible? I recognize that if you’re going to grow a business, that’s not the best instinct. I understood what we had to do, and there was no one better than Janice to do that. My instinct to make our readers feel uncomfortable and ashamed of themselves is, you know, hard to build a business around.

On Wednesday night I finished the profoundly disappointing Apple TV series, “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” and decided to roll right into the first episode of its new release, “Lucky.”

The “Lucky” pilot is good, not great. But there’s a reason I didn’t rush to watch the second episode, which Apple TV also dropped, before the show reverts to a one-a-week release format: Because of “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.”

And partly because of “Your Friends & Neighbors.” And “Sugar.” And “Murderbot.” And “Stick.”

And absolutely because of “Down Cemetery Road.”

The problem with the Netflix argument is that it was never built to be a prestige streamer. It was built to have everything you or anyone else could want. It was — and is — the modern equivalent of a broadcaster, emphasis on broad, built to destroy both broadcasting and cable, which it did rather brilliantly.

That will always and forever be its legacy.

But in becoming the first essential streaming service, Netflix has also created plenty of great programming, plenty of top-tier prestige series, endless amounts of Mid-Plus content and, yes, gratuitous amounts of Mid and Mid-Minus series.