By Ben Fritz
"I Love Lucy." "Star Wars." "Thriller." It doesn't get more American than that.
All nations are held together by culture, but the U.S. is unique for the power of its pop culture. Our music, television shows and movies are a multitrillion-dollar business and the first way that billions of people around the world get to know us.
For most of the 20th century, they were also the glue that held the country together. In a sprawling nation founded on the precept of individual liberty and populated primarily by immigrants from around the world, there was hardly one American experience. Maids in Boston, factory workers in Chicago and farmers in California lived much different lives despite being part of the same country.
Cinemas, radios, television sets and records changed all that. Americans might do different things during the workday, but at night and on weekends, we were watching and listening to the same things -- things made in America, primarily for Americans, by the first modern celebrities.
It was the birth of the monoculture -- a word that captures the historically unique power of American entertainment in the 20th century. An estimated 200 million tickets were sold for "Gone With the Wind," which came out in 1939, when the population of the U.S. was 130 million. The "Amos 'n' Andy" radio show was so popular that movie theaters scheduled around it and piped the audio in on their speakers. In 1983, more than 100 million people watched the finale of "M*A*S*H."
Americans could count on the fact that their neighbors, their co-workers, or the stranger they sat next to on a plane knew the same pop culture as them and quite possibly had an interesting opinion about it. We talked about the stuff we had watched and listened to at work, on dates and at family reunions. The monoculture was a unifying force when politics, race, and geographic and generational divides kept threatening to tear us apart.
You don't need me to tell you that the monoculture is dying a rapid death. Outside of major sporting events, we're all watching and listening to different things, fed to us by algorithms designed to divide us into uniquely satisfied consumers. The hottest content on YouTube or TikTok at any moment means nothing to 95% of the population. The most popular streaming series are watched by total audiences so anemic they would have been quickly canceled by television networks in the 1990s.
Movies, probably the most unifying force of pop culture from the 1930s through the 2010s, now cast a smaller shadow. Only three American productions grossed more than $1 billion in 2025, compared with nine in 2019. The reason is simple: People are reluctant to go to a theater when there are an essentially infinite number of things to watch at home.
"For most of the history of this art form, we were able to make successful movies that appealed to everyone, that were considered a great way to spend your time while eating your popcorn," says Donna Langley, a veteran film executive and chairman of NBCUniversal Entertainment, a subsidiary of Comcast. "That broad experience has become a more difficult thing for us studio people to manufacture. The audience wants a much better value for their money."
The implications for the battered-and-bruised entertainment industry are obvious. The impacts on our culture are just starting to fully materialize, but will be more significant. Instead of pulling us together, pop culture is another force dragging us apart.
Everyone my age remembers "Jurassic Park," "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and the early seasons of "The Simpsons." My teenage son and his friends watch and listen and play different things, sometimes even when they're in the same room. Whatever it one day means to have grown up in the 2020s, it won't have much to do with pop culture.
Film changed everything
The growth of the American monoculture was, like so much of our nation's history, a product of geopolitics, economics and technology.
Until the early 1900s, the U.S. was relatively poor, geographically dispersed, and without the technological means to share media with everyone. Newspapers and pamphlets have been a part of the country since our founding, but because each copy had to be physically created and then transported to be read by at most a few people, they reached only a fraction of the populace.
To see anyone act, you literally had to be in the room where it happened.
Film was the first medium to change that. A single story could be shot once, copied endlessly, and displayed to hundreds of people at a time in auditoriums everywhere. Europe pioneered the art form, but it was the U.S. that perfected the business we now know simply as "Hollywood."
The two World Wars devastated the European cinema, along with so much else on the continent. In the U.S., meanwhile, the industry was booming at the same time our population was expanding and becoming more wealthy.
European nations by and large tried to recover by propping up their filmmakers with quotas and subsidies. They regarded the cinema as a source of cultural pride that needed to be protected and nurtured.
In America, there was no cultural establishment to preserve. There was only a growing population hungry for entertainment on one side and a rapidly growing industry on the other. Capitalism, in its purest form, was colliding with popular culture.
The studios made the movies and, until a federal consent decree in 1948, owned the theaters in which they played. A handful of vertically integrated companies dominated the market and focused their efforts on big-budget productions that would appeal to the broadest possible group of people. Think physical comedy like Charlie Chaplin, visual spectacles like "The Wizard of Oz" and sweeping romances like "Casablanca."
Because our nation was so diverse, these movies were what cultural critics call "low context" stories. You typically didn't need to know a lot about specific cultural references to understand what was going on. The visuals, the action and the character archetypes were enough to figure things out and enjoy what you saw.
Around the same time, something similar was happening in radio. European countries set up state-run broadcasters. The American airwaves were given to companies focused primarily on producing entertainment, music and news content that delivered the biggest possible audiences to advertisers.
That model continued with television. At first, fledgling local stations came up with content for their audiences. But it didn't take long until national networks dominated. The economic logic of broadcasting "The Honeymooners" or "The Tonight Show" to the whole country on the same day was too powerful to ignore.
From the 1940s through the 1990s, three TV networks and seven movie studios determined everything Americans watched, and five or six record labels determined what we heard. Independent production was difficult because the costs of production were so high and distribution was so tightly controlled. Just making a movie or a record without the backing of a major company was difficult. Getting them into theaters or on the radio was nearly impossible.
It was the job of gatekeepers at networks and studios and labels to release entertainment that attracted as many people as possible at once. When they succeeded, they created collective cultural moments. If the Beatles had made their American debut on a YouTube channel, rather than "The Ed Sullivan Show," most of America wouldn't have noticed. "Sinners" was one of the few zeitgeist defining movies of recent years in part because millions of us saw it together, in theaters, in the span of a few weeks. The national conversation that followed likely wouldn't have happened if we watched it whenever we got around to it on our tablets.
The flaws of this system were obvious then and painful to look back on now. A minuscule number of people, most of them white men, determined what everyone heard and watched. Their cultural blinders were imposed on an entire nation, which is why it was so difficult for Latin music, auteur cinema and rap to force their way into the mainstream.
Even when entertainment executives' minds were totally open, their job was to appeal to the biggest possible audience. Content that appealed to a minority of the audience simply didn't fit the business model, no matter how enthusiastic and underserved that minority group was.
The 1980s through the 2000s were the peak of the monoculture. Hollywood learned from "Jaws" and "Star Wars" that big-budget movies released in virtually every theater in the country at the same time could produce outsize returns. "Back to the Future," "Batman," "Jurassic Park" and the Harry Potter and Marvel series all followed. It was the era of tentpole blockbusters.
On television, America spent a summer wondering who shot J.R. on "Dallas, " and NBC's "Must See TV" slogan defined an evening of entertainment for the nation with hits like "Friends" and "E.R."
The internet breaks Hollywood
When Napster and YouTube took college campuses and then the world by storm, Hollywood freaked out about piracy. The bigger threat from the internet, it turned out, was disintermediation.
The monoculture had been built on limited distribution. People bought the newest CDs at Sam Goody and watched late-night talk shows because those were the only options.
Taylor Swift still sells -- or streams the equivalent of -- tens of millions of albums, and "Stranger Things" is watched by tens of millions of people. It isn't because we don't have other options, but simply because large numbers of people -- though fewer than consumed the blockbusters of a few decades ago -- are so interested that they're willing to seek them out.
There are fewer and fewer mainstream hits like those each year. Swift is in a class by herself in the music industry. Powerhouse film franchises like Marvel and Fast & Furious are sputtering. There's no such thing as a TV sitcom that all of America laughs at anymore.
The internet broke Hollywood's hold on distribution. If you can make it, you can stream it to the exact same devices that Disney and Netflix and Warner Music use. It doesn't hurt that making stuff is increasingly easy too, thanks to the cameras on our phones and mixing boards on our laptops and artificial intelligence that does the grunt work for us.
YouTube has become the most popular video platform on televisions not because it has the hottest handful of shows, but because there's something on it for everyone, no matter how mainstream or obscure.
The company, owned by Alphabet's Google, doesn't even make content. It's simply a platform. Like TikTok and Instagram, its success is built on a sophisticated recommendation engine that delivers exactly the right content to you. And me. And everyone else.
To understand how things have changed, consider the case of anime, the Japanese animation style that used to live in the remotest corners of video stores and is now one of the hottest businesses in Hollywood. There may not be a lot of anime fans, but they're a passionate group who turn out to theaters for hits like "Demon Slayer" and all subscribe to Sony's streaming service Crunchyroll, which caters specifically to them.
Anime fans were always willing to spend lots of money, it turns out. Before digital distribution, there wasn't a way to market or deliver content specifically to them, so the business wasn't viable.
Building a mass audience, meanwhile, is harder than ever, because Hollywood can no longer force content on the country by giving it the best time slot or the best position on the shelves of Best Buy .
"I think there's an audience out there with a real appetite for stories, events and experiences tailored specifically to them," says Langley. "And it has to feel authentic, or they're not coming."
It's undeniably good that entertainment-industry decision makers are no longer all-powerful arbiters of mass culture. But it's a loss that connecting over entertainment is now a rarer thing. How often do you bring up a television show to a colleague or relative or friend, only to hear them respond, "Oh, I've been meaning to try that" or "What app is that on? I've never heard of it."
Like so many 21st-century trends, what feels good for us as individuals is eroding us as a populace. We stare at our phones rather than each other. We find out someone else has different political views than ours and swipe left on a dating app. And if we discover the person next to us on the plane listens only to truecrime podcasts and streams true-crime documentaries, we may feel there's an unbridgeable gap between us and load up our favorite science-fiction series rather than talk to them.
R.I.P., monoculture. You deserve a televised funeral, but most of us would probably never see it.
Ben Fritz is a Wall Street Journal entertainment-industry reporter in Los Angeles. Email him at ben.fritz@wsj.com.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 19, 2026 12:00 ET (17:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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