Welcome to Assembly required with Stacey Abrams from Cricket Media. I'm your host Stacey Abrams. I love storytelling,

novels, plays, movies, you name it, and I really love television. In fact, one of my dreams as a kid growing up

in the time before the internet

and the time before streaming was to be a Nielsen family.

One of a select few who received a box that attached to the

television and a notebook to record every show viewed by the household. Then one

day it happened. We received the packet that asked us to help determine

television for America. I was giddy. For a two-week period I attended that

duty like Gollum over his precious.

It was awesome.

Very few tweens followed the ratings process like I did, or as I did in college,

subscribe to Entertainment Weekly and The Economist with

equal sincerity. I tracked movie premieres and their opening weekend revenue

like others followed the NASDAQ. More recently I had the extraordinary chance to talk to

Turner Classic movies about how films like Mr. Smith goes to Washington shape political

discourse and public lives.

Now, you might be wondering what does this have to do with a show focused on solving problems and grappling with social and political issues.

It's because Hollywood is more than an imagination factory.

It's a barometer for how we face societal change.

It drives economic trends, and it reflects how we are thinking about culture often before we

figured out how to describe it ourselves. It's been about one year since the two big

strikes in Hollywood ended, the Writers Guild first and then the Screen Actors Guild. The

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