Some of the past century’s greatest fiction writers were unified in challenging the cultural desert created by mass commercial media.  It is a hopeful sign that some in today’s streaming entertainment have picked up that same gauntlet.

In 1933, the Sixth Annual Academy Awards saw the Noël Coward play-turned-movie, Cavalcade, winning the Oscar for Best Picture.  The script was about class, namely London’s wealthy vs. their servants, tragedy (in war and at sea), and an illicit affair between the wealthy couple’s son and their butler’s daughter.  The movie was critically and commercially successful.

That same year, writer C.S. Lewis (famous for the “Narnia” series) convened the first meeting of the “Inklings” at his offices at Magdalen College in Oxford.  He told the Oxford Daily that its purpose was to counter the secular academic climate and that its “members sought to demonstrate that imagination and reason were compatible with Christian belief.”

A fellow Inkling, Professor J.R.R. Tolkien (the Hobbit, Lord of the Rings), taught his students the truth he observed in stories and folk legends repeated over a thousand years in Anglo-Saxon and Norse traditions:  that a common theme of an inter-generational story is how the “right” (moral choices, self-sacrificing charity and compassion, honesty and courage) are often rewarded only “in the end.”  Such endings can even occur outside the lifespans of the story’s heroes.

Tolkien referred to this illuminating ending as the “eucatastrophe,” the opposite of a disaster, the moment in which years of diligence, patience, long-suffering and self-sacrificing love are shown to clearly have been the right choice.  Lewis called that moment one of “eventual joy.”

To Lewis, to live a life in pursuit of such non-immediate joy was to live in harmony with the “echo of a tune we have not yet heard.”

That line of thought, that moral living is, in the end, its own reward, seems to escape the screenwriters at Universal, Paramount, Warner, Disney and Sony, the so-called “Big Five” studios, all of which have a presence in Los Angeles County.  Collectively, they comprise what we call “Hollywood” today.

Storytelling influences culture, and culture inevitably influences decisions about right and wrong, even in decisions that are more financial, commercial, and political.  Story-telling that is devoid of morals will ultimately lead to politics devoid of morals.

So... I rejoiced when confronted with an unexpected surprise the other day.  I purchased a new flat-screen TV and wanted to watch something “new” on it.  For me, that is hard, because the typical “Hollywood formula” doesn’t qualify as “new.”  A remake of a timeless story was the best option visible, so I started watching the #5 most popular fiction series currently on Amazon:  The Pendragon Cycle:  Rise of the Merlin.

Good acting, great sets, low-key but believable computer graphics made episode #1 interesting enough.  I sat down to watch episode #2.  Halfway through the second episode, the male hero proposed to elope with the king’s daughter; she is overwhelmed with passion, pulls the hero toward her in a most romantic embrace, and he stops everything with the interjection:

“No, let us follow the rising Eastern God’s tradition, and consummate our union after the pledge of marriage.”

The king’s daughter agrees wholeheartedly... and the drama follows that recommendation.  But I immediately pressed “pause” because this is clearly not “the Hollywood formula.”  Something was different about this script.  I immediately “googled” the studio... and all was explained.  “The Pendragon Cycle” is a production of the DailyWire.

Studios like Angel and DailyWire have had surprising success challenging Hollywood – specifically over the very failing that motivated the Inklings in the 1930s and 40s.  Hollywood routinely misses when conveying the “eucatastrophe,” the eventual joy of right choices.

As Tolkien observed, those “right” choices are what enable a culture to survive.  Which is why the stories that reinforce them are timeless and are carried forward for generations.

It will be interesting to see whose “streaming productions” are still in demand a hundred years from now.