Following the release of their playbook for screenwriting in the age of climate change earlier this year, Good Energy, a nonprofit story consultancy, is now sharing their research study focused on the absence of the climate crisis in scripted entertainment today. Completed in partnership with the USC Norman Lear Center’s Media Impact Project, this study establishes a baseline for acknowledgment of the climate crisis in TV and film scripts written from 2016 to 2020.
“We started doing this research around this time last year so it’s really been a year-long process doing the research, getting the data, and crafting it together to see what it means,” says Anna Jane Joyner, founder of Good Energy. “Going into it, we expected numbers to be low…only 2.8 percent [of all scripts analyzed included any climate-related keywords] is a pretty glaring absence when we’re talking about a phenomenon that literally every human on earth is experiencing in both intimate and collective ways. So that was affirming of our work and why we’re doing all of this.”
Erica Rosenthal, director of research at the USC Norman Lear Center, says that her team has been studying the prevalence of various health and social issues in entertainment for over 20 years, per the media impact lab’s mission. “There’s actually very little research on how frequently climate change issues are represented in entertainment and what audience appetites are for these stories,” she says. “There’s also very little research on the impact that climate stories might have on audiences, which is something that we’re looking to examine and in future research with Good Energy.”
Courtesy of Good Energy Project
The team analyzed approximately 37,453 TV and film scripts from this 5-year period, by developing a script database of transcripts and searching for terms from their list of 36 climate-related keywords.
“We measured the frequency with which those search terms appeared and we did some breakdowns to understand what genres they appeared in and which networks are addressing climate most frequently in their stories, and if a script that mentioned climate change keywords is actually addressing actions people can take [themselves],” Rosenthal says.
Today, the research is available in an open-source PDF on both USC’s and Good Energy’s websites. In addition to analyzing scripts, the teams surveyed over 2,000 and learned that almost half of them would like to see climate change acknowledged more in scripted entertainment and that another notable chunk of people are open to seeing this more often.
Among cable networks, Showtime had the largest number of climate mentions. But a greater proportion of NatGeo episodes (14.6 percent) included climate mentions than any other cable network, due to the series Mars. And HBO Max led the streamers in the likelihood of climate mentions (6.4 percent of episodes), while Netflix had the rawest climate mentions likely due to the sheer amount of the platform’s content.
“I think what really surprised me is the fact that audiences believe that they care about climate change more than the characters on TV [and in film] do,” Joyner says. “And it was also striking to me that when climate disasters show up in television and film — droughts, heat waves, wildfires, monster hurricanes — they’re only connected to climate change in a script 10% of the time. When the fossil fuel industry comes up in a script, it’s only connected back to climate change like 12 percent of the time. Those are two areas where it feels like scripts should be making more of that connection when they come up.”
Courtesy of Good Energy Project
According to the data, audiences generally can’t recall climate change being present in scripted entertainment. The two most prevalent examples that audiences did give as examples of films with climate elements, however, were Day After Tomorrow and 2012, “a disaster movie Mayan apocalypse story which has nothing to do with climate change,” Joyner adds.
“People are more likely to take action that they see modeled in entertainment, particularly when they see these actions having an effect. Even when storytellers are not talking about climate change in some way, they can incorporate showing these actions, in terms of energy conservation, being [normalized],” Rosenthal says.
The Good Energy team is planning to do another round of data analysis next year looking at scripts from 2021 and 2022, and will likely repeat this research process every two years moving forward to see how narratives are shifting, if at all. In the meantime, Good Energy is also launching a “climate lens” workshop, where they are working with approximately 150 writers to help creatives in the entertainment industry uncover how to establish characters that are experiencing climate change like we are in reality, and use a “climate lens” as a framework for approaching a story’s arc more broadly.
“We found through qualitative research that when we say ‘climate story’ or ‘climate storytelling,’ it gets misconstrued because people think that we’re asking them to write a whole new kind of story or [create] a whole new genre, but what we’re really saying is, regardless of what genre it is or what the story is if it’s taking place today or in the next 100 plus years, that climate change is already a part of the story,” Joyner says.
Courtesy of Good Energy
CBS’s Madam Secretary, on which Joyner served as a consultant, had more mentions os climate change alone than any other individual broadcast network; 7.5 percent of the show’s episodes included at least one climate mention.
In addition to providing support for individual productions, the Good Energy team is also working with several networks and streaming platforms to better integrate the climate conversation into what they produce.
“The goal is to work with the entertainment industry to develop not only more accurate but more authentic stories about climate change. It’s not about preaching to the audience, but about reflecting their values,” Rosenthal says. “Our research has found that what audience members really want in their entertainment is the opportunity to develop relationships with characters who they feel share their values, concerns, and fears. But they don’t feel like existing characters share their concern about the climate crisis; it’s something people don’t talk about and as a result, we don’t see it reflected in entertainment.”