Dear Penguin,
The (mostly) negative reaction to your analysis suggests they don't grasp the core issue at hand. Please forgive my effort at taking it a step further.
The engine of entertainment business relies on maintaining a facade of exclusive inclusion. Consumers of entertainment enjoy the result, often live vicariously through favoured characters. Sometime they construct emotional connections that are obsessive and sometimes dangerous (John Hinkley).
What the audience sees is an illusion of an illusion.
The entertainment business is grounded in a false economy. Especially in the U.S.. It may well be the least progressive business model at work today. The supply of creative artists so overwhelms the demand for them that the industry has created structural barriers to entry in order to protect top line producers, directors, etc from having to drink from the firehose of talent.
Using stage and screen actors for an example...
How many other occupations are there where you have to "BREAK IN" taking an average of about 8 to 10 years? How many other occupations have an 86% effective annual unemployment rate with a median income for the 14% who do work of about $7,500/yr USD? In what other line of work do roughly 70% of professionals have a career of a year or less?
Such a gigantic imbalance between supply and demand leads to exploitation, nepotism, pay for play, etc. None of it is surprising when looked at through the lens of conventional economics.
The people who are making the most money out of this horribly flawed system are the intermediaries who either promise access, or defend the cream at the top against the action of the spoon. Not to mention the thousands of colleges and universities with BFA Acting, Musical Theater, etc. programs that gladly put students tens of thousands of dollars in debt while promising a leg up they can rarely deliver.
My observation... Shitt's Creek as superb as it is, is just a slightly less veiled metaphor for progressive hypocrisy than the entertainment industry as a whole. It is a subset of a set.
I don't know how things are in other countries, but if any other industry in the United States operated the way the entertainment industry does, there would be Congressional Hearings galore.
The proliferation of content hungry outlets like Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime, etc is beginning to erode the status quo as smaller, less expensive models for content creation emerge. Live performing arts with the help of COVID shutdowns is being disrupted too. The house of cards is teetering and will soon fall.
My hope is that what emerges in its place is better balanced than what evolved last century. Any business where one "success" comes at the price of a thousand failures begs morally for reimagination and reconstruction.