The Daily Wire’s New Streaming Service Aims to Be the Anti-Disney

By Michael Lovito, October 30, 2023

For conservative commentators, complaining about “woke” entertainment companies like Disney makes for easy copy. Yet, no matter how upset the right seems to get about liberal Hollywood, they rarely put forward an alternative to the movies and TV shows that are supposedly indoctrinating their children.

At least, not until now. On October 16, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Walt Disney Company, conservative news website The Daily Wire launched Bentkey, their new streaming platform for children’s television. Already a major player in online journalism, podcasts, and YouTube, The Daily Wire is putting its money where its mouth is – $100 million worth, to be exact – with the subscription-based streaming service. The goal is to attract parents turned off by what conservatives see as the left-leaning sympathies of modern kids’ entertainment. Building Bentkey into the next Netflix or Disney+ will be an uphill battle for the company, but the time and money The Daily Wire is pouring is a clear signal of its faith in the project. Whether or not they can convert that passion into a sustainable, profitable product is another question entirely.

Waging War On the Mouse

The Nashville-based company announced its intention to invest in kids’ content shortly after Disney announced its opposition to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill in March 2022. Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing  has insisted on contrasting Bentkey with the entertainment giant ever since. In a video posted on DailyWire+, the website’s video-on-demand platform for grownups, Boreing  called out Disney for “indoctrinating children…into the LGBTQIA cult” and including a song about the legacy of slavery in an episode of “The Proud Family.”

“Walt Disney loved America. The company he founded thinks America is systemically racist,” Boreing  said. “Beyond just their content, Disney as a corporation pushes all the worst excesses of the woke left, paying for its employees to travel for abortions, paying for quote-unquote anti-racism indoctrination of its employees, and going to war on behalf of radical left-wing social policy in Florida. It would be impossible to state just how big a loss this is for Americans who believe in basic reality.”

Despite the explicitly political reason for Bentkey’s existence, Boreing  and other Daily Wire personalities have claimed that the platform, which was initially titled DW Kids, won’t focus on “teaching kids politics,” but rather “values and all the things on which politics are built later.”

“They are stories centered on timeless truths and virtues – courage, patience, faithfulness, love of family,” Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh said about Bentkey’s programming in a video coinciding with the platform’s launch. “These are conservative values. They are the values we are trying to conserve, and that the modern entertainment industry has been waging a war against for many years.”

A Family of Chinchillas and . . . Rob Schneider?

While the original programs produced for Bentkey don’t feature characters railing against abortion and gay marriage, the creators of its flagship show have strong conservative pedigrees. “Chip Chilla,” an animated series about a home-schooling family of chinchillas that, according to The Guardian, bears a striking resemblance to Australian kids’ TV sensation “Bluey,” was co-created by former Babylon Bee creative director Ethan Nicolle. The two chinchilla parents are voiced by “Saturday Night Live” alum Rob Schneider and Broadway star Laura Osnes, both of whom publicly refused Covid-19 vaccinations, while guest stars include Daily Wire personalities like Walsh, Jeremy Boreing , and YouTuber Brett Cooper.

However, the three other original series created for Bentkey – the live action and puppet show “A Wonderful Day with Mabel Maclay,” the exercise series “Fit Kid Go,” and the history focused “Kid Explorer,” remain broadly apolitical. In fact, at least two of the shows have the potential to alienate The Daily Wire’s conservative audience. In the production notes for “A Wonderful Day with Mabel Maclay,” creators Ryan and Katy Chase make multiple references to “social-emotional learning,” an educational method that’s been criticized by The Daily Wire in the past. And “President Charla,” the tenth episode of “Chip Chilla,” emphasizes the importance of an orderly transition of power, even though Daily Wire podcasters like Walsh, Candace Owens, and Michael Knowles have questioned the validity of the 2020 presidential election.

A Big Bet on Little Kids

Even if conservative audiences find no issue with Bentkey’s shows, The Daily Wire’s bet that they can attract viewers with original content and licensed series from Europe and Australia is still a risky one. Each of DailyWire+’s one million plus subscribers will receive free access to Bentkey, and the starting price of a standalone annual subscription is a competitive $99. But that head start may not mean much in a media economy where Amazon and Disney have struggled to retain subscribers and make streaming profitable while sporting big name intellectual properties like “The Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars.”

“The kids’ content, it’s amazing. Fantastic, I think. Is its success guaranteed? Not at all,” Walsh said. “People need to support it. If they don’t, it could be a disastrous failure. It could take the whole company down given the amount of financial investment we put into it.”

But not all observers are convinced that the investment will be worth it, or that The Daily Wire leadership is even solving an actual problem. “Disney and other popular children’s media companies are not in the business of ‘being progressive.’ They’re in the business of making money, and to stay relevant, they have to keep up with the times,” Rebecca Hains, a professor of communications at Salem State University who studies children’s media and representation, told The Righting in an email. According to Hains, the composition of kids’ TV has gotten more diverse since Disney’s founding. But that has less to do with companies pushing a specific political agenda than it does with the industry adjusting to the demands of a changing audience. “Reflecting cultural shifts is good business sense. Many audience members enjoy seeing people who look more like themselves shown on screen in appealing roles. U.S. society is diverse, and shifts in media representation are reflecting that, not causing it.”

These criticisms haven’t tamped down The Daily Wire’s ambition, however. In his launch day video, Boreing , who’s currently directing an adaptation of “The Pendragon Cycle” for DailyWire+, unveiled the teaser for “Snow White and the Evil Queen,” Bentkey’s adaptation of the famous fairy tale. Boreing  framed the film as counter-programming to Disney’s own upcoming live-action “Snow White” remake, whose star, Rachel Zegler, drew the ire of Ben Shapiro and other conservatives for her comments regarding the original film’s sexual politics. To Boreing , this controversy represents just another opportunity to build the Bentkey brand.

“We know we aren’t what Disney is today,” Boreing said. “But we hope in time we might become what they were once upon a time. A little studio with big ideas and the courage to chase them.”

Michael Lovito is a Brooklyn-based reporter and critic whose work has appeared in Salon, Brooklyn Magazine, Pavement Pieces, and The District. He also serves as editor-in-chief of the politics and pop culture website The Postrider.  @MLovito

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