There’s nothing surprising about The Shell Collector, the debut original film on Fox News Media’s streaming platform, Fox Nation. Media companies are hungry for original content to win market share among the morass of competing platforms. Fox News Media seeks to expand its conservative empire through Fox Nation’s slate of real estate, lifestyle and reality programming. Films like The Shell Collector, a beachside romance about a military widow falling for her late husband’s best friend, are relatively cheap to produce and amenable to viewers less into, say, the testicle-tanning fearmongering of one Tucker Carlson.
The Shell Collector, which premiered this week, is thus notable as a stake in the ground for Fox’s investment in soft power. It’s “family values” carried on the ocean breeze of a beige, uncomplicated love story, an inexpensive, in-house method for palliating the network’s core message of white Christian theocracy to those outside the traditional Fox News demographic. Namely: younger (white) women. “These films are definitely targeting the female Fox News fan,” Fox Nation’s president, Jason Klarman, told the Hollywood Reporter last month. Original films like The Shell Collector “will absolutely attract her, and creating unique originals that she can’t get anywhere else is certainly part of the strategy to drive growth”.
