Hello and welcome back to What I’m Hearing. Two housekeeping items:

We’re launching a couple new benefits for Inner Circle members. First, you can schedule “office hours”—1:1 meetings with myself or any Puck author. Second, we’ve got a new Friday email just for the Inner Circle, with exclusive insider news and insights, as well as a limited number of invites to events. If you’re not Inner Circle, you can upgrade here.

Second, it’s been a busy week on my podcast, The Town: I broke down the Emmy outrages with critic Inkoo Kang, counted down the 10 nicest stars with THR’s Lacey Rose, and released my full conversation with Weinstein biographer Ken Auletta. Subscribe here.

Let’s get started….

P.S. As a reminder, you're receiving the free version of What I’m Hearing at . For full access to Puck, and to each of my colleagues, you can subscribe here.

Matthew Ball: That's part of it, but “bidirectional” is really about giving agency and input to the user. This is a complicated idea, but… if Disney puts out an adjacent [Star Wars] experience yet says that nothing that the two Matts do matters, then that's kind of disempowering. That's not too “directional.” The big question is how do you have what the players are doing have some representation in the canon at large? That's a challenge.

So there’s an impact on the Star Wars story beyond just the stakes of the video game, is what you're saying.

I’ll give you an example. I'm a producer on a content experience that launched yesterday on Facebook Watch. It's called The Walking Dead: The Last Mile. Now, The Walking Dead was the most popular show on all of television for eight years. And this experience is co-authored by Robert Kirkman, the creator. He has said that it's canonical to the comic book franchise, but it allows the audience to produce their own avatars or zombies, place them into a living, persistent world, and...