For TV, hard to go wrong with an HBO series. Most recently, Succession was excellent.

Those “boring franchises” are what bankroll the passion projects, artsy festival bound movies, and experimental content.

As far as content goes, there has been a ton of excellent stuff just this year across movies, TV, and anime. One “organic” way to start is to look for recent recommendation threads on Reddit for a movie or show you really like.

See, I've seen this stated many places but never explained. How exactly does the money made by derivative bullshit go into valuable, passionate, art projects and not either directly into pockets or into the next billion dollar derivative bullshit thing?

Generally, the bullshit costs way more to produce and market and advertise. And at least on paper, a significant amount of the money made is only recuperating costs for the 3 hours of incredibly CGI it took to make a 3rd 'ant man' or a 4th 'jurassic park'. The majority of actual indie art films cost ridiculously less than that because they're filming a movie, not a commercial.

Anyways, my opinions aside, are there any articles with cited money trails that prove that billion dollar blockbusters actually fund valuable art and not just executives yahts?

Use 3rd party discovery services.

Reelgood is a good one, sort by IMDB score (which is somehow still kinda working as a metric) or the reelgood score which is a popularity among enthusiasts kinda ranking. You will find tvs gems streaming services criminally and inexplicably never recommend.

But "old school" recommendations from TV /movie buffs (like the tvtropes community or various forums) are still a good source.

> But for movies and TV? Where do I find the good stuff?

There’s a trove of incredible foreign movies and TV shows out there. Scandinavian and Asian (Korean in particular) content has a really good hit to miss ratio for me.

For examples, check out international film festival nominations and winners.

Having a good time woth Trakt for discovery and rating. It has a very active app/plugin/webhook ecosystem and I've gotten some great recommendations from it by scrobbling via Plex and following a few people with similar preferences on there.

just follow writers and creators you like, note which actors have good taste, follow them from project to project.

I don't know what you like, but "Prestige TV" seems to be where writers, directors, and actors wanting to do something other than another retread from some studio's IP backlog, end up.

Indie films, international films, etc.

Mainstream entertainment has always converged to mediocrity.