Unique media is any media product that is unique. As far as I know, there's no show quite like Community. There's no book quite like Catch-22. There's no podcast quite like Hello Internet. Why not? There are hundreds of books where kids solve mysteries. Thousands of television episodes about friends friending together in situational comedic predicaments. The abundance of so-so media makes the rarity of the phenomenal unique media all the more tragic. Why are the unique media not instead abundant?

One explanation is that it's all about the creator's brain. The creative vision behind any unique media is sufficiently rare to have only come to fruition once in all of history. Because people are unique, unique media arises. But anything happening once is a strange phenomenon. Things are much more likely to occur more than once or not at all. Is it not strange that no one's brain has sufficient overlap with Dan Harmon's brain or Joseph Heller's brain to make another version of their great works?

Another explanation is that something about the environment suppresses duplicates of the unique media. Maybe a youtube channel has enormous Community energy. Maybe an anonymous blogger cranks out stories with stupendous Catch-22 energy. Maybe a podcast with outrageous Hello Internet energy is hiding in plain sight. The algorithm, or economic reality, or perhaps merely time prevents these duplicates of unique media from grabbing mainstream attention.

In any case, once you finish the unique media, you're destitute. Left hobbling along with online discussions and fan art and best-of compilations to satiate you, the stale fast-food burger to the unique media's ribeye steak. You crave another fix but you've just consumed all of this reality's supply. Why, oh why!