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Television Movies Entertainment

Big Budget Blockbusters Arrive Amid Fears of 'Peak TV' (ft.com) 79

Crop of expensive fantasy adaptations from Amazon and HBO Max served up at subsidised prices. Financial Times: Since 2016, the veteran US television executive John Landgraf has been predicting the arrival of "peak TV" -- the moment when the number of new scripted shows reaches an all-time high. The streaming boom has proved him wrong every time but he gamely made the prediction again this month, telling guests at the Television Critics Association press tour that 2022 would mark "the peak of the peak TV era." Landgraf, chair of Disney's FX network, conceded that he could be wrong this time too. But there is little doubt that this autumn will present audiences with a flood of some of the most expensive television ever produced. On September 2, Amazon Prime will release its adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, with an estimated budget of $465mn for the first season -- almost enough to make Top Gun: Maverick three times over.

HBO Max's House of the Dragon -- the prequel to Game of Thrones -- is reported to have cost $200mn for the season's 10 episodes. At Disney Plus, Star Wars: Andor will lead a large slate of new programmes that include a Pinocchio remake, She Hulk, and a spin-off of the Cars franchise. These shows are being served up to consumers at subsidised prices by streaming platforms making record losses. The only profitable exception is Netflix, but the industry pioneer's market value has plunged almost $200bn over the past year because of slowing subscriber growth. Its share price is languishing at a four-year low. The forthcoming crop of new programming was given the green light during a headier time, when Wall Street cheered as streaming services committed lavish sums to compete. But faith in the streaming business model -- and investor tolerance for profligate spending -- has waned as Netflix's once-blistering subscription growth has gone into reverse.

[...] On top of that, there are growing concerns that inflation will bite into discretionary spending, including on streaming services. "Everyone [in Hollywood] is throwing big dollars after big things," said Niels Juul, who was an executive producer of Martin Scorsese's Netflix film The Irishman. "But [subscribers] are inundated now to the point where they are looking at their monthly bills and saying, 'Something's got to go -- I've got $140 worth of subscriptions here!'" Even so, Tom Harrington at Enders Analysis said consumers were still getting a better deal than the streaming companies themselves. "People get through $100mn of TV in a day and say: 'what's next?' From a consumer point of view that is great. But for a video operator, it's clearly unsustainable."

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Big Budget Blockbusters Arrive Amid Fears of 'Peak TV'

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  • TV sucks (Score:1, Troll)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 )

    Who has time to sit watching something for thirty minutes for at most 3 or 4 dopamine hits? If you can't fit a dopamine fix into a 15-second clip, it's probably not useful anyway.

  • by luvirini ( 753157 ) on Saturday August 27, 2022 @02:09AM (#62827225)

    Basically there are too many streaming services spending too much money on production for the whole thing to be sustainable in the long run.

    Basically I think more and more people will be "service hopping" and rotating what services they have at what time.

    I still know many people who have several services, but more and more people that I know are actually canceling some they had or doing the rotation.

    • Pretty much this. Streaming services try to out-do each other with flagship productions to attract viewers, but viewers at the same time are hit with inflation and increased costs, so they invariably will cut back on expenses. And streaming, like all entertainment, is one of the first to get the axe.

      In the end, what we'll likely see is people reducing their streaming to one or maybe two services. If they don't just go "screw this" and reach to some "alternative sources" that have all the shows they want to

    • a large slate of new programmes that include a Pinocchio remake, She Hulk, and a spin-off of the Cars franchise

      So a remake of a remake of a remake of a remake, some skinny model CGI'd green parading around in a bikini, and yet more formulaic Cars crap (you've seen all the movies, you've played the video game, now watch the TV series!). Gee willikers, I can't wait!

      • I agree, nothing from Disney+ makes me want to watch their junk. She-Hulk...lol
        • I was just being snarky since I didn't realise they'd already made episodes of this, but it really is what I'd stated as a joke, a random model CGI'd green. There's samples on Youtube of Hulk and her, or at least Hulk next to a green soccer mom, showing how ridiculous the whole thing is.

          For anyone wanting to see it, Google "Angry Green Soccer Mom".

          • For anyone wanting to see it, Google "Angry Green Soccer Mom".

            I cannot seem to get any results. I just get angry soccer moms???

            • It was a joke, the actual name is She Hulk Attorney something, but given the content Angry Green Soccer Mom would be a better title.
        • by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
          have you tried "The orville" if you are into trek it's a great show, way better than the trainwreck CBS called Discovery. But you may be right that's the only one that jumps out at me, oh well back to my Deep space 9 rewatch on netflix I guess, I'm still waiting for Amazon prime (well prime video) to release Babylon 5 in my region, no luck yet
    • by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Basically there are too many streaming services spending too much money on production for the whole thing to be sustainable in the long run.

      Basically I think more and more people will be "service hopping" and rotating what services they have at what time.

      I still know many people who have several services, but more and more people that I know are actually canceling some they had or doing the rotation.

      This, but traditional broadcast TV is dead in the water. That's because it relied mainly on either live sports (which have gone to streaming) or reality TV (which has gone to streaming and isn't drawing in the crowds any more).

      I predicted that this kind of balkanisation of streaming services would happen years ago. It seems to have started in the US but I have no doubt it'll come to the rest of the world in time. In the UK, Amazon and Netflix still have almost all the content, this'll change in time. How

      • However what'll happen is what has already started happening in the US... Bundling.

        i don't see anything wrong with that; bundling can be a very pleasant experience. Oh; you didn't mean this [wikipedia.org], did you?
      • Basically there are too many streaming services spending too much money on production for the whole thing to be sustainable in the long run.

        [...]

        [...] I predicted that this kind of balkanisation of streaming services would happen years ago. It seems to have started in the US but I have no doubt it'll come to the rest of the world in time.

        It's pretty common in business, particularly in industries as fluid as information technology, for products and services to go through periods of consolidation followed by what you call "Balkanization". Some time in the 1990's, Microsoft Windows practically eliminated the competition in consumer and small business operating systems. Then we had the resurgence of MacOS, followed by the toehold made by GNU/Linux. While the fabled year of the Linux desktop never happened, what would be regarded in the past

        • by mjwx ( 966435 )

          Basically there are too many streaming services spending too much money on production for the whole thing to be sustainable in the long run.

          [...]

          [...] I predicted that this kind of balkanisation of streaming services would happen years ago. It seems to have started in the US but I have no doubt it'll come to the rest of the world in time.

          It's pretty common in business, particularly in industries as fluid as information technology, for products and services to go through periods of consolidation followed by what you call "Balkanization". Some time in the 1990's, Microsoft Windows practically eliminated the competition in consumer and small business operating systems. Then we had the resurgence of MacOS, followed by the toehold made by GNU/Linux. While the fabled year of the Linux desktop never happened, what would be regarded in the past as "alternative" operating systems such as Android and Chrome OS are now commonplace.

          We can go further back and see a similar pattern in the demise, relatively speaking, of big centralized computing environments in favor of the personal computer. Now we see a consolidation of some of that computing power in the development of so-called "cloud" computing.

          That really demonstrates my point... try getting a computer these days that doesn't have Windows on it. It can be done but it's expensive and often a worse computer. So most Linux users just buy a Windows laptop and install Linux (often dual boot as most of us are just normal folk who use Linux and have no real issue with Windows).

          If you think "cloud" is going to be some kind of magic solution for that... look at how consolidated it already is. Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

  • They're paying quality prices for programming but getting crap. Cut the crap (even if it means a smaller catalog of programming), control costs for the quality stuff, and you'll see a rise in streaming services that people might actually be willing to pay for.
    • That's not even going to work in the long run. Let's assume that these shows are actually as good as their price tag suggests. It's not going to solve their problem.

      People won't put up with subscribing to 4+ different streaming services. What we will likely see is that people will eventually decide to cut back and have one or maybe two, and just do without the other shows. Since that's going to be pretty much evenly distributed, because some people will rather forgo Show A and watch Show B while the other h

    • Every so often a cheap show turns out to be superb. The BBC used to be good at this: HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy started life as a cheap radio show. And sometimes shows take time to find their stride: MASH got there in the end, but it was nearly killed several times. So the problem is 'cut the crap' is easy to say, but REALLY hard to get right.

      • Most of the best television is cheap. The most important factor in making great television is creative freedom, and too much money prevents that, all those investors are going to want to make sure they get their returns. I can't think of any of my favourites which were particularly expensive.
        • by GBH ( 142968 )

          I think it's fairer to say that cheap shows can be great, not that expensive shows can't also be great. There's loads of "cheap" shows that keep my interest (recently Motherland Fort Salem was good enough for me to enjoy). But to suggest that some of the most expensive series' were not astonishingly good is wrong. Band of Brothers was really expensive and one of the best series ever. The Manalorian was great. Game of Thrones was probably the best series ever for me, it's a shame they stopped making it after

  • When basically Netflix/Amazon Prime/Hulu were the only streaming services in town, it reduced those looking for pirated content, as it was more convenient to log onto Netflix than find a working torrent. Also, didn't hurt that paying $10/mth for content you wanted to actually watch over $100/mth for a cable package with a load of crap you didn't was a good deal. Slowly though the content providers got greedy and, wanting a piece of the streaming action, pulled their content into their own walled gardens. No

  • by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Saturday August 27, 2022 @03:23AM (#62827287)
    The term started happening around the late '00s when the quality of TV shows suddenly skyrocketed, thanks to offerings from HBO, FX, AMC, and eventually Netflix. "Peak peak TV" was sometime late in the 2010s, when diamond-hard works of genius were being fired off like machine gun bullets. But waves of corporate consolidation and moating of content behind increasing numbers of subscription services has cratered the quality. Genius was on tap for a while, but it's more of a treasure hunt now.
    • by mjwx ( 966435 )

      The term started happening around the late '00s when the quality of TV shows suddenly skyrocketed, thanks to offerings from HBO, FX, AMC, and eventually Netflix. "Peak peak TV" was sometime late in the 2010s, when diamond-hard works of genius were being fired off like machine gun bullets. But waves of corporate consolidation and moating of content behind increasing numbers of subscription services has cratered the quality. Genius was on tap for a while, but it's more of a treasure hunt now.

      I'd argue that TV really peaked in the 90's. The 00's were the tail end of that. By 2010 all they had were remakes and reality TV which was boring as batshit.

      GOT and TWD are really anomalies, the kind of thing we'd see on streaming services if they had just been 5 years later, though, as much as I loved these series, they are getting to the point where they're being milked for all they're worth. A like a good meal, a show should last long enough to leave your audience wanting just a little bit more.

      • Peak TV isn't about the average state of programming, but about how great the best were. In the period I mention, it's true that the cancer of "reality" TV went malignant in a lot of places, but at the same time the big prestige sources were punching holes in the sky with their quality. Now there are so many services, it's actually a chore to find the best content, and a nontrivial expense. And for some reason they all increasingly bury their best material while heavily promoting absolute bullshit.
    • "Peak peak TV" was sometime late in the 2010s, when diamond-hard works of genius were being fired off like machine gun bullets. But waves of corporate consolidation and moating of content behind increasing numbers of subscription services has cratered the quality. Genius was on tap for a while, but it's more of a treasure hunt now.

      IMO, the issue is good shows are hard to make. I don't think changing business details would fix that. TMK, geniuses are not that hampered by studios. GoT was amazing, but it took George RR Martin decades to write something of that depth and quality. Dexter was AMAZING, for the first few seasons, but they just couldn't keep it up. The MCU keeps surprising me how many entertaining movies they can produce. I keep thinking they're out of ideas and then they make something that surprises me. However, I th

      • For me, the MCU has gone on too long. End Game would have been the perfect time to bring it to a close or, at least, give it a rest for a few years. I was already getting comic book movie fatigue, but wanted to see how the story ended. And then it just kept going, but nobody seems to know where to take it. WB execs just said they have a 10 year plan, but I feel like they've already missed the boat. I did enjoy The Batman, though.
      • I'd agree that HBO Max is making very strange promotional decisions. Just by pure luck, I ran into a full season of a fascinating show called "Tokyo Vice," but I'd never heard a peep about it, they don't display it on their promotional crawls, and I had to log directly into their site rather than my cable provider to even see it listed. It's not a show for the ages, but it's top quality material, and they don't seem to care at all.

        Seems there are times when an artistic medium just goes supernova. The
  • (and 6 was at best mediocre)

    Why would anyone be interested in House of the Dragon? HBO's showrunners clearly can't come up with a good story unless Martin's already mostly developed it - and that was true even before the Discovery group came in with their cost-cutting knives out.

  • by Budenny ( 888916 ) on Saturday August 27, 2022 @04:18AM (#62827329)

    The question for Europe may be: what happens when, as seems to be happening now, the public cancels their TV in enough numbers to invalidate the state broadcaster funding model?

    An example of the model is the way the BBC is funded in the UK. You need a license to use a TV in the UK. To watch without having one is a criminal offence like any other tax evasion. Anyone with a TV is charged a tax for this license. In the UK its about 160 sterling a year. This tax is then used to fund the state broadcaster, the BBC.

    [Strictly speaking, the tax is on anyone who uses any device to watch live broadcast TV, or uses the BBC catch-up service, but for almost everyone this means its a tax on TV ownership.]

    You pay this tax if you have a TV capable of watching any live TV of any sort, from any broadcaster. An analogy would be if you had to pay a tax to be allowed to read any newspaper, it would be a criminal offense were you to be caught reading one without a license, and the proceeds of the tax were to be paid to (eg) the NY Post, the WSJ, the NYT, or the Fort Worth Gazette.

    You don't have to pay the tax if you don't have a TV which is capable of receiving live broadcasts. So for instance, if you disconnected your TV and stored it in a box in the attic, you would file a declaration that you did not owe the tax (called in the UK a 'TV License'). This is more or less the equivalent of cancelling your subscription, but its not just cancelling a particular vendor, its cancelling a subscription to all broadcast TV, whether satellite, cable or off-air.

    This is happening in the UK at the moment. Last year there were 250,000 cancellations, and at the moment about 2 million households don't pay the tax. In the UK jargon, they do not have a TV license.

    So the interesting question is, if the streaming model continues to take share from the broadcast model, and if the revenue from the tax falls due to simple customer rejection of the services it provides, how is the state broadcasting model to be funded?

    You can see the signs of a pending eruption in the UK, where there is for the first time in many years an open debate going on in government about the future of the License Fee, and there is rising opposition to it and increasingly definite proposals to abolish it. This is partly caused by dissatisfaction with the BBC itself. But its also caused by the rise in alternative media services and the replacement of live TV with streaming, particularly among the young, for whom broadcast TV is coming increasingly to resemble rotary dial land line phones.

    Something their parents say they used to use, a long time ago.

    Its hard to say where this is going. It could be that the streaming services are a flash in the pan, but it doesn't feel like it now. It feels more like some really big changes are coming to the broadcast TV industry, whether private or state, and that the broadcast model itself is in real trouble. With consumers, and that is the powerful force.

    • by larwe ( 858929 )

      if the streaming model continues to take share from the broadcast model, and if the revenue from the tax falls due to simple customer rejection of the services it provides, how is the state broadcasting model to be funded?

      The likely outcome here is not hard to predict, at all. There is little possibility that Auntie will willingly decouple from the TV license teat and switch to a commercially supported model. It's about as likely as seeing HRH working in a Nando's to raise funds to repaint Buckingham Palace. Many regions already impose special rules on streaming providers stating that they must provide at least x% local content - it is a very short step from there to require them to contribute to the local content "scene".

      • It may be that the TV license of the future is applicable to any device capable of receiving streaming broadcasts over the Internet.

        That would be hard to implement - I suspect they will switch to a simple monthly tax on internet service. ~14 quid/month is also more palatable to most that a lump sum of 160/year.

        • Not from the UK, but am aware of the TV license system in the UK.

          A simpler way may be to say paid streaming providers have to pay X (2 pounds for example) per subscriber, per month to the BBC.

          It will be up to the streaming providers if they want to pass on the fees to the customers or not.

      • by GBH ( 142968 )

        if the streaming model continues to take share from the broadcast model, and if the revenue from the tax falls due to simple customer rejection of the services it provides, how is the state broadcasting model to be funded?

        The likely outcome here is not hard to predict, at all. There is little possibility that Auntie will willingly decouple from the TV license teat and switch to a commercially supported model. It's about as likely as seeing HRH working in a Nando's to raise funds to repaint Buckingham Palace. Many regions already impose special rules on streaming providers stating that they must provide at least x% local content - it is a very short step from there to require them to contribute to the local content "scene". Alternatively, and perhaps even easier to enforce, would be to follow this logic: TV licenses (and radio licenses before them) are not linked in particular to the broadcast technology. TV licenses in the analog era didn't need new Acts of Parliament to be applicable in the Freeview era. It may be that the TV license of the future is applicable to any device capable of receiving streaming broadcasts over the Internet.

        The TV licence is already applicable to computers, phones, laptops in fact any viewing device. It's there, clearly stated on the licensing website. If you watch *ANY* "live" broadcast streaming service (so any live sports, anything off Twitch, any live tv station (as in you're watching the stream of what's being broadcast), anything that's live streamed on Youtube such as a concert or a streamer who's doing it live) then you need a license.

    • Someone from Germany might be more capable of answering this, but IIRC they simply switched to a "TV tax" that you have to pay, even if you don't own or operate a TV. You could have one in your home, so you owe the tax.

    • The TV broadcasters in Europe have opened streaming services. There are MANY of them in Europe, just they are not known on /. because they are not a US behemoth. Tax-funded public broadcaster in each country have opened or are opening such streaming services, because people still want contents relevant to their local society and made in their native language. Cable TV through optical fiber is already a streaming service (you can replay programs in the past, it supports multiple TVs, and is cheap). If the tr

    • by mjwx ( 966435 )

      The question for Europe may be: what happens when, as seems to be happening now, the public cancels their TV in enough numbers to invalidate the state broadcaster funding model?

      An example of the model is the way the BBC is funded in the UK. You need a license to use a TV in the UK. To watch without having one is a criminal offence like any other tax evasion. Anyone with a TV is charged a tax for this license. In the UK its about 160 sterling a year. This tax is then used to fund the state broadcaster, the BBC.

      Not quite correct.

      You only need to pay a TV license if you consume content funded by TV license (basically BBC, including the BBC Iplayer). You can and quite a few anti-establishment types make it a point of not paying the TV license. The license authority doesn't bother with people not paying the TV license beyond sending polite threat letters. Enough people pay the license that there's no point in even bothering with anything else.

      I suspect you're from a country that doesn't have a national broadcas

      • by Budenny ( 888916 )

        "You only need to pay a TV license if you consume content funded by TV license (basically BBC, including the BBC Iplayer)."

        Not true.

        " The law says you need to be covered by a TV Licence to:

        " watch or record programmes as theyâ(TM)re being shown on TV, on any channel
        " watch or stream programmes live on an online TV service (such as ITV Hub, All 4, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Now TV, Sky Go, etc.)
        " download or watch any BBC programmes on BBC iPlayer.

        "This applies to any device you use, includin

    • by DuncanE ( 35734 )

      They will switch to the Australian model. ABC (the Australian BBC equivalent) gets its money from general tax revenue. The UK will probably do the switch piece meal. News will be paid for first by all tax payers as thats a "vital" service. Then it will be about making "quality locally made TV". And anything educational of course be an easy swap. You license will end up just being access to BBCs streaming service.

  • The economics for big-budget shows works for TV. It just don't work for streaming.

    Think about big-budget TV shows for a moment. The more people who watch, the more ad revenue they earn. Friends may have been the most expensive sitcom to produce, but NBC was happy to pay it, because they pulled in 20+ million viewers for every episode. To figure out just how much money you earn per viewer, let's look at the sitcom "This is Us." According to this page [fitsmallbusiness.com], the sitcom charges $317,981 for a 30-second commerci

    • by larwe ( 858929 )

      The more people who watch, the more ad revenue they earn. Friends may have been the most expensive sitcom to produce, but NBC was happy to pay it, because they pulled in 20+ million viewers for every episode.

      Not only that, but they pulled in those 20+MM people *at a specific point in time* meaning the ads in question could be tightly focused on a time-sensitive promotion. Ads in a streamed episode are asynchronous - you might get 20MM watchers to a specific episode, but they'll be spread across months if not years. So each individual ad slot is less valuable.

  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Saturday August 27, 2022 @06:45AM (#62827387)

    Not because the shows are bad. Or because nobody would want to watch them. But because of how fractured the streaming and TV market is today, and how viewer's habits changed.

    We used to watch our shows, one episode per week. We don't do that anymore. People binge watch. Streaming has made this possible. We wait for the season to finish, then hoover it up in one, long go.

    Especially with streaming, and how the streaming market is fractured. Instead of subbing to a streaming service for a year, watching one episode of the show I want to see (i.e. that I sub to the service for), what people do is to wait for a season to finish, sub for a month and watch the whole season during that month. Rinse, repeat with the next streaming service.

    Of course, ratings are horrible with this practice, because it seems like nobody watches your show. Everyone's waiting for the season to end so they can sub for a month, binge it and cancel the sub again.

    • I still encounter people who like to consume series as they are released, and discuss them with other people who do that. I used to watch some shows with housemates, which was a nice group social activity.

      • Certainly. But what we're looking at is a fragmented streaming market with every service having its flagship series and mostly less interesting to not interesting filler in between. So even if people decide that they want to follow their "main" show weekly, they will not do so with 4+ streaming services. Twice so now that inflation is kicking in and people have to cut back on expenses.

        What we will likely see is that people will more or less evenly spread out between streaming services and if they are really

    • by GBH ( 142968 )

      We used to watch our shows, one episode per week. We don't do that anymore. People binge watch. Streaming has made this possible.

      This certainly used to be the case but in case you haven't noticed MANY of the big budget streaming shows are now shown weekly because the binge watch model is fundamentally flawed.

      I'd suggest most services run on a 10/80/10 ratio of brilliant/average/awful shows that they make. That 80% is where the bulk of shows sit and they go from almost brilliant to almost awful. But if it's a style or subject you really like you'll often happily watch shows pushing towards the bottom 10%.

      From a subscriber perspective

      • They sure don't release it that way, but people watch it that way. They wait for the season to finish, then sub, binge and quit.

  • I miss really well written sitcoms. They're a lot cheaper to make, accessible, and rewatchable. Frasier was probably my favourite from American TV. But they've pretty much disappeared from British TV too. The IT crowd might have been the last good one. There have been a few others but I mean good with solid funny writing, believable cast, able to see itself through several series.

    Netflix did Man verses Bee. Wasn't quite there, but it was the right direction. TV you can just sit down and watch for a laugh an

    • I don't understand why the streaming model seems to necessitate having such short seasons for all shows and releasing them all at once. On broadcast and cable, TV shows were usually around 26 episodes long per season. This gives you a lot more time to get invested in the characters and the universe. It also means you have new episodes coming out for your show for *half of the year*- which is a pretty good to make and keep an audience.

      Yes, the budgets for each episode obviously need to be shorter to accommod

      • by GBH ( 142968 )

        They are moving away from this all at once binge model because it's fundamentally flawed.

        So at least some of the problem is tastes have broadly moved away from procedural TV to a more story arc driven model. Many of those older, traditional series follow procedural models. Typically attributed to crime dramas (but sometimes adapted outside that genre) was liked because it supported syndication. You have what is a self contained episode - think monster of the week if you watched something like Buffy, alien o

    • I think we're getting too close to fascism for mass comedy to really work any more. Right-wingers just aren't funny, they can't laugh at themselves because they have to feel superior, all they can do is laugh at people who are different. (And they can't even do that too openly at the moment, because modern fascism evades democracy rather than destroying it openly, so being too open about your racism etc. is still taboo.) Comedy needs something like social democracy to thrive.

      (Anyone from Scandinavia here? I

  • Scripted? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Saturday August 27, 2022 @07:15AM (#62827423) Homepage Journal

    "peak TV" -- the moment when the number of new scripted shows reaches an all-time high.

    Uh, what? They're all scripted. "Reality" TV shows are scripted, too. Even talk and news shows are essentially scripted, they meet before they meet to talk about what they're going to talk about, so they know what they are going to talk about on TV. Part of the host's job is to keep them on that track.

    I'd personally argue that we reached peak TV when these "reality" shows proliferated. That's specifically when TV jumped the shark. At the point at which you can't write anything more interesting than a caricature of some boring people doing some stupid shit... You've basically written Seinfeld without any of the actors that made it work.

  • by Stan92057 ( 737634 ) on Saturday August 27, 2022 @07:23AM (#62827437)
    The TV show? "She hulk" that s cut into 6 parts the longest episode 37 minutes out of 2 so far second was 30 minutes is nothing more then a movie cut into 6 pieces. Disney sucks for content and they are going to raise the prices?? And neither does 13 shows make a season, you can watch new content in a months time and BTW short seasons don't make them better just shorter..
  • This piece argues the case.

    https://www.latimes.com/opinio... [latimes.com]

    My immediate response is that the rubbish that is being produced so often does make one doubt whether the training ladder is doing a good job. The BBC alternative - short seasons, few writers, seems to work as well if not better (unless the woke get hold of the scripts - as demonstrated by Doctor Who rather recently)

    • The BBC does a really good job at short series. They tend to be well focused with very little filler, except where needed for character development. I always wondered why American shows had to meander on for 24 episodes. Then Netflix (and the other streamers) started cutting down on the number of episodes and I thought they'd be copying the BBC. The result, though, seems to be overlong episodes, some of which are beginning to approach feature length, without actually containing the aesthetic qualities o
      • IME most shows with seasons/series longer than about a dozen episodes suck rocks. It's hard to make 20 really quality episodes of most TV shows. And on the other hand, you're not going to keep my attention all year with 6-7 episodes, and if there's nothing else keeping me on a streaming service, you're not going to manage it with twelve of them either. I'm not going to pay ten bucks a month or whatever for a single episode. So unless I'm a really avid TV watcher, and I am not, I'm just not going to subscrib

      • I really miss TV shows where 1 episode was 1 story.. I find most TV these days (even the ones people love) to be too slow - basically very episode has to have so much filler and pointless dialogue because they are padding a single story out to almost 13 hours. Perhaps 45 minutes was sometimes a bit short, but at least it meant the story was told concisely. I mean I get that people like binge watching 13 hour stories and I'm the outlier, but I just cannot be arsed starting a story that's going to take that

    • Chibnall is way less 'woke' than RTD or Moffat. Nothing he's done remotely compares to Beast Below's "the truth of your society is being kept from you", let alone "if this country doesn't Turn Left, jolly Italians will be getting shipped off to camps". For decades, the Doctor has been a figure who tears down unjust systems, now suddenly it's "protecting fair play in the universe". The problem with Chibnall is simply that he's just a crap writer, whereas RTD and Moffat were both kind of geniuses. And, quite
  • Does anyone believe that peak TV is really in the future or the now? Peak TV was clearly like mid GoT. TV is done, even netflix has peaked at this point. Youtube on a smart tv is cheaper, better, more convenient, more diverse covering a wider range of topics and cultures, and on the order of 1000 times cheaper to produce. Online video content creation is so distributes, utilizing so many people with so many talents and perspectives that it is basically foolproof, while I think you would find it hard to find

    • I don't know. I go to YT when I want to know how to fix my bike or where to position myself to ride off a ten foot drop without killing myself. They've got some good how-to things. As an entertainment source, I find it severely lacking. I can only take so much of a cute 20-something making fun of TikTok videos. And don't even get me started on TikTok. Yeah, TV has plummeted lately, but I don't think YT is the answer.

      Now, would you kindly get off my lawn.
      • I think that might be more of a finding the content problem than a problem with the content. Because even if you just really really like the traditional tv of film format, YT has so many either uploaded by the original copyright holder or illegally uploaded. But even without that you have drama, comedy, horror. But even if you are right and the whole of YT does not have the content you seek, I think it is coming. Online video content creators is where the interest and growth is, if their is a market it will

  • I still just have 2 - Netflix and Prime - both I had for years. My grandkids use my Netflix account and I use prime to get the free shipping. There are things I would maybe like to see on other services, but I'm just not camped in front of the TV enough to justify a new membership. If they aggregated for a reasonable price, I would bite, but I'm not signing up for a dozen new services.
  • TV, what is TV? I heard that it was something that was popular in the pre 2000s. A bit like those video tape things my grandpa had.
  • ... then. They could at least get everyone watching while the most popular, crass, tacky reality TV show picks the next presidential candidate for the Republican Party... and the rest of the world looks on in abject horror... again.
  • The production values are "high" I guess, and the cinematography can be an absolute work of art at times, but the plots are so fucking nonsensical or contradictory that I just can't force myself to watch.

    Two examples from recent memory that arent GoT season 8:

    Westworld Season 2 and Picard.

    The first season of Westworld was reasonable TV. Tightly written, good stuff. The second season entailed a grand plan to "rescue" the robots by uploading their minds...to a computer in a room rigged to flood with seawater.

  • by dohzer ( 867770 )

    Woah... $200 milli-nanos. That's way too little to spend!

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.

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