Nine of the 10 Most-Watched Streaming Programs Are Reruns (bloomberg.com) 215
Despite investing billions in new streaming services, media giants have failed to dethrone old favorites, according to Nielsen data. The 21-year-old legal drama "NCIS" tops the list, with viewers streaming 11.4 million episodes per week. Netflix dominates the top 10, with eight shows owing most of their viewership to the platform. Reruns from CBS and other networks make up the majority of the list, with "Stranger Things" being the only original series.
"Nine of the 10 most-watched streaming programs are reruns. In addition to the three from CBS, there is one from YouTube (CoComelon), one from Canada (Heartland), one from Australia (Bluey) and Suits. The only original series to crack the list is Stranger Things," Bloomberg writes. However: "While reruns dominate the top 10, that is not the case overall. Most of the 100 most popular titles of the last three years are original series," it added.
"Nine of the 10 most-watched streaming programs are reruns. In addition to the three from CBS, there is one from YouTube (CoComelon), one from Canada (Heartland), one from Australia (Bluey) and Suits. The only original series to crack the list is Stranger Things," Bloomberg writes. However: "While reruns dominate the top 10, that is not the case overall. Most of the 100 most popular titles of the last three years are original series," it added.
Re-watching Northern Exposure (Score:2)
Northern Exposure is on prime, I remembered it as a good show, but damn, it was really good. Not surprised the top shows are re-runs.
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Northern Exposure is on prime, I remembered it as a good show, but damn, it was really good.
Yup, just finishing up with season 2.
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It's a fantastic show. Someday I'm hoping to visit Roslyn WA where it was filmed.
9 out of 10 (Score:3)
of new programs are just remakes or spin offs of the same old crap.
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Or maybe it's just statistics. For every new programme out this year, there are 10,000 old ones, probably more. Unless the new one is literally 1 in 10,000 in terms of quality...
There is also the desire to re-watch stuff in preparation for the new shows. I re-watched Star Trek Discovery from the start, before season 5 started last week. New stuff sells the old stuff.
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Please, don't ever speak to me again.
Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the olden times, writers wrote the show as it aired since there was no binge-watching. This allowed for feedback to be immediately integrated. Fan-favorite characters were put in the spotlight, characters that failed to get a following were killed off, plot threads that got boring were cut short... The most famous example of this is Breaking Bad's Jesse, who was supposed to get killed off in the first season, but pretty much became an icon.
But today, a streaming service orders 8 episodes, they get written, filmed and released in batches. Because of this, there is no feedback to be integrated. The show exits the writing room, having been created with the writers in an ivory tower, and goes straight to filming. If you look back to the old classic, all of them changed heavily as they run, often within the same season.
This can't happen with today's batch-ordered shows, and it shows.
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So, you are saying JIT (just in time compilers) are better than pre-compiled stuff?
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You make a good point and probably fair. However, this doesn't explain the success of many HBO shows which film all at once a season and were wildly successful (Sopranos, The Wire, Oz, GOT, etc).
Re: Makes sense (Score:2)
- Carnivàle
- Rome
- Five Days
- John From Cincinnati
- Tell Me You Love Me
Etc....
Just because some went on to be great hits, doesn't mean every one did.
Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)
The "olden times" arent exactly perfect in that regard however.
More than one show has latched on to an idea generated from fandom - hell, in Battle Star Galactica (2003), the concept of the Final Five wasn't even a thing until the show runners cottoned on to the amount of fan speculation around the remaining unnamed human-form Cylons, but they quickly pivoted to it becoming central to the show and ditched their original concepts.
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the olden times, writers wrote the show as it aired since there was no binge-watching. This allowed for feedback to be immediately integrated. Fan-favorite characters were put in the spotlight, characters that failed to get a following were killed off, plot threads that got boring were cut short... The most famous example of this is Breaking Bad's Jesse, who was supposed to get killed off in the first season, but pretty much became an icon.
But today, a streaming service orders 8 episodes, they get written, filmed and released in batches. Because of this, there is no feedback to be integrated. The show exits the writing room, having been created with the writers in an ivory tower, and goes straight to filming. If you look back to the old classic, all of them changed heavily as they run, often within the same season.
This can't happen with today's batch-ordered shows, and it shows.
I think they only do that when it's something like an 8-12 episode run. For network shows that have 20+ episodes I suspect they're still filming while airing.
But I think the bigger factor is simply runtime, NCIS has 463 episodes [wikipedia.org], that's something like 20,000 minutes.
Stranger things has 34 episodes [wikipedia.org], probably closer to 2,000 minutes. It takes a lot of Stranger Things bingers to make up for a single NCIS binger.
As for your claim about all of them changed heavily as they run, often within the same season I'd counter that they barely changed at all. Do you really think you could easily tell two seasons of NCIS apart if they had the same cast members?
With 20+ episodes you're generally just doing variations on the same template, people watch because they enjoy hanging out in that world. The niche that Netflix goes for is basically mini-series. Every episode is different and fits in an arc, and there's usually a substantial difference between seasons.
I think there's a place for both, but I'm not sure hours watched is really the best metric to compare them.
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Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer is probably the other most famous example of this, where he was supposed to be killed in Season 2 but was so immensely popular with the fans that after occasional guest-reappearances he was eventually made into a permanent title-credits cast member on Buffy and subsequently Angel.
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Jesse kind of ruined Breaking Bad, if you ask me. His constant moral qualms were just annoying. I mean, giving all that money back? Really?
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Jesse was a moral juxtaposition for Walter. Walter went from the straight laced moral thinker, a teacher with a family, to an absolute monster. Jesse was just in it for the money and didn't really think about the rights and wrongs of the whole enterprise, until he started getting sucked into the world of the cartels.
We would normally think of Walter as the good citizen, doing a poorly paid but rewarding and socially positive job, a family man and an intellectual. Jesse is the low level drug dealer, the crim
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It depends on the show. For example, Star Trek The Next Generation was being produced while it was airing, but the stories were selected in advance and they largely ignored fan feedback, of which 90% boiled down to raging that Kirk and Spock weren't in it and the short skirts were abandoned.
And good thing too. When you largely ignore the fans you get DS9. When you listen to them too much, you get Voyager. Good writers don't need fan notes to be good, they recognize when a character has broken out to be more
Simple Reason (Score:2)
Twenty years ago, they hired writers.
See, the Internet, e.g. the teenage punkass committee, convinced show business execs that writing wasn't a real skill. It didn't require any talent or education. Unlike engineering or being a science man.
It's not a real major. Art and writing are just playing with crayons, you see.
For a clue on how that worked out, take a look at the last half-dozen Disney scripts. Refusing to hire good writers cost their shareholders $172 billion in just under four years.
That's what goo
Re:Simple Reason (Score:5, Interesting)
That's survivorship bias talking. For every good show you remember there was a dozen shitty ones. SNL was funnier in the 1970s and music was better back then too. A quick look at the music charts from 1975 will tell the real story.
Re:Simple Reason (Score:4, Interesting)
Survivorship bias is real, so is the 90/10 rule (90% of everything made is garbage). However, while this is subjective and not at all scientific, it is worth pointing out that "survivorship" in this context tends to mean the things that we look back on and remember fondly. I don't remember much of the new stuff that I've watched over the last few years.
It's possible (perhaps even likely) that that's a function of age: when I was younger everything was new and so I was less critical. It's also possible that there was less available, content-wise, when I was younger and so for that reason as well my standards were lower back then. All I know is that whether it's me or "them", I find myself not watching much of anything new these days, especially TV shows. There is the occasional series. The Last of Us and Mrs. Davis are the two most recent series I remember watching all of. There hasn't been a single new [to me] series I've watched in 2024 yet that I can recall. And I find that when I load up a streaming service I tend to spend more time looking for something I want to watch than I do actually watching something, and more often than not I close it and go do something else.
Then again, "back then" we used to say of cable "200 channels and there's nothing on."
Re:Simple Reason (Score:5, Interesting)
The counterpoint to that is Pixar. They had an unbroken string of megahits from 1995 until Brave in 2012. Since then Pixar has been a complete disaster.
You can almost pinpoint the exact moment in Brave when the executive committee overruled Brenda Chapman and destroyed the characters and the film. That methodology reached its peak when Disney deliberately threw a two-time Academy Award winning director under the bus and lit a quarter billion shareholder dollars on fire because Bob Iger didn't like Dick Cook.
They almost set the table for a bankruptcy when Eisner did the same thing to Jeffrey Katzenberg.
There's no substitute for talent. Dollars can't imitate it. Computers can't imitate it. Overpaid executives and office politics can't imitate it. Either you hire a writer who knows what the hell they are doing or you go to zero.
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I thought the characters were consistent and reasonably defined. Overall, the 'teen going into the world and seeing dumb shit' story moved well and didn't fixate on earlier scenes and didn't depend on one scene. Possibly, at the end, it was disneyfied but not as bad as many Disney movies.
I possibly see this aimed at 12-14 year-old females, who want to see adult-ish stories but still want people to be one-dimensional.
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SNL was funnier in the 1970s and music was better back then too. A quick look at the music charts from 1975 will tell the real story.
Pop music in the 1970s was primarily disco. It was a divisive genre in its day, and by the 80s most people wanted to forget it was ever popular in the first place.
People who were alive in the 70s and didn't listen to disco were part of a counterculture, and that was part of the appeal. 70s rock is otherwise nothing special if you're young enough for it to just be the "dad rock" that your dad listened to.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
I don't get it (Score:2)
What do they consider an "original series"? Wasn't every program an original series at one time?
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"Original programming" is essentially jargon.
It doesn't refer to the content being new so much as the distribution rights, in the sense that you are not seeing something redistributed in syndication, but rather it was created and distributed in the same place. It was originally a marketing term HBO used to distinguish itself from the rest of the broadcast TV industry in the 80s, that is a bit muddy today.
For example, when Netflix first started buying the rights to stuff, it would call the rebooted seasons o
how come there's so much new stuff then? (Score:2)
In other news (Score:3)
McDonald's sold the most hamburgers this quarter. Does that mean they make the best hamburgers?
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McDonald's sold the most hamburgers this quarter. Does that mean they make the best hamburgers?
I'm not sure that's really the best analogy. When you compare decades of content distilled down to its best offerings against the latest original series that Netflix is currently promoting, yeah, the old stuff is arguably better.
Baddies East only gets better every rerun (Score:2)
Ever deepening grudges against fellow participants are a recipe for more action.
Makes mathematical sense - sample size + awareness (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not even factoring how many people have heard of something. I love Rick and Morty. However, it appeals to a small niche and not everyone has heard of them. Everyone has heard of Seinfeld, The Office and Friends. It's like how Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston songs always are top streamers. It's not that people only like old stuff and hate new stuff. EVERYONE has heard of the old stuff and there is a lot more of it.
Finally, some people consume media to enjoy something new and get the full experience. Other people consume it for background noise. They listen to old songs while working because it's easier to listen to a song you've heard 1000x and concentrate than hearing amazingly good mind-blowing awesomeness for the first time. Half the people I know fall asleep to old sitcoms they've seen 100x. They still love the new stuff, but the put the old stuff on for comfort and familiarity or just because it won't engross them too much.
The new economics of streaming means it costs nothing to play something, so while in the VHS era, you wouldn't waste a lot of renting a movie over and over. In the streaming era, since it's free, you can just watch something 1000x and it's the same cost to you as if you watched it once. It's just now we know how many times you watched it. In the past, we only knew the times you bought the physical media...not that how many times you actually watched it.
To me, this story is completely meaningless.
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Best comment on this story.
Size Matters (Score:2)
The later full seasons of Seinfeld had around 22 episodes.
A full season of 24 was, obviously, 24 episodes. The first season of Person of Interest had 23 episodes.
A full "season" of Stranger Things is 9 episodes. So was Severance. The Rings of Power, which is probably the most expensive TV show ever made, had a paltry 8 episodes.
So yeah, there is a *lot* more old TV to watch.
Are we better off? (Score:3)
Streaming platforms are trying to do two things, one is provide bingeable TV 24/7 to eliminate FTA, the other is to replace premium cable and cable sports. Their best shows are a pretty good technically but they aren't great art. They don't have time to develop and improve, they are shown and then get axed. Once they have a monopoly they will have to do a third thing -- return dividends to shareholders. By the time you factor in your broadband and few streaming subscriptions are people going to be paying less than the $120 p.m. the average US viewer were paying for cable? And we will have lost free network TV as well.
Well, what *is* the reason? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm late to the party here, but as I look through the comments, about three-quarters of them fall into one of two basic types:
1) Modern shows are too preachy and politically-correct! That's why no one is watching them!
2) No, they're not! You must be one of those awful Republicans!
(I refuse to use the word "woke", in this context. It's a stupid word.)
My response to comment #2 is, well, if "preachiness" and "political correctness" is indeed not the problem, then what *is* the problem? When you compare a typical TV show from 2024 to a typical TV show from 2004, are there other consistent differences you can identify?
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You hit the nail on the head.
It's just Bloomberg clickbaiting (Score:2)
There isn't a problem. The new stuff has all been watched already. But hey, look at all these older titles, lets watch them too.
After all, reruns have always had plenty of retreading on network TV forever as well.
Re:Well, what *is* the reason? (Score:5, Insightful)
When you compare a typical TV show from 2024 to a typical TV show from 2004, are there other consistent differences you can identify?
Bad writing, mostly. Especially the trend of trying to stretch out a single story arc to an entire season and then using soap opera-esq interpersonal drama between the characters as a substitute for entertaining sub-plots.
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Older shows tend to have many more episodes. 24 per season, compared to 10-12 now. As such older shows often had filler or bottle episodes, and newer ones often have higher per episode budgets. That also means more time for writers to work on each episode.
Older shows were often developed with syndication in mind, so long story arcs were avoided to keep them episodic. As such older shops can be "watched" in the background while doing other stuff. Missing an episode or getting distracted doesn't matter. So ma
Because people like watching completed series. (Score:5, Interesting)
I gave up on watching new shows, because they kept getting cancelled unless they were massive hits. I only watch series I know are finished.
Reruns make up most of content....... (Score:2)
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Strong claims require strong evidence. Your gut feelings are not science.
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Miss Universe Pageant
Pre-Trump - Losing money
Bought by Trump - Successful
Bought by Thai transgender activist Jakapong Jakrajutatip - Bankrupt
https://www.bbc.com/news/busin... [bbc.com]
Of course all you Democrats are going to say it had nothing to do with woke trans owners and everything to do with The Don's golden touch, so this isn't a fair example.
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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/miss-universe-in-moscow-how-trumps-beauty-contest-spawned-a-business-deal-with-russians-and-a-bond-with-putin_n_5aa14c8de4b0e9381c164540
It was co-owned by NBS most of the time Trump was an investor.
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Casinos are only impossible to sink if you're using it as a front to launder money, you're on the Vegas strip, or you can ignore federal gambling regs like the rez casinos.
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New Trek.
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New Trek.
Which ones? Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks are actually quite good. Picard got off to a slow start, but the final season was pretty decent.
Discovery, though, never should've never been a thing. There were so many things wrong with it.
Re: I guess the people have spoken (Score:2)
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I watched episode one, and was thoroughly bored. But it's a 100% kids show so I won't judge it.
One New Trek I felt was thoroughly maligned for no good reason was Short Treks, except the lame episodes that tried to tie in to Discovery. It was an anthology series that didn't seem very "Trek," but it was hopeful and really well written, which shocked me. The tribbles episode was hysterical, and very in line with the Federation ethos (despite a certain YouTube video that dishonestly cut it up and made it see
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I'm not using that as a pejorative, I just don't want to watch that.
Re: I guess the people have spoken (Score:2)
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O_O I may check it out again. Can you suggest an episode? Always like the Chakotay character.
Re: I guess the people have spoken (Score:2)
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Although the whole woke thing is just conjecture, I do find nothing new that really interests me, and from the statistic it would seem I am not alone.
For me there is nothing wrong with woke in a show but when its always there it gets boring, is it other things like stretching a story that could be told in 1 episode over 8? Is it the high likelihood of a show being canceled after the first season? Is it comedies that just seem to be an angry political rant as opposed to being just ludicrous like old shows.
Mo
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Although the whole woke thing is just conjecture, I do find nothing new that really interests me, and from the statistic it would seem I am not alone.
For me there is nothing wrong with woke in a show but when its always there it gets boring, is it other things like stretching a story that could be told in 1 episode over 8? Is it the high likelihood of a show being canceled after the first season? Is it comedies that just seem to be an angry political rant as opposed to being just ludicrous like old shows.
More research needs to be done to determine the exact cause the the statistic does give an indicator that something is seriously wrong with the quality of new shows.
The cause is pretty simple if you've ever talked to the creatives involved in making TV shows. Their hands are tied every step of the way on most modern shows. Writers bring in a script, it gets run through committee, stripped of anything original (i.e. risky/unknown), stripped of anything that may offend *the wrong people* (pick your lane, and make it the correct one) and then gets every producer's pet peeves and favorite causes shoe-horned into it. By the time it's being shot, it's no longer a creative wo
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Strong claims require strong evidence. Your gut feelings are not science.
True, obviously, but being in a similar position of having watched a few things that were cancelled or not renewed for additional series I'd suggest it's a real thing to wait until there's at least 2-3 years of something before investing time.
Randomly here's a few things we've (family at large) enjoyed that were cut off prematurely: PanAm, I Am Not Okay With This, Defying Gravity. And - sob - obviously, Firefly, as much as it was worth the effort even for its short run (same for Dollhouse).
So, original poin
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True, obviously, but being in a similar position of having watched a few things that were cancelled or not renewed for additional series I'd suggest it's a real thing to wait until there's at least 2-3 years of something before investing time.
Problem is if no one watches the 1st season to wait to see if it lasts it won't get a second season. To this I see it as the people producing have no faith or vision to see it through. unlike startup companies whose owners will literally bet their houses on something they believe in show makers ask for investors and then if it fails they don't care they still got paid. And they pitch what investors want to hear e.g. Defying Gravity was pitched as Greys Anatomy in space
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Strong claims require strong evidence. Your gut feelings are not science.
True, obviously, but being in a similar position of having watched a few things that were cancelled or not renewed for additional series I'd suggest it's a real thing to wait until there's at least 2-3 years of something before investing time.
Randomly here's a few things we've (family at large) enjoyed that were cut off prematurely: PanAm, I Am Not Okay With This, Defying Gravity. And - sob - obviously, Firefly, as much as it was worth the effort even for its short run (same for Dollhouse).
So, original point might be anecdotal but unless you're suggesting that every series get to run its course then you have to accept it's a thing and OP's view is reasonable.
The reasoning is what is being called anecdotal. The point is that the streamers are showing a strong preference for older productions. So people come up with their "reasons"
Some say that it is because of "woke". Some of the people siding with the present programming say that it is toxic male manbabies on Youtube who have a strange power to influence everyone.
Others, such as myself, tend to lay blame that the present people behind the output have no idea how to tell a story. The closest they can get is
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Apparently, not that many. Just script writers.
Reasons - Literacy Rate (Score:2)
The average literacy rate and different genres read by script writers was wider years ago than today.
TV writers in the 1950s and 1060s grew up in the 1910s to 1940s and had several decades of pulp magazines, literary classics, 2 world wars in recent memory, and use you imagination to visualize the scene (radio drama) to help spur creative writing.
Even very formulistic older shows, westerns, police procedural, court drams, sitcoms had depth to the characters, realistic dialogue and did not rely on tropes to
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TV has always been woke.
True. I credit, in part, my interest in going into electrical engineering from watching Barney Collier on Mission Impossible. As a kid, I thought all the gadgets he had were cool.
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Nonsense, the moral themes of the 60s were not the same as what we get now, not by a long shot.
Those shows enjoyed universal themes, and the politics that poked in was never allowed to replace complex, interesting characters, or entertaining plots. Now, the universal themes we all enjoy are considered an obstacle to identity politics and BuzzFeed style virtue signaling. The inmates have taken over the board room!
I mean, look at what they did to Snow White's seven dwarves when Peter Dinklage made a single
Re:I guess the people have spoken (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm no fan of Disney, but methinks you aren't the aesthete you claim to be. There are tons of great movies and TV shows out there, but instead of finding them you watch childish superhero crap and--here's the kicker--your complaint is about "DEI."
Childish superhero movies have always sucked. It shouldn't require a black protagonist for you to notice their many shortcomings.
As for your nostalgia for the "moral themes of the 60s," I suspect you're not talking about Dr. Strangelove. How about The Graduate? You're definitely not talking about To Kill a Mockingbird.
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I'm no fan of Disney, but methinks you aren't the aesthete you claim to be. There are tons of great movies and TV shows out there, but instead of finding them you watch childish superhero crap and--here's the kicker--your complaint is about "DEI."
Sure, let's pretend DEI isn't a thing. I didn't claim it was the downfall of Boeing or Silicon Valley Bank, that's silly posturing for people who think trans isn't real or who can't tolerate a slightly more complex definition of "woman," but DEI, identity politics, whatever you call it, has no place in creative endeavors. It ruins them wherever it's found because studios and the politics obsessed writers they hire are awful.
Childish superhero movies have always sucked.
I don't generally like superhero movi
Re:I guess the people have spoken (Score:5, Interesting)
What you see as "woke" I see as pop. "Woke" gives you a convenient political lens in which to criticize film, but it forces you to look exclusively through that lens.
"Pop" is just writing to the times. It's what the majority of film projects have always been and they have always sucked. White hat/black hat westerns sucked because the writers tried too hard to write what people wanted, what studios wanted, etc. Everyone in Hollywood is looking for a formula and the producers and executives who get the final say have always been there to make bad decisions based on what they perceive to be the correct formula.
Making the main characters black or trans or whatever may be part of the current formula, but that's not what makes the formula bad. The formula is bad because it's a formula. Even when you escape the bean counters, there are tons of Hollywood jackasses who believe in the monomyth (it is to literature what Freud is to psychology–influential bullshit). Pop film usually sucks.
I watched episode 7 of Star Wars in theaters and before the film was half way over I decided to never watch another film or show in the Star Wars franchise. But it had nothing to do with "woke." It was just redundant and pointless. It was Disney-fied. It's like they focus grouped the shit out of the original Star Wars films and just copied everything that made the uber-nerds cheer. But if you ask me, the greatest filmmaker of our time is Jordan Peele, and you can't get more "woke" than his films. He doesn't take crappy formulas and insert minorities into them. He makes spectacular genre films with original twists and allegories.
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That's a useful delineation between 'woke' and 'pop' (but not as useful as your sig).
Interesting that you didn't come to that conclusion about the prequels though - I guess that most of what is presented as objective opinion about Star Wars is more the changing subjective opinion of people who are themselves changing as they age.
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No money.
No class differences.
Acceptance of extreme diversity.
Peace on Earth.
TNG was woke, and so is the overall philosophy of Star Trek (although Shatner banging everything that moved was not woke).
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Conservative politicians - and conservative media - have successfully redefined "woke" to be essentially any liberal (or extreme left) idea (often exaggerated to an extreme) they don't like.
They've been very successful in turning the term 'woke' into a pejorative...honestly it is impressiv
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Those shows enjoyed universal themes, and the politics that poked in was never allowed to replace complex, interesting characters, or entertaining plots.
Universal themes from the sixties, like civil rights and super heroes? We still have those shows today. If anything, we're in a revival of civil rights programming. And also super heroes. And those things are not separate from politics.
We're in a television golden age right now, due mainly to funding. TV on streaming services is viewer funded, not advertiser funded, and it's marvelous. If you look at which networks are winning Emmys, it's the viewer funded ones by a large margin.
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Why would you expect the moral themes to be the same - that's over half a century ago?
What's changed is social-media driven tribalism. It's possible to build yourself a solid power-base by convincing people that they need to be afraid of some abstract concept like 'woke' and then herd mentality stops anyone from speaking out when you label the latest thing you want to swing people against as 'woke'.
The examples that you give aren't objectively true, they are subjectively true to the tribe you are part of.
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Universal themes are universal.
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tl;dr
times change and it scares me.
It's much better in the form of a song. [youtu.be]
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I guess Trump is just "times a changin'" then.
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It's more of the same ol', to be honest.
Just with corruption cranked up to 11.
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It's more of the same ol', to be honest.
Just with corruption cranked up to 11.
What corruption? After Clinton and Biden, I don't see it for Trump.
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Really? The reality distortion field is that powerful?
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TV has always been woke. (almost always, anyway. 1960's kicked it off with early doctor who and star trek.
And let us not forget this gem [imgur.com]. So "woke".
Hans Kristian Graebener = StoneToss
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Its about levels. Things like Dr Who taking Davros out of a wheel chair and stopped him being disfigured because you can't have a handicapped evil person.
Its their show so they can do what they want, but I also don't have to watch it.
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Ahem, point of order. A male Jefferson fathered children with the slaves. There is no significant evidence that it was TJ, and indeed it would be significantly more likely to be his brother or nephew given that they were contemporarily known to 'party' with the slaves, to the point there are multiple primary sources mentioning this fact.
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Andy Griffith didn't feel the need to carry a gun as the town sheriff. Does that make him woke?
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No it just means he lived in a predominately white town.
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As you say, there was no need for him to carry a gun. It would have made no sense. Had he faced baddies with guns, yeah. But back then, the far left wouldn't have been allowed to influence the creative process in such a big way.
Even comic strip characters back then usually refused to kill largely so they didn't have to invent new characters every week.
But no, Uhuru was black, so we can create bland characters and ruin nearly all aspects of storytelling and it's the same thing, right?
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Andy Griffith didn't feel the need to carry a gun as the town sheriff. Does that make him woke?
I think it makes him Batman.
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That show was a fantasy of rural southern life. Genteel society and all that. There was maybe one episode where there was a wanted fugitive on the loose. I think that's the one where Barney tries to shoot a gun.
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Correction, there was a running gag about how Barney carried a revolver (probably a .357 magnum) but constantly mishandled it, shooting the floor near his feet.
Re: I guess the people have spoken (Score:2)
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They're also far less episodic without having interesting or likeable characters and stories. Instead of a personality, characters spew limited, politically correct dialog and must always be seen as good leftist ideologues at all times.
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I remember just several years ago when nearly everything new was amazing. I know, I've been partially bedridden for 15 years so I watch everything I can. But golden ages have to end, and something has to kill them.
Ideology did it this time. College campuses were always echo chambers, but the internet made that exponentially worse. Hollywood is just a window into a massive bubble.
Then Trump came along and gave them a justification let loose identity politics and any other anti-democratic impulse they cou
Re:I guess the people have spoken (Score:4, Insightful)
boxes they check. It's no longer good enough to be black or a woman, you gotta check three boxes! Polotical ideology has replaced art! Just look at new Trek, what garbage!
Then you clearly haven't watched any of the old Trek series.
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Examples.
Re:I guess the people have spoken (Score:4, Insightful)
Examples.
The Deep Space Nine episode "Far Beyond the Stars".
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Examples.
The Deep Space Nine episode "Far Beyond the Stars".
That episode is amazing on so many levels. Sisko's breakdown as he cries and carries on about how, "I CREATED IT, AND IT'S REAL," really hit me hard as a writer. The message of the episode didn't take over so completely that you lost the characters, and the characters were played to perfection in both timelines being portrayed. I miss message episodes that still leave you feeling like the characters and the things they are going through matter as much as the message itself. Now it's just a message, characte
Re:I guess the people have spoken (Score:5, Interesting)
Mostly I was referring to the fact that the plot of that episode was about racism in creative industries. It was far more meta and on the nose about the issue than Star Trek had been up until that point, since they didn't use any metaphors for the discrimination - it literally was about a black writer who wasn't allowed to publish his work because he'd written the captain as a black man.
It's still quite relevant today, as it's often the case that what some people perceive as "wokeness" or "pushing an agenda" is in actuality, just creative types who want to see themselves reflected in their work. Tim Federle, the director of "Better Nate Than Ever", basically said as much during an interview. [variety.com]
It was always about going back to what was authentic for me at 13. And so at 13, my favorite food was macaroni and cheese. My dream was to be a cat in “Cats” on Broadway. And I was discovering about my identity - I was like, “I bet I grow up and I become gay.” So, I wanted to thread that into this film
I'll admit though, that's oddly specific and at the risk of sounding like the publisher who didn't want to print Sisko's story, there's probably not too many people in the audience who can relate to a 13-year-old gay teenager who dreams of becoming a broadway star. Hell, I was a 13-year-old gay teenager (albeit many years ago) and I never had any aspirations of pursuing a creative career path (I prefer working on machines).
I think the mistake that writers are making today is not doing enough initial character development to get the audience to empathize with the characters in the first place. The audience sees them as just checking off a diversity checklist because the writers never bothered to make the characters anything beyond that.
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https://memory-alpha.fandom.co... [fandom.com]
Kirk kissing Uhura was so scandalous that some stations in the south wouldn't broadcast it.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.co... [fandom.com]
https://memory-alpha.fandom.co... [fandom.com]
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Good episodes, with good stories, good writing, and a good moral. Politics secondary. As for the Uhura episode, not only did it make sense in context of the episode, it wasn't shoehorned in. Refusing to let them kiss would have been the artistic suppression, in fact the studio only did it because Shatners demanded it, if I recall. Now the woke are running the studio and forcing writers and actors to compromise themselves creatively.
And that's why everything sucks now.
Re: I guess the people have spoken (Score:3)
What do you mean politics secondary, that happened just a year after Loving v. Virginia. It was political. Or the fact a woman was on the bridge at all, with a guy with a Russian accent. Or all the socialism right under your nose that maybe you wrote off because the military is basically socialist as-is, but the Enterprise didn't run around defending foreign mineral/oil interests, the interstellar banana trade or prevent the spread of (insert ideology) either did it, and there was kind of a lot of sharing.
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Star Trek is about how humans are destined to become communist.
Your complaints about Star Trek ring pretty hollow for me. It's a franchise that should just die. Of course any new Star Trek is going to suck.
I remember when Deep Space 9 came out and I gave the first few episodes a shot. It was clear that they would have to try too hard to do anything original and the concept had just exhausted itself. I haven't watched Star Trek since. That's why I'm not pissed off about where the series has gone. I don't kno
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Damn, I pity you being bedridden, at least 3 or so years ago there was Youtube as an escape from the lame "mainstream" content; but even now Youtube is being filled with low effort, AI voiced clickbait nonsense! 5 Years ago I thought the concept of spending your time watching somebody else online playing a video game was the lamest thing ever; now it seems it is some of the most entertaining content out there!
As for TV, my favourite TV show is probably still Star Trek - TNG - nothing has beaten it in over 3
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Well, I don't really listen to music, but I do like watching to people react to music on YouTube! :D But yeah, AI has ruined it, though that started in 2016-17 when they 1) gutted compensation on the platform; and 2) put into place automatically enforced, really extreme rules against uttering any remotely non-ad-friendly phrase. You can't even talk about "sexual abuse" because you'll get demonetized before the video is published.
As for TV, we entered a Golden Era with The Sopranos in 2000 or so (or perhap
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And just imagine, he is more than the meatshield for the hero!