I mostly don’t even bother watching new series anymore, I’ve gotten so used to the good ones getting canceled way too soon
If it’s bad, you didn’t waste time on it.
If it’s good, it’ll get canceled before finishing.
If it’s good and finished, it’ll still be good and finished when you binge it all later.
Though IMHO, the problem is the same (capitalism…) problem affecting film and gaming: people have forgotten how to spread their bets out over a wide mid-market for modest returns overall. Instead, everyone is a gambler now and only invests huge money into safe projects they expect a monster return on.
You look at older shows and they weren’t all great, but they’d make 40 episodes a season for under a million. Often, they weren’t even all that good, but you’d get a few episodes a season that were solid and eventually, usually after 2 seasons, the cast and crew has learned enough about the characters and the making of the show to be good at it. Shows and creators today have no runway. You don’t get 80 episodes to figure it out and start making regularly good content. You get like 1 episode to become a mega success, or you get canceled.
If you want to make games you either become an indie and work with a dozen people or less, or join one of the like 5 megastudios that make all the big games on a team of thousands. The 50 to 100 person mid budget studio barely exists today in any industry. It’s killing content, killing variety, and it’s going to kill the mediums because the next generation of creators doesn’t have a place to learn and practice their craft.
It’s this whole culture where being “mid” is somehow horrifying. Either everything you do has to be a world record and the best most amazing thing ever, or you might as well not bother. Everything’s been “optimised” to death.
I mean, that’s because we have more options for entertainment than ever before. If something is mid, why should I watch it over the 10,000+ 10/10s that I haven’t experienced yet, or even worse, why should I watch it over rewatching one of the 100s of 10/10s I already know and love? There’s only so many hours in the day that you have to watch something, why would you willingly spend time on mid content?
We have more options, most of which is just “optimized” bullshit that appeals to the biggest possible audience and takes absolutely no chances with anything, and you’ve been conditioned to only want that instead of something that might sometimes not give you the best possible dopamine hit
I was focused on the production side, which I do think is primary in this issue, but i agree that there’s a cultural issue on the consumer side as well.
I think it’s an artifact of our accelerated society. When I was a kid, most of the adults I knew worked fairly regular hours at one job, came home, and watched a tremendous amount of cable TV. Movies were a special occasion at the theater, or there was some home theater. And video games were still new.
Now, most of the adults i know either work 2 jobs or work 1 job that stresses them out badly enough to be two. It also feels like maintaining life is just harder. Things should be faster but there’s so many scams and middlemen now that you spend a lot of time researching and navigating situations to avoid trouble.
They stream media and play video games, and they have so much choice but so little time that it feels like you need to maximize the fun time.
But I think all that is still downstream from the capitalist mode of overproduction.
But I think all that is still downstream from the capitalist mode of overproduction.
Oh yeah absolutely, this is all basically just a metastasis at this point
The thing that burns me the most is that the cancellation of the show likely means that there will not be any further re-recordings of the audiobooks with Rosamund Pike. She re-recorded the first four books of the series to match the show.
They took a popular series from a genre fanbase, hoping that it would cross over.
But, they then tinkered with the original material so much that the fan base they were hoping would boost it to broader popularity was split, reducing hype outside of the book fans.
So, the hype didn’t spread.
But, the show was also weak in its own right with wooden acting and played out tropes shoring up dubious writing choices. I’m not sure how much the flat performances were the actors not getting into character, and how much was bad direction choices, but too many of the early scenes were just bland and lacked personality.
Since the series is such that the characters are what make the epic scale relatable, a lot of people that came to the show either because an existing fan wanted to share the experience with them, or they had it come up prompted on the service just shrugged and stopped watching by the third episode.
There were definitely good parts to the show, but getting to them meant wading through a lot of meh, and that just isn’t the way to build a viewership.
I originally couldn’t finish the first episode. I went back and tried again. Made it through and wondered why I bothered. Then I forced myself to carry on and was so damn bored by the third episode I was checked out. I let it play through, but didn’t really engage.
It was just so meh.
Since they changed several of the characters’ personalities, I couldn’t even rely on preexisting engagement to carry me over until the plot got moving.
When it first came out, I knew there was no way to stay 100% with the books. There was just no way to adapt the first three books without structural changes because a lot of what goes on to progress the story is internal to the characters. Later books would be even harder to adapt. So I went in eager to see how they made it work, because they had the budget to make it work. And then you get blandness. It was the equivalent of unsalted oatmeal.
This is one of the things I most wanted done right like LOTR was. Right off the bat you saw changes that basically ruined it (looking at both men and women for dragon reborn but then characters are caught off guard by a female using male magic.) and to top it off they really dug into personality and relationship changes with a lot of screen time going through them while many other things were not shown. I personally think 100% is possible unless you mean literally doing the thought overlay like they did in the original dune movies. You don’t really have to have all the thoughts if you show what they are doing and you can add a bit of dialogue between characters that is about what they were thinking in some cases (I don’t view that as really veering away from source for that type of thing.)
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Could anyone else afford to finance this? It wont get cheaper to make.
It’s not like studios and streaming services are poor
This cost hundreds of millions, was not well received, and does not appear to be gaining a growing audience. Why would anyone want it?
That’s a different question than whether anyone could afford to finance it
I thought that part was implied
Weeellll, “not well received” is more than a bit subjective, so it was kind of hard to tell from your initial comment that you personally don’t think it’d be worth more seasons and not just that it’d be expensive to make but worth it if someone could cough up the money.
Tons of studios could easily afford it, and there’s plenty of people who did like it – enough to get us 3 seasons anyhow
They cancelled it because there weren’t enough viewers for the high costs though.
But what’s enough in this day and age? Enough to cover costs? Enough so that the studio execs can buy 5 new yachts per year instead of just 3? I have no idea how much they were actually making off WoT
Why sink money in a failed show none really cares about?
I made it through like 2 episodes and I get that diversity is important but wtf this show wants to make me believe there’s medieval villages with all ethnicities everywhere? I hate that I hate this so much.
… the wheel of time is a post-apocalyptic setting, not a medieval one. They have high literacy rates, printed books, and, yes, the Emond’s Fielders being diverse would be accurate, since they’re the remnants of a powerful kingdom that was, itself, diverse.
Here’s the real issue with the show. Any change they made replaced good writing with stale or outright hurtful tropes (they made up a character just so they could fridge her in the first episode). The End of season 1 was shot by covid and a lead leaving. And they were only just recovering the story from that in season 3.
The Two Rivers was not very diverse until after the Seanchan invasion at Falme.
… them being all Two Rivers folk before then. Show me in the text where that meant they had no diversity.
The characteristics they all share in the Book is “dark of hair and eye”, shorter than Rand, and without the Aiel style of tanning that Rand shows.
Guess what features the cast of Emond’s field all had?
That’s my point why spend hundreds of millions on a likely loser?
I too was a bit bored at times, but that even happened with GoT. I also enjoyed each season more than the last, which I’m sure is largely because of the plot, but I think the character progression was decent.
The actors were definitely growing into their roles and needed time to build chemistry. There’s always the risk of using lesser known actors, but I usually prefer that to a fully loaded A-List cast that uses the big names for marketing purposes rather than fit.
