No nuance and characters are saying the obvious stuff, because viewers are looking at another device while watching. We’re so cooked.
No nuance and characters are saying the obvious stuff, because viewers are looking at another device while watching. We’re so cooked.
On a tangential topic, why does almost every tv series changes after the first or second season?
Like not on just the story progressing, but the acting, the dialogue, the main “thing” stops being done and it just becomes a setting, that kind of thing.
Like a series about work, where they work on the first season, but on the next one they never work anymore, the theme is there, but gets different, work is just a thing they say they are doing while doing other things, maybe a scene or two they work.
Or the series keeps getting weirder and weirder, not on a change of topic, but the “events” keep getting more extreme, like they ran out of ideas.
Idk if it is something just I notice, but I keep seeing over and over: I like the first season, it seems like the hook, but on the next season it seems the same tv series, but with a different tone, like the company just says “yeah, but now don’t talk about this, do that way because this tv series did this and made money” or the ideas were all made just for the first season.
Or I’m being dumb hahaha
Bc of capitalism, the same answer as why everything else is done.
In this case, someone may have a passion project and spend literally ten whole years writing and tinkering and crafting and perfecting that first season, and then continue the natural storylines into the second season as well. Eventually though, they just start phoning it in, as they put their more creative juices into writing their next project, while they crank out season after season on a deadline. Milking the show dry, whether it has anymore left to give or not.
And that’s not even necessarily because they are greedy or otherwise want to - studio execs think that they know better than writers how to write, so whereas when a show was created it was made by writers, over time each show increasingly becomes written to please the studio execs idea of what the audience wants, rather than the artists’ idea of what the audience wants.
So of course they suck - under those conditions, how could they not?
It certainly feels like you described. But damn, I just wanted something that didn’t just gave that drop in quality from one season to another, I just quit after one or two seasons.
I remember reading about the making of Stranger Things, on Netflix, by that pair of brothers. They swore to themselves to do exactly 2 things when they made and sold the show: (1) never sell out for the sake of money - especially don’t make stupid CGI animations that suck rather than staying true to the art - and (2) don’t keep the show going longer than like one season, or basically don’t just make them for the sake of making them, but instead keep it tight and only make something with a purpose in mind, you know?
And that explains why the show went off the deep end immediately, after like the first season. The brothers had a fight and I think split up even over it. One wanted the purity of the show, while the other wanted the cold hard cash.
Money isn’t wrong. Even the love of money isn’t wrong. It’s wanting it above all else that leads to the enshittification of everything that that attitude touches.
Fortunately there are other things to enjoy, besides TV:-).
I still enjoy watching the final(?) season, but I was very late to the Stranger Things train (watched it ~anyear ago) and the break between season 1&2 was there and quite obvious, especially when you watch them back to back. At the start of season 3 I was like “they’re trying to make the same story arc again, but bigger and escalate it even more right?”
Now, I’m more interested in how “deep” they manage to go with it and how much they can escalate while retelling basically the same story arc again and again.
Money is bad and we should have an economy without it
Easier said than done.
More generally, human nature is prone to biases, and unless we resist them we will continually fall prey to them.
For example, just because chasing after money to the exclusion of all else is bad doesn’t make communism good, and even if it were, well I don’t want to get banned from this community by going further there, talking about contemporary and recent examples of nations that tried to implement that:-).
Stay curious!
Australia used to have an economy without money and it was good