There’s no way it took 3 years to film 6 fucking episodes of a show that is just people talking in the same location every time.
The modern Prestige Television format is more in line with making a movie cut into episodes than making a serial-run TV show.
If you compare, say, the Mandalorian to Xena or Buffy, it’s night-and-day different in the actual design and production. Nevermind the post-production with CGI and after-effects. Consider those 6 episodes a two-hour long movie and, yeah, 3 years isn’t outrageous.
The Andor series was blowing north of $12M/episode. Go back to 90s-era Buffy and it ran around $2M, by comparison. Xena was being filmed for barely $1M/ea. House of the Dragon was $20M per episode (as compared to $6M/ep for the Season 1 GoT). Consider that The Walking Dead ran a meager $3M its first season, while WandaVision was going through $25M.
Even if it looks like people are just standing and talking, you have to consider whether these people are heavily CGI’d or shooting in a very inhospitable place for filming or whether the people being filmed are commanding enormous salaries (both Friends and Seinfield cast members were demanding north of $500k/ep by the final season).
Yeah, and I’ll admit Xena definitely looks kinda wonky today, but that’s more because props didn’t have to look realistic on a 360i screen. Buffy mostly holds up great. It’s campy and you can see the rubberyness of monsters and such, but that doesn’t take from it meaningfully. Hell Star Trek TNG on a modern big screen still looks pretty good.
I think Game of Thrones broke the minds of TV execs. Apple TV seems to actually be following the old HBO model of throwing a ton of money at shows and it pays off for Severance and Murderbot, both shows that would’ve been on HBO 20 years ago. But Netflix was supposed to be the “everyone uses it” type deal. It’s just burning so much money on production quality where a lot of shows would be similarly good without it.
I canceled Netflix over the price partly, and over the killing account sharing, but mostly it was because they kept killing shows I liked and weren’t putting out nearly enough stuff I wanted to watch to keep me. The price value proposition wasn’t there. Also the quality (especially of writing) rapidly approached slop designed by committee.
The modern Prestige Television format is more in line with making a movie cut into episodes than making a serial-run TV show.
If you compare, say, the Mandalorian to Xena or Buffy, it’s night-and-day different in the actual design and production. Nevermind the post-production with CGI and after-effects. Consider those 6 episodes a two-hour long movie and, yeah, 3 years isn’t outrageous.
The Andor series was blowing north of $12M/episode. Go back to 90s-era Buffy and it ran around $2M, by comparison. Xena was being filmed for barely $1M/ea. House of the Dragon was $20M per episode (as compared to $6M/ep for the Season 1 GoT). Consider that The Walking Dead ran a meager $3M its first season, while WandaVision was going through $25M.
Even if it looks like people are just standing and talking, you have to consider whether these people are heavily CGI’d or shooting in a very inhospitable place for filming or whether the people being filmed are commanding enormous salaries (both Friends and Seinfield cast members were demanding north of $500k/ep by the final season).
Yeah, and I’ll admit Xena definitely looks kinda wonky today, but that’s more because props didn’t have to look realistic on a 360i screen. Buffy mostly holds up great. It’s campy and you can see the rubberyness of monsters and such, but that doesn’t take from it meaningfully. Hell Star Trek TNG on a modern big screen still looks pretty good.
I think Game of Thrones broke the minds of TV execs. Apple TV seems to actually be following the old HBO model of throwing a ton of money at shows and it pays off for Severance and Murderbot, both shows that would’ve been on HBO 20 years ago. But Netflix was supposed to be the “everyone uses it” type deal. It’s just burning so much money on production quality where a lot of shows would be similarly good without it.
I canceled Netflix over the price partly, and over the killing account sharing, but mostly it was because they kept killing shows I liked and weren’t putting out nearly enough stuff I wanted to watch to keep me. The price value proposition wasn’t there. Also the quality (especially of writing) rapidly approached slop designed by committee.
I couldn’t handle the in-app advertisements. That whole year where they kept trying to give me shitty video games was the last straw.