I used to call it netflix syndrome but I think its just bad writing industry-wide
Everyone is obsessed with plot development at the expense of entertainment. The great writers know how to do both. Like for example in The Boys. That show has something spectacular happen in every single episode, while also developing the plot and the characters.
I think part of the problem is that everything is trying to be some cinematic masterpiece vs back then a lot of shows were made purely for the fun premise. The Boys definitely found a balance between the two. What I would do for another show like Chuck.
Oh man I always appreciate when someone brings up Chuck. That show (particularly the first 3 seasons) had a masterful balance of individual episode stories and overarching story. I would submit Archer did a decent job of this as well, although I think the formula was weakened during the “coma seasons”/Archer Vice. They are still great seasons, they still feel like Archer, just that they don’t build on the story that they had already invested in.
You take that back! Archer vice was one of the best seasons!
“If we don’t spend it this year, we can’t get an increase next year.”
It was great in a vacuum, it just felt like a diversion from the investment the writers had been making in the first 4 seasons.
Same with the Coma seasons. I particularly like Danger Island, but they are all fantastic as individual spinoff shows. But they do nothing to advance the plot that had been so invested in up to that point.
Stuff like Archer and Lana’s relationship, Archer’s father, Barry, could all have been more developed in that time if they had just stuck to the story they were telling rather than spending 5 seasons faffing around on other stories. Worse yet, we may have gotten more substantial character development out of Malory while Jessica Walter was still alive if they hadn’t taken those diversions.
I agree with you so much about Archer. Those middle season were ehh. The last few season when he got out the coma and he developed more as a human/dad and all that was great.
I got teary eyed when I watched the last episode with Jessica. It was a good tribute (I feel) with her even if the last episode was reused voice acting for her.
I recently rewatched Chuck and fully agree the first three seasons are very strong. I did see a few plot holes upon watching it straight through that I never caught when I watched it live.
There were a lot of shows like this around the same time.
Burn Notice had the overall arc of Michael resolving the Burn Notice but individual “criminal of the week” episodes.
Agents of Shield started as a “084 of the week” but I think around season 3 moved more toward a fully serialized show.
I think Burn Notice specifically, not necessarily started, but saw how people were starting to change how they watched shows. I believe USA Network even posted the shows the day after on their website for people to watch.
I’m okay with serialization so long as it’s a good story.
Upvote for Chuck. They lost it with the later seasons and all that “zooming” but it gave use the best dynamic duo of all time.
Ugh now I’m gonna binge the first few seasons.
You’re right. Happy Days was certainly not trying to be a masterpiece, but it was pretty fun.
As a kid it was one of my favorite shows even though in my mind in the 90s it was 50yrs old haha
I’d look to a show like The Good Place for a perfect balance.
It absolutely matters if you haven’t seen previous episodes, but each episode is still, on it’s own, great.
love that show so much
The boys are getting pretty repetitive though. If i have to listen to the French man talk about Marseille one more time i will break.
The next season is the final one. Good thing they know when to call it.
It’s a side effect of streaming. Heavenly seralzed used to have two big drawbacks. If people didn’t catch the first few episodes that didn’t have a way to get into the story. The story also had to hold peoples interest for a week before the next episode dropped. So only the best seltzer shows lasted.
Now you start the show when you want at the beginning. So instead of making an episode that’s entertaining and when next week come around you think it was good last week I’ll watch that again you get a show that encourages setting stuff up and the implying it’s about be resolved right before the episode end.
It’s great for getting you to binge and then getting renewed on a stemmer. Stemming is the best way to watch shows produced for the old weekly broadcast system but not the best environment for developing new shows.
My brother in Christ, please proof read if you’re gonna post paragraphs.
I usually do. It’s pretty rough to read it. II had intended to finish this post later but apparently posted it instead of saving the draft.
Pretty much the same with movies of the superhero and other genres. You gotta start at the beginning and only in the last 15min is Surf Dracula at max power. Then you get a couple of uninspired sequels (because sequels print money regardless), and eventually a reboot where they retell the same old Dracula-Finds-Surfing-In-His-Time-Of-Grief origin story but with a younger actor.
Nah, the first two movies are building up to showing you Surf Dracula a full power, with things being mostly in place at the end of movie 2. Then movie 3 comes along and Dracula is already over the hill and has given up on surfing.
The internet really does have everything if you search for it…
James Bond and Ethan Hunt are always just getting framed and running from their own organizations nowadays instead of doing cool missions.
Which is not at all what it’s supposed to be about. It’s annoying. I hate how gritty and dark everything tries to be these days.
Nice to have a balance though. Some of the Moore and Connery era movies were basically Austin Powers.
austin powers did to spy movies what blazing saddles did to western/cowboy movies
they had to be grittier or darker to get away from the parodies
We’re in a bit of a sticky situation. Nationalism is very unpopular now, and people have a general distrust of our government and its institutions. That is reflected in these movies, where the enemy is actually their own organization, where it would have been a foreign enemy in the past, like an actual enemy of our country. But then the depiction of the government institutions as untrustworthy in so many movies fuels people’s distrust of the government to the point where now the only stories that people will believe are where the hero is fighting internal powers. It’s a bit of circular reinforcement.
Well it’s nice to see Russia doing their part to make foreign superpowers unpopular again.
I’m itching for a James Bond where he’s up against the KGB again, and has his full kit of ultra-modern make-believe toys!
The first Kingsman movie was one of the best new Bond film, even if it had some tongue-in-cheek parody elements and openly acknowledged it. Over the top bad guy, fun gadgets, saving the world. Definitely scratches the itch for a Bond film pretty well.
And the KGB is on a rusty bicycle from 1929.
New James Bond doesn’t even have goofy gadgets
One reason I prefer watching older shows is that the format made the writing so concise. They can fit two plots and some character development into 42 minutes, unlike newer shows where it’s twenty minutes of dialog and narration every episode. For example, the last season of Discovery had as much happen as two episodes of TNG.
On the other hand, those shows hit the big reset button every week. I’d love something episodic, but what happens in previous episodes still has an effect on future episodes. Star Trek started to do that a little with DS9, but even there… O’Brien is in a mind prison for what he thinks is 20 years and he’s fine in the next episode?
We call that Star Gate.
Surely you meant Farscape?
Why not both?
I loved SG1 but they didn’t do nearly enough of that. I never watched Atlantis or the other one though.
SG-1 had a huge forward progression. At the beginning they were basically a hiking team, but by the end they had tech that surpassed Trek.
The whole episodic vs serialised thing was pretty much during that time.
It’s pretty obvious from the shows of the era.
House, for one. Earlier seasons being rather strictly episodic, and last season being a serialised joke about how ridiculous the rigid episodic nature of the earlier seasons were. Not ecactly, but…
He’s not fine on the inside
Disney Marvel shows will have the pacing of a 20 episode season but end on episode 8.
Also the ducking voice over at the end hammering home the moral of the story. No matter if it makes any sense at all.
Because sometime we all need to <verb> a <noun>, even if <unrelated thing>. There is so much <emotion> that causes us to bla bla bla I can’t even write this bullshit.
Shows these days also do a lot of “tell don’t show.” Yes, I know the McGuffin is important and why, I don’t need you to explain it to me with a full paragraph of dialog.
Gave up on the Handmaid’s Tale, as half of each episode was a flashback to one of the characters visiting a cafe in the times before Trump’s second term - which the writers probably thought was brilliant character and world building, but was actually wheelspinning.
Wait, I just described Lost too.
I feel like the only show ive seen recently that does a good flash back system is the Fallout TV show. Also as an aside that show needs a date system to show how long has passed between scenes.
And then it’s not picked up for a second season.
Which is a shame because if you look at the source material (a single issue comic from 1973 where he battles King Triton in Atlantis to free the Bikini Lesbians) you really need to understand the history of the surfboard to fully appreciate his character.
It shows 5 mins of surfing if you’re lucky. More likely it shows him about to drop into his first big wave with cheering in the background, then fades to black
It is then canceled while season 2 is in pre-production. The head writer eventually reveals S2 would’ve dealt with the rivalry between Dracula and up-and-coming surfer Nosferatu(played by the same actor as Dracula. Absolutely no one acknowledges their resemblance), leading up to the big Surf championships
Nosurferatu?
Nosurferatu would be the name of the vampire that wants to ban surfing.
Yesurferatu
Forgot to mention that his star-crossed love interest, a gay priest and silver mirror salesman whose whole value system was turned upside down by their forbidden love, is shown cheering in a close-up after their tumultuous breakup earlier in the season
Don’t stop believin’
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I literally got the ending of Surf Dracula 2024 spoiled for me at work the DAY AFTER IT CAME OUT! Like who has time to watch all 24 episodes in one evening, let alone have the audacity to talk about it out loud in a public setting…
In the latest movie adaption of the Surf Dracula (2024) by DC they already introduced the less grounded and more magical elements of the Surf Dracula franchise and even allready introduced the Surfer Werewolves to sell more toys and build up an expanded universe. They also did not even use Van Chil’sing as his archenemy but made him fight a gigantic sky hole that spawned an army of faceless minions.
F&&k you, you F&&king F&&k!!
I had to Google this because I thought it was an actual thing!!
Take your upvote and die a horrible painful death!!
[have a great weekend!]
Is this post about “Cobra Kai”?
I like watching it and yelling “WHAT THE FUCK ARE THE ADULTS DOING WHILE THIS IS GOING ON???” and “WATCH OUT FOR THOSE STAIRS!!!”
and they’re always whispering all the time too. it drives me crazy. nobody whispers that much in real life. it doesn’t make people sound more mysterious
Check your vlc settings to ensure the speaker setup matches your arrangement (so it’s not sending 5.1 to some stereo speakers)
I wish we just had sound infrastructure that was capable of taking arbitrary input channels and then remixing them to the output channels that are actually there. It just seems like an essential feature of modern sound systems on PC (and in general, really).
Yes! This would be a great OS addition - instead, have some lukewarm AI!
I hope you like sad acoustic covers of beach boys songs, cause you’re getting sad acoustic covers of beach boys songs.
Throw in a few pipe organ covers and you have yourself a deal.
Give me the beach boys and free my soul
Well, East Coast ghouls can rip I really dig those fangs they bare And the Southern ghouls with the way they kill They drain me low when I’m down there The Midwest Werewolves’ slaughter Really lasts all moonlit night And the Northern ghouls with the way they hiss They keep their thralls dead cold all night…
I wish they all could be blood-suh-sucking ghoooouuuls
Maybe I’m basic, but I love exposition over pretty much all else. I watched the entirety of Adventure Time despite not really being a fan of the humor or the main characters just because I craved more information about the history of Ooo.
i barely even watch adventure time but i spent a lot of time reading the theories of nuclear war and all that stuff
Isn’t that what Wikipedia is best used for?
Wikipedia is information that’s already been interpreted and retold by someone else. Nothing beats going to the source for your info
When it comes to a TV show you don’t like but want to know what happens, I would say it does beat it because you won’t spend time watching something you don’t like.
sometimes the thirst for lore is stronger
Have you seen the 1979 Mad Max film? He’s only mad for the final 10 minutes, he’s pretty chilled up until that point
Damn that is a solid movie. Such a unique apocalypticing world setting, shame how it ended up McGenericwood Fury Road garbage.
“That ain’t the goose.”
What I say after watching the “sequels”.
Nostalgia good, modern bad, blah blah, whatever. I just want to see Surf Dracula.
I’m guessing it’s a mystery and Surf Dracula is trying to find out why there’s so many vampire killings when vampires decided to chill out and live along side humans or maybe the vampires are getting to close to attacking the human love of their life or something and there’s gonna be an episode where Surf Dracula has to dress in a big, rubber, human suit to go day surfing (you know so the sunlight doesn’t kill them) to crack the case.
lol no, it’s a three part miniseries about how Surf Dracula uses the power of painting in watercolor to help those with general anxiety disorder.
Don’t worry, I heard Surf Dracula sucks.
No, that would mean they will have to wear the suit every episode, it can’t be a one off goof.
Just have them apply liberal amounts of waterproof suncream. Or just say vampires can survive the sun in this universe and that stereotypes are mean.
Ah see, my assumption was that Surf Dracula usually surfs at night
