Comment by coding123
3 months ago
I don't understand why TV sucks so bad. I mean when do we get the next alias that has 24 episodes a season and 8 or 9 seasons.
3 months ago
I don't understand why TV sucks so bad. I mean when do we get the next alias that has 24 episodes a season and 8 or 9 seasons.
Shorter attention span these days. Viewers want a payoff immediately and don't want to wait a whole season.
Aside from streaming, commercial breaks are getting longer and episode content shorter. Content is only half the runtime now. If they put a rerun between each new episode, viewers stay engaged, but they get a whole bunch more commercial spaces for free.
We can't even have books any more to get content at our own pace. AI is going to produce too much crap to sort through, unless you stick to the known authors, but that just confirms this article's point.
> AI is going to produce too much crap to sort through
There will be money to be made in manual curation again soon.
As in magazine style, not influencer style. Where it's not the producer paying for an ad, but the readers paying for the editor doing their job.
If it has been done for writing for a couple hundred years, it can be done for video entertainment as well. It's already done for video games to a point, although some review sites look like payola now.
I think one component of it is the devaluing of writing in the industry. A big issue in the most recent WGA strike (mostly glossed over in favor of obsessing over the AI stuff) was studios pushing really hard to turn writing into one-off gig work instead of a stable position. A lot of successful shows have a first season that is lackluster or just plain "off" because they hadn't figured out what the show was actually about, and I suspect that excessive commoditization of the writing process is a recipe for producing that "weird first season" every season.
Devaluating writers probably hurts, but you see the "weird first season" even in older shows. The 1960s series Get Smart and Dick Van Dyke Show had first seasons that were much weaker than what the show would become, to cite a couple of examples. There probably is no substitute for a period of getting your sea legs under you as a writer.
What I'm saying is that I suspect writers need to be attached to a specific show for a while for that seasoning/maturity/"sea legs" process to happen for the show. I don't think it works if there's just a procession of people who only write one or two episodes and then move on to other shows.
To be fair, there is the odd exception where one writer just single-handedly cranks out the scripts (e.g. Joe Straczynski writing all of season 3 of Babylon 5), but that's the exception for a reason.
>when do we get the next alias that has 24 episodes a season and 8 or 9 seasons
When? It'll be 3 years late when you discover a cult classic that was canceled for abysmal ratings after 6 episodes. Which is why they'll never make it.
We'll never have the same experience as Alias when we no longer have to revolve our schedules around the broadcast time!