The Demand for Mature Fantasy - Intentionally Blank Ep. 147 

Brandon just wait til you hear about the Fallout Boy track titled "Champagne for My Real Friends, Real Pain for My Sham Friends."

One of the reasons why I really enjoyed Dark on Netflix. It felt like they wrote the three seasons of the show before ever filming the first one. It had a coherent story that felt like they intended it only to be the three seasons from the get go and didn't want it to go beyond that.

I'm pretty sure Thanos smiled when Brandon said superhero movies were inevitable.

Dan, as a fellow depression sufferer, I just want to give you a big hug because I’ve been there, in some ways I am still there, and I appreciate yall being so open about it as well.

At the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, they have a replica of Sunflowers which you can actually touch to feel the texture of the paint. Maybe Isaac can get away with touching it with his tongue.

Your discussion about long form content reminded me of Korean dramas. One of the things that drew me to them in the first place is the fact that they’re so self contained. Sure, some of them get second seasons, but most manage to tell a very complete story in 16-ish episodes. I find it works especially well for love stories as you’re really able to give the relationship time to develop which makes the pay off seem so satisfying. I don’t believe that the scripts are usually set in stone before they start filming though.

Shogun on Hulu is a perfect example of the "miniseries" concept! It's based on a book and they've done an incredible job with casting, action, dialogue, cinematography, etc in the 7 out of 10 episodes that have been released so far, and the creators have made it clear that this is all we're getting. It's a fantastic show.

I'm all for it we are entering the Golden Age of the mini-series

@31:15 - This is, right here, why I don't enjoy a lot of American shows. So it turns out I've been looking out for long-format storytelling and not a show. Also explains why shows like Dark succeed. Everything felt cohesive as a story and there was foreshadowing, character arcs, timed reveals and mysteries that weren't necessarily revolved around the episode format.

The long form discussion is exactly what I've been thinking but could express it so eloquently.

Unless they've recovered all 60,000 litters of wine, is it not possible that some large quantity was stolen, and spilling the rest was just a way to cover their tracks, or convince authorities nothing was stolen?

Would love to hear Brandon’s take on Frieren, the high fantasy anime that just finished airing. The character focus and fine craftsmanship are incredible.

You can't talk about the YA Boom of the early 2000s and 2010s without talking about the Harry Potter films, yet here we are lol

As an animator I wouldn’t want to start animating if the storyboard isn’t finished. The way Hollywood starts filming is crazy

They could start a newsletter and call it The Wine-Waster's Guide.

I just wanted to thank you for all of your work. I don't know how I will be a person without them. I don't know the correct words to express my feelings, I can not find them as near as you find the words but there are no limit for my gratitude for you. Thank you.

There was a disgruntled ex employee of a winery here in Woodinville WA that broke in and released $600,000 of wine onto the floor this last December. So dumb!

“Weird old guy” is definitely less an age thing and more of a state of mind thing. Maybe it’s accelerated if you serve in a bishopric

I really liked the discussions on mini-series here. There's a huge space in-between standard TV Series and Movie that can be played in. I think The White Lotus is a great example of a show that does this well.

17:48 Eragon came out several years before Hunger Games. The YA fantasy boom attempt came from Harry Potter’s success and Twilight. The YA apocalyptic boom attempt came from Hunger Games, which I think replaced the studios’ YA fantasy emphasis.

I have a (poorly researched) theory, an opinion if you will, that what you read as a youth is your genre of choice for the rest of your life. Older generations read books like Hardy Boys, Boxcar Children, and Nancy Drew are now the generation that enjoys episodic crime procedurals. However Millienials and Gen Z really shifted from those episodic books to serialized fantasy like Harry Potter and Percy Jackson. Now that generation is growing up and they are looking for a more mature version of their childhood fandoms. This is why the success of Game of Thrones and the Witcher. It's also why we all have found the cosmere and want it adapted.

Man they seem like such good friends, my friends all have depression but refuse to talk about it with anyone. My entire friend group has depression but just soldier on alone. It's rough being the groups golden retriever type

Another excellent podcast! Loved the first hand experience Brandon tells while working with showrunners.

The TV serie of Golden Compass is good

Such a good insight on long for miniseries versus 10 episodes of an episodic show! My favorite stories and TV shows are those that clearly worked on the whole concept (supernatural season one through five)

It looks like we have a couple of neat westerns on the way this year. One is the Kevin Costner two part film, and I noticed a trailer has come out for what looks like a western with Viggo Mortensen. I’m excited to see both of these and I hope they are refreshing.

His dark materials (The Golden Compass) TV show is actually really good

Definitely should watch the His Dark Materials TV show. It’s a great adaptation.

I really like the idea of the Era of Mini-series! Like a lot!! It would be a fresh cleansing of the pallet from what’s been in the Hollywood industry we’re seeing now days.

Regarding scripts not being completed when TV Shows are being made, as frustrating as that is from a long-form storytelling perspective, that's what keeps writers employed and gives them living wages. If writers finished writing before the show started filming, the networks would cut them off payroll at the end of pre-production. This is partially one of the issues that was addressed in the recent writer's strike, because Netflix, and other streaming services were starting to do that, and then on top of that Streaming residuals are much lower than network TV residuals, so it was almost impossible for us screenwriters to make a living wage. That being said, I really hope we can find a happy medium in which writers for long form shows are kept on throughout the filming process, while still having finished screenplays before shooting begins and an entire plan for a season finished before production.

Sorry can't let you give rings of power and wheel of time a pass, ever. Still love everything you make!

You should get whoever did the queens gambit to do the stormlight archives. That was exactly what you are saying you would like out of long form story telling.

What I crave to see is a mature epic fantasy book written beautifully, linguistically and has good world building with a passionate burning romance of a YA fantasy book.

Absolutely missed out on the pun “Pinot no more”

the wine stealer gives me an idea for a short story of ghostbloods perpetrating a heist to divert the hion lines

I'm going to bring up Babylon 5. It's not a perfect example of what Dan and Brandon were talking about in terms of long-form storytelling in a TV format, but, while it didn't have the process, it achieved the result. A 110 episode story - 77 hours (give or take) that more or less followed a planned course from beginning to end, even with changes due to actors having real lives, and due to the entire network folding, despite the scripts themselves only being written with the usual lead time. Of course, that was because JMS had the entire five year arc in his head (in greater or lesser detail) and was willing and able to improvise around it without breaking it. And I have no idea how he managed to pull that part off. Of course, as a production model, it's neither sustainable nor transferrable. On the other hand, I'm not sure how you produce a long-form story - particularly if it's supposed to be an adaptation - without having someone capable of both holding the entire story in their head, and of saying yes to improvisations and inspirations that wouldn't break it. You could chunk it down into seasons or short arcs, so that you can get each chunk scripted and edited, but you still run into the problem of today's brilliant idea causing trouble two seasons later. Giving the Rohirrim modern communication speeds so that Theoden can know that the Fords of Isen have been taken without having to wait for a messenger to actually carry the message seems reasonable as a way of making things more intuitive for a modern audience member, but it means that heading for Helm's Deep changes from an act of desperation in response to a changing tactical situation to a deliberate decision to march his civilian population through No Man's Land... I've also long held that Smallville's greatest weakness was also its greatest strength - its ties to established DC canon as a Young Superman story - it was a strength by providing a deep pool of references and colourful characters to draw upon (particularly in later seasons when DC were more willing to let them raid the toychest) but it was also a weakness when they kept wanting to explore interesting alternate takes on their versions of the characters, which would have strayed too far from what was decreed to be their future states... On the other hand, there are also cautionary tales of what happens when you don't have a plan to follow. The 2000s Battlestar Galactica reimagining actually did a pretty good job, considering how painfully obvious it became that they were just making it up as they went, but the X-Files (and probably Lost as well, but I recognised the signs and steered clear, so can't confirm from my own knowledge) got lost in its own ever shifting mythos with no idea how or when they should reach any sort of endpoint...

I know and appreciate that you both have a ton of work in your lives already, but I would absolutely LOVE to see you collaborate on a project like Gaiman and Pratchett for Good Omens. I think it could be a lot of fun

His Dark Materials is great on HBO. It had me feeling all the emotions. Brandon you should definitely watch it. I actually just finished the last episode yesterday.

Am I the only one that feels like Larian Studio would be the perfect game studio to make a Cosmere game ? Those guys and Brandon would go along so well given their mutual love for high-quality, and "let's move the industry forward and show publishers how it's done" kind of mentality.

I agree with the script writing complexity in Hollywood. I do find the opportunity to do miniseries like the older Sam Neil Merlin series or even a more similar style to how British shows operate to be a possible direction we see the industry move into.

I would love for Brandon to have a discussion on pop culture with the guys from the Watch on the Ringer. I think they would have a great, knowledgeable conversation on the state of storytelling in Hollywood.

The only streaming series I’ve seen so far that actually takes advantage of the freedom given by the streaming platform is the zombie show Black Summer on Netflix. The episodes are as long as they need to be to tell the story, more akin to chapters in a book. They aren’t aiming for some artificial time limit the way commercial TV does it, which breaks everything down to half-hour or hour-long episodes. A couple of the episodes of Black Summer are 44 minutes long. A couple are 31-33 minutes long. The finale for season 1 was just 21 minutes. Watching it is a completely different feeling from every other show because the rhythm established back in the 1950s to sell products is completely ignored. If a chapter/episode needs to be 36 minutes long, that’s how long it is. If the next one needs to be 48 minutes, so be it. It’s refreshing, and I wish other shows followed suit.

I think the youtuber Dominic Noble did a video about golden compass. He has a series called Lost In Adaptation where he discusses the differences in film adaptations of books and whether or not they worked. Really good stuff i definitely recommend.

Van Gough paintings, do contain egg yolks (considering that is how some colors were mixed at the time), so maybe they could be considered food. The paint also contains mercury tho' so I wouldn't suggest licking any if the opportunity ever presented itself. :D

BEEF was a perfect limited series. 👏🏽

Given how good Dune 2 is doing, i think science fantasy is going to be big. OR given that people are still trying to scratch the GoT itch, just fantasy could do well too. Ee really just need a movie to light the spark. Which begs the question, how are the cosmere movies coming along? Because if they land that could be the spark.

Someone did that to a Winery in Woodinville WA. They lost about 24,000 bottle worth of wine when someone broke in and opened the spigots on some vats over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Dans diet is my daily usual, soda and a slice of bread *chefs kiss*

still mad we didn't get a huge pirate boom after Pirates of the Caribbean took off

@13:50 Message From Space was kinda cool. Old fashioned FX, over the top, but still cool.

I’m glad Dan is back with a beard

Brandon's unintentional shout out to Five Finger Death Punch's song "Sham Pain"

It could have been a hiest! If one of the Powers in the Food Heist Black Market owned a competitors wine, or a bunch of the previous year's batch, the loss of 2 mil of wine might make other wind more expensive. Buying cheap before the vandalism and selling high in the weeks and months afterwards would turn a tidy profit...

The wheel of Time show fails to adapt the story on so many levels that I can't not blame Rafe anymore.

631 still haunting us T_T

It's interesting; I habituated myself into eating even when I didn't feel like it, in order to keep my energy up when I'm sick, and I suspect that helps me with not wanting to eat when depressed, too. Unfortunately, this also means I'm fatter than I'd like to be, and depression unmotivates me from acting on that adequately. (And yeah, I know exercise helps mood. It doesn't for me, but I should still do it for the more typical reasons.)

28:43 describes the korean Dorama formula

(Mid-heist) "Oh no, it's the feds! Leave the wine!" -- "The FBI" -- "Don't be silly, this is a food heist! It's the FDA!"

On His Dark Materials aka Golden Compass. I first read the series. Then I watched the film and I really disliked it. Lyra was really off. The film shows Lyra as a fair haired likable pretty girl which in books she was really not. I also hated the film for flopping the ending and it being the only film. For both of those reasons I really liked the series. Lyra there is the closest to how I imagined her when reading: boyish, bratty, while being fiercely loving and caring. And the ending drove just as many tears out of me as the ending in the books. Don't get me wrong, there is quite a number of problems with the series. But what counts is that they managed to finish it and made a fair job out of it.

I was growing up in the Bible Belt when Golden Compass came out and it was probably the last gasp of the satanic panic I recall because I remember the outcry about this movie before it even came out that “God is the villain” which coincidentally got Harry Potter off the hook. The fact that it was a boring film was sorta secondary and never came up in those days in my circle. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy somehow flew under the radar and that was the beginning of a very long journey for me. But that’s a story for another time.

Golden Compass movie. Its like you're reading cliffnotes on the book.

I'd be curious to hear you both talk about the new Shogun miniseries adaptation on FX.

The Grapes of Wrath "Wine Heist group" :)

Dan from a fellow espresso depresso... not eating while alone is definitely a depression thing

Hollywood is a long trainwreck of taking the wrong lessons from any success. Also, don't watch Halo season 2. Save yourself the heartache.

Silo is pretty good. Based on Wool a sci-fi book.

To echo others in the comments, Shogun should be used as a template for long-form content going forward. Not that they all have to be exactly that length or that tone or that genre, but they need to tell a compelling, continuous story that respects their characters and - FINALLY - ends. Just ends. Tells its story, tells it well, and closes it out without filler and without any intent to go even one step further.

0:40 well, now I know that Brandon has memos sent to his desk whenever a celebrity does something weird. lol

WHOA! I haven’t tuned in in a while. You both have beards now?!?!?!

Talk about the new dune! For a full video

Brandon has the classic Santa nose and he has glasses but Dan would be a good Santa too

The Grapes of Splash

I always thought Dafne Keen would make a good Vin from His Dark Materials

I think that choosing the right topic for the podcast is very important, lately I've been ignoring most episodes because they arent that attractive, but this was a good one, thanks.

Film Editors are underrated

I'm not 100% sure, but I believe Eragon's popularity was a number of years before the Hunger Games.

I honestly don't think we're going to have any meaningful advances in long-form Fantasy until we collectively get over our disregard of animation, and the sheer untapped potential of animated work aimed at adults. No matter the context, live-action shows will always have to budget and ration out the fantastical elements that animation gets for the cost of admission. (Can you imagine the constant costs of making *Roshar* in live-action?) Not only that, but the ability to render in different art styles, use animation techniques and colors to convey emotion, and the ability to easily keep the same character even if the actor ages or swaps out entirely, are all advantages completely unavailable to live-action. But audiences and studios currently consider animation solely a toy for children (even though most Marvel films are 50+% animation anyway at this point), and are so convinced that you need a Real Human Face to connect with audiences that they have Master Chief take off his helmet. It's easy to say that this means we *can't* make more adult animation because there 'isn't a big enough audience'... but honestly? The only way to build an audience is to take that risk, and keep taking it. Between stuff like Arcane and Blue Eye Samurai that are unapologetically ahead of their time, to myriad western animated shows with solid worldbuilding, story, and characters (Avatar, Owl House, Infinity Train, etc) that *strain* at the limitations imposed on them by the title of 'kids show', the tide is already turning in favor of animated drama. How fortunate that this coincides with rising demand for mature fantasy :D Here's hoping many take the plunge!

I've seen a huge boom, particularly in books, of romance/erotic fantasy. Not my cup of tea, but GoT I feel really normalized hyper sexual fantasy for mainstream (as you spoke of milestone moments)

I think anime will eventually make it to the blockbuster big screen. It’ll need to accompany some newer technology. It’ll need to be formatted correctly.

If it was a competing winery that dumped the wine it could be a case of food unjust enrichment.

I feel like I haven’t properly looked forward to a movie in ages. Marvel kind of died, and I’ve lost my yearly event movies. I wasn’t a huge fan of Dune, as one who doesn’t like sand. I think Spiderverse 3 is the only thing I’m actively looking forward to right now. I want to go to the movies, but nothing there right now feels super worth it. I think the last thing I saw in theaters was Five Nights at Freddy’s. I feel like that might be sad.

Here's a question I've always had watching any of these live streams where Brandon is signing stuff: The pages come to him in a big stack, and he signs them, and then moves them on to one of four different stacks without rhyme or reason. Then someone comes by, stacks all four together into one stack and carries them away. So, what is the point of separating them into four stacks? Has he ever addressed that?

I mean Rings of Power AND Halo are both wildly off the mark....

It could be that the end of the blockbuster era is because leisure activities like going to the movies is absurdly expensive.

Week 19 of persistently asking for an intentionally blank episode on Marching Band! How’s your week Brandon?

It's funny how the issues that Brandon brings up with The Golden Compass movie are also the exact issues that the show has, to possibly a bigger extent even. I'd say it's overall better than the movie, but still his description of what the movie is like could have 100% been describing the show.

11 minutes in and I just want to know if Dan got some food!

Adjusted for inflation Water World is still in the top 20 most expensive movies I believe.

Space Opera realyy has to be done in serial form. It's to big to fit into standalone movies well. It took Starwars 6 feature length movies to fit in two story arcs. Honor Harrington by David Drake Leay/Mundy by David Drake, and Frontlines by Marko Kloos, would all be ripe series for adaptation right about now.

Hmmm. Brandon's almost convinced me not to be so annoyed about Frodo sending Sam away in the Peter Jackson films... ^.^'

Curious if Brandon Sanderson has seen "The Boys" and believes their scripts are written as he said at the end show. I believe they finish all the scripts before starting filming, and is one of the reasons the seasons take so long to come out, they come out when they are ready, not because of an arbitrary deadline.

Maybe I don’t fully understand portal fantasy, but I wouldn’t have thought Superheroes were those (even if Endgame had a shit ton of portals)

Just finished Season 2 of Halo and it is is night and day better than season 1

i have a confession...i skip the food heists

And by the way it's not about taking food, it's about breaking food. Destroying the status quo because the status is not quo.

The problem with Rings of Power is that Amazon is Dan Aykroyd from Tommy Boy. They have no interest in selling Tolkien, they just want to slap Tolkein's name on their own products so that they sell better.

Hmm…what’s the next big in popular culture? Not sure. But i myself am steeped in the anime world right now, whereas a few years ago i didn’t want anything to do with anime. That said, anime is now mainstream. McDonalds has a deal with an anime company right now. Netflix has been heavily invested and even so now after the success of the LA One Piece, now with WIT studio doing yet another One Piece anime (I’m excited for that as I love WIT studio). I think even Disney is starting to invest in anime…something to do with Bleach. I don’t think anime will be as mainstream as Marvel was in the US, but it definitely is big around the world. All i know is, all of the One Piece fans are happy right now (i mean besides having to deal with the recent death of Akira Toriyama). Star Wars and Marvel fans - not so happy.

Is food vandalism vandalism WITH food, or vandalism OF food? (on edit, this got covered. NVM.) Old paints were high in lead and other toxins, btw. More on food vandalism, did we ever consider when protesters splashed the Mona Lisa with soup? Surely that's worthy of food vandalism detention?

@24:49 Like… Star Trek since 2009 😭

Wow 😳