I kinda get where you're coming from. While I partially disagree, since there's all sorts of great TV and shows coming out nowadays, they're all scattered across a dozen streaming services, which prevents that feeling of a unity when a show comes out, since half the people have never even heard it (ie Poker Face, on Peacock)
@@BigMek667 consider: 20 minute episodes. Modern tv often has 90 minute episodes, and barely 5-8 of them. Thats dumb. that's trying to speedrun a movie trilogy on release timing while dragging it out in actually runtime. 24 episodes is only dragged out if youre trying to write a movie trilogy, and we're talking about television.
I think one zeitgeist property of recent years is Stranger Things, and even though it started in the 2010s, I feel like it’ll wind up being largely associated with the 2020s because of how heavily nostalgic it is. In the absence of other zeitgeist fictions, and as the world gets crazier and crazier, people crave nostalgia more than ever, Hollywood definitely reflects that, and I think that’ll be this decade’s legacy
@upg5147 luckily the first season works completely alone as is so if they do suck (I also don't have much faith) the original season won't be impacted by it.
It's always good to remember the "cycle of consulting". Executives at companies hire consultants, and at some point those executives get hired by the consulting companies to become consultants, in an infinite spiral of propping themselves up. This leads to a problem where once an idea shows success, it extremely quickly spreads and take over. In the entertainement industry, right now that idea is nostalgia, it's building on established universes. There's also an element of "too much" : when there's so much content, people will gravite towards what they know, thus encouraging companies to produce even more content of what people already know.
audiences are far more scattered than they used to be. an absurd number of streaming services exist. for me the closest thing right now is how everyone seemed to be talking about frieren and now dungeon meshi (delicious in dungeon)
An insightful take and one I agree with. Thanks for talking through it, and I look forward to your exploration of how greed affects it. I think that is one of the biggest drivers. Money, and how money-backed subcultures have caused divisive upheavals. There is a lot less content nowadays that feels like it is actually FOR the consumer instead of for the producer
I couldn't agree with you more. Although not everything coming out lately is all that bad, we haven't seen any gold star content in sometime, particularly on a popular level. That aside there have been serval gold star films though (my opinion: All of Us Strangers was gold star) I blame the US economy. Downsizing of materials and products, housing prices and rent hikes have everyone anxious. Authors and screen writers need free space in their minds to fantasize and to dream, but their imagination has been downsized by worry, or overtaken by extra work hours and second jobs. But that's 8 hours a day that an author needs to head-write before they get home. Like how Stephen King wrote in his head while bussing tables. I think that as the standards of work in most positions inclines as well, it becomes difficult to space out and fantasize while on the job, as your ever expected to do more, and compete harder, and be more perfect. Secondly, there has been a huge stigmatization on "spacing out" and it has developed a negative connotation. Probably due to the extreme success of Tiktok. Meditation, stoicism, and mindfulness have grown to high acclaim and are overly sought after. Having your head in the clouds all day has been labeled ADD, and an indicator of poor mental health (which isn't always entirely wrong). But this, unfortunately, has also worked hard to defeat American and global creativity. Pessimistic, maybe, but I feel as though the machine is sanding down writers.
I disagree. There are too many great shows to watch right now. At under halfway through the decade we have: The bear, Shogun, Arcane, Dark, Abbot Elementary, House of the dragon (I haven't seen this one), Jujutsu kaisen S2, Scavenger's Reign, Barry, Succession, The boys, Invincible, Queen's Gambit and much more. There's still a lot of good stuff out there it's just buried by the pure amount of content (and paywalls) we have available to us due to streaming.
I find it fascinating that everything great came out between 2005-2010, be it Anime or Western media. With Bleach Blood War & JJK, I really have high hopes for this new Decade ✊️
I agree with those who say that streaming has something to do with it and how everything has ro wrapped up (neatly or not) in 8-10 episodes. Then you have to wait like 3 years for season 2 and attention spans aren't that long. Add on top of that strikes and other issues (pandemics, stusio changes,etc) and you have a lot of 'throw away' shows that just don't unify people like before. Not sure if we will ever get back to those days
so true. think: they could afford to give hundreds of indie or small-time directors million dollar budgets every year, each, or to make insanely well written epics, but they try the later while making the shit too focus-grouped to be good.
I think it's not so much that there's less, but that there's such a glut of on-demand media that we're unable to latch onto any singular thing. There's dozens of streaming services with millions of hours of stories to tell and they're all being told all at once with no curation or sense of deliberation, plus many of these shows are simply gated off to disparate and fractional streaming services. It's no wonder entertainment is in the state we find it today.
Idk bcz i dont watch much stuff, but in anime there are still big shows that everyone in the anime community talks about (like AoT, JJK) but not everyone watches anime of course
My theory is that this new generation of writers and show runners is not interested in telling compelling stories. They’re interested in earning “points” with their audience and others in Hollywood. They have a message to get out, but they’re not smart enough to express that message through clever writing.
I think to some degree, I agree that there isn't as much of a global interest in any one thing. And i also agree that a lot of derivative work is coming out bc the market is SO saturated it's hard not to get sucked into what's easy. But I also don't think i would exactly call what we had before a "golden age" in part because a lot of the properties that got so popular weren't NECESSARILY good and were ABSOLUTELY inescapable, and it meant a LOT of great properties got sidelined by things that weren't necessarily always better. I actually like how wide tastes can vary now and I don't have to get verbally stoned for not having seen Breaking Bad or not liking the MCU. There are still lots of good stories out there, and it doesnt feel like a bad thing that you can introduce ppl to things you love and vice versa.
"Golden age" just means that there are more than 2 good things that go mainstream. Greatness takes time, and the Golden Ages just mean things that take 10 years to make conveniently are stacked. For instead of releasing 10 great things every year, we get like 5 in 2 years.
I think there are great movies and tv shows coming out, some very original stuff mixed in with all the other mid and low tier shit. I think the fragmentation has killed the excitement, and the constant piggy backing off tentpole franchises actually kills people's interest in starting in on them so even the big ones don't derive the same frenzy they used to. I'd say the main issue is fragmentation, as many many people have been saying lately the streaming model peaked a few years ago and is now falling prey to rising costs and a constant proliferation of new or dying services. So if you don't have the streaming service running a specific show, and don't know anyone watching it or at least vocally watching it, there's nothing to prompt you to do so. I think there's also just a lack of urgency that may have existed pre-covid but has definitely been affected by the covid years. It feels like so many people just know there's a bunch of shows they need or want to watch and that they can just get around to it later (which is slightly untrue given a lot of concerns about the lack of digital preservation and immense media loss we will have for the 2000-2020 years). There's very few, if any, shows that are being dropped week to week and prompting large community conversations (risking spoilers and general FOMO) so there's no urgency to watch. Which also lessens enthusiasm towards newer shows as well.
7:30 you just have the tv on anymore and just feel ok/make it sociall. Its harder for crazy people to steal controll of you watching what you want, or they watch what they want.
A big thing I think is missing mono-culture. Everybody was kind of on the same thing at the same time and there was collective unity there. Now with everything scattered across streaming services, the rise of binge watching, and narrative story telling being turned into a way to keep subscriptions everything is just kind of bland. Of course there are gems like Blue Eye Samurai and Shogun but they are becoming far and few in between.
As someone who's with you on this 100% The things that make my blood pump and get me viscerally excited are very few and far in between but on the TV end of things? CASTLEVANIA!!! It's animation which is niche, so it's not like... going to be a Star Wars... but it could be, maybe. It's legit just incredible. X-Men '97 is another one. Better Call Saul, it's a bit premature but I'm a huge fan of House of the Dragon season 1. I think it's near perfect TV. It evokes every emotion from love, hope, to disgust, to genuine fear of a large animal in a way that most horror movies have trouble replicating. But these are niche things. and you wanna talk about things that went this way? Music. Nobody gives a fuck about music like they used to. It's all passive listening, people can't even tell you their favorite artist these days. The biggest artists have little micro cults. It's not mass appeal. Taylor Swift, a musician I don't like but my drummer does, is the closest we have to like a huge hit artist that is consistent that people can regularly talk about.
I dunno if they're "trying" so much as that's just the natural end-point of a particular kind of corporatisation of media. Every time we get out of it, suits just drag us back.
I think its less that we don't have cultural touchstones anymore, or that we have less genuinely good things coming out (EEAAO, Spiderverse, Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon are just a few examples of movies that hold their own against what the 2000s and 2010s offered), I think it's more that the corporate fingers feel all over everything we consume more than they ever have. To use the MCU as an example, it was evident that up through Endgame they were telling an overarching story. Not everything was good (not by a long shot) but everything felt like a piece of a puzzle, a part of the overall whole. Since then, everything has been more like an advertisement, a hook. Even if an individual movie is good, its purpose isn't to fit into anything. Its purpose is to keep you coming for the next one, whether its good or bad doesn't matter. All that matters is that the Mouse gets a little bit more of your money. Everything feels stale because its all plain cash grabs, and the times they are good feel like accidents because there was still one sane person left to guide it somewhere. We get Indiana Jones and Star Wars and The Rock dangled in front of us, like cheap nostalgia is just some baby toy. All the while they overwork their artists (CG, animators, writers, etc) and replace what they can with machines and AI until more and more of art just feels pointless. They imitate art like a doppelganger in the service of getting a hold of your wallet, or even worse have AI go through the motions of what it interprets of human stories as an even more soulless attempt to imitate artists, until someday that's all that will be left. There are still amazing works of fiction to be found, but less of them can be found through the mess of cash grabs and tainted works
I think there's a burn out effect stemming from corporate greed and "agenda" getting in the way of good story telling. It has worn people down and hype/expectations are just low. I have friends who no longer watch anything new and just rewatch the glory days of stuff instead because they have been repeatedly disappointed by mediocre writing and sociopolitical propaganda pushed in all media in general
I don't entirely agree with... really any part of that. At least if we're counting movies, those big tentpoles still exist. Even people who haven't seen Dune have definitely heard of it and probably seen the memes. Barbie and Oppenheimer forced every critic to come up with some take that included both of them. There are a few shows like that, too: I've had a friend who doesn't play video games ask me to show him The Last of Us games, because he loved the show so much. Even the big tentpoles of the past weren't entirely because of cable. I guess Breaking Bad was on AMC, but I don't know anyone who watched it there. Firefly got to be a massive influence despite being pretty much destroyed by cable, but it got popular before streaming -- it got popular on DVD! Some of those aren't nearly as big as we assume. Not everyone watched Firefly. Not everyone watched Avatar! To the extent that this *is* happening... I don't hate it. Before, during, and after that golden age, a lot of my favorite things were pretty niche. I love that Marvel was so good for so long, but I love that shows like Scavenger's Reign and Blue Eye Samurai get to exist, and I think the degree to which streaming providers have to compete plays a role.
@@Richard_Nickerson yeah totally, i just think saying the internet is too generalized and english is annoying (it's my first language so youre allowed to make fun of me about it)
Just gonna put this out there: If you think we've long left the golden age of tv shows/series or whatever, I have a few titles for you. Andor. Arcane. Invincible. The Boys. The 3-Body Problem. All of these came out in the last couple of years. All of them are amazing. Well, the writers for The Boys brought on the C-Team for season 3 and it was a bit underwhelming in the final few episodes, but I consider that more of a hiccup for now than a permanent stain on the series. It can recover. In any case, these shows aren't just good. They far outclass countless "great" shows I watched in times long foregone. There is still a ton of fantastic media to watch with excellent writing, cinematography, action, introspective characters, commentary on social politics without being annoying, and etc. Personally? While there might be a ton of Marvel Slop and dogwater media out there, I happen to think we're in the golden age right now.
I agree that there aren't a ton of huge cultural touch-stones. I think it's streaming service related... tons of derivative stuff out there but mostly it's just so fractured for viewers. Anyway if you haven't watched it Severance was pretty high quality, the second season will be out at some point. But back to the fracturing it was mostly just pushed out on Apple TV without much advertising. I honestly don't think you would like Shogun--I'll probably get butchered for this: You can tell the show is self-serious and wants to be cool. It's just a bad vibe if you're really sensitive about that stuff and I think you might be.
You're getting old, bro. Every generation goes through this existential transition, and every individual feels the growing distance from their personal golden age. I think the solution is to create and wear your inspirations proudly, keep their spirit alive, take them to new places.
