I’m starting to think “prestige TV” is a curse. Every new show is:
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Gorgeous cinematography
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Acting so good it should win Oscars
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Writing that’s basically literature
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A budget that could fund a small nation’s GDP
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CG that makes real life look low resolution
…and then they vanish for three years.
By the time season 2 shows up:
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I’ve forgotten who half the characters are.
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The actors have aged so much it looks like a historical drama about making season 1.
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Society has moved on, memes are dead, fandoms have dissolved, and the only people talking about the show are me and one guy on Tumblr named “WolfDad_94.”
I miss the days when TV was a little worse. Back then, you could crank out 22 episodes a year, the plot was 60-80% filler, and nobody cared if the lighting was realistic because you didn’t have to wait until your kids were in high school to watch the next season.
Bring back slightly crappy TV. I want my stories on time, not perfect.
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Honestly, 100% agree.
This was true a few years ago. It’s all back to shit now.
Honestly a lot of modern TV shows should be movies
Honestly yea. I think a perfect example of this is Andor. Had a 2 year gap between season and I forgot who everyone was and what everyone did.
That’s why I never start watching a show until all the seasons are out.
The shows you’re looking for are now the Reality TV industry.
a balance between the timing and quality is what we should really be asking for. If it’s 80% filler I’m not watching it.
I don’t think it’s right to say that it’s become too good. It’s become too cinematic. That part of why you have to wait so long between seasons.
I agree with you. I hear the higher ups give lines like “we are waiting for the perfect story” before they green light a renewal. What they are really waiting for is for the cast to age out of the roles and the once eager and invested fanbase to move on.
Years between seasons because of delays in renewals, cast commitments elsewhere and the high, harder to secure budgets that are reflected in enhancements like set/costumes/cgi is in the end killing good stories reaching audiences. I think most people would accept a little less in the final product (quality) if they could just get more in a timely fashion (quantity). I am not advocating for garbage but there must be a middle ground.
Perhaps I’m missing out on the good stuff, but it feels like ‘prestige TV’ died 5-10 years ago. When was the last time something as good as Mad Men or The Wire was made?
Now so much content is pumped out so fast, it’s just not as good.
Sure money is spent and shows look great – but the platforms paying for them creative an environment that does not reward quality. They impose house rules and cancel ruthlessly if the viewing metrics aren’t right. A critically praised but more niche show will get cancelled over a mediocre franchise series that loads of people second screen.
As a result, the best creatives have moved back to Film. Neon and A24 are making sensational, high quality prestige content that rewards the creative bravery that heralded the last ‘golden age’ of TV
Edit: To everyone commenting the name of single shows, my point is that 5-10 years ago there were multiple amazing shows running at the same time and far, far fewer being made. Of course there are one or two good things now, but the percentage is much lower. Chernobyl I agree is one of the best shows ever.
Andor may be good but it’s also part of a trend of flogging existing IP far beyond when it was dead. There are so many bad/mediocre star wars shows – Andor being good is the exception not the rule.
Idk how unpopular this is because you honestly make some really good points. I think there can be a middle ground where tv can still be good without having such a huge budget or focus on cinematic quality, but also not take 2-3 years to produce eight episodes for one season.
The word you’re looking for isn’t good, it’s tasteful. There’s no reason any of these features should make a good TV show. If you want shows to be different, that means the taste makers are your enemy.
Then again, this is an AI post. Who knows who this comment is even reaching.
Chat gpt wrote this for sure
Except when the lighting is too dark that you can’t see anything.
Peak television was the late 90s till about 2020. I don’t know if Covid is to blame or what but that was 20+ years of 10-13 episode seasons produced yearly with long running shows of 5-6 seasons with continuous stories that had you there every year.
I didn’t know we had any good TV shows anymore, let alone too many of them. As far as I’m concerned good TV ended with Better Call Saul.
I was telling my wife that I miss garbage summer TV. Something that doesn’t strain my brain but I at least put my phone down for.
Basically anything that used to be on USA. Burn Notice, Suits, Royal Pains, Covert Affairs… just give me good looking people and ridiculous plots.
>Writing that’s basically literature
Hard disagree. Tv writing has never been worse. Few shows actually write episodes anymore, they just parcel out 10 hours worth of story in hour long chunks.
I agree with alot except for writing. Writing seems the least important in modern TV. But I think that’s because there is so much out there for jobs that the top networks can pay big money but there’s so many other places for popular work.
Yeah this is definitely unpopular. TV nowadays is shit.
Meanwhile I just want a very simple show like House MD or Mentalist where one genius solves all problems. Any recent shows with such a script?
I wish I lived in your reality, feels like 95% are trash, 3% are good but get cancelled and just 2% end up being a good, complete show.
The time between seasons definitely takes away from being into a show.
A good season never followed negates it, if a significant plot point wasn’t fully addressed.
Was literally just thinking this. There is a growing list of shows I started and most likely won’t be finishing because by the time the next season came out, I was over it.
Check out season 2 of Wednesday. I have zero memory of season 1 from 3 years ago.
Stranger Things is 10 years old with only 4 seasons. You’re a whole new person in the span of 10 years but I’m still watching a show about 20 somethings needing heavy cgi to still play preteens chasing ghosts? No.
Omg Severance is so good check it out! 3 year gap for 2 seasons and 10 episodes.
We don’t need Disney and Netflix making “the most expensive tv show in history” over and over again.
Give us 20 something episodes, with occasional holiday filler, and a 1 year max break in between.
You’re wrong.
That’s exactly why they’re not good. The gorgeous cinematography is not novel anymore.
The precise, calculated spots where twists and cliffhangers are introduced is sterile and robotic.
They are all lame because they are carbon copies of each other in the way they tell a story.
I got your point, but modern “prestigious” tv is mostly terrible. It looks bland, feels lame and written outrageously bad. And that trend to run 5 seasons for 15 years is just a cherry on top of this shitcake.
And you know one thing after another already created an enormous chain of tightly linked events that will eventually return your beloved crappy tv shows.
Why? Because of streaming wars. Those who will survive and share the market will be oriented on wider and less demanding customers. To be fair, they already are. They need more easily digestible content and little to none “prestigious” shows for awards.
But yeah the current model is laughably stupid. And the main reason is actors. You are aiming for movie stars, but can’t make contracts with any obligations. In the past tv stars had side projects, that wouldn’t cross your main series production schedule. These days everything has turned around.
And don’t even get me started on budgets, those bloated leviathans loosely connected with reality. They have nothing to do with quality, but movie actors paychecks, production chains full of middleman and of course crappy but expensive CGI.
Most of the writing is terrible.
Very polished but very forgettable
Much like modern cinema
The market is over saturated with TV shows, due to the massive push for subscription-based services, which is essentially why they have to be good. It’s also why many of them would be better off as a film vs a TV show, but for the love of the green, they get produced as series instead, to bring in that sweet sweet subscription money.
I generally can’t comment with my personal opinion on what I think of the current quality of TV shows, since I don’t watch TV. If it wasn’t for my wife, I wouldn’t even own a television.
Don’t know about “too good” but certainly overproduced. When it takes 3 years to make 6-8 episodes it makes it really hard to get in to them
I agree with you’re overall point but I also think there’s still a fair amount of terrible writing.
I love my prestige tv! Its so good its impossible to keep up with all the shows. The downside is people are watching different things at different times so we lost the shared experience
i know youre lying theres hardly a good show out there thats new be real
vintage quality tv is low-tech but dazzling acting — and they knew how to tell stories — sometimes music is cheap off the shelf, but often A+. i detest the current cliche of mystery subliminal noises continuously in the background, or oh what a happy garden music, or oh how ironic music . . .
The filler episodes were usually the most entertaining of any series. Now, everything has to be about driving the plot forward and we’ve lost a lot of the joy in/from storytelling.
this is a good opinion actually
I’ve tried to watch every highly rated show from the past 5 years, and they’re all garbage.
At best, episode 1-2 will be ok, followed by 8 episodes of garbage (that people don’t seem to notice because of the initial quality).
I’m watching Nautilus as I type this; great cast, storyline, cinematography, beautiful sets, overall great show…
I think we do have both. But I agree that more genre/IP TV shows should start to take this approach again
Well this depends on the network. ABC/Disney/Hulu are not doing this bullshit. This is Netflix. Blame Netflix.
While it’s not ideal, I’d still prefer a great tv show that took awhile to make over a mediocre or even bad show that pumps out episodes.
And then you get plenty of shows like Andor that finish their story and are high quality.
Add to the grievance list:
>Gorgeous cinematography
>Acting so good it should win Oscars
>Writing that’s basically literature
>A budget that could fund a small nation’s GDP
>CG that makes real life look low resolution
…and no art or fantasy whatsoever
I’ll recall everything that happened two years ago it’s just too old for six to eight new episodes.
I wish a lot of these shows were just extended mini series and be done so there is no two or three year wait. Do six, eight, ten or even thirteen episodes, show the whole thing and call it good. (Depending on the story)
There are many stories that work perfectly as a movie and anything more would just pad it out. Same happens to some series that could just be mini series. There are so many concepts that just got dragged out.
Don’t forget the part where they cancel it before the next season comes out
Yep. Just shut up and give me 22 episodes. Filler can be good. I’m tired of waiting years for 10 lousy episodes.
Apart from the gaps between seasons, there’s so much stuff coming out now (beyond even just television shows: movies and video games have similar issues) that just keeping up on pop culture feels like work. Worse, it feels like homework.
How do I take a break from taking a break?
I see what you’re saying.
I especially noticed a lot of newer shows (ex White Lotus) these days will have these beautiful 4k shots of nature in between scenes. While it does look nice from a technical standpoint, after a while it kind of starts to feel unnecessary and “tech demo” like. Almost like the show really wants you to be impressed with how good it looks that it comes across as overcompensating.
You guys are getting writing that’s basically literature?
I hate the 10-episode trend. Waiting that long for a handful of episodes is frustrating
I always bring up buffy when this sort of thing comes up. Because it was on 22 episodes by the time they reach the end of season 3 you feel like you know these characters. You’ve seen them all in multiple situations and seen how they react. Alot of the time they are on their 2nd or 3rd experience and act differently/have learned.
End of season 3 nowadays and there might be a person or two who you can say that about but not the entire cast(with quite a few people coming and going).
Sure the fights are cheesy as hell by today’s standards but that was never the point of the show.
But you kinda felt the season move forward and just the timeline of 22 episodes meant everything didn’t happen in the span of a week. You literally felt like you were going over a 3 month period in the show because that was how it was released in real time. There was actual growth by the end and it felt earned.
I do miss the shows that had 20-24 episodes per season and ran between September to May, picking up again in just a few months.
However I think it was not that sustainable for cast and crew. They must have had no work/life balance.
Something missing now is the creativity of filler arcs or episodes. Some led to great episodes that would otherwise not exist but on the other hand you’d also get some real stinkers. It was inevitable. This also allowed shows to be more dynamic and grow and change outside of the writer’s room. Leading to some iconic characters like Spike in Buffy or Benjamin Linus in Lost.
Most of the TV shows that I have seen recently are very well made but also just kind of are not interesting. Most of it is awful and has been for a long time.
I’m not sure the writing’s gotten better, though. If anything, it’s worse. They spend their money on the wrong things now.
This makes me realize how high my low standards are.
Perfectly cooked steak is amazing, but McDonalds gets the job done too.
I’m perfectly happy with TV shows getting more time to work on their production. I don’t want people to be overworked to get something sub-par out the door earlier. We really to question ourselves if our rationale is, “I want TV to be worse quality on a worse shooting schedule just so I don’t have to wait too long to see more of it.”
Nah, if a show is good, idc if I wait 1 year or 5 years for the next season.
I prefer quality over quantity
If I get a small quality season per year I’m happy. How hard can it be to release 8-10 episodes per year?
What shows are you watching because most of the shows are utter garbage
No they aren’t and your first bullet points are poorly supported reasoning that are thwarted by your second examples, which make this topic seem even more pointless.
So you got my upvote just because it’s poorly explained and the premise is wrong in general.
I have the exact opposite opinion of thinking most tv shows are bad, poorly paced, and painstakingly drawn out to retain viewership.
That’s why I’ve been gearing to animation (specially animes) and modern sitcoms (Ghosts is a good example): their production cycle is fast and they don’t have seasons with just eight episodes.
But I disagree about the writing, most modern tv shows have convolute writing trying to be literature, but they kind of suck at storytelling.
I think alot of these shows have bad writing and cinematography tbh
Honestly you seem a bit blinded by production value and “sheen”, because most shows don’t have such a high level of quality as you describe.
Most of them have mediocre writing with extreme amounts of filler, and are drawn out to fill out ten to twelve episode seasons. Costumes are overly polished and look “perfect” but also don’t look realistic.
Makeup is “perfect” but characters don’t look like they live the world they are in, they look like they were just in a makeup chair. It’s quite tiring to me at least.
Most shows are actually dogshit now. There’s no reason to tell a good story if you have nice visuals, it seems.
This is such an “oh no, my bed is too comfortable, oh no my food is too delicious” kinda problem…
What kind of literature are you reading?
I’m sorry but most tv and cinema that comes out is not too good or nearly good at all. I’d be curious to see your list of good tv shows
I prefer a lot of episodes per season with quality writing and good acting / sets, rather than 8-10 episodes every 2-3 years with incredible cinematography and CGI in every frame.
There’s plenty of shit ass television if that’s your speed
I was just talking to my gf about how everything looks so overproduced these days. She was watching Wednesday season 2, and everyone constantly has perfect makeup, perfect hair, perfect outfits, etc. Everyone’s acting is so deliberate and.. robotic. It’s too much, and feels soulless.
And then they cancel it when it gets 96% on rotten tomatoes (I will probs be mourning The Wheel of Time forever)
Honestly I’d argue most TV has gotten worse because of trying to be better. Shows weren’t mostly filler they were mostly character development. Some shows can handle the new format and still give you character development like Star Trek Strange New Worlds.
But other shows you go through five seasons and still feel like you don’t know much about the characters because they’re leaving out all the “filler” that would have fleshed out who these people are.