7 ms·

That's mostly because filmmaking is ceasing to be filmmaking, at least for big movies and TV shows. I tend to ignore new TV shows these days. Why? I just know

That's mostly because filmmaking is ceasing to be filmmaking, at least for big movies and TV shows. I tend to ignore new TV shows these days. Why? I just know they're gonna be great for a few seasons at best then start sucking, and I don't feel like wasting my time in the meantime. I can count on one hand non-episodic TV shows in the last 25 years that have maintained their high quality throughout. The Wire The Sopranos Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul Mr. Robot Honourable mention for Twin Peaks: The Return, although Twin Peaks didn't exactly maintain its quality throughout season 2 even if Lynch swooped back in to save it near the end. All cases where one person or a couple people had strong creative control of the project throughout. I could sit here all day listing shows that started out really good but then it became clear the writers had no idea what they were doing, or the writers who did left. These shows are all written by committee now. All these garbage Star Trek shows. Westworld has really neat sci fi premises for each season but other than season 1 they always devolve into action schlock because the writers don't understand how to actually write good sci fi. As for big movies, they feel like they're written by marketing people not writers. They're optimised for getting people into the theatre and everything else is an afterthought. There's still a handful of auteurs making great movies you could think of as big. People like Tarantino, Scorsese, the Coen brother. Christopher Nolan gets lucky sometimes, but most of his sci fi is ruined by sloppy writing for me(Interstellar...) One thing is certain for me though. I can't think of a single recent movie I've enjoyed that had lots of CGI in it. The movies with the best writing are pretty much never the ones with huge effects budgets. The true art of filmmaking lies in the writing. You can have all the effects in the world, the best actors and directors. Doesn't matter one bit if the script is terrible.

censor_me 4y ago
Tarantino is about to stop making movies by his own account - "a director should never make more than 10 movies". I'm slightly vexed that you did not mention Villeneuve, who made Blade Runner 2049 and recently Dune. Blade Runner 2049 is already a cult classic and Dune felt like a fresh air of mature sci-fi in the age of Marvel. He is about the only one I truly look forward to see his next movie, right now being Dune 2.
citizenkeen 4y ago
As a lifelong Star Trek fan, Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, and Prodigy are as good as its ever been. The writing on all three is incredibly tight. Disco and Picard... have been a struggle.
- kuschku 4y ago
  The third season of Picard is actually good again, I can really recommend it. A bit weird, but it's definitely evoking much more of the Star Trek feeling than the previous seasons did.
  - bena 4y ago
    How? Like Season 3 is definitely better than Season 2 and maybe Season 1, but besides the majority of the actors being in Starfleet uniforms on a Starfleet ship, it still feels way more Discovery than TNG. It's just cramming the nostalgia down your gullet so often that you don't have time to not care. Look, Riker. Yay. Crusher! Yay. Worf's back, yay. He said a non-stereotypical Klingon thing, hilarious, he's not like the other Klingons. Oh. Now he said a stereotypical Klingon thing. He's still got the heart of a Klingon. Ooh. Changelings. Dominion War. Wolf 359. Locutus. Wow. Much Star. Very Trek. All in all. I'd say Season 3 of Picard would have made for one of the better TNG movies. But considering that most of them were not good, that's not really a high bar to clear. Lower Decks is the closest thing to old-school Star Trek that is currently being produced. But that's mostly because it wants to be a pastiche of TNG-era Trek.
    - kuschku 4y ago
      Season 3 of TNG is definitely better than at least half of S1-S3 of TNG. Old-school Star Trek never was that good either, it took quite a while to figure out the formula to get good content. Only by the time DS9 and VOY came out did they have a well-working formula, but at that time it became a bit too formulaic. Still, it's entertaining, and there's enough quality there to enjoy it.
      - bena 4y ago
coremoff 4y ago
The quality of writing in big budget media is truely shocking; they have no idea how to write a tight plot, or what verisimilitude means, or why consistency is important. Looks at Rings of Power; absolutely gorgeous, and some great dialog sprinkled here and there, but the plotting, world building, tone, and story-beats are amateurish. There's also far too much fan service in almost every popular franchise, and writers have absolutely no patience; an old example, but one I think highlights this, is the movie "Solo"; I quite liked the movie, much more than I expected and more than the general public did, but it was infuriating how they had to put in every single plot point that Han Solo mentioned in the original trilogy, as if without it we wouldn't understand who Solo was, or how clever the writers were. Similarly Black Panther 2; so much good stuff but ruined, in my opinion anyway, by too much exposition given to us as dialog rather than flashback - Namor's backstory was probably unnecessary, and if it was necessary it would have been better as an opening sequence (not to mention the movie being at least an hour too long).
- revelio 4y ago
  They do know how to do it. Check out "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish", it's really nicely done. They just don't do it often because when it comes to hiring writers and senior execs they prioritize ideological compatibility over proven skill: https://i.imgur.com/DSy9zoy.jpg https://i.imgur.com/DSy9zoy.jpg (the woman in black runs the Star Wars franchise) So you get these car-crash scripts with holes a five year old could spot, but they hammer home the message and so the people at the top feel good about themselves.
- imbnwa 4y ago
  >The quality of writing in big budget media is truely shocking; they have no idea how to write a tight plot, or what verisimilitude means, or why consistency is important. 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie better than a lot of schlock out there now
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  > There's also far too much fan service in almost every popular franchise I recently watched The Matrix: Resurrection and thought half the movie was just fan service. "Look! It's Neo and Trinity back together again! And they're doing cool Matrix stuff!"
kayodelycaon 4y ago
As a life-long fan, Star Trek has always had plenty of garbage writers and terrible episodes. (The original series is hilariously bad by modern standards.) The only thing that's held the series together are amazing actors and that the good episodes are really good. Strange New Worlds has had an amazing first season. Hope that continues. :)
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Sure there are lots of terrible Star Trek episodes. But being episodic, that's fine. These new treks are all just aping off the old shows. One which is basically just the Voyager premise done again. And one(or two? I've lost count at this point) that tries to cash in on TNG nostalgia. I'm sure Strange New Worlds is the most competent rehashing of old ideas so far, but meh! Make something original. Go to the 25th century, make all new characters, a new ship, new technologies, new aliens, new concepts. That's what I want Star Trek to be. If I want nostalgia I'll throw on an episode from TNG season 3. It just has this stench to me of retreading old stuff. And no, TOS still holds up. It has some terrible episodes, some weird 60s moments that feel cringey, but it also has episodes that are fantastic sci-fi. And yeah, it looks like crap. I don't care. Sci-fi is not about special effects.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    If you look at Star Wars over the past decade(?) there's generally an inverse relationship between how good the series/movie is and how close it is to the original story arc. TOS can live apart from modern standards; you have to give it the benefit of historical perspective. And there was real chemistry between the case. And, because it was episodic, you can pick out 15-20 episodes and enjoy them as historical SF.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  > Strange New Worlds has had an amazing first season I don't get why people keep saying this. Don't get me wrong, it was pretty decent. Mount was the highlight of the otherwise mediocre-at-best Discovery S2 and he's still killing it in SNW, Peck is actually a great Spock, and the acting in general is high quality. But the writing was really kind of all over the place and their best episode cribbed Ursula Le Guin even harder than Voyager cribbed Robert L. Forward[0]. My personal opinion is that it has potential to be really good, but it hasn't been demonstrated that the writing competence is there yet. [0] Credit where it is due: if you're going to be unoriginal, you may as well crib from some of the best.
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
> The movies with the best writing are pretty much never the ones with huge effects budgets. The contrast was highlighted on a recent flight I took. I watched Zoolander while the guy next to me watched some Avengers movie starring Thanos. Not only were the colors more vibrant in Zoolander, the camera was always in focus. Even with $200mil on VFX, it was still blurry and soft-focus.
nwoli 4y ago
It’ll be fun and exciting if text-to-video can disrupt this. (Seems very likely. Shows might be totally revived to high quality within 3 years or so.)
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  No, text to video will not improve writing. GPT will also not improve writing. I can already imagine fully generated TV shows. But they're not gonna be good, they'll lack cohesive vision and smart writing. This technology will only enhance the ability to produce more garbage at ever increasing rates.
  - nwoli 4y ago
    My point is mostly that there exists a ton of talented writers and people with imagination who aren’t getting a chance to actually produce movies and tv shows. (I don’t think the issue is lack of talent doesn’t exist on the planet, I think they just aren’t lifted to the highest positions in hollywood, like they used to in decades past.) Admittedly there’s gonna be a ton of garbage via gpt too.
    - ancientworldnow 4y ago
      Most people tend to over estimate how talented the average non professional writer is and dramatically under estimate how good pro writers are. Writing is very hard. The issue is not coming up with ideas either, so don't think gptX streamlining the hard work (actual writing) will make much of a difference either. Same is true for acting, photography, directing, etc.
the_only_law 4y ago
> Honourable mention for Twin Peaks: The Return, although Twin Peaks didn't exactly maintain its quality throughout season 2 even if Lynch swooped back in to save it near the end. Yeah honestly I didn’t care for it much. The casino plot felt like tedious filler, certain interesting characters from the original completely were completely sidelined, and at times it just felt like the horror surrealism was over the top to force some extra shock value. More egregious to me though are the remakes of Hawaii 5-0 and Magnum PI. Those make me legitimately angry when I see them.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Taste is still taste of course. It's extremely... Lynchian. This is mostly because Lynch changed a lot as a director since the original Twin Peaks. He brought that growth with him into The Return, and so it's basically a completely different beast. It was never going to be anything like the old show. I loved it through and through. I enjoyed it even more on repeat viewing when I wasn't constantly waiting for Coop to "wake up". Lynch is an acquired taste though, I get that for sure.
kenjackson 4y ago
I'd add Mad Men and GoT, but it doesn't change the point you've made.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Haven't finished Mad Men, so I couldn't speak to it. Though I am planning to because it's become a lot more interesting to me as I've grown older compared to when it was new. As for Game of Thrones, it doesn't fit into my list because the quality of the writing really nosedived, starting in season 5 to my mind, though seasons 6 and 7 is where it took a turn for the drastically worse. And season 8 was a disaster. So it's exactly in the opposite group that's too long to exhaustively list.
  - Wohlf 4y ago
    Mad Men does start to dip for a bit somewhere around season 5 imo, but once they get on track for the ending it picks back up and they stick the landing.
  - mjrbrennan 4y ago
    Definitely try to power through Mad Men, I tried to watch it a few times when I was younger but never got past season 3, whereas season 4 is where the real heart and message of it shows through, and the character development reaches new peaks. Really does seem like a show that resonates more when you are older.
The-Bus 4y ago
I would also highly recommend FX's The Americans.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  I forgot about that! That stayed good throughout although it did dip a little towards the end. But I think it's still good enough for my list because I enjoyed it throughout.
rcarr 4y ago
Looking at that list I have a feeling you'd like "The Bear". https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14452776/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14452776/
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation! I'll check out once it's finished airing :)
JohnFen 4y ago
> That's mostly because filmmaking is ceasing to be filmmaking, at least for big movies and TV shows Maybe that's why there seems to be fewer great movies being made than ever before in my lifetime.

censor_me 4y ago

Tarantino is about to stop making movies by his own account - "a director should never make more than 10 movies". I'm slightly vexed that you did not mention Villeneuve, who made Blade Runner 2049 and recently Dune. Blade Runner 2049 is already a cult classic and Dune felt like a fresh air of mature sci-fi in the age of Marvel. He is about the only one I truly look forward to see his next movie, right now being Dune 2.

citizenkeen 4y ago

As a lifelong Star Trek fan, Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, and Prodigy are as good as its ever been. The writing on all three is incredibly tight. Disco and Picard... have been a struggle.

kuschku 4y ago
The third season of Picard is actually good again, I can really recommend it. A bit weird, but it's definitely evoking much more of the Star Trek feeling than the previous seasons did.
- bena 4y ago
  How? Like Season 3 is definitely better than Season 2 and maybe Season 1, but besides the majority of the actors being in Starfleet uniforms on a Starfleet ship, it still feels way more Discovery than TNG. It's just cramming the nostalgia down your gullet so often that you don't have time to not care. Look, Riker. Yay. Crusher! Yay. Worf's back, yay. He said a non-stereotypical Klingon thing, hilarious, he's not like the other Klingons. Oh. Now he said a stereotypical Klingon thing. He's still got the heart of a Klingon. Ooh. Changelings. Dominion War. Wolf 359. Locutus. Wow. Much Star. Very Trek. All in all. I'd say Season 3 of Picard would have made for one of the better TNG movies. But considering that most of them were not good, that's not really a high bar to clear. Lower Decks is the closest thing to old-school Star Trek that is currently being produced. But that's mostly because it wants to be a pastiche of TNG-era Trek.
  - kuschku 4y ago
    Season 3 of TNG is definitely better than at least half of S1-S3 of TNG. Old-school Star Trek never was that good either, it took quite a while to figure out the formula to get good content. Only by the time DS9 and VOY came out did they have a well-working formula, but at that time it became a bit too formulaic. Still, it's entertaining, and there's enough quality there to enjoy it.
    - bena 4y ago

coremoff 4y ago

The quality of writing in big budget media is truely shocking; they have no idea how to write a tight plot, or what verisimilitude means, or why consistency is important. Looks at Rings of Power; absolutely gorgeous, and some great dialog sprinkled here and there, but the plotting, world building, tone, and story-beats are amateurish. There's also far too much fan service in almost every popular franchise, and writers have absolutely no patience; an old example, but one I think highlights this, is the movie "Solo"; I quite liked the movie, much more than I expected and more than the general public did, but it was infuriating how they had to put in every single plot point that Han Solo mentioned in the original trilogy, as if without it we wouldn't understand who Solo was, or how clever the writers were. Similarly Black Panther 2; so much good stuff but ruined, in my opinion anyway, by too much exposition given to us as dialog rather than flashback - Namor's backstory was probably unnecessary, and if it was necessary it would have been better as an opening sequence (not to mention the movie being at least an hour too long).

revelio 4y ago
They do know how to do it. Check out "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish", it's really nicely done. They just don't do it often because when it comes to hiring writers and senior execs they prioritize ideological compatibility over proven skill: https://i.imgur.com/DSy9zoy.jpg https://i.imgur.com/DSy9zoy.jpg (the woman in black runs the Star Wars franchise) So you get these car-crash scripts with holes a five year old could spot, but they hammer home the message and so the people at the top feel good about themselves.
imbnwa 4y ago
>The quality of writing in big budget media is truely shocking; they have no idea how to write a tight plot, or what verisimilitude means, or why consistency is important. 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie better than a lot of schlock out there now
Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
> There's also far too much fan service in almost every popular franchise I recently watched The Matrix: Resurrection and thought half the movie was just fan service. "Look! It's Neo and Trinity back together again! And they're doing cool Matrix stuff!"

kayodelycaon 4y ago

As a life-long fan, Star Trek has always had plenty of garbage writers and terrible episodes. (The original series is hilariously bad by modern standards.) The only thing that's held the series together are amazing actors and that the good episodes are really good. Strange New Worlds has had an amazing first season. Hope that continues. :)

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
Sure there are lots of terrible Star Trek episodes. But being episodic, that's fine. These new treks are all just aping off the old shows. One which is basically just the Voyager premise done again. And one(or two? I've lost count at this point) that tries to cash in on TNG nostalgia. I'm sure Strange New Worlds is the most competent rehashing of old ideas so far, but meh! Make something original. Go to the 25th century, make all new characters, a new ship, new technologies, new aliens, new concepts. That's what I want Star Trek to be. If I want nostalgia I'll throw on an episode from TNG season 3. It just has this stench to me of retreading old stuff. And no, TOS still holds up. It has some terrible episodes, some weird 60s moments that feel cringey, but it also has episodes that are fantastic sci-fi. And yeah, it looks like crap. I don't care. Sci-fi is not about special effects.
- ghaff 4y ago
  If you look at Star Wars over the past decade(?) there's generally an inverse relationship between how good the series/movie is and how close it is to the original story arc. TOS can live apart from modern standards; you have to give it the benefit of historical perspective. And there was real chemistry between the case. And, because it was episodic, you can pick out 15-20 episodes and enjoy them as historical SF.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
> Strange New Worlds has had an amazing first season I don't get why people keep saying this. Don't get me wrong, it was pretty decent. Mount was the highlight of the otherwise mediocre-at-best Discovery S2 and he's still killing it in SNW, Peck is actually a great Spock, and the acting in general is high quality. But the writing was really kind of all over the place and their best episode cribbed Ursula Le Guin even harder than Voyager cribbed Robert L. Forward[0]. My personal opinion is that it has potential to be really good, but it hasn't been demonstrated that the writing competence is there yet. [0] Credit where it is due: if you're going to be unoriginal, you may as well crib from some of the best.

BeFlatXIII 4y ago

> The movies with the best writing are pretty much never the ones with huge effects budgets. The contrast was highlighted on a recent flight I took. I watched Zoolander while the guy next to me watched some Avengers movie starring Thanos. Not only were the colors more vibrant in Zoolander, the camera was always in focus. Even with $200mil on VFX, it was still blurry and soft-focus.

nwoli 4y ago

It’ll be fun and exciting if text-to-video can disrupt this. (Seems very likely. Shows might be totally revived to high quality within 3 years or so.)

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
No, text to video will not improve writing. GPT will also not improve writing. I can already imagine fully generated TV shows. But they're not gonna be good, they'll lack cohesive vision and smart writing. This technology will only enhance the ability to produce more garbage at ever increasing rates.
- nwoli 4y ago
  My point is mostly that there exists a ton of talented writers and people with imagination who aren’t getting a chance to actually produce movies and tv shows. (I don’t think the issue is lack of talent doesn’t exist on the planet, I think they just aren’t lifted to the highest positions in hollywood, like they used to in decades past.) Admittedly there’s gonna be a ton of garbage via gpt too.
  - ancientworldnow 4y ago
    Most people tend to over estimate how talented the average non professional writer is and dramatically under estimate how good pro writers are. Writing is very hard. The issue is not coming up with ideas either, so don't think gptX streamlining the hard work (actual writing) will make much of a difference either. Same is true for acting, photography, directing, etc.

the_only_law 4y ago

> Honourable mention for Twin Peaks: The Return, although Twin Peaks didn't exactly maintain its quality throughout season 2 even if Lynch swooped back in to save it near the end. Yeah honestly I didn’t care for it much. The casino plot felt like tedious filler, certain interesting characters from the original completely were completely sidelined, and at times it just felt like the horror surrealism was over the top to force some extra shock value. More egregious to me though are the remakes of Hawaii 5-0 and Magnum PI. Those make me legitimately angry when I see them.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
Taste is still taste of course. It's extremely... Lynchian. This is mostly because Lynch changed a lot as a director since the original Twin Peaks. He brought that growth with him into The Return, and so it's basically a completely different beast. It was never going to be anything like the old show. I loved it through and through. I enjoyed it even more on repeat viewing when I wasn't constantly waiting for Coop to "wake up". Lynch is an acquired taste though, I get that for sure.

kenjackson 4y ago

I'd add Mad Men and GoT, but it doesn't change the point you've made.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
Haven't finished Mad Men, so I couldn't speak to it. Though I am planning to because it's become a lot more interesting to me as I've grown older compared to when it was new. As for Game of Thrones, it doesn't fit into my list because the quality of the writing really nosedived, starting in season 5 to my mind, though seasons 6 and 7 is where it took a turn for the drastically worse. And season 8 was a disaster. So it's exactly in the opposite group that's too long to exhaustively list.
- Wohlf 4y ago
  Mad Men does start to dip for a bit somewhere around season 5 imo, but once they get on track for the ending it picks back up and they stick the landing.
- mjrbrennan 4y ago
  Definitely try to power through Mad Men, I tried to watch it a few times when I was younger but never got past season 3, whereas season 4 is where the real heart and message of it shows through, and the character development reaches new peaks. Really does seem like a show that resonates more when you are older.

The-Bus 4y ago

I would also highly recommend FX's The Americans.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
I forgot about that! That stayed good throughout although it did dip a little towards the end. But I think it's still good enough for my list because I enjoyed it throughout.

rcarr 4y ago

Looking at that list I have a feeling you'd like "The Bear". https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14452776/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14452776/

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
Thanks for the recommendation! I'll check out once it's finished airing :)

JohnFen 4y ago

> That's mostly because filmmaking is ceasing to be filmmaking, at least for big movies and TV shows Maybe that's why there seems to be fewer great movies being made than ever before in my lifetime.