3 ms·

Film is much less creative. But look at television and you see a different story. We have far more creativity and variety than ever before.

omginternets 4y ago
Is it? What do you have in mind? There’s certainly more television than ever before, but I haven’t seen anything truly novel in a while.
- watwut 4y ago
  "Truly novel" is kinda difficult to define requirement. With literally any movie, you can argue for hours whether it was truly novel or not. But for me, just browsing netfix got me much bigger variance then what was available to me 20 to years ago. Back then, all films were the same action movie plus some comedies, basically. They all ended well. There are good and bad characters, no nuance and good ones win. The structure was also the same and formulaic. You could go to indie theater and see something else once in a while, but that was it. I have seen more novel things (at least novel for a movie). Not all of them were well executed, but the writers at least tried a new idea here and there. Twin sisters that switch families every year for example. It was not too good, but was not too bad and mainly it was something different.
fullshark 4y ago
I don't see any novel TV. The last truly novel TV format was probably the different reality TV formats which exploded 20 years ago and kind of took over everything. Netflix which has dropped billions of dollars on TV basically decided to just copy every format which was successful on cable TV, and has invented nothing novel as far as I can tell except for the interactive TV specials (https://help.netflix.com/en/node/62526 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/62526) which didn't really seem to take off.
- duckmysick 4y ago
  Releasing the whole season all at once (instead of weekly/daily) is a novel format to me.
- michaelt 4y ago
  If you expand TV to include youtube and other streaming services, in a sense we're in an age of unprecedented choice. You want to watch someone building a robot? Or building a sailboat from scratch? Smelting iron in a furnace they built themselves out of clay? Blacksmithing? Welding? Reviewing PC-98 Visual Novels? Taking apart LED lights? Picking locks? Shooting antique firearms? Using a tatoo-removing laser on themselves? Restoring classic cars? Fitting powerful rally car engines into classic cars? We've got all of those, completely free and available on demand. Back when there were only 4 TV channels, content had to have much wider appeal - requiring both mainstream topics, and keeping things simple enough to be accessible to almost anyone.
  - fullshark 4y ago
    Great point! But even those services seem to have stagnated after an explosion in their growth phase maybe 10 years ago with novel attempts to capture eyeballs, and are becoming relatively samey in terms of content. The article even talks about the phenomenon of "instagram face" and "UGC all looks the same." One of the weirdest to me is twitch, before twitch/justin.tv existed did you think a platform for live streaming by anyone on the planet would be used largely for watching strangers play video games?
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Why would the services not stagnate? When a new medium is presented, especially one with lots of access, people try lots of new things on it, some succeed and some fail. People pick up on trends and fads and tend to follow them, so those things become the thing you're more apt to see if you pick at random. Those trends evolve over time. If you're looking around you can find the 'different' thing that will become the new trend, and many more things that will die off.

omginternets 4y ago

Is it? What do you have in mind? There’s certainly more television than ever before, but I haven’t seen anything truly novel in a while.

watwut 4y ago
"Truly novel" is kinda difficult to define requirement. With literally any movie, you can argue for hours whether it was truly novel or not. But for me, just browsing netfix got me much bigger variance then what was available to me 20 to years ago. Back then, all films were the same action movie plus some comedies, basically. They all ended well. There are good and bad characters, no nuance and good ones win. The structure was also the same and formulaic. You could go to indie theater and see something else once in a while, but that was it. I have seen more novel things (at least novel for a movie). Not all of them were well executed, but the writers at least tried a new idea here and there. Twin sisters that switch families every year for example. It was not too good, but was not too bad and mainly it was something different.

fullshark 4y ago

I don't see any novel TV. The last truly novel TV format was probably the different reality TV formats which exploded 20 years ago and kind of took over everything. Netflix which has dropped billions of dollars on TV basically decided to just copy every format which was successful on cable TV, and has invented nothing novel as far as I can tell except for the interactive TV specials (https://help.netflix.com/en/node/62526 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/62526) which didn't really seem to take off.

duckmysick 4y ago
Releasing the whole season all at once (instead of weekly/daily) is a novel format to me.
michaelt 4y ago
If you expand TV to include youtube and other streaming services, in a sense we're in an age of unprecedented choice. You want to watch someone building a robot? Or building a sailboat from scratch? Smelting iron in a furnace they built themselves out of clay? Blacksmithing? Welding? Reviewing PC-98 Visual Novels? Taking apart LED lights? Picking locks? Shooting antique firearms? Using a tatoo-removing laser on themselves? Restoring classic cars? Fitting powerful rally car engines into classic cars? We've got all of those, completely free and available on demand. Back when there were only 4 TV channels, content had to have much wider appeal - requiring both mainstream topics, and keeping things simple enough to be accessible to almost anyone.
- fullshark 4y ago
  Great point! But even those services seem to have stagnated after an explosion in their growth phase maybe 10 years ago with novel attempts to capture eyeballs, and are becoming relatively samey in terms of content. The article even talks about the phenomenon of "instagram face" and "UGC all looks the same." One of the weirdest to me is twitch, before twitch/justin.tv existed did you think a platform for live streaming by anyone on the planet would be used largely for watching strangers play video games?
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Why would the services not stagnate? When a new medium is presented, especially one with lots of access, people try lots of new things on it, some succeed and some fail. People pick up on trends and fads and tend to follow them, so those things become the thing you're more apt to see if you pick at random. Those trends evolve over time. If you're looking around you can find the 'different' thing that will become the new trend, and many more things that will die off.