5 ms·

"Holland seemed to focus more on developing fewer shows of higher quality content while Bajaria was more focused on "get all the content, throw it all at the wa

by jerf 4y ago

"Holland seemed to focus more on developing fewer shows of higher quality content while Bajaria was more focused on "get all the content, throw it all at the wall and see what sticks" (who saw "Squid Games" coming?)." I think the root problem is that no studio anywhere is large enough to put out enough high-quality content to keep the people engaged continuously. Not even Disney. All the studios were looking over at Netflix making all the money and wanted to disintermediate the middleman, but the combination of all of them doing that turn one fairly decent (not perfect, but decent) streaming service into an array of streaming services each individually not worth the subscription. That worked for a bit but it's wearing out. The solution of just pumping out more is the obvious one to try, but it hasn't been going well. I'm... actually not convinced that's impossible? The bottleneck on these seems to be quality writing. Generally the actors act, the editors edit, the directors direct, the effects crew broadly succeeds at the effects, etc. But Hollywood in 2023 seems to have negative respect for writing. Take any Writing 101 course, and if you want to write for Hollywood, completely throw it out the window because they do not care in the slightest about any of that. I recognize of course that any 101 course is only the intro and the basics, but current Hollywood writing is not taking the rules, deeply understanding them, and then transcending them by virtue of the deep mastery of their craft... they're just plain writing for crap. They've got a ton of other priorities and "good writing" is so far down the list that it might as well not be on there. You can't get the best of the best to write for 100% of every season, but a lot of streaming stuff is several cuts below what middle-of-the-line episodic television shows were managing in the 90s in really, really basic stuff. Surely there's enough competent writers to at least get a solid C on the writing front to let all the other factors carry over to "at least worthwhile", if Hollywood would just raise the priority on that quite a bit more. Tons of high quality content is probably not on the table for anyone, but surely with all these resources we could scrape together some medium quality content more consistently?

ChuckMcM 4y ago
A lot of wisdom in that rant. I too have noticed the big gap is writers (who are going on strike it seems). I think we're all going to have to suffer through "stuff written by LLMs" for a while, but I really think that a studio that restructured their revenue sharing to focus more of the proceeds towards writers would find quite a bit of success in today's market.
- teh_klev 4y ago
  > I too have noticed the big gap is writers I started watching "The Night Agent" but the dialogue became too painful for me to carry on after about four or five episodes. That coupled with a script where two secret service agents bitch at each other like children eventually nailed the coffin.
  - ChuckMcM 4y ago
    Exactly! I had the same reaction. First episode, "Okay, an interesting (if well worn) setup, a lead character that is somewhat interesting, some dynamics." to second episode "Well that really didn't feel particularly entertaining", to the third episode, "not getting better, time to get off this train."
    - chris_wot 4y ago
      I just watched “Ghosted”. It was somewhat entertaining, but hardly stellar. This is the sort of movie that is being released these days, and we can easily take it or leave it.
      - teh_klev 4y ago
        Dexter Fletcher as director piqued my interest in Ghosted just a wee bit. I read The Rachel Papers as a youngster and quite enjoyed the film when it came out (in which he plays the main character in the book). I'll probably watch it on holiday to hedge against the possibility of losing two hours of my life on a school night :)
    - teh_klev 4y ago
      I feel the same is also happening with Rabbit Hole, though I might persist with it. The Kiefer and Charles Dance in the same series, what's not to like?
  - jstarfish 4y ago
    The show got better by the end. The show itself-- not the dialogue. On a similar note: for so much of Night Agent, it felt like they started with competent technical advisors that paid enough attention to detail to make terminals show TUIs/GUIs that actually relate to the current goal, but the writers came along and rewrote every technical explanation with "brb guys, gotta hack the mainframe" garbage. The wine moms around me love the show though, so maybe it's just catering to the target demographic.
justinclift 4y ago
One of my friends is a writer, and his take on the problem is that the seasoned writers Netflix used to have (a few years ago) are now all getting fairly "old". Aka around their 50's. So, they were let go, and a new generation of young, unseasoned writers has been doing the writing. But unlike previous generations though (heh), many of them are not even slightly interested in learning from the previous (seasoned) writers, whom they view as inferior for some reason. Thus, the extremely low quality (idiot level) of writing in recent years. No idea how accurate that is, but it seems like a reasonable take at first glance. Mind you, I don't really watch US origin tv/movies any more myself due to their crappiness. :)
- hooverd 4y ago
  I wonder if some of that is TV writers growing up on ubiquitous TV writing, like how anime is increasingly made by people who just like anime and weren't as interested in a wide variety of media as the older generation.
- FourHand451 4y ago
  Certainly I would agree that letting go a lot of experience folks would have an effect on the product. However, I think this comment could use some more justification: > But unlike previous generations though (heh), many of them are not even slightly interested in learning from the previous (seasoned) writers, whom they view as inferior for some reason. Claiming that a particular generation is really different from another in this sort of way is something I'd need to see a lot of evidence to be convinced of. Kids trying to do their own thing and middle aged folks lamenting "kids these days" is a tale as old as time.
  - justinclift 4y ago
    Thus the "(heh)" in my post. I recognise the same thing, and found it ironic. > Kids trying to do their own thing and middle aged folks lamenting "kids these days" is a tale as old as time. Yeah, agreed. From my point of view, it's not totally the new writers fault. It's the fault of the management chain that got rid of the old writers and also didn't tell the new ones "Look, just humour the old fogies for a while, you might learn something...".
svachalek 4y ago
I really felt this when I was watching Andor. It's about a bunch of nobodies in the Star Wars universe, no Jedi at all. But there were so many moments when things just made so much sense, that it actually took me out of the moment in surprise. There's so little good writing anymore that it's shocking when you see it.
TheCondor 4y ago
> I think the root problem is that no studio anywhere is large enough to put out enough high-quality content to keep the people engaged continuously. Not even Disney. This. There simply isn't that much really great content.
muffinman26 4y ago
Bringing up episodic television shows in the 90s brings up an interesting point. For 90s episodic television, script submissions were open to the public. Each show still had a team of staff writers like they do today, but the staff writers would mostly write the really important episodes (like finales and two-parters). The bulk of the episodes would be freelance scripts, with the staff writers editing for consistency and adding an extra scene or two to hint at continuing plot threads. In today's binge-able format, almost every episode is written by the staff writers. (They might still let someone with connections, like an actor on the show looking to make a career change, submit an episode.) Sure, 90+% of submitted episode pitches were probably terrible, but that was fine because show runners could choose the best episodes from the slush heap. Now each series only orders roughly as many episode scripts as a season has episodes. If a writer has a 75-80% hit rate, the show can't discard the bad episodes.
- MichaelDickens 4y ago
  > The bulk of the episodes would be freelance scripts, with the staff writers editing for consistency and adding an extra scene or two to hint at continuing plot threads Can you name a few shows that were written that way? I'd never heard of this but I don't watch much TV from before the 2000's.
  - whartung 4y ago
    I know Star Trek: The Next Generation did this. They also did it with Deep Space 9. Not sure about Voyager. I don't know what other shows might have done this.
  - CitrusFruits 4y ago
    I worked with a copy writer that had written an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." By coincidence she had submitted an a script for an episode that coincided with a major plot point they were working to (a character leaving). I asked her about it, and it was really the only major writing credit she ever got.
  - muffinman26 4y ago
r00fus 4y ago
>but the combination of all of them doing that turn one fairly decent (not perfect, but decent) streaming service into an array of streaming services each individually not worth the subscription. And thus we're back at "cable rates" but pick your poison. The response should be "cancel services when you don't need them" but it's tougher if you have a family with young kids who you let watch. I really liked paying CBS/Paramount for a single month so my kids could binge Korra (sequel to Avatar: the Last Airbender) back when Netflix released A:tLA first. We literally watched nothing else on the service.
- bmelton 4y ago
  A friend of mine just does one service at a time, and it's low-key fairly brilliant. There's a bit of headache with installing / uninstalling apps on televisions and having to log into things once a month or quarter or however long it takes him, but the kernel of the idea is that there are generally only a few new, good shows worth watching for any given network, but all the good shows are roughly equally distributed between networks. So instead of paying $10 a month to Disney for Mandalorian, Wandavision, Loki, an additional $10 for Peacock for Mrs. Davis, Bel Air, and Poker Face, plus however much else for HBOMax, Netflix, Hulu, etc., he could just pay one network $10 a month, binge the couple of good shows that they had, and then instead of waiting months for the next thing to come out, unsubscribe and switch to another network. Lather, rinse, repeat. He isn't as current, and sometimes it's hard to chat about whatever the current new thing is, but society has effectively already given up on the concept of the whole nation tuning in to any one thing and it being the topic of watercooler conversations for a myriad of reasons. Note: He has children, and I have no idea how he handles this other than to note that he also has a digital antenna, so some shows are "always available" (or at least as much as is allowed for)
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
    This is why all the streaming services are constantly trying to hype up their one "must watch" show. If you aren't watching it now, you're left out of the conversation, and nobody will want to talk about it in three months.
jstarfish 4y ago
> Take any Writing 101 course, and if you want to write for Hollywood, completely throw it out the window because they do not care in the slightest about any of that. I don't think it's that. Historically, you'd have a strong cast and crew on board for the first ~2-3 seasons. Any show attracts its critical mass of viewers early on, so the first way to keep production of later seasons profitable is by eliminating expensive gimmicks (helicopters, SFX, on-location, etc.). Firing the writers and replacing them with Writing 101 interns is usually the next step. It's not that nobody cares, but the replacement labor is new to the game; they're not writing award-winning scripts at that stage in their lives. It's a step above mining fanfiction.net for scripts.
dahwolf 4y ago
Well said, writing makes the difference. Quite a few great movies have an extremely simple setting. Even if we establish that writers can't write anymore, let's turn to books not yet televised? One phenomenon of shitty writing and dialogue is that increasingly I hate the main character. Smug, cringe, sassy, sarcastic, lecturing. I'm not rooting for them, I hope the bad guys win.

by jerf 4y ago

ChuckMcM 4y ago

A lot of wisdom in that rant. I too have noticed the big gap is writers (who are going on strike it seems). I think we're all going to have to suffer through "stuff written by LLMs" for a while, but I really think that a studio that restructured their revenue sharing to focus more of the proceeds towards writers would find quite a bit of success in today's market.

teh_klev 4y ago
> I too have noticed the big gap is writers I started watching "The Night Agent" but the dialogue became too painful for me to carry on after about four or five episodes. That coupled with a script where two secret service agents bitch at each other like children eventually nailed the coffin.
- ChuckMcM 4y ago
  Exactly! I had the same reaction. First episode, "Okay, an interesting (if well worn) setup, a lead character that is somewhat interesting, some dynamics." to second episode "Well that really didn't feel particularly entertaining", to the third episode, "not getting better, time to get off this train."
  - chris_wot 4y ago
    I just watched “Ghosted”. It was somewhat entertaining, but hardly stellar. This is the sort of movie that is being released these days, and we can easily take it or leave it.
    - teh_klev 4y ago
      Dexter Fletcher as director piqued my interest in Ghosted just a wee bit. I read The Rachel Papers as a youngster and quite enjoyed the film when it came out (in which he plays the main character in the book). I'll probably watch it on holiday to hedge against the possibility of losing two hours of my life on a school night :)
  - teh_klev 4y ago
    I feel the same is also happening with Rabbit Hole, though I might persist with it. The Kiefer and Charles Dance in the same series, what's not to like?
- jstarfish 4y ago
  The show got better by the end. The show itself-- not the dialogue. On a similar note: for so much of Night Agent, it felt like they started with competent technical advisors that paid enough attention to detail to make terminals show TUIs/GUIs that actually relate to the current goal, but the writers came along and rewrote every technical explanation with "brb guys, gotta hack the mainframe" garbage. The wine moms around me love the show though, so maybe it's just catering to the target demographic.

justinclift 4y ago

One of my friends is a writer, and his take on the problem is that the seasoned writers Netflix used to have (a few years ago) are now all getting fairly "old". Aka around their 50's. So, they were let go, and a new generation of young, unseasoned writers has been doing the writing. But unlike previous generations though (heh), many of them are not even slightly interested in learning from the previous (seasoned) writers, whom they view as inferior for some reason. Thus, the extremely low quality (idiot level) of writing in recent years. No idea how accurate that is, but it seems like a reasonable take at first glance. Mind you, I don't really watch US origin tv/movies any more myself due to their crappiness. :)

hooverd 4y ago
I wonder if some of that is TV writers growing up on ubiquitous TV writing, like how anime is increasingly made by people who just like anime and weren't as interested in a wide variety of media as the older generation.
FourHand451 4y ago
Certainly I would agree that letting go a lot of experience folks would have an effect on the product. However, I think this comment could use some more justification: > But unlike previous generations though (heh), many of them are not even slightly interested in learning from the previous (seasoned) writers, whom they view as inferior for some reason. Claiming that a particular generation is really different from another in this sort of way is something I'd need to see a lot of evidence to be convinced of. Kids trying to do their own thing and middle aged folks lamenting "kids these days" is a tale as old as time.
- justinclift 4y ago
  Thus the "(heh)" in my post. I recognise the same thing, and found it ironic. > Kids trying to do their own thing and middle aged folks lamenting "kids these days" is a tale as old as time. Yeah, agreed. From my point of view, it's not totally the new writers fault. It's the fault of the management chain that got rid of the old writers and also didn't tell the new ones "Look, just humour the old fogies for a while, you might learn something...".

svachalek 4y ago

I really felt this when I was watching Andor. It's about a bunch of nobodies in the Star Wars universe, no Jedi at all. But there were so many moments when things just made so much sense, that it actually took me out of the moment in surprise. There's so little good writing anymore that it's shocking when you see it.

TheCondor 4y ago

> I think the root problem is that no studio anywhere is large enough to put out enough high-quality content to keep the people engaged continuously. Not even Disney. This. There simply isn't that much really great content.

muffinman26 4y ago

Bringing up episodic television shows in the 90s brings up an interesting point. For 90s episodic television, script submissions were open to the public. Each show still had a team of staff writers like they do today, but the staff writers would mostly write the really important episodes (like finales and two-parters). The bulk of the episodes would be freelance scripts, with the staff writers editing for consistency and adding an extra scene or two to hint at continuing plot threads. In today's binge-able format, almost every episode is written by the staff writers. (They might still let someone with connections, like an actor on the show looking to make a career change, submit an episode.) Sure, 90+% of submitted episode pitches were probably terrible, but that was fine because show runners could choose the best episodes from the slush heap. Now each series only orders roughly as many episode scripts as a season has episodes. If a writer has a 75-80% hit rate, the show can't discard the bad episodes.

MichaelDickens 4y ago
> The bulk of the episodes would be freelance scripts, with the staff writers editing for consistency and adding an extra scene or two to hint at continuing plot threads Can you name a few shows that were written that way? I'd never heard of this but I don't watch much TV from before the 2000's.
- whartung 4y ago
  I know Star Trek: The Next Generation did this. They also did it with Deep Space 9. Not sure about Voyager. I don't know what other shows might have done this.
- CitrusFruits 4y ago
  I worked with a copy writer that had written an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." By coincidence she had submitted an a script for an episode that coincided with a major plot point they were working to (a character leaving). I asked her about it, and it was really the only major writing credit she ever got.
- muffinman26 4y ago

r00fus 4y ago

>but the combination of all of them doing that turn one fairly decent (not perfect, but decent) streaming service into an array of streaming services each individually not worth the subscription. And thus we're back at "cable rates" but pick your poison. The response should be "cancel services when you don't need them" but it's tougher if you have a family with young kids who you let watch. I really liked paying CBS/Paramount for a single month so my kids could binge Korra (sequel to Avatar: the Last Airbender) back when Netflix released A:tLA first. We literally watched nothing else on the service.

bmelton 4y ago
A friend of mine just does one service at a time, and it's low-key fairly brilliant. There's a bit of headache with installing / uninstalling apps on televisions and having to log into things once a month or quarter or however long it takes him, but the kernel of the idea is that there are generally only a few new, good shows worth watching for any given network, but all the good shows are roughly equally distributed between networks. So instead of paying $10 a month to Disney for Mandalorian, Wandavision, Loki, an additional $10 for Peacock for Mrs. Davis, Bel Air, and Poker Face, plus however much else for HBOMax, Netflix, Hulu, etc., he could just pay one network $10 a month, binge the couple of good shows that they had, and then instead of waiting months for the next thing to come out, unsubscribe and switch to another network. Lather, rinse, repeat. He isn't as current, and sometimes it's hard to chat about whatever the current new thing is, but society has effectively already given up on the concept of the whole nation tuning in to any one thing and it being the topic of watercooler conversations for a myriad of reasons. Note: He has children, and I have no idea how he handles this other than to note that he also has a digital antenna, so some shows are "always available" (or at least as much as is allowed for)
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
  This is why all the streaming services are constantly trying to hype up their one "must watch" show. If you aren't watching it now, you're left out of the conversation, and nobody will want to talk about it in three months.

jstarfish 4y ago

> Take any Writing 101 course, and if you want to write for Hollywood, completely throw it out the window because they do not care in the slightest about any of that. I don't think it's that. Historically, you'd have a strong cast and crew on board for the first ~2-3 seasons. Any show attracts its critical mass of viewers early on, so the first way to keep production of later seasons profitable is by eliminating expensive gimmicks (helicopters, SFX, on-location, etc.). Firing the writers and replacing them with Writing 101 interns is usually the next step. It's not that nobody cares, but the replacement labor is new to the game; they're not writing award-winning scripts at that stage in their lives. It's a step above mining fanfiction.net for scripts.

dahwolf 4y ago

Well said, writing makes the difference. Quite a few great movies have an extremely simple setting. Even if we establish that writers can't write anymore, let's turn to books not yet televised? One phenomenon of shitty writing and dialogue is that increasingly I hate the main character. Smug, cringe, sassy, sarcastic, lecturing. I'm not rooting for them, I hope the bad guys win.