> streaming services, which have produced a world-historic surplus of high-quality scripted series. No, they're almost all terrible and as far as I can tell mo

> streaming services, which have produced a world-historic surplus of high-quality scripted series. No, they're almost all terrible and as far as I can tell most people can't find anything new to watch, or if they're lucky they can find one or two things to almost get into. The trick is that there's no way to find out how many people are watching things any more, and that keeping your subscription going is binary. You can accumulate a huge amount of personal dissatisfaction before actually cancelling. The main thing I'm hearing about these grossly padded, awful series, is that after people get interested by the pilot, they increasingly start fast forwarding through more and more of the episodes until they're consuming them so quickly they might as well be watching a digest of the "previously on...", until they get so disgusted by the repeated slights to their intelligence that even this they can't even stomach. Giving up a subscription also means giving up the archive of the "vibrant film and television" from "the era immediately preceding streaming," that even though they may have seen it before, is pleasant to leave playing in the background. Production values are very high. Dialog is sometimes very good. Series are high-concept, but empty, endless and awful, and I even feel sorry for the writers that have to keep generating scenes with one character walking up to another character who is busy working on something and says: "how are you holding up?" There are going to be five of those in this episode, and maybe one thing that advances the plot. Apple TV has all the money in the world, and just generates clumsy high-priced disasters. I have no idea how bad the corporate culture can be in these places to actively repel any story that is any good. I think the problem is that they're not making enough cheapo series where talent could accidentally sneak in because no one was paying attention.