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Post by Jeremy on Mar 8, 2021 7:16:25 GMT -8
Was hoping to have a Dr. Seuss piece up last week, but rhyming is hard. Anyway, here it is now.
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Post by Jeremy on Jun 17, 2021 10:03:31 GMT -8
This week I decided to take a break from praising great animation and look on the flipside - what are the worst episodes of the best animated shows? Warning: Article may sound snarkier than it's meant to be.
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Post by Jay on Jun 17, 2021 10:13:33 GMT -8
This week I decided to take a break from praising great animation and look on the flipside - what are the worst episodes of the best animated shows? Warning: Article may sound snarkier than it's meant to be. The book South Park was parodying was A Million Little Pieces, which still gets talked about insofar as James Frey lied and apologized and still has a massive book deal and connections with various Hollywood elites and their projects. Cancel culture!
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Post by Jeremy on Jun 17, 2021 10:20:02 GMT -8
As I recall, Frey did face backlash and spent a few years in publishing purgatory following the scandal. Could've been worse if social media had existed back then.
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Post by Jay on Jun 17, 2021 10:25:34 GMT -8
Surely. It remains in my mind because I hang out with a lot of writers and would-be memoirists who are quite resentful and envious of those folks who somehow get paid the big bucks for their work. Plus, you know, Frey may have been caught but the literary culture that incentivized such a "memoir" still is out there if it hasn't worsened in the last couple decades. I'm surprised more folks aren't caught in it, but then few present their work as 100% true and promote it as such anyway.
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Post by Jeremy on Oct 1, 2021 12:57:45 GMT -8
I woke up this morning and got myself to write about the cultural influence of The Sopranos. Check it.It's been a hectic summer, as you may have guessed, but I'm going to try to get back to the weekly writing schedule, at least for the next few months.
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Post by Jeremy on Nov 26, 2021 11:22:47 GMT -8
Okay, this is not technically a TV post, but it is adjacent to a new TV series, and it's an article I've wanted to write for a few years now. The new Hawkeye show on Disney Plus, though a spinoff from the MCU, draws its key inspiration from the comic book series by Matt Fraction and David Aja - arguably the best Marvel comic book of the past ten years. Today I finally explain why.
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Post by Jeremy on Feb 1, 2022 9:57:56 GMT -8
Once again, this is not a TV post, but I've been itching to write about one of these social media non-troversies for a while, and the global uproar stirred over the perceived ban of Art Spiegelman's Maus finally pushed me to go for it. Here I break down the entire story and why everyone got it wrong. Just a word of warning, the piece is over 5,000 words long. I've broken it into a few sections in case you don't want to read it all at once.
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Post by Jeremy on May 4, 2022 5:54:23 GMT -8
I'm back again. Today we've got a piece about Netflix and the recent issues it's faced in maintaining its hold at the top of the streaming world - issues driven by the fact that Netflix is quickly losing its cultural relevance. TUDUM!
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Post by otherscott on May 4, 2022 9:12:09 GMT -8
I think when it comes down to it, the competition is the biggest problem. When you could have originals plus host The Office, Friends and Seinfeld all for less than $10 a month, that is going to be a deal even if the quality of the originals is scattershot. As soon as you can no longer do that and are charging much more than that, it's a much sketchier product.
I will say that Netflix could have done a better job with their back catalogue though. Bojack (for its entire run) and Orange is the New Black (for 4 seasons) are two of the highest level content you can ask for, but there's just not enough of it. And then they got into a spot where they started prioritizing short term gains by cancelling shows prematurely to keep the money rolling on new material rather than building up complete stories worth that people can go back to. It's hard to promote Glow as something people should go back and watch when it ends abruptly and not on its own terms, and even worse for a show like The OA which didn't even get the chance to tell the story it wants to tell.
I think Netflix has done a really good job in the reality space though, a space I'm not very interested in overall, and that may continue to keep it relevant moving forward. None of the other streaming services have been able to match Netflix's reality commitment, and no one actually cares about back catalogue of reality shows. (To the point where there are seasons of Survivor, maybe the most impactful reality show of all time, that are not available in Canada through any means (paid or otherwise) other than finding old DVDs).
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Post by Jeremy on May 4, 2022 15:31:35 GMT -8
Netflix's leveraging of reality shows feeds into the larger point - they aren't interesting in being the best streaming service as much as the most streaming service, and reality programming (which can usually be made quickly and on the cheap) is a great way to keep the content gears churning. They've also recently begun adding interactive "games" to their catalog as a way of keeping things fresh. A lot of new ways to cultivate new content, but it all comes with hiked prices and the continued loss of popular acquired programming. (Curious to know what the Seinfeld viewing numbers are; guessing they're not nearly at the level of Friends.)
I saw an article a few years ago which predicted that Netflix will wind up as the AOL of streaming services - a once-valuable pioneer, eventually eclipsed by competition that was better built for the long haul. As recent events suggest, this is not an unreasonable prediction.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on May 4, 2022 20:04:57 GMT -8
They've also recently begun adding interactive "games" to their catalog as a way of keeping things fresh. I don't think that interactive content in the vein of "Bandersnatch" is meant as a novelty so much as it is meant as an anti-piracy measure.
Most of the interactive programming, as far as I can tell, is aimed at children, which hints towards Netflix's "lack of good content" problem really being a "lack of good content for Anglophone adults" problem, because as far as I'm aware they do make pretty good content aimed at children and foreign markets. Jeremy is a noted Green Eggs and Ham evangelist, but 3% and Casa de las Flores are supposed to be great (I will report back to you on the latter in a month or two, maybe).
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Post by Jeremy on May 5, 2022 14:36:36 GMT -8
Netflix casts a wide net across all genres and markets - and they've coproduced a ton of international programming (Squid Game has received the lion's share of attention, but it's just a drop in the bucket), and I don't doubt that some of it is quite good. But the bulk of it, much like the bulk of American English programming, is there to fill a void that can never be full enough.
Netflix's brand of children's programming is similar in this vein, in that this some quality TV if you can separate it from all the churn. (The Jurassic World animated series is apparently quite good, but the unimpressive CG animation has kept it way down my watchlist.) They have the budget and the means to create quality kids' programming... but the lynchpin of Netflix Kids has for the last several years been the DreamWorks shows, which are extremely popular but not particularly impressive. It's kind of tough to take Netflix's commitment to good youth programming seriously when they cancel several animated projects to make more room for another Boss Baby spinoff.
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