No nuance and characters are saying the obvious stuff, because viewers are looking at another device while watching. We’re so cooked.
They dumb down their shows because I’m on the phone and I’m on the phone because their shows are so dumb that I get bored.
Soon they will reinvent the radio drama, but on TV with a story board or something.
Having partaken in online discussions about Pluribus (which doesn’t really do this), I can see where they are coming from (although I absolutely do not agree with it).
You go into episode discussion threads and regularly wonder “have we watched the same show?”, because people will just absolutely not know about some absolutely pivotal plot point that happened or explanation that was done.
It’s insane
Heard about this a few times now and witnessed it too. I don’t recall which movie it was, since it was forgettable, but the characters felt the need to remind me what was going on in the plot more than four times and I remember actually questioning my sanity. Like, do they think I’m this stupid and can’t follow a simple plot?
That explains the latest season of Wednesday.
You could just treat it like a shitty audiobook. I half-expected characters to start describing their own facial expressions.
I’m pretty sure this is why andor flew under the radar/gets mixed reviews. Even with friends who are huge Star wars nerds like me, I get ‘but it’s boring!’ a lot, mostly because it builds up to the climax in each three-episode arc. There isn’t necessarily a huge, inexplicable ‘OK time for action’ scene in every episode just because. To enjoy it you need to be plugged in, absorbing the dialogue and connecting the dots scene to scene to understand how the plot got to the action and why it’s important, and if you do you understand the tension buildup. Otherwise it just seems like two episodes of babbling and then some stuff happens, while you’re still staring at your phone. At no point do any of the characters stop and explain what’s happening before or during an important scene, it’s all show-don’t-tell. One of my best friends is working on his PhD, super bright guy, huge Star wars nerd. Has all the baby yoda this, clone trooper helmet that. I finally understood when we were watching something on stream once and I’m like “what’s that? That noise?” It was his other screen on in the background watching a Twitch stream :( now I understand he’s never not had a second screen going with a stream lmao feel like I’m taking crazy pills. We might as well pipe video of that stupid railway running coin grabber mobile game directly to the cortex of every citizen atp
As I’ve gotten older. I have completely stopped using the phrase “To enjoy [] you need to []”.
It’s pointless
Anyone who needs to do it isn’t going to, and everyone who is going to do it - will do it anyways.
Andor may also simply be a bad show, and this person’s opinion an outlier.
Is that your opinion? Or just devils advocate? I loved andor, I don’t go looking for reviews or what people say about media I watch, but, I would agree with the person above, I thought it was one of the best things that has come out of Star Wars. At least it treats you like an adult.
Didn’t realize people didn’t like it, but, of course, I don’t like things other people like.
I haven’t seen it, I was merely offering an alternative viewpoint.
Welk, that validation of many people’s suspicions about Netflix shows. Stranger Things’ last episode was particularly harrowing…
World’s ending, every second counts!
*monologues for 5 min about the importance of friendship
The enshitification of thought.
People should try reading more books and watch less TV/streaming precisely for this reason. Also maybe if you want to watch a movie consider watching older movies.
This is a fascinating article/podcast that talks about this but is focused on how it impacts your attention span and has data: https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/attention-spans
Mark: So I was very surprised to learn that TV and film shot lengths have decreased over the years. They started out much longer. They now average about four seconds a shot length. That’s on average. If you watch MTV music videos, they’re much shorter. They’re only a couple of seconds. So we’ve become accustomed to seeing very fast shot lengths when we look at TV and film. Even commercials have shortened in length. Commercials used to be much longer. Now it’s not uncommon to see six-second commercials, even shorter than that. Now it’s a chicken and egg question. We don’t know if TV and film have affected our attention spans on computers and phones. We don’t know if our attention spans have affected the decision-making of film editors and directors. We don’t know exactly if there is any causal connection we see these two parallel trends.
It could be the case that directors and editors are influenced by their own short attention spans when they create these film shots or it could be that they’re creating short film shots because they think that’s what the viewer wants to see. But this has become quite ubiquitous. In fact, on YouTube, there’s a particular YouTube aesthetic which uses jump cuts. So when you’re watching a YouTube film, the film becomes very jumpy. The natural pauses that people make when they speak it is removed. So the idea is to pack more content into a shorter amount of time. So we’re seeing short lengths of content from all directions. It’s not just what we’re attending to on computers and phones.
It also applies to games. Play a SNES or PS1 era game and you need to remember, plan ahead, solve problems, map out your path.
Play a modern game and its thirteen icons flashing showing you the exact linear path towards the NPC with the simplest dialogue to solve the simplest quest.
Proving that the Netflix execs don’t have the foggiest fucking idea what they’re doing.
You gain viewers by engaging them - by giving them something so interesting that they can’t be distracted.
If you dumb everything down, the most likely outcome is that rather than looking at their phones in addition to your show, they look at their phones instead of your show.
As long as the people are still subscribing, it doesn’t matter.
The other half of this proof is them being practically the only streaming service with binge/bulk releases instead of weekly. Ifs very likely this way because they’re too stupid to gauge a show’s success by any other metric than how much people watch in a short time.
I mean… have you met people? We’re all collectively getting dumber by the hour. So I guess it makes sense to chase that moving target.
The TV series, “Police Squad” was canceled because “people had to pay attention” to see/get the jokes. ☹️
This gotta be a joke. No fucking way… FUCK!
This has been around for a long time, before Netflix. My dad and much of his generation get lonely when the TV is off, so he leaves it on at all times on whatever, while working or watching sports. Network TV does this with predictable crime dramas and sitcoms, cables got Hallmark movies and reruns of family guy, etc. Half-tune is a popular format for pretty much most age groups.
I explicitly don’t do this, but I do have podcasts for my second screen in a sense-- only I won’t do them unless it’s a grindy game or Minecraft or something, and usually the podcast is taking my cognitive attention. It’s disruptive if it’s a thoughtful activity, like scrolling social media (though I guess the fediverse is a little more engaging than slopbook or whatever).
If I’m looking at my phone it’s because whatever’s on the screen is not engaging my attention isn’t it?
All the stuff on the phone has been designed for maximum engagement, there is no way movies or series can compete with that for people who are e.g. social media addicted.
And I am not saying that to say Netflix is right, the problem needs fixing at the root, not doctoring movies into something complementary.
