I'm beginning to dislike Netflix (re: Archive 81, 1899, Warrior Nun etc cancellations)

nevin

Hero
IDK, ive gone back a few times to watch 20-24 eps seasons of shows and don't find they offer much over the new prestige era. Very few shows took advantage of that run time in the past. Most show the wear of long running seasons, few repetitively used sets, and many toss away episodes that offer little to the whole experience. I do recognize that you too see this as a potential benefit of the format, but I found it to be a rare exception myself.
there is some truth to this but 90 percent of all TV shows are junk.. But I will note that 20 to 24 season shows drip fed kept the viewers entertained longer increasing the profit margin. Now they are trying to do 8 to 10 season shows atmovie quality and discovering the margins are razor thin. Because that show lasts 1 day to a week for most people. Quality Icecream is great but if the choice is an icecream cone every weak or an entire box at a time you'll get sick of it much quicker a box at a time.
 

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Ryujin

Legend
there is some truth to this but 90 percent of all TV shows are junk.. But I will note that 20 to 24 season shows drip fed kept the viewers entertained longer increasing the profit margin. Now they are trying to do 8 to 10 season shows atmovie quality and discovering the margins are razor thin. Because that show lasts 1 day to a week for most people. Quality Icecream is great but if the choice is an icecream cone every weak or an entire box at a time you'll get sick of it much quicker a box at a time.
For this reason streaming services work their film crews at a ridiculous and unsustainable pace, to try and save money. I'm hearing horror stories from crew.
 

Thomas Shey

Legend
On the other hand, random traditional TV shows often got by because, outside the hardware to receive them and watching commercials, the networks did not expect you to pay for them. Netflix, Max and Prime (though the latter is a complicated case because Prime Video is at least partly propped up by the fact its bundled with all the free Amazon shipping) do. As such the dynamic is different.

(There are streaming services that behave more like traditional broadcast TV--but Tubi and its kin do not have the dynamic of paid streaming services in any meaningful way).
 

The TV industry is trapped in the streaming model - it's too popular with viewers, but also mostly unprofitable.

 




Talking of disliking Netflix - I was re-watching Always Sunny recently, and kind of assumed they'd removed the Lethal Weapon episodes, which they had, but what got my goat was that they'd renumbered all the episodes to cover that up.

So the episode numbers on Netflix for Always Sunny are just lies, at least for any episode in a season after a Lethal Weapon one.

This sort of thing is really crap. I can understand removing the episodes - it's cowardly, sure, but it's okay so long as you admit you're doing it. A better option is the Disney approach of the health warning before those episodes (unless they're truly beyond-the-pale, as per Song of the South). But pretending they never existed, and renumbering to cover up the fact that you removed them? That's really crap behaviour, and damaging to people's future understanding of shows.

Also, messing stuff up even further, they combined the two episodes which were a two-parter at the end of S6 (they didn't do this for any other two-parters, AFAICT), and managed to somehow massively lower the visual quality. S6 is in Full HD with normal Netflix compression, but their bizarrely combined "A Very Sunny Christmas" Part 1 and Part 2 is clearly either in an outright lower resolution (doesn't even look like 720p), or is massively more compressed. Why do this kind of thing? Both unnecessary and damaging.
 
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