raniE
Big Bearded Guy
- Joined
- Feb 10, 2019
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As the title says, I think I might be done with epic tv-shows. You know, the kind that has fantastic production values, gets movie caliber actors, has an enormous plot that takes an entire season, or more likely several seasons, to deliver. The awesome spectacle that back in the 90s and early 00s I could only dream of.
Back then I remember often being disappointed with the episodic nature of tv-shows. Stuff like Star Trek Voyager or The X-Files, or even older fare like MacGyver or The Incredible Hulk were often good, but since they never really resolved anything and almost always just reset back to the status quo there always felt like something was missing. Then came stuff like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which stayed episodic but also had a larger overarching plot in there, one that was actually real and not just hinted at like in X-Files. This stuff I loved. And then came the era of prestige TV. The Sopranos. Battlestar Galactica. True Detective. Game of Thrones. Westworld. Stranger Things. And at first, I loved it. It was like watching a movie, but for hours and hours. Old 3 hour Hollywood epics had nothing on this.
But. The longer this has gone on, the more I've noticed It isn't everything I wanted it to be. These shows often start great. But despite the budgets, the actors, the initial premise and the clear desire to move away from being that old kind of tv-show, it seems like it is often impossible to escape the tv-format. Even for something that was never actually on tv, like Stranger Things. Plots start tight, and characters multi-faceted, complex and interesting. But as the series moves along, the plots become looser, the characters devolve more and more into caricatures of themselves and the show seems to lose its raison d'etre.
The pacing is also so often off the wall slow. I recently watched the first season of a slightly older show, Jeremiah, from the early 00s (based on the old Jeremiah comic). In the first two-parter episode the show managed to introduce the audience to the main characters, introduce the post-apocalyptic setting and the story behind it, introduce a villain, have the heroes captured by the villain, have the heroes escape, then go off to find a different place, find it, meet new characters, discover they are isolationists and then break their isolationist streak and agree to work for them. And I realized, in a modern prestige tv show, that would have been the entire first season. Maybe more than that actually. We would have had reams of dialog before the two leads even met, the villain would have been painstakingly introduced to us, loads of character moments would have been had, and nothing would have actually happened for the first three episodes. So seeing all this play out over the course of a single two-parter was fantastic and very refreshing. It felt like a natural pace for a show, rather than something that wants me to binge an entire season worth of content in one sitting and then wait for the next season to show up.
Even when there's something to adapt it seems it doesn't work out that well. I loved Game of Thrones, but the show that ended in 2019 was nowhere near the show that began in 2011. This probably wasn't helped by running out of material halfway, but even if someone made a Lord of the Rings tv-show now I can't escape thinking that in the final seasons it would be almost unrecognizable from the book (the early parts should work very well however as it moves about as slowly as a typical modern tv-show).
I'll still watch the rest of Stranger Things, but I'm totally uninterested in all the new prestige shows I'm hearing about.
Has anyone else had this same experience? Or do you think I'm way off base?
Back then I remember often being disappointed with the episodic nature of tv-shows. Stuff like Star Trek Voyager or The X-Files, or even older fare like MacGyver or The Incredible Hulk were often good, but since they never really resolved anything and almost always just reset back to the status quo there always felt like something was missing. Then came stuff like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which stayed episodic but also had a larger overarching plot in there, one that was actually real and not just hinted at like in X-Files. This stuff I loved. And then came the era of prestige TV. The Sopranos. Battlestar Galactica. True Detective. Game of Thrones. Westworld. Stranger Things. And at first, I loved it. It was like watching a movie, but for hours and hours. Old 3 hour Hollywood epics had nothing on this.
But. The longer this has gone on, the more I've noticed It isn't everything I wanted it to be. These shows often start great. But despite the budgets, the actors, the initial premise and the clear desire to move away from being that old kind of tv-show, it seems like it is often impossible to escape the tv-format. Even for something that was never actually on tv, like Stranger Things. Plots start tight, and characters multi-faceted, complex and interesting. But as the series moves along, the plots become looser, the characters devolve more and more into caricatures of themselves and the show seems to lose its raison d'etre.
The pacing is also so often off the wall slow. I recently watched the first season of a slightly older show, Jeremiah, from the early 00s (based on the old Jeremiah comic). In the first two-parter episode the show managed to introduce the audience to the main characters, introduce the post-apocalyptic setting and the story behind it, introduce a villain, have the heroes captured by the villain, have the heroes escape, then go off to find a different place, find it, meet new characters, discover they are isolationists and then break their isolationist streak and agree to work for them. And I realized, in a modern prestige tv show, that would have been the entire first season. Maybe more than that actually. We would have had reams of dialog before the two leads even met, the villain would have been painstakingly introduced to us, loads of character moments would have been had, and nothing would have actually happened for the first three episodes. So seeing all this play out over the course of a single two-parter was fantastic and very refreshing. It felt like a natural pace for a show, rather than something that wants me to binge an entire season worth of content in one sitting and then wait for the next season to show up.
Even when there's something to adapt it seems it doesn't work out that well. I loved Game of Thrones, but the show that ended in 2019 was nowhere near the show that began in 2011. This probably wasn't helped by running out of material halfway, but even if someone made a Lord of the Rings tv-show now I can't escape thinking that in the final seasons it would be almost unrecognizable from the book (the early parts should work very well however as it moves about as slowly as a typical modern tv-show).
I'll still watch the rest of Stranger Things, but I'm totally uninterested in all the new prestige shows I'm hearing about.
Has anyone else had this same experience? Or do you think I'm way off base?
