I used to call it netflix syndrome but I think its just bad writing industry-wide
Everyone is obsessed with plot development at the expense of entertainment. The great writers know how to do both. Like for example in The Boys. That show has something spectacular happen in every single episode, while also developing the plot and the characters.
I think part of the problem is that everything is trying to be some cinematic masterpiece vs back then a lot of shows were made purely for the fun premise. The Boys definitely found a balance between the two. What I would do for another show like Chuck.
Oh man I always appreciate when someone brings up Chuck. That show (particularly the first 3 seasons) had a masterful balance of individual episode stories and overarching story. I would submit Archer did a decent job of this as well, although I think the formula was weakened during the "coma seasons"/Archer Vice. They are still great seasons, they still feel like Archer, just that they don't build on the story that they had already invested in.
You take that back! Archer vice was one of the best seasons!
"If we don't spend it this year, we can't get an increase next year."
It was great in a vacuum, it just felt like a diversion from the investment the writers had been making in the first 4 seasons.
Same with the Coma seasons. I particularly like Danger Island, but they are all fantastic as individual spinoff shows. But they do nothing to advance the plot that had been so invested in up to that point.
Stuff like Archer and Lana's relationship, Archer's father, Barry, could all have been more developed in that time if they had just stuck to the story they were telling rather than spending 5 seasons faffing around on other stories. Worse yet, we may have gotten more substantial character development out of Malory while Jessica Walter was still alive if they hadn't taken those diversions.
I agree with you so much about Archer. Those middle season were ehh. The last few season when he got out the coma and he developed more as a human/dad and all that was great.
I got teary eyed when I watched the last episode with Jessica. It was a good tribute (I feel) with her even if the last episode was reused voice acting for her.
I recently rewatched Chuck and fully agree the first three seasons are very strong. I did see a few plot holes upon watching it straight through that I never caught when I watched it live.
There were a lot of shows like this around the same time.
Burn Notice had the overall arc of Michael resolving the Burn Notice but individual "criminal of the week" episodes.
Agents of Shield started as a "084 of the week" but I think around season 3 moved more toward a fully serialized show.
I think Burn Notice specifically, not necessarily started, but saw how people were starting to change how they watched shows. I believe USA Network even posted the shows the day after on their website for people to watch.
I'm okay with serialization so long as it's a good story.
Upvote for Chuck. They lost it with the later seasons and all that "zooming" but it gave use the best dynamic duo of all time.
You're right. Happy Days was certainly not trying to be a masterpiece, but it was pretty fun.
I'd look to a show like The Good Place for a perfect balance.
It absolutely matters if you haven't seen previous episodes, but each episode is still, on it's own, great.
It's a side effect of streaming. Heavenly seralzed used to have two big drawbacks. If people didn't catch the first few episodes that didn't have a way to get into the story. The story also had to hold peoples interest for a week before the next episode dropped. So only the best seltzer shows lasted.
Now you start the show when you want at the beginning. So instead of making an episode that's entertaining and when next week come around you think it was good last week I'll watch that again you get a show that encourages setting stuff up and the implying it's about be resolved right before the episode end.
It's great for getting you to binge and then getting renewed on a stemmer. Stemming is the best way to watch shows produced for the old weekly broadcast system but not the best environment for developing new shows.
My brother in Christ, please proof read if you're gonna post paragraphs.
"What did Autocorrect fumble?" is the new Cockney rhyming slang.
Pretty much the same with movies of the superhero and other genres. You gotta start at the beginning and only in the last 15min is Surf Dracula at max power. Then you get a couple of uninspired sequels (because sequels print money regardless), and eventually a reboot where they retell the same old Dracula-Finds-Surfing-In-His-Time-Of-Grief origin story but with a younger actor.
Nah, the first two movies are building up to showing you Surf Dracula a full power, with things being mostly in place at the end of movie 2. Then movie 3 comes along and Dracula is already over the hill and has given up on surfing.
The internet really does have everything if you search for it...
James Bond and Ethan Hunt are always just getting framed and running from their own organizations nowadays instead of doing cool missions.
Which is not at all what it's supposed to be about. It's annoying. I hate how gritty and dark everything tries to be these days.
Nice to have a balance though. Some of the Moore and Connery era movies were basically Austin Powers.
We're in a bit of a sticky situation. Nationalism is very unpopular now, and people have a general distrust of our government and its institutions. That is reflected in these movies, where the enemy is actually their own organization, where it would have been a foreign enemy in the past, like an actual enemy of our country. But then the depiction of the government institutions as untrustworthy in so many movies fuels people's distrust of the government to the point where now the only stories that people will believe are where the hero is fighting internal powers. It's a bit of circular reinforcement.
Well it's nice to see Russia doing their part to make foreign superpowers unpopular again.
One reason I prefer watching older shows is that the format made the writing so concise. They can fit two plots and some character development into 42 minutes, unlike newer shows where it's twenty minutes of dialog and narration every episode. For example, the last season of Discovery had as much happen as two episodes of TNG.
On the other hand, those shows hit the big reset button every week. I'd love something episodic, but what happens in previous episodes still has an effect on future episodes. Star Trek started to do that a little with DS9, but even there... O'Brien is in a mind prison for what he thinks is 20 years and he's fine in the next episode?
Disney Marvel shows will have the pacing of a 20 episode season but end on episode 8.
Also the ducking voice over at the end hammering home the moral of the story. No matter if it makes any sense at all.
Because sometime we all need to a , even if . There is so much that causes us to bla bla bla I can't even write this bullshit.
Gave up on the Handmaid’s Tale, as half of each episode was a flashback to one of the characters visiting a cafe in the times before Trump’s second term - which the writers probably thought was brilliant character and world building, but was actually wheelspinning.
Wait, I just described Lost too.
And then it's not picked up for a second season.
Which is a shame because if you look at the source material (a single issue comic from 1973 where he battles King Triton in Atlantis to free the Bikini Lesbians) you really need to understand the history of the surfboard to fully appreciate his character.
It shows 5 mins of surfing if you're lucky. More likely it shows him about to drop into his first big wave with cheering in the background, then fades to black
It is then canceled while season 2 is in pre-production. The head writer eventually reveals S2 would've dealt with the rivalry between Dracula and up-and-coming surfer Nosferatu(played by the same actor as Dracula. Absolutely no one acknowledges their resemblance), leading up to the big Surf championships
In the latest movie adaption of the Surf Dracula (2024) by DC they already introduced the less grounded and more magical elements of the Surf Dracula franchise and even allready introduced the Surfer Werewolves to sell more toys and build up an expanded universe. They also did not even use Van Chil'sing as his archenemy but made him fight a gigantic sky hole that spawned an army of faceless minions.
and they’re always whispering all the time too. it drives me crazy. nobody whispers that much in real life. it doesn’t make people sound more mysterious
Is this post about "Cobra Kai"?
I like watching it and yelling "WHAT THE FUCK ARE THE ADULTS DOING WHILE THIS IS GOING ON???" and "WATCH OUT FOR THOSE STAIRS!!!"
I hope you like sad acoustic covers of beach boys songs, cause you're getting sad acoustic covers of beach boys songs.
Maybe I'm basic, but I love exposition over pretty much all else. I watched the entirety of Adventure Time despite not really being a fan of the humor or the main characters just because I craved more information about the history of Ooo.
Adventure Time's exactly the right show for that addiction. Most episodes aren't moving along some overarching plot, and don't neatly tie off and return to the status quo. They're like - that happened, it was fucked-up, you gotta deal with it. The show hardly goes three consecutive episodes without dipping into mortality salience or outright existential horror. And then what becomes crucially important two seasons later was a cutaway gag with the tiny elephant grandma.
To anyone who hasn't watched the show: there is an episode where the main characters are transformed into a bowl of soup and a runny egg (respectively) when they attempt to stop two wizards from going to Mars so they can kill God. It is titled "You Forgot Your Floaties."
Nostalgia good, modern bad, blah blah, whatever. I just want to see Surf Dracula.
I’m guessing it’s a mystery and Surf Dracula is trying to find out why there’s so many vampire killings when vampires decided to chill out and live along side humans or maybe the vampires are getting to close to attacking the human love of their life or something and there’s gonna be an episode where Surf Dracula has to dress in a big, rubber, human suit to go day surfing (you know so the sunlight doesn’t kill them) to crack the case.
Have you seen the 1979 Mad Max film? He's only mad for the final 10 minutes, he's pretty chilled up until that point
I do like the idea of serf dracuala with the intent on telling how he came to be a count but I don't want a humanising tale I want it to be pretty much a horror movie with just one troublesome person managing to run away at the end
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