Life, Writing, Weirdness

Or it should be. Warning: rant ahead.

I’m extremely frustrated with the current television experience.

As someone who generally wants to be told new stories (where new means something I haven’t seen before) the proliferation of streaming services, paid and free, and the mining of things that are still inside copyright to get in front of people’s eyes should mean that we’re entering a glorious new golden age of television. Or perhaps it could be expressed using an even rarer precious metal. A Platinum Age? Osmium?

I should have easy access to almost everything ever produced for television across the world but, as usual, capitalism is fucking it up.

How do I mean that? Let me count the ways.

1. Rights. “That’s mine so you have to pay to show it which means your subscribers have to pay to see it.” On the surface of things, that’s fine. Things need to be paid for. More importantly, people who make things need to be paid. Once we’re out of the initial run for something, though, all I really care about is if the people who actually made it are receiving residuals. If they’re not, I’m not all that interested in enriching the studio who currently owns the rights for it.
2. Everyone seems to think they need their own streaming service. Every studio, every production company, every niche interest. There are over 200 at this point. It’s like going back to mid-90s cable where you could pay for individual channels. How many services do the corporations really think I’m interested in paying for? Answer: every corporation thinks theirs is essential and everyone else’s is unnecessary. They’re all right on the second half of that, and all wrong on the first.
3. Price goes up, experience quality goes down. Every service works under the idea of “charge what the market will bear” rather than “charge what would actually be fair”. Unseen in the background, most of them scrimp on maintenance and development that won’t put money directly on the bottom line.

And every service thinks I should watch what it wants me to watch without regard to what I’m actually interested in. In this section, when I use “you” I’m speaking directly to streaming services in general, but if some of their managers and executives want to take it personally, who am I to argue?

1. Algorithms. There are a couple of exceptions, but generally speaking, the built-in algorithm of a given streaming service is just going to show me the same things over and over, shuffled randomly into different categories. It doesn’t show me new things, it shows me what the service wants me to watch.
2. People who watched this also watched. See algorithms, above.
3. Trending. No, that’s still just using an algorithm to push particular shows at me.
4. Top 10 in Canada today. Stop it.
5. Popular in Category X. Seriously, let it go.
6. Because you watched Y. Fuck all the way off.
7. AI. There’s no such thing yet. This is just the algorithm with a creepy, half-melted face mask. Someday, maybe, but not today. I honestly don’t think the tech bros and giant corporations really have any idea how the rest of us feel about having inferior products that are often wrong or just make shit up shoved down our throats at every turn.
8. Searching. Which seems like it should be a good thing after all my complaints to this point, but if I try to bypass whatever algorithms are at play and look for things on my own, it’s only worthwhile if the results are in an unbiased alphabetical order, which not everyone uses. Even those that do mostly take a page from Google’s book and show me a bunch of stuff that’s tangentially related to what I actually asked for. If I search for Star Trek, sure I might be interested in Battle Beyond the Stars, but it’s not what I asked you to find. If you don’t have it, maybe just don’t have it and tell me that. Directly speaking to the streaming services: your algorithms are bad and you should feel bad. They are crappy and don’t work.

(Note: WordPress splits my list if I interrupt it. “Let me count the ways” came to fifteen, but I could probably find more.)

And then there’s production of new TV, or episodic video, or however you want to phrase it in the current era. With the ease of use of ubiquitous video technology, one would think it would be constantly getting easier to produce TV (or movies for that matter). Get some decent video editing software to go with your decent writers and actors and get to work. Yes, I’m oversimplifying, but it should be far easier to make a TV show than it was in the 1980s. That’s being screwed up, too.

1. Economics. In the current climate, it’s somehow cheaper, and therefore better, to produce a bunch of things and hope that one of them will be a breakout success instead of investing in a smaller number of really good things and building them into great things. So many shows with incredible potential get tossed after one season because they didn’t immediately catch millions of eyeballs.
2. Number of episodes. Season length has gotten shorter and shorter. Yes, I understand 6-8 episodes has worked for most European models for a long time, but while it seems like a lot of those have moved up into the 13-episode area, the opposite has happened on this side of the pond. In North America, 26 used to be the norm (30 in early days), but streaming services seem to have gotten down into the 8-10-episode range for a season in the last several years. So not only are services tossing good shows after a single season, they’re not producing enough episodes for big chunks of the potential audience to decide how much they like them before the decision has already been made to cancel them.
3. Networks. Somehow, they still think they’re important even though their shows have gotten shorter and shorter to make room for more and more commercials. “Hour long” shows have gone from 48-51 minutes in the original golden age of television down to 37-42 minutes in the current era. Subscription-based cable networks (which still exist) go a little longer, but not quite into golden age territory. Sure, if the show is produced by a streaming service, they don’t have to stick with that but sometimes do anyway.
4. Commercials. Worse on networks, but they’re even on services that want me to pay for them. Greed, a hallmark of capitalism.

You can argue any of those points and may even get me to give ground here and there, but probably not much. Maybe commercials are still necessary on a paid service to keep subscription fees low, but you’ll probably need to show me a balance sheet to get me to buy into that idea.

Ultimately, I’m left having to completely curate my own viewing experience. Which I think I’ve talked about previously. Not being able to binge-watch things, I’m usually cycling through a dozen things. Out of the current dozen, exactly one was produced in the current decade. The rest is a combination of nostalgia watches and things I didn’t see or know about the first time around. In the queue is a lot of the same but also some things produced outside of North America, and most of it not in English.

So, once again, capitalism ruins everything and we’re left to our own devices. It’s not like it’s even any good at keeping prices low at this point.

I’m going to go queue up the next thing on my list which looks like it’s the second last episode in the regular series before network fuckery forced them into TV movies.

Happy watching and be well, everyone.