Oh No! Viewers Are Tuning Out Hollywood's Newer TV Series In Favor of Just Rewatching Old Shows Over and Over Again

Buhhhhh whyyyyyyy?!

The new shows are so much more Diverse and do so much Work for Trans Visibility.

Are you telling me that the public does not consider hardcore propaganda and social engineering to be entertainment?

The most streamed show last year wasn't the latest Netflix reality TV show craze. Nor was it the highly anticipated final season of "Succession" or the debut of "The Last of Us."

According to Nielsen, the most minutes last year -- more than 57 billion -- were spent watching "Suits," a legal drama that premiered 12 years prior.

The show, which is available to stream on Netflix and Peacock, stars the former actress Meghan Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex, and likely has her to thank for its second life. But "Suits" isn't the exception.

Old shows, which debuted over a decade ago, dominated the top streamed list of 2023. Several of the programs, including "Suits," "Gilmore Girls," and "Friends" have been off the air for years.

According to Nielsen, the most streamed acquired shows of 2023 were: [table omitted, but the shows are Suits, Bluey (Disney's only highly rated show, and they don't produce it, they merely license it), NCIS, Gray's Anatomy, Cocolmelon, The Big Bang Theory, The Gilmore Girls, Friends, Heartland, and Supernatural].

Many of these shows also have a persistent nostalgia factor. The New York Times recently described "Gilmore Girls" as "an endless buffet of TV comfort food."

Oh, as opposed to the "daring" "quality" shit that streamers produce themselves?

Maybe the incredible shift from favoring talent and experience in the writers room, to favoring simple quota-driven diversity, might have something to do with the rejection of newer shows:

Oh, and of course, the endless race-bending:

Besides woke content and driving out experienced, proven writers in favor of diverse 23 year old transgenders without any skill or prior credits, former network executive Paul Chato notes some reasons for the rejection of current tv series.

You can watch that if you care. I'll just mention one point he makes, which I have been pointing out for years and years.

TV shows used to be episodic. That is, each show would be a self-contained story. You watch the show, you get a beginning, a middle, and an end. Hopefully the ending is satisfying, but even if it's not, the show is now over. You don't have to sit around for sixteen episodes waiting for plot threads to evolve.

Now, during the 2000s, it became fashionable to mix episodic episodes with season-arc type episodes. For example, Person of Interest (one of the last new shows I watched) would do, in a 22 episode season, about sixteen standalone, completely episodic episodes. But the first episode of the season would set up a season-long conflict and season-long enemy, and then around three episodes during the season would be peppered in showing this conflict evolving and escalating, and then the season would end with a two-parter finale in which that season-long conflict is confronted and resolved.

So this was a hybrid model, part episodic, part ongoing story. Most of the time, though, you had a full story contained in an episode, and you didn't have to wait until May for the payoff to it.

I heard someone note that the old model of TV shows would be a pilot, and then every episode following was just a remake of the pilot with different character and situations. If the first Friends episode is about six New Yorkers struggling to get their careers on track and falling in and out of love, well, every episode after that is just that same story, with different circumstances.

But the new model of "TV shows" is really just this: Rejected movie pitches, scripts for two hour movies, which are then reconfigured to be six, eight, ten, or twelve episode season of TV shows. The main story of the season -- the plot of the rejected movie script -- is just d-r-a-g-g-e-d out for 6, 8, 10, or 12 hours. The first episode sets up a unstable situation that must be resolved, like most movies do, but then makes you sit through hours and hours of nonsense to get to the third act.

And to pad it out, they just add in a lot of soap-opera-style subplots and false climaxes along the way.

That's not very rewatchable. First of all, if you got hooked on the initial premise and initial starting conflict, then really you just wanted to know how does it end?, well, you only have to watch the last episode or last couple of episodes for that.

The old model had endings every episode; the new model has one ending per season, or maybe one ending for multiple seasons.

People (mostly women, who seem to like the new kind of TV) keep telling me to watch this show or that show, and I keep saying: "I don't want to bother watching an hour of TV without any resolution, just to decide if I feel like committing to another 8 or 10 hours to get a resolution."

Or as I've learned: I like endings. Endings are where it's at for me. It's not enough to set up a premise and a hook; you have to actually pay that premise off with an ending.

And the new model of TV seems to be writing on Easy Mode because they don't bother with endings very often.

Beginnings are easy. Conflict is easy. Premises are dime-a-dozen. It's satisfying endings that matter. As Seinfeld said, sort of, regarding car reservations.

If you don't have an ending, you don't have a story. Period.

There was a recent show I liked, the one with Adam Scott called Severance. It was a pretty decent show, but when you get to the last episode, hoping for a resolution -- no, they just give you another cliffhanger. You get some new information, but no closure to the plot threads that have been set up all season. Just... more plot threads.

I don't know if I'll bother watching the second season, unless they tell me in advance "This is the last season." I don't want to get on an endless treadmill of never-ending soap-opera wheel-spinning.

Anyway, that, and the fact that now every single couple is biracial (and the races are always white and black, which are apparently the only two races) and that every show has to have a big storyline celebrating The Message and Trans Acceptance, and oh, also nothing is well written and these shows have so much slack you could use them to make sails for a cutter, would explain why no one wants to watch your crappy shows anymore, Hollywood.

Bonus: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit went full Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

In this episode, looters loot a bunch of high-end luxury brand stores. One of the thieves says he's doing so to "put food on the table."

One of the store attendants is taken into a back room and r*ped.

But then she won't identify the assailant, because he's black and you know, black males just can't get justice from the justice system.

Note that there is no question this is the r*pist; they also have him on video.

And the whole Law & Order: SVU team frets about what a tough decision it is to identify a rapist, knowing that the justice system might fail and he therefore might... be found innocent.

Because he's actually guilty. The justice system failing here would be if he were let off.

I haven't been this enthralled since their GamerGate episode!

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:30 PM

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