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I think there will still be ambitious and creative stuff being made.
It'll just be in the minority, the bulk being predictable and repetitive.
I'm reasonably confident this has always been the case and we see the past through the rose tinted glasses of selection bias.
Fargo sorta negates that argument.
I love Fargo but it's ten years old now.
It's literally airing it's current season finale this week. It's ongoing and has remained fantastic all the way through.
When I got to the first few episodes of season 2 I thought it was all downhill but it picked up and on to season 3 now, was happy to see the recent episode released so I know there's more for me to get to
Legion wasn’t perfect but it was certainly complex and ambitious. Made by the same guy too.
That was released seven years ago. Point I'm making is Noah Hawley was able to make a name for himself writing these complex series before the current crunch caused a situation where a first time showrunner wouldn't be allowed to.
You might see a parallel to the New Hollywood movement that started in the late sixties and ended in the late seventies.
Noah Hawley is creating an Alien show. I'm cautiously excited.
I think it’s who you know and who you are in Hollywood that matters most, but especially who you know. I consider Barry to be a masterpiece in terms of directing and acting. Perfect popular media can exist, it’s just extremely rare under capitalism, everything needs to work like clockwork for a show like Sopranos to exist again, but that takes a lot of time and effort and the right people for it to be a possibility. Streaming fucked everything over too so that’s an issue. Can you really recall any decent shows that existed around sopranos era? There’s only as many as you can count on your hand and the same applies today, it’s not like every show during that period was great and the same stays true today - but it’s probably a lot harder today since the algorithm is mostly in charge of what shows are getting more seasons. Enshitification is true but it’s always been shit it’s not like much has changed.
I buy it.
It struck me (and I'm speculating here) that TV now is produced/green-lit mostly on a season to season basis with each season being produced like a Lord of the Rings Trilogy ... ~10 hrs of screen time, all written at once and then filmed at once.
Under such constraints, I don't think there is any room for the show, its story and its characters to breath, and I think I've been feeling this.
Some may say that we're getting longer arc now and that that its better. But I'm not sure I'm convinced. I think we're getting longer arcs in an MCU sense where the characters aren't invested in as much compared to the broader "universe" (eg, how many decent villains has the MCU actually had ... Endgame's success being a clue as to when they got the villain right). We're also getting shorter screen times and less organic/chaotic episodic writing (because so much screen time used to be produced) ... that allowed characters to be understood and filled out.
It feels like everything is trying to be a hit and more like a film and the feeling of organically getting to know a world and its character has been lost.
I can't help but think of season 8 of Game of Thrones. It had twists and drama and "subverted expectations" but felt dumb and unearned compared to the foundation of the fandom developed in the more meandering and character developing early seasons.
It really depends on the producers. On one hand netflix is greenlighting everything it can hoping to get a new Squid Game, killing everything that does not become viral in the first season. But then you have series like Fargo, not even producing a season per year, while maintaining the quality constantly stellar over 10 years.
Has the amount of disposable tv series increased? Absolutely. Has the number of overall series increased? Also yes. I cannot tell you the ratio between shallow/complex, but saying that "nothing new is made anymore" is just wrong.