Hacker Cinema
Arrested Development
2003 · TV series · 5 seasons
Created by Mitchell Hurwitz
The story of a wealthy family that lost everything, and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together.
36 positive3 negative1 mixed78 neutralfrom 118 commenters
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128 comments on Hacker News
That was like living out and episode of Arrested Development in real time. I have a hard time recalling it without mentally casting Jeffrey Tambor as Rudy Giuliani.
I think Netflix's incentives, especially now that they have an ad tier, have changed.
With a subscription service 10 years ago, you just need to have enough must-see content:
- Original scripted TV series that become mainstream known and/or seen as prestige TV, like "The Crown," "Mindhunter," "Bridgerton," "Stranger Things" etc.
- "Crown Jewel" reruns with huge fanbases such as The Office, Friends, Seinfeld, Modern Family, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Arrested Development, etc.
- Unscripted TV series that become buzzy - like Love Is Blind, Tiger King, etc.
Having those categories all well-stocked ensures that only a fool would cancel their Netflix subscription as they'll be out of the loop when the new season of a 'zeitgeisty' show drops. You don't really need all your viewers to watch more hours to get more money every year, you can grow revenue with a combo of new viewers and price increases as long as users just watch regularly.
I think present-day Netflix sees incentives:
- to get as many people on the ad tier as possible so they can scale revenue with watch time
- to increase watch time which is a solved problem via psychological manipulation if you have good ML like they do
- more watch time without spending more money points pretty obviously to lowering cost per show as much as you can, which manifests as worse quality, more reality, more imported dubbed shows, etc. and drastically curtailing giving huge checks to the Matthew Weiners, David Benioffs, and Vince Gilligans of the world to bet on a massive superhit.
So they will want to focus heavily on the unscripted category plus whatever they can slap together cheaply, then autoplay and optimize their way to growth.
Agreed. I think the newscaster joke in arrested development was a solid demonstration of this point. For those who don't know it, the showrunners would frequently insert a news clip of the same reporter summarizing whatever silly plot was going on, ending with: "What this means for your weekend, at 10."
Honestly that's what people watch the news for. What are external factors that they were previously unaware of that might impact their lives (or weekends)? Most (not all) people are aware of the dangers posed by heart disease. They're not watching the news to learn about something they're already aware of.
I might be beating this horse to a second death, but there's a section of road near where I live that's dangerous, and we all know it's dangerous. It's not newsworthy. If another section of road collapsed and introduced a new danger, then that's newsworthy. News is newsworthy because it's new and unfamiliar. If something is reported on that's old and unfamiliar, then that's a documentary. If it's new and familiar, then that's a paradox. Or maybe a fun anecdote at a party.
I assume you mean it's not really worth watching if it's currently on broadcast TV?
Surely there's a huge list of old broadcast TV network shows that are worth watching, and that still suffer from the ad-break problem to various degrees.
Obviously I'm pulling from a wide time-period, and I'll probably get some of these wrong because I'm not in the the US and don't quite grok the network/cable divide, but off the top of my head, I think these are/were all worth watching: Seinfeld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Freaks and Geeks, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, Community, Schitt's Creek, The Office, The X-Files, various Star Trek series, Cheers
That list could be easily improved on, but I assume it's missing your point anyway if you were only talking about current broadcast network TV (if it exists :) )
Arrested Development seasons 1 and 2 are pure comedy gold.
Oh there are certainly some excellent American comedy shows..
Seinfeld, Curb, Arrested Development, Modern Family, The Office (US), South Park, Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, Frasier, Fresh Prince, Friends, How I Met Your Month, Futurama, Simpsons (OG) and then there's not a lot more on the bench unless you include the lesser remakes of British shows.
A lot of them aren't funny or aren't satire.. just look at the Shameless remake - they turned that into a character drama when it was a sitcom.
America has more of a stand-up culture I feel.
I wonder if it's because the news in America is pretty much fiction that they basically don't have political satire as a genre outside of the topical news shows (Daily Show / John Oliver) which are honestly more like real news shows than comedy at this point.
"Any portrayal of a husband" on TV?
Comedies often have some mockery built in, and comedies aimed at kids in particular like to take shots at authority, but there are a lot of examples I can think of in just the general-TV-millenial-vibe-y things I've watched over the past couple of decades. More than the "bumbling dad" type, I'd say, from things I've seen in the zeitgeist (I guess one recent super typical example is Rick and Morty, though everyone sucks there):
* Arrested Development: Michael is the most competent of the bunch. His father was also quite competent, if an asshole and eventual criminal. But, you know, that put the "sit" in sitcom...
* Luke from Gilmore Girls is pretty consistently more sane than Lorelai, turns out to be a good dad too IIRC; other fathers include a loser and a number of very successful businessmen, teachers, etc.
* King of the Hill: doing his best, often the most sane of the bunch
* Bob's Burgers: haven't watched a ton of this but from what I've seen Bob is a goofball but respectable and wholesome, kinda a Hank Hill. Not a lazy Homer
* Parks and Rec: Ben Wyatt is a pretty positive character
* Brooklyn 99: Terry is practically a superman of competence and seems to hold is own with his wife and kids. Holt is a supremely competent husband. Boyle is a goofball generally and in dating, but that does not really extend to his eventual marriage and child, where he seems to be doing quite well.
* Schitt's Creek: Johnny is the competent center of the family surrounded by comically exaggerated crazy wife + kids
Dramas seem even further away. Where do Breaking Bad or the Sopranos land?
turning this into an episode of Arrested Development is apropos on how over the top this whole AI/LLM hype train has become
It's a reference to the Arrested Development television show.
This misses the forest for the trees.
It doesn’t need to win awards or prestige.
Someone needs to say “play me new episodes of the office or arrested development” and it needs to generate something that resembles the office or arrested development. People can have the noise on in the background, and it won’t matter if it isn’t quite coherent or super funny.
Netflix might accidentally be the worst possible example you could pick for 'wouldn't exist if piracy were legal.'
Netflix built their entire streaming business model during a time when piracy was so widespread it was almost as good as legal. They succeeded precisely by proving that people would pay for good service even when free options were readily available. They're a textbook example of a business that thrives by being better than free!
Despite huge investments in enforcement, movie piracy never waned. The reason it declined? Netflix. Why is it now seeing a bit of a resurgence? Also Netflix, actually, or rather the fact that people have splintered the streaming landscape.
Here's some articles from Forbes at the time. [1] [2] [3] and an interview with the Netflix CEO [4]
People following the Netflix/piracy story at the time saw it like this: Netflix doesn't necessarily need to care if piracy is legal or not, because it removes most of the incentive to pirate. People tried a lot of things against piracy, until Netflix came along and that was the thing that actually worked. Piracy goes down where Netflix is available. I've also provided enough sources to explain why: Piracy is a service problem [3]. Netflix provides the missing service, so people don't feel like they need to pirate anymore.
In a world where piracy was fully legal, Netflix would still exist, and still drive down piracy. This is Netflix's entire reason for success!
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthickey/2013/05/07/netflix-we-kill-piracy-bittorrent-yeah-so-about-that-piracy-thing/
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/01/24/whatever-happened-to-the-war-on-piracy/
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/02/03/you-will-never-kill-piracy-and-piracy-will-never-kill-you/
[4] https://www.stuff.tv/news/netflixs-ted-sarandos-talks-arrested-development-4k-and-reviving-old-shows/ (under the heading "what are you doing to combat piracy?" )
In 1986-87 there were 5 billion people. The only reason I even know of her is because of a tiny role in an episode of Arrested Development.
Try this: look up the most highly rated episodes on IMDB and watch only those. Missing the crummy episodes usually does not interfere with understanding the story arc. Often, I set a minimum IMDB score that I will watch, like 8.5 or 9.0 to capture only the best. This works well with series that:
- take a year or two to find their footing or
- have a large cast (some mediocre) that get their own story lines of no consequence occasionally or
- introduce cast members that don't make it or
- implode towards the final season.
I have done this for many series that are somewhat uneven:
- The Americans
- How I Met Your Mother
- Fringe
- Orphan Black
- Halt and Catch Fire
- House of Cards (watching the ratings allows you to miss all of season 6)
- Arrested Development
- Bojack Horseman
- Veep
- 30 Rock
- Jane the Virgin
- Black Mirror
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
- Suits
- Six Feet Under
- La Femme Nikita
- The Blacklist
- Peaky Blinders
- The Romanoffs
- Ozark
- Westworld (sometimes dropping episodes does not matter)
- Succession
- Borgen
And all of these series have lots of strong episodes.
Series I would not do this with:
- The Bear
- Breaking Bad
- Money Heist
- The Serpent
- Fleabag
- Chernobyl
- The White Lotus
I was a teen in the 1980s and that was a time of action films. I think I like Weathers' role in Arrested Development the best I liked the dry deadpan humour his character was so great.
I don't see anything on Netflix that is trying to compete with TBBT, which is a CBS show firmly targeted at Middle America.
If anything, Netflix comedies are the opposite of TBBT, there's no audience laughter, it's all single-camera like Arrested Development, The Office and other 2000s-era neo-sitcoms.
I put on a show on my iPad I know really really well so it’s slightly enjoyable to drown out my mind otherwise racing but not new enough to keep me awake listening.
I’ve watched the first ~5min of Arrested Development seasons 1-3 probably 100 times at this point. Before that it was pirated copies of Simpsons or South Park episodes (years and years ago).
I think the parent was making a coy reference to the TV show Arrested Development, how it has a couple with the confused belief that the state can't prosecute both a husband and wife for the same crime[1].
In any case, in the US, the analogous legal structure for prosecuting such enterprise crimes is generally RICO:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrupt_Organizations_Act&useskin=vector#Summary
[1] which I always read as those characters getting the wires crossed between double jeopardy (you can't re-prosecute someone for the same criminal act) and marital privilege (you get some level of protection from prosecution when you're married since spouses can't be forced to testify against each other). In the show, their attorney really does suck and they make excuses for him.
Arrested Development up to Season 3 (the rest doesn’t exist). In my opinion, it is the most rewardingly rewatchable comedy show of all time. Extremely dense packing of humor that takes multiple passes to fully appreciate.
Curb Your Enthusiasm, as others have mentioned. It has an improvised feel to it (intentionally!) which makes it quite unique.
What We Do in the Shadows is more modern but also a brilliant comedy.
The Office is amazing too, though it’s not for everyone and has its downs.
It was to podcasting what House of Cards, Orange is the New Black and Arrested Development Season 4 were to Netflix.
A few thoughts:
1) On the talk of saturation Netflix had somewhere around 230 mil subscribers last year. In theory the addressable market should be adults ~20 and up so somewhere around 5 bil. So not even close to saturation. Discounting say half of that imagine how much better the service could be with 10x the current subscriber base. They talk about increasing subscription price... At 10x you could half the subscription price and still increase content spending 5x which would be pretty incredible.
2) The article talks about old content not holding value as expected. I think a lot of this has to do with the near complete failure to invest in rewatchable content. They were clearly aware the value of shows like The Office and Friends in terms of rewatchability. Off the top of my head I can't even think of an attempt at original content in that lane from Netflix (Licensing and extra seasons of Arrested Development is the only thing that comes to mind). To be fair though utterly bizarrely nearly every service has failed at this kind of content for the past 5 years or so.
3) The lack of global hits is very strange. I was trying to lookup high budget tv productions in foreign countries and not sure if it is just a lack of data or they don't exist. I would think even if there is a cultural bias around kinds of shows people watch just in terms of production quality western shows would still be globally dominant. Are there any examples of international shows with 20 mil per episode budgets?
This one is definitely strange to me looking back on what I would have estimated for the world of streaming a decade ago. I would have expected a much more expected shared culture in terms of what is watched worldwide. Instead it seems if anything we have become increasingly isolated. It's crazy to think Netflix isn't even active in a country the size of China for example. I would have thought by now technology would lead to shows with viewerships counted in the billions not millions. Squid Game is apparently Netflix's most popular show ever but even that from brief research has under 200 mil views which in the context of total population still makes it incredibly unpopular. I.e. if you take 100 random humans and put them in a room almost none of them have seen it. I wonder if we will ever reach a point where anything is actually globally popular.
They also have a tendency to edit, remove episodes, etc. And it does not even need to be for political correctness either. It could be licensing rights to music in shows. They will sometimes edit a show to remove the music or remove the episode altogether. (This happened with Scrubs.)
They will remove content that involves people talking about suicide. They will remove content that is offensive. They have even gone back and edited previous episodes and content. This has happened in Stranger Things (actual edits with no notice) and Arrested Development (a redesign of the fourth season that is far worse than the original version of it). (I could not watch the fifth season. It was way too terrible.)
I feel like I've seen this picture as a bit on a TV show, but I can't remember which one. Maybe Arrested Development, when they were making a lot of George Sr/Transparent jokes?
I'm with the other commenter, I understand it's part of setting up the jokes and sort of an excuse for why they never grow as a character but it still makes it really unenjoyable to watch for me. I couldn't do Arrested Development or Archer for the same reason, after watching one or two episodes I just feel mad.
There are extremely few comedy shows I really enjoy: Arrested Development, Curb you Enthusiasm, Fawlty Towers, Only Fools and Horses, Malcolm in the Middle - and Seinfeld. I think they all have something in common: while they all offer plenty of easy-to-digest but clever short-term jokes, they regularly feature completely unexpected long-term jokes, to great effect.
Seinfeld stands out because they typically achieve this across storylines. A great example (spoiler alert) is Kramer's golfing vs. George's lying in "The Marine Biologist", where the literal act of revealing that the joke was actually a storyline collision got the biggest laugh in the show's history. They sometimes even did it across episodes, for example George's job as a hand model. I think this is one of the main reasons Seinfeld nearly topped the 2013 WGA ranking of the best written TV shows [0].
Larry David became the master of this technique during the 3rd year of Seinfeld, and he further perfected it in "Curb".
[0] https://www.wga.org/writers-room/101-best-lists/101-best-written-tv-series/list
It's a reference to the second episode of the TV show Arrested Development. A recurring line about a boardwalk stall the company owns: "There's always money in the Banana Stand."
It’s a comedy trope. Seinfeld is probably most famous for the formula with back-references throughout the series. Arrested Development dabbled in it, and Community took it to the extreme of whole story arcs. Brooklyn 99 and New Girl revel in it. A less comedy-specific example, Buffy, created a role for the throw away character (Spike) because he was so well received, then went on to do several more episodes along a similar theme (Zeppo, the one about Jonathan being a superhero, the musical, come to mind).
Movies are less susceptible to being described as formulaic, but an iconic movie, The Big Lebowski, could reasonably be summarized this way (albeit the series is serialized into one piece). Coffee and Cigarettes doesn’t satisfy the “nobodies” in the literal sense, but it’s almost entirely this formula.
I’m just citing examples I can think of, I haven’t watched most of what people have watched. And I don’t mean in any way to dismiss the actual work, or the concept, or your finding novelty in it. It’s a really cool device for storytelling, but it’s definitely not a unique device.
I don't understand the anti-Netflix hate. If you don't like their catalog, you have lots of options.
Password sharing is the rampant default. It's not just grandma in the home or your daughter at college. It's your friends, your exes, your old housemates. Netflix has been, IMO, remarkably chill about this for a very long time. Y'all are talking like they are audaciously stealing something you believe that you are owed.
I think that what got lost along the way is that Netflix forgot what their real product innovation was: long-tail convenience. Whether being able to order from a massive catalog of DVDs or stream things in hi-def without having to worry about torrents or FTP servers, Netflix really changed the way we access media.
They've also played a massive role in popularizing alternative comedy to the masses. Same with documentaries, to a different degree.
I do think they've made some questionable content production decisions. It's highly likely that if they'd stuck to financing comedy specials, documentaries and bringing back shows like Arrested Development and Firefly, they might not have scared Disney, Amazon, HBO and Hulu into competing with them. Their greed made it impossible for the incumbents to not compete.
I'm not familiar with Die Hard, but https://diehard.fandom.com/wiki/Argyle doesn't suggest anything about Argyle being a "stoner buddy". So the reference from Stranger Things to Die Hard is... simply the name Argyle? There's an Argyle in Arrested Development. Is that a Die Hard reference?
Is the entire article a ragedump inspired by the author basing his life experience on the #1 grossing action film of 1988?
I feel like either you might be massively out of touch or this is a most not-so-subtle totally unverifiable flex ever.
I'm reminded of that episode of Arrested Development. "I mean it's just one banana Michael, how much could it possibly cost? $10?" "You've never actually set foot inside of a grocery store before, have you?"
Readers here love to crap all over Netflix, but it's still the service I use most. Yes, the movie selection is lackluster and yes, they make a lot of mediocre shows (though often for niches where fans of that content may have few other options). But they also make some of my favorite shows of all time like Bojack Horseman, Big Mouth and Sex Education. And they've revived some of my favorite content of all time like Arrested Development, W/ Bob & David and Wet Hot American Summer (with mixed results, but still). Not to mention a lot of fringy comedy that may have otherwise never been produced, like I Think You Should Leave, Aunty Donna and Middleditch and Schwartz.
And they've brought content into the mainstream (in the US) that we otherwise may have never seen, like Black Mirror and Squid Game.
Throw in some flagship nature documentaries, a ton of stand up specials and the occasional cultural phenomenon like Stranger Things and I still feel like Netflix is easily worth the cost. And just because they produce a lot of crap doesn't negate any of the above. There is no number of Adam Sandler movies that will change how much I loved Michael Bolton's Big, Sexy Valentine's Day Special.
I either watch a netflix series that I've seen multiple times before (Office/Parks & Rec/Superstore/Arrested Development) or read a book series I've read before (flip flopping between Harry Potter and the Discworld series). They're not boring, but they don't stimulate me as much, and if I miss a chapter, or a half an episode, so be it.
> but I can't just close the book and forget about it.
When I'm reading for sleep, It's closer to reading to the point of dropping the book rather than closing it and deciding to go to sleep fwiw!
For the uninitiated, this is a meme reference to a clip from the TV show Arrested Development, popular on Imgur as a reaction to show support for someone else who expresses a sense of loneliness in their appreciation or affection.
A version of this: https://i.imgur.com/pgXjbNy.gifv
This is an episode of Arrested Development. https://arresteddevelopment.fandom.com/wiki/Fakin%27_It
"At the hospital, Lucille mentioned that she hoped Buster would coincidentally stay in a coma throughout the trial. Michael asked Lucille if she was responsible for this, but in fact, Buster got into G.O.B.'s forget-me-now pills."
> The food analogy is shitty because you know what I do when McDonalds takes burgers off of their menu? I go to the grill next door to get my burger.
You don't pull a tantrum on an Internet forum about how you are now forced to hire an anon crew to get into a McDonald's warehouse to get your Mac Something ? Indeed you just go to another service provider to see if they have the Mac Something or something else to satisfy your palates. (sorry I kept the food analogy going).
> and if I've purchaced a streaming service explicitly because of Startrek then I'm going to feel like I was cheated.
Read the lines on the contract. No one is cheated. Especially for the price you are paying by the way. Netflix is still a rental service. (fun fact: Netflix doesn't even have full international rights on its own productions, see: orange is the new black, arrested development).
> You can argue until heat death of the universe whose fault it is, but in the mean time if there is no way of legaly watching the content piracy is the only way.
I will argue until heat death that SG1 content owners are not forcing people to pirate their content. It's just hard cold facts. You may not like it because you feel like you are entitled to it or that it doesn't matter much that no one gets hurt or it's stupid or whatever, that's not really the point. The point is that they are not forcing you. It's on you when you decide to go torrent hunting, launch a DCC+, get popcorn, whatever.
> if there is no way of legaly watching the content piracy is the only way
Doesn't mean you are entitled to it or that you are forced to do it. No one is forcing you to pirate SG1 or Star Trek Voyager. It's entirely on you, own up your actions.
I am not saying you should or shouldn't, I am not questioning the morality of it. All I am saying is "nobody forced you".
> (and importing expensive DVDs in an erra where literally none of my devices have optical bays is not actual option)
Again, that's on you. Not content owner's fault that you don't have a DVD player.
Now let's take a step forward. Imagine you pirated off those SG1 episodes. But then you get a letter from copyright holders and a fine from whatever judicial instances in your country manages these kind of things.
You don't want to pay the fine, you go to courts.
Do you believe for an instant arguments like "I pirated those episodes because they were not available anymore on Netflix, they basically forced my hand ; promised, once they are back up I'll subscribe again to Netflix" will fly ?
A reference to the TV show Arrested Development :) Terrible legal advice given to a crooked businessman!
I agree with your core sentiment on movies - but I couldn't disagree more on the topic of TV having reverted to the mean.
It may not all be "Sopranos", but I've seen so many TV shows in the past decade that have pushed boundaries and delivered experiences that frankly, have hit me much harder than almost any movie - and certainly much harder than pre-netflix era TV.
I know everyone has different taste, but I think we've seen a lot of maturation in the past decade specifically in the form of more interesting TV anthology series / single-season narratives (True Detective, Fargo, Watchmen) and dark-ish comedies (Rick and Morty, Barry, American Vandal, Succession). I think networks in general are giving show-runners more space and budget for trying weird stuff, because even if they end up with a show that's too niche for a general timeslot - there's at least the possibility of selling it to a streaming service later (like Arrested Development, The Expanse, and Community did).
Second Generation. I worked for 12 years in my dads accounting firm and built a custom app for the firm while I was there. Dad couldn’t let go so eventually I knew I had to move on. It was very painful to leave but I left on good terms in the end although it took a while it was worth it.
I’d recommend the book ‘breakthrough companies’, the first concept in the book is the importance of ‘crowning the company’ which separates all successful businesses that outlived their founder/s. Especially relevant in family business.
If your parent does not want to hand over the reigns, and you’ve stayed for loyalty, often it’s very healthy to leave (even just for a while) and reset expectations.
Consider doing a family vision document, the Coopers Family in Australia which is a major brewery and something like 7-8 generation did this earlier and the values defined later helped stop a takeover when some extended family members were open to a major corporate buy-out.
I love arrested development (netflix) couldn’t watch it until a while after I left.. too close!
Nice movie ‘Kinky Boots’ - A drag queen comes to the rescue of a man who, after inheriting his father's shoe factory, needs to diversify his product if he wants to keep the business afloat. Lots of feels for inheriting Gen.
The new Pee Wee movie. Death Note was a remake. They made a movie as a sequel to Breaking Bad. They also pick up many series that were canceled elsewhere, like Arrested Development. The Sandler movies are technically original, though at this point his stuff is as much a franchise as Madea.
But, yeah, they do pick up a lot of original and niche stuff too. They're the only reason the romantic comedy is still a thing, for instance.
The sibling comments all have great shows listed. I'd say It's Always Sunny/Arrested Development get closest to the format of "a sitcom about terrible people".
Seinfeld also contains a stand up comedian playing himself. In that respect shows like Louis and Master of None are also quite similar.
Louis in particular is a fantastic show if you can ignore Louis CK's recent scandal.
> What if you could easily answer the question "what is everything currently known in mathematics."
I love this. I work on this problem a lot. More generally of the form "what is everything currently known in X"?
I would love to be able to make statements like "I am familiar with X/Y/Z% of the nodes in Computer Science/Medicine/Arrested Development Season 2". I would love it if the abstract idea of the "dent" (http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/) a researcher makes could actually be concretely measured as nodes added/updated/subtracted from some corpus of knowledge.
Have you thought about moving the content to a git repo and allowing people to contribute via a pull request?
Another trick is using secondary meaning for words in your reputation management posts. So, if you were arrested, you post something like "John Doe Reviews TV Show Arrested Development"
Then, backlinks, and it ranks well for "John Doe Arrest".
Are you saying Netflix hasn’t made quality shows that will last through 2039? I’d like to know which company you think has made close to the amount of quality shows Netflix has since 2014. Here’s part of a list I have for a content project. No company comes close to this output in recent history.
House of Cards launched February 2013 (7 seasons, finished)
Orange is the New Black launched July 2013 (7 seasons, finished)
Stranger Things launched July 2016 (3 seasons, 1-2 more)
—
Dark (2 seasons, 3rd is last)
Glitch (2 seasons, 3rd might never come)
Russian Doll (1 season)
Haunting of Hill House (1 season, anthology)
American Vandal (2 seasons)
Black Mirror (anthology, last season not that good)
The Crown (3 seasons)
When They See Us (mini-series, 2019)
Unbelievable (just came out)
—
Glow (3 seasons)
Kimmy Schmidt (4 seasons, finished)
Arrested Development (they tried, hard to get it all back together after years of being done)
Sex Education (1 season)
Bojack Horseman (5 seasons?) #animated
Mindhunter (2 seasons)
The OA (2 seasons)
Maniac (mini-series)
Wet Hot American Summer (2 seasons, but season 1 is the top notch one)
F is for Family (3? seasons) #animated
Big Mouth (2? seasons) #animated
—
Documentary mini-series
—
Staircase
Making a Murderer
Evil Genius
The Jinx
Wild Wild West
——-
There’s more I’m missing and I didn’t include a number of shows Netflix helps finance but isn’t the main financier or producer or original place of distribution. Shows like Glitch.
Can someone explain to me how this is not like that episode of Arrested Development where they steal a dollar from the banana stand and then throw out a banana to "cancel it out"?
> They got into content creation and they're now deep in debt despite their massive subscriber base.
I've found that while Netflix has some decent original content - the overwhelming majority of it is garbage and totally uninteresting.
Sometimes I feel some of the Netflix Originals where mothballed from normal venues, so Netflix picked it up, failing to realize why nobody else wanted to produce it in the first place.
As just an example, I was a huge fan of Arrested Development - but continuing that show where it left off after ~10 years of not being on air... it just didn't "have it" anymore...
And... when I search for a movie, it seems about 90% of the time they don't have it. Instead, they recommend a bunch of Netflix Original's that totally aren't what I'm looking for.
That was a scene from the fictional TV show Arrested Development.
> Lucille: Don’t you judge me. You’re the selfish one. You’re the one who charged his own brother for a Bluth frozen banana. I mean, it’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, ten dollars?
Gates' actual guesses were pretty reasonable: https://youtu.be/ad_higXixRA
I have ADHD and have literally trained myself to use Arrested Development to put myself to sleep. Always the same episode. Even with the most crowded mind, I lay down with one earbud in, and I can’t make it 3 minutes without passing out.
The rapid dialogue means there’s no opportunity for intrusive thoughts to enter, but I know it all by heart, so there’s zero intrigue in any of it.
The attention switching idea seems consistent with my own experiences. I dated a girl with pretty severe ADHD; whenever she watched Arrested Development (a very fast paced sitcom with a lot happening) she would turn into a zombie and be almost entirely oblivious to any outside stimuli.
...maybe it's just that storytelling is like a magic trick which requires the wholehearted participation of writer and reader to be successful. If you're not interested, you should quit and find something else to do.
I'm the same with television - cannot watch The Wire too many times, cannot watch most other things even once.
Wholeheartedly agree. I can't stand movies and most TV shows but there is a relatively small set of shows that I will binge rewatch at an interval of every 2-4 years. A few are the great ones like The Wire or the Star Treks that make me rethink my place in the universe as I get older, but when I say the rest out loud they all sound so... banal. And yet, I love rewatching them every time, especially when it's with friends or family - when they don't know what's going to happen and you get to experience that again vicariously.
Arrested Development, Archer, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Moral Orel, Xavier Renegade Angel... stupid stuff like that. It's especially great today with so many shows surviving for 5-10 seasons. I'll watch one or two seasons that are available and come back years later to something that combines elements of nostalgia with brand new never before seen seasons.
Edit: Also, to add, I have always been a voracious reader, especially of nonfiction. While I absorbed a lot of knowledge, I can't really remember any actual stories that I have read in my lifetime save for one. Some young adult book, House of the Scorpion, published in 2002 that was required reading for one of my kids so I read it to help them with their book report. For some reason, that book just resonated with me and it's still my favorite.
which was reprised in an episode of arrested development where Henry Winkler (who played Fonzie in Happy Days) jumps over a shark on a dock: https://i.imgur.com/uHPHW0c.gif
facebook used to let you do direct knowledge graph searches
"restaurants liked by people who like Joe's Pancakes and Green Dragon Mexican Pizza"
"movies liked by people who are friends with people who like Back to the Future and Arrested Development"
"people who live nearby and like Green Dragon Mexican Pizza and Arrested Development"
"friends of friends of friends who like Arrested Development and Joe's Pancakes"
"Friends of Megan Albert friends who are women named "Erin" Chipotle employ"
I think you can see why they removed it.
this URL might lead to something like "restaurants liked by people who like Snow White" https://www.facebook.com/search/130104022710/likers/pages-liked/273819889375819/places/intersect/
This seems like basically the same principle as dropout from neural networks.
One could make an Arrested Development episode where George Sr. and Lucille hear about this concept and decide to apply it to their children.
(Edit: the Arrested Development <-> Netflix tie in didn't even occur to me until after writing the comment.)
Party Down. If you like The Office or Parks and Rec, it's kinda like that but funnier. I like them all but I laugh more watching Party Down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_Down
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Arrested Development. The first 3 seasons.
Master of None. Season 2 is funny. Season 1 is good but not that funny. It's more real and depressing. Season 2 is great, and funny.
I'm not convinced. You don't consume music the way you consume TV shows and movies, it's often a more "passive" activity where you start a playlist in the background while you do other things. You can do that with movie/TV shows of course but a movie will last you ~two hours while a TV show can literally last you days or weeks at a time without input if you really like having The Office in the background while you do other things. Assuming that you can afford buying subscriptions to various services it's not massively annoying to have to use HBO Go to watch Westworld and Netflix to watch Arrested Development. It's not as good as having a unified service but it does the job.
If like me you like composing playlists instead of playing one full album at a time then not having the vast majority of your music available on a single service is a huge deal breaker. When I hear a song out there and I want to add it to my playlist I expect that it will be available on Spotify and the vast majority of the time I'm right.
If I need to go hunt for songs on various services and I can't easily make a single unified playlist with all of it I think it'll be back to piracy for me, it won't be less convenient and it'll be much cheaper.
This is the only show I'm currently keeping up with as new episodes come out, via Hulu. Its wit and ability to make me laugh out loud is up there with the first three seasons of Arrested Development, while featuring a fundamentally hopeful outlook on humanity. I also enjoy "terrible people" comedies like Arrested Development and Seinfeld, but The Good Place (like the better Pixar movies) reminds me that you don't have to be cynical to make smart comedy for adults.
I remember me and others, on HN years ago, complaining about how Netflix was investing too much money into TV and original TV while skimping on its streaming movie catalog (this was around the time its STARZ deal was ending). Turns out their strategy was exactly right. I like watching movies, but nothing gets my return visits like serial TV, such as "Breaking Bad" and "Walking Dead". Investing so much money into "House of Cards" seemed bizarre 5 years ago but now that Netflix has so much exclusive content, it's hard as a longtime subscriber to just quit it. even as someone who now subscribes to Amazon Prime and HBO. I actually like Amazon Prime's library, which can be augmented with content I buy from Amazon separately, enough to quit Netflix. But my parents really like the Netflix shows (and I'll admit to binge watching HoC, as shallow as it is), which is something Prime or HBO will never have.
edit: besides the Netflix-conceived shows, e.g. HoC and "Narcos", there are the Netflix-bought shows, such as Arrested Development and Black Mirror, and what seems like countless comedy specials, such as Louis CK 2017. Back when I thought HoC was a poor investment, I was thinking that one really great show a year wouldn't be enough to keep me subscribing year after year. But Netflix seems to be introducing exclusive content several times a month.
> If all major studios pull their content from Netflix, then it will not have the large library size anymore.
It already is a bit like that if you leave the cushy confines of the USA, where the rights to even stream some of their own Originals (e.g. Orange is the New Black, Arrested Development, Lilyhammer) have not been secured and thus us poor souls must resort to pirating or waiting, potentially for years.
To quote Netflix[0]:
> Depending on the region, Netflix may not get the licensing rights for an original series for many years.
[0] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/4976#why-are-some-netflix-original-tv-shows-or-movies-available-in-one-country-but-not-another-
Netflix acquires story for Tobias Fünke in Arrested Development season 5.
> Fox has set up numerous shows for failure, including Arrested Development, which was aired against Monday Night Football and wasn't aired during sweeps week. How does a show succeed, no matter how good, when it's never given a chance to develop an audience?
This is revisionist history. Fox pushed AD hard during season 1 and discovered that it was the ultimate cult show, with a small but devoted audience and no reach chance to expand it's base. Fox pushed it into the dead zones of the schedule because they knew the audience would follow it anywhere. Internally, AD had huge champions which is why it got far more episodes than it would have rationally deserved if you just looked at ratings.
There's no real way Fox could have turned it into a viable hit if only it had treated it better. Like later critically adored darlings like Community of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, there was a natural ceiling to its viewership that was never going to fit into the business model of an early 21st century network channel.
Arrested Development especially rewarded loyal, in-order viewing and hurt "random" (seeing any episode out of order while switching channels) because the show focused a lot on jokes or plot devices made episodes before.
My sincere apologies in advance for being completely off topic here, but I'll share this in case someone needs a good chuckle . This is from one of my favorite episodes of Arrested Development "Beef Consomme".
http://i.imgur.com/oE8rlAE.gif
It is entirely impossible for me to not think of this when anyone mentions "Bees".
My service is fine for all other use cases but remote HD video, with its need for constant high bandwidth, is always going to be a fundamentally more difficult problem to solve than local digital video, traditional cable-delivered video, or regular downloads that can tolerate variance in transfer rate. It doesn't feel like it takes a conspiracy to explain that. When cable companies wanted to be our email or news/content portals I never had any issues using competing services on cable internet.
I was never going to cut the cord. I like having many channels and the serendipity of a wide variety of programming that's on "now" to choose from. There are shows/movies I never would have chosen myself but I stumbled onto them because they were "on" and they became favorites.
With a DVR I can also time-shift so I'm not tied to watching something on the broadcasters' schedule when I don't want to.
I tried Netflix to augment this with what I thought would be a big influx of other programming but it wasn't only the streaming experience I didn't like, I was unimpressed with the selection of the Netflix library. If they do another season of Arrested Development, I'll subscribe for a few months to support that.
They do call it a "Netflix Original", which I guess means it's "original" in the sense that Arrested Development was an "original" (i.e. first run episodes)
I thought Arrested Development has been parodying the tech scene well.
Seasons 1-3, which aired during the Bush era, showed the lives of incompetent and corrupt property developers + military contractors.
Now the main running gag is a BS non-existent app.
The problem I have with Netflix recommendations is that while they understand genres, they're not good at recommending good shows.
Since I've watched Archer and Arrested Development, Netflix thinks I'd like every mediocre comedy show, since I've watched Sherlock and Luther, it thinks I'd like mediocre non-serialized detective shows, and anything made by the BBC. Watching all of BSG (which isn't even on Netflix anymore, RIP) has given me a permanent section of terrible sci-fi recommendations.
Hey cool thanks, that's great! I haven't seen many of those, but I liked Firefly, BSG, GoT, and VM S1-2 (haven't seen S3). I've seen Buffy S1 and the musical episode, I probably should revisit it.
My top recommendations would be Twin Peaks, My So-Called Life, Freaks and Geeks, Sports Night, and Arrested Development. I like a lot of shows that get cancelled "early".
The "myth arc" episodes of the X-Files are worth it, but don't try to sit through all 9 seasons. Recently, Better Call Saul is awesome for the emotional depth and film noir aspects, and the previous Breaking Bad to which it's a prequel is still a masterpiece even though I find the premise implausible. The Walking Dead is seriously addictive too.
There's just no way I'm going to pay for TV channel by channel, though. I joined for a month or two to support Arrested Development. There's very few shows I'd care enough to do that for. I canceled because regardless of their other originals I wasn't going to keep paying for another channel. It's not nearly enough content to be a replacement for cable and not worth another bill every month in addition.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean about them having a great movie selection. By mail, sure. But by streaming that's never been true.
It happened a long time ago, at least I became aware of this shift when an exec from Netflix was quoted saying "The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us" http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201302/netflix-founder-reed-hastings-house-of-cards-arrested-development
The argument of the article is that Netflix's dataset doesn't really help them make decisions like what the content of their next documentary should be. It argues that what happens instead is that Netflix's programming honcho, Ted Sarandos, picks projects based on the person who's putting them together, looking for creators with a solid creative track record and an existing cult following:
> I began to sense that their biggest bets always seemed ultimately driven by faith in a particular cult creator, like David Fincher (“House of Cards”), Jenji Leslie Kohan (“Orange is the New Black”), Ricky Gervais (“Derek”), John Fusco (“Marco Polo”), or Mitchell Hurwitz (“Arrested Development”)... I do think that there is a sophisticated algorithm at work here—but I think his name is Ted Sarandos.
So take the case of the Nina Simone doc. It was directed by Liz Garbus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Garbus), whose previous films have been Sundance- and Oscar- fare for a few years now. So it could just be that Sarandos looked at her track record and decided that Garbus was an up-and-coming talent, and that mattered more than the specific content of whatever her next project was going to be. He was just betting that a Liz Garbus documentary was going to be great, no matter what story it told.
I think there are two separate viewpoints, both useful, neither true, that can be used to understand the structuring of stories. The viewpoint espoused in this article is that there exist certain timeless structures, imposed by the form that inextricably results in a type of output. And that the job of a writer is to discover these forms and work within them.
There's another line of argument, made by Steven Johnson in Everything Bad is Good for You, where viewers are trained by the media to read texts in a more sophisticated fashion. As viewers become more media savvy, the desire for surprise causes a constant creative arms race as structures that were once avant garde becomes commonplace, then tired, then old fashioned.
The A/B plot mentioned in the article is only about 40 years old (starting with Hill St Blues in 1981). Prior to that, television comedy followed a strict single line for fear of confusing the audience. Nowadays, it's not uncommon to see a sitcom go up to E plots. What's allowed them to do that is that television has developed increasingly dense visual shorthand that allows them to speed through a plot even faster, allowing for more story to fit into those 22 minutes.
Previous constraints on syndication meant that characters were required to remain in a stasis throughout the entire run but season long and series long arcs are now becoming the norm with even relatively retrograde sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory engaging in long term plotting.
If you look towards the cutting edge, you start to see people playing around with the traditional three act structure in interesting ways to keep the form fresh. How I Met Your Mother plays around with time and memory, sometimes establishing the conclusion at the front of the episode and then uses flashbacks to flesh out the central conflict in reverse. Louie routinely fits 2 or 3 stories into a single episode or stretches a single story across multiple episodes. Arrested Development S4 was an overly ambitious attempt to build a single, series long story, told and retold from multiple perspectives. And one of Girls' most polarizing episodes, One Man's Treasure (the bottle episode where Hannah has a tryst with the rich doctor) was hated by some precisely because it rejected the standard formula and resolutely avoided going for a climax and resolution.
Such techniques follow the standard adoption cycle, first appearing in cutting edge, low rated comedies aimed at early adopters before eventually gaining widespread appeal and mainstream success before becoming hacky and relegated to shows for children and old people.
Arrested development has seemed for quite a while to be a main source of movie humor. "Sideways" comes to mind that way.
Considering the way adult male authority appeared in a lot of TV shows (60s and 70s) led me to think that the screenwriters were enacting their own conflict with their bosses, men who made them cut down on risque jokes, nixed plot lines, etc. And those weren't great years for adult male authority in politics.
Was a whole subplot of Arrested Development Season 4 (Netflix season).
Ted Sarandos, 'Chief Content Officer' put it as "The goal is to become HBO faster than they can become us" http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201302/netflix-founder-reed-hastings-house-of-cards-arrested-development?currentPage=3
It shouldn't be compared to Big Bang Theory. That show is a typical paint-by-numbers sitcom, the kind that CBS has been cashing big checks on for the past decade. They aren't particularly funny. I think Chuck Klosterman wrote something that these shows are "in the form of funny", which means that they follow a common comedic timing and use the laugh track as a cue. Once you start looking for it, you always see it.
The three camera and laugh track are usually indicators that the show probably isn't "smart funny", but it's not always true. I can watch Seinfeld reruns and pick out the camera cuts, laugh tracks and joke timings, but the show is still pretty clever.
But most people capable of making shows of Seinfeld-quality aren't going to go do a CBS sitcom. Seinfeld's set up was mostly a relic of its era. Today, you can get a single-camera comedy greenlit thanks to the cable channels. Even networks took some chances. I don't watch too many network shows anymore, but I know Scrubs and Arrested Development were single camera shows without laugh tracks and they were on NBC/ABC and Fox, respectively.
As for Silicon Valley, I was expecting more from it. It's a Mike Judge show and the reviews were very positive. I've only seen the first two episodes, but they were at least good enough to make me want to watch more. It sometimes takes these shows a while to build the characters and build enough background for more jokes to connect, but at this point, I'm more worried about the story lines being thin than the comedy. That's what ultimately lost my interest in Entourage. That show started out as being a fun 30 minutes, but it was very superficial and once you realized that the plots were ridiculous and the characters didn't make that much sense, it became tedious to watch. Since both Entourage and Silicon Valley are both based on specific, unique cultures, I think they're fairly comparable.
This complaint was raised by a lot of television critic-bloggers during the first run of Netflix releases (House of Cards and Arrested Development in particular). I think it's ludicrous. If you and all your friends really think that weekly spoiler-free discussions are the most important thing, then just agree to watch 1 episode a week. We already have to deal with this sort of thing with weekly releases, if someone misses the recent episode (or someone else is catching up with earlier seasons on VOD).
> I'm aware this happened with Season Four of Arrested Development. There was a massive hype right up until it was to premiere on Netflix and then … nothing. People watched it, then moved on.
This pretty much happened with HoC season 1 as well. Massive hype for this Fincher/Spacey series and then... nothing until a month or two ago for season 2. On the contrary, shows like "Orange is the new black" didn't have much hype initially and slowly grew as more and more people binged through it and became pretty popular.
Andy Greenwald said it best: "I’ve argued before that encouraging this sort of bingeing does no favors to the art or the audience. It takes a pleasantly coursed dinner party and transforms it into a hot dog eating contest." http://grantland.com/features/breaking-bad-black-mirror-year-television/
I'm aware this happened with Season Four of Arrested Development. There was a massive hype right up until it was to premiere on Netflix and then … nothing. People watched it, then moved on.
I personally love to be able to binge a new television show, like House of Cards but at the same time I also love the discussions around it (Breaking Bad had some very cool discussions in between episodes). So I'm not quite sure what format is better in the long run.
Perhaps the future will be more like how Sherlock Series 3 was aired (only a few days between episodes, not an entire week). Whatever the case, television is only getting better from this point onwards.
As a former ESL teacher, I think TV can be helpful but it's better to be very selective about which shows you watch. Pick shows that have a lot of dialogue in English.
Older TV shows tend to be more dialogue-centric. If you have the TV Land channel, I'd suggest: MASH, All in the Family, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, The Dick Van Dyke Show, &c.
Contemporary shows that would be good for this purpose might be: Modern Family, NCIS, Mad Men, Big Bang Theory, Parks and Recreation, Arrested Development, Parenthood (advanced: lots of simultaneous talking).
"Netflix makes 0 additional marginal dollars from an existing subscriber watching an extra hour of video. What they care about is producing something "must see" for a particular niche that would convert a non-member into a paying member."
Netflix makes 0 marginal dollars on a hit show, but for Netflix, this isn't about the marginal dollar. This isn't even about adding more subscribers per se. This is an attempt to preserve subscribers in the face of a rapidly diminishing content library.
As I mentioned in the article, a lot of the networks and movie studios are raising their rates on Netflix, or pulling their libraries altogether. In the long run, Netflix risks becoming a "dumb pipes" commodity business, no more special or different from Amazon, iTunes, and all the rest, if it doesn't have something exclusive to keep viewers interested.
That's why they're betting the farm on original content. HoC won't appeal to everyone, but it signals to Hollywood and to tastemakers that Netflix is a serious buyer, and that it's in town to buy a lot more where that came from. Hollywood has a strong signaling / social proof system in place, and moves like this are often great ways to break the ice and establish credibility in a town that will shut up and listen to money. :)
"That means a rabid fan base and buzz is far more important than broad popularity. That's why shows like Arrested Development and Orange is the New Black have been so good for them, because they have an in built audience they can bring reliably."
Correct, and I don't see us in any disagreement here. This is what I mean about Netflix's home-field advantage in "audience development." Netflix knows its niches better than networks know theirs, and furthermore, it can afford to be in the niche game, because it's not dependent on mass advertisers. This is a significant advantage Netflix can draw upon.
The business model of Netflix is entirely different from broadcast TV. Netflix makes 0 additional marginal dollars from an existing subscriber watching an extra hour of video. What they care about is producing something "must see" for a particular niche that would convert a non-member into a paying member.
That means a rabid fan base and buzz is far more important than broad popularity. That's why shows like Arrested Development and Orange is the New Black have been so good for them, because they have an in built audience they can bring reliably.
I'd argue the opposite from you which is that Netflix is worse than traditional TV at developing audiences. For someone to adopt a new show on Netflix, they have to be interested in the show AND a subscriber of Netflix or so interested in the show it would compel them to subscribe to Netflix vs just switching over to the right channel at the right time to check it out.
Instead, Netflix's strength is in supporting a pre-existing audience.
> Can we at least agree that laugh tracks are awful, even on otherwise-phenomenal shows (Seinfeld)?
No. Multi-camera sitcoms with live audiences are very, very different in writing, tone, and end product to single camera comedies. They both serve different purposes.
Shooting a sitcom in front of a studio audience radically alters the pacing, the way jokes are told, and the setup (you're inherently constrained to fewer sets).
I think there is still a space today for comedies with live audiences (and the ratings seem to back this up). I love Arrested Development. I also love Frasier. AD would obviously never have worked with a live audience, Frasier would have been a far worse show without the laugh track.
Now, I'm not talking about canned laughter. I think I can agree that adding laughter in post is bad. And Big Bang Theory is particularly guilty of 'sweetening' live audience reaction, meaning jokes that shouldn't be that funny often have huge waves of laughter. I don't appreciate that.
Sports is just one part of overall package that explains why I no longer subscribe to satellite or cable: I don't feel I'm getting good value for my money. Summarizing what started out as a much longer paragraph, we were paying $80/month for a lot of crap, crap we would never care to watch. Buried in that $80/month somewhere was ESPN.
AMC, however, continues to get our money. _Breaking Bad_ and _Mad Men_ are two shows that I just pre-pay for the seasons as soon as iTunes makes them available. I don't even know how much a season costs because I don't care; take my money, damn it. And we get episodes the day after they air. (_Walking Dead_, OTOH...meh, two season of that was enough.) TNT and _Falling Skies_, same thing: take my money. _House of Cards_ and _Arrested Development_ were enough to get me to come back to Netflix. I've got money, and a fair amount of it; I'm willing to pay for good programming.
But what I won't do is pay a bunch of money for reality shows and ESPN. I don't want to hear sob stories about how it's just not financially feasible to do it any other way. Figure out a way, because I can live just fine with the TV I've got, or none at all. And if I'm just not the kind of TV customer anyone wants, I'm fine with that, too.
Reminds me a lot of this classic scene from the TV show "Arrested Development":
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xinzdo_it-ain-t-easy-being-white-it-ain-t-easy-bein-brown_shortfilms#.UdJ7pz4sUqk
It's not like having DRM is really stopping piracy, especially in Netflix's case. For example their new original series of House of Cards and season 4 of Arrested Development were both pirated (I assume using some kind of desktop screen recorder?) and posted online within days of their netflix release. So the use of DRM did not stop people from pirating their content, in only prevented potential customers on other systems, like Linux, from legally purchasing their content.
> This will never happen, for the simple reason that you have choice and as a result, competition. You can choose Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, or any of the smaller ones.
You will not have choice with regards to exclusive content. If you want to watch Arrested Development (season 4) you will need to be on Netflix, if you want to watch Zombieland you will need Amazon Prime. Just like the networks where HBO, ESPN, etc. have exclusive rights to their content.
There's some good observations here, but I would stop short of the claim that "for viewers, this can only be good." It's not good that some great movie libraries have already been stripped from Netflix because the contract renewal was going to be too expensive. It's not good if Netflix goes all-in on original programming and fails, potentially taking the rest of the company down as well. It's not good if Hollywood feels little pressure to make it easier for consumers to access their content because they're getting great contracts with traditional distributors.
It's also interesting that this article makes no mention of Netflix's 3 other original series that are not as popular as House of Cards and Arrested Development - Netflix is probably making as many flops as hits at the moment, and that adds an important qualification on the risk/reward calculation of its strategic investment in original series - the headliner shows have to not only justify themselves (as the article describes), but carry the duds as they come along as well.
I have been impressed by Netflix's willingness to push forward into largely uncharted waters (at least in the U.S.). I had cancelled my subscription when they split their service, and while I still think it would be better if they were combined, I have since re-instated the streaming only service when House of Cards and Arrested Development appeared on there. In doing so I can at least support their desire to make the web a first-class citizen when it comes to movies (eventually?) and television. Now if they can just get rid of need to figure out what I want to watch before I can watch something I'd be completely enamored.
I've forwarded a domain to this URL if someone to conveniently visit it without creating an account:
http://www.hackertraps.com/
(Bought since mentioned in Arrested Development Season 4 and I'm otherwise not sure what to do with it.)
There aren't that many 47 year old female undergraduates, let alone in computer science. And, in addition to describing her own experiences at UCLA, Bateman, is publicizing stories of older women going back to school in STEM subjects, as you'll see from her twitter and esp. her tumblr, where she lets some of these women tell their stories, at length.
And it's interesting reading about her interest in computer science, what it took for her to be able to be admitted to UCLA, her experiences with the courses and projects, etc.
Additionally, if you read her stuff, you'll see she is an entrepreneur, with her own company, who was trying to get Hollywood interested in doing projects involving digital media, the internet, etc. years ago but kept getting push-back.
And that's without any of the celebrity pixie-dust.
As far as that goes: she was on a very highly rated, award-winning TV show, along with Michael J. Fox, called Family Ties, back when tens of millions of people would watch a TV show.
And: given that the newly-revived Arrested Development just came out on Netflix, she happens to be the sister of Jason Bateman, who plays Michael Bluth.
tl;dr: she's quite HN-worthy.
It's not just the UI, the interesting part is the categories. People have been trying to do clustering/categories for 15 years, and the results have usually been laughably bad!
When you have categories, you can present diverse results (maybe I wanted apple recipes when I typed Apple?) and you can avoid query reformulation when a query turns out to be overly generic.
Here's an example:
https://blekko.com/#?q=hearing%20loss
Now I don't know if you're interested in alternative medicine or not -- and we've got those results separated so you can either read or ignore them.
You'll probably wonder why we have both health and hearing in this result. The hearing category is websites dedicated to hearing, while health contains more generic health websites.
All of this doesn't work perfectly -- the [Arrested Development] movie/tv example is a good example of how we go wrong sometimes.
Does anyone else find this to be a cruel kindness to geeks given that it coincides with the release of Arrested Development Season 4?
they're unlikely to even notice if one or two videos (for example, one of the Netflix-produced broadcasts like House of Cards or the forthcoming Arrested Development episodes) are unprotected. It wouldn't make a difference to them.
I'd notice. The only reason I'm considering getting Netflix is to watch Arrested Developent. However, I basically only have Linux machines and so I won't be able to.
Off-topic: what if Kickstarter had been around in 2006 for Arrested Development? Perhaps we wouldn't just now be getting a season 4.
To be technically correct - the best kind of correct - the show has only been cancelled twice. In fact, to be even _more_ technically correct, it hasn't actually been cancelled, just not renewed.
People tend to confuse the times after the films where there were no new episodes to show and none in production with a cancellation, because the films themselves did not bring the show back to television. That's like saying Arrested Development is cancelled after the film is released, because no new film or television episodes has been ordered.
This is not so much constructive, but more a comment on my Netflix viewing habits and opinions on three shows which they've created:
I really enjoyed House of Cards. Lilyhammer was pleasantly surprising and I'm looking forward to future seasons. I recently tried watching Hemlock Grove and that was awful. I'm sceptical of Arrested Development: I loved the original, but it's been a long time and I feel like it's time to move on.
Otherwise, I find Netflix to be attractive in cycles. Every now and then, I will discover a bunch of new things (be it movies or TV shows) and binge watch them, and then I feel like there nothing left on Netflix. I keep paying on "down periods" because I like there is a sense of security because I have a high quality / stable streaming service available to me. Then, after a few weeks, I eventually return to Netflix for more binge viewing.
Rant ahead...
Am I the only one dissatisfied with the way media delivery has played out the past couple of years? We started with a rapidly developing delivery system (the internet) and content makers who couldn't see the value in capitalizing on this sales channel by making movies, TV shows, and songs available to consumers at reasonable prices (read: less than physical media costs), which led to piracy, global dissatisfaction, and decreased industry revenue.
Fast forward to 2013, where we have...
Ecosystems: iTunes, Amazon Video, Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, Blockbuster Ondemand, Android, Cinema Now, and Vdio
Which can be accessed on TVs, web browsers, smartphones, tablets, dvd players, bluray players, gaming consoles, media streaming devices (Roku, Apple TV, etc.), and HTPCs.
... all with different user experiences (most are poor), varying media coverage / depth, and a pricing system that only satisfies bulk consumers that want to watch a bunch of legacy content.
Larger companies that were first to build relationships with content makers have been the most successful, but the entire process still wreaks of bureaucracy, middle-men, and band aids. Netflix seems to be the only one that realizes this, and has started producing their own content (e.g. House of Cards and Arrested Development), and I think this is the only true catalyst that will change the industry for the better.
It's a reference to a TV show called Arrested Development.
VM was one of those smart shows that died an early death, kindof like Arrested Development or Firefly. For the longest time fans of movies and TV have been able to buy DVDs, tickets to cons, posters, action figures, etc., but all of that is a proxy for what fans really want to buy: MORE CONTENT. Glad to see this working.
I'm going to echo the other commenters here and ask why House of Cards was a hugely bad decision. It's funny because just today I reactivated my Netflix account so I could watch the show.
There is a problem here though. Because I'm sure I'll devour the season in less than a month, I'll be tempted to cancel my account (until Arrested Development is released). If they had spaced the release out like a normal TV show, they could get about 3 months of subscription fees from me.
It's quickly mentioned in the article, but the laugh track in the show is what makes me HATE "The Big Bang Theory". It drives me crazy, it ruins ever joke for me, and it also makes it very hard for me to follow the plot of the episode when there is a "laugh pause" after every 1-5 words in the dialog.
I find much more humor in a show that has hilarious jokes/PUN's and doesn't need to stress them so much. For example, Arrested Development, is one of the best comedies ever done (in my opinion) because the complexity in their jokes and there is no need to stress the idea of when to laugh.
If "The Big Bang Theory" goes by the idea that the laughing from the live audience helps them determine what to cut parts of the episode, they should just film it without the live audience then air it to a screening crowd separately to decide what to cut and keep. Why dilute the show for other viewers not watching it live with that extreme annoyance of constant laughter? I just don't get it.
I came to the same realization as you did, and stopped my Netflix subscription a few months ago.
I figured that as far as watching a movie goes, I'd rather rent 3 latest releases a month on iTunes for $3 each than pay $8 for a sub-par catalog on Netflix. Netflix does have a bunch of shows that I enjoy re-watching everyonce in a while, but buying the physical copy used for cheap on Amazon is again a better option.
I might resume my subscription for a month when they release the Arrested Development exclusive season, but that's the only interesting they'd offer that I can think of.
Louie, Season 3 stands out to me as the best show of the year. Every 'section'(between advert breaks) is extremely well written, directed, and even orchestrated. Each 'section' feels like an operatic movement, with each episode being extremely cohesive and emotive. From an artistic point of view, it's one of the best shows of the year. From a comedy point of view, it's probably the best show of the year, definitely the stand out show for me this year.
Homeland was also very good this year, it managed to keep up the suspense and excellent acting, I'm excited to see the new season next year.
I enjoyed Dexter, I'm not sure I like where they are heading though, it's getting darker and darker by the series. I also enjoyed Castle, I think it's very funny and well written, but perhaps I have a soft spot Nathan Fillion.
Most anticipated TV series for next year is the new Arrested Development. I love the first three seasons, I'm a bit nervous with netflix financing it, I hope the (probably) smaller budget hasn't meant too many compromises in terms of writing and production, but with the excellent cast from the previous seasons all returning, I'm excited to see how they're going to pick up from the end of season 3.
Am I the only one who thinks this sounds like the plot of an Arrested Development episode?
This article is predicated on the argument that he who owns the content gets the revenue.
Let's keep in mind that in the first part of 2013, Netflix is going to be premiering both House of Cards and new episodes of Arrested Development. If they both do well, and Netflix can get more high-quality exclusives in the pipeline (admittedly both rather large 'ifs'), there's a real possibility that Netflix might find themselves in the very compelling and potentially lucrative position of being the first network of Showtime/HBO-caliber content that really understands digital distribution.
I want crowd-funding to address consumer choice,editorial & artistic freedom, consumer friendly consumption mechanisms, platform lock-in and profit concentration. Crowdfunding is very much compatible with all of these requirements. Theo only thing standing between us & that world is a few quarters of Kickstarter/ IndieGogo/ Rally/ GoFundme growing their user bases.
Latest Netflix estimates say that 1 episode of Arrested development will cost 1.5 million $. Going with an average rate of 3$ per episode would mean 500,000 average pledges would be enough to fund such an enterprise. (36$ per user per season)
Two games on Kickstarter, Double Fine Adventure/ Star Citizen had a pledger base of about ~90,000 users. We're half an order of magnitude from that. 2~3 years in internet time is an eternity, I'm confident that producing quality content will soon migrate online. I think the studios obsession with piracy & control will soon backfire on them. Google is going after them with premium channels, Amazon & Netflix are both toying with content in-house & Apple has the market power to eventually twist their arms.
I wish Netflix would transition fast to an HBO model where they produce their own content. I could see them establishing a kickstarter like content crowd-funding option (opt-in) for say 15 $ / month extra where users would vote on shows, finance them & bring them to life. just imagine what/if scenarios would have played out when "Arrested development" was canceled if we had such an option back then.
My point is, if kickstarter can start raising sums as high a 4 Mil $ for project eternity & 6 Mil $ for Star Citizen, the days when AAA movies could be crowd-funded is not far from us. I'm looking forward to the day when big studios & their greedy shortsightedness get disrupted. The penultimate frontier of disintermediation. fingers crossed
Citizen Kane is famous for a bunch of different reasons, including advancing the state of the art of cinema and being basically a flawless masterpiece. But probably the thing that stands out the most today is its psychological depth, in that to this day it's arguably still the best character study ever done.
Firefly doesn't have that sort of psychological depth, but it does have a lot of moral ambiguity, something that's virtually non-existant in CK. That's something that would have gone a lot deeper had the show gotten another two or three seasons, but they never got that chance. It also has some of the most clever writing of any TV show, up there with only Arrested Development really. Cleverness might not be as prized by critics as authentic character writing, but it's still at the top of its form nonetheless. The main downside of the show was that it was already starting to get a bit formulaic toward the end of season one when they canceled it. In any event, I don't think you could ever put Firefly above Citizen Kane, but certainly I think it pushed the boundaries of its genre in a way that is rare.
The Avengers, on the other hand, has virtually no redeeming value whatsoever except for Joss Whedon's clever writing during the second half and the amazing effects during the NYC fight scene.
Not directly related to the article, but I was immediately reminded of the Arrested Development episode where the value of Gob's suit kept going up. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81Nl7VYFEaI
Television has already changed. If you look toward the UK, already there's low budget comedy shows like Mid-Morning Matters with Alan Partridge, which is a continuation of a rather famous comedy character spanning radio, multiple television series and soon to be film -- which was recently produced for peanuts with modest corporate sponsorship from Fosters, dumped online as web episodes -- and now is being picked up for broadcast television after the fact.
Arrested Development may be news to some folks here, but the age of producing shows for internet distribution has been our path for quite some time. Not only are shows being produced in this fashion for the internet now, but we're increasingly recruiting new talent via the internet. Just look at the star of Community, Donald Glover. This is a brilliant comedic actor who first got his major break by producing a set of YouTube videos that went viral with the other comedians in the Derrick comedy group, a group which was later picked up by College Humor and several of which, including Donald, have been tapped by mainstream American television now.
I could only see Arrested Development 'changing everything' if you weren't already aware that things have already changed.
As someone who was entrenched in the music startup world for a while, I've concluded that the only way to save the music industry is for the major labels to die or become obsolete and for new, innovation-friendly content producers to emerge in their place. We need for music what Netflix is trying to do for movies/tv (see Lillyhammer, new Arrested Development season).
It's that broken.
This is potentially valid, but I would present a counter-argument based on the events surrounding the Netflix vs. Starz negotiations and subsequent pulling of Starz content from Netflix.
Around the same time, Netflix announced new episodes of Arrested Development would be appearing exclusively on Netflix. Other expansions into exclusive content seem to indicate that Netflix is going the direction of competing with both the cable companies (distribution) and the content providers, by necessity. In order to continue growing, Netflix is having to make content, too. I would argue that's going to continue. Netflix will find shows in the still-fat middle of the long tail, and pick them up when they get canceled, and they'll probably go into new production, too.
Was it HBO's intention to make a potential future distribution partner into a direct content competitor? Probably not, but that's what happened. Other "distribution" plays will probably end up being force to do the same.
Netflix seems to be thinking ten years out. HBO seems to be thinking next quarter. HBO may be poised to make all the right moves when the time is right; I can't say what's going on behind the scenes, and I am definitely not an expert in the entertainment industry (I worked in broadcast TV for five years about 15 years ago, but that knowledge does not scale). But, the Internet is without a doubt the future of entertainment.
"once you start talking about the amount of programming the average person or family watches, the flat-rate-watch-all-you-want model is extremely attractive for consumers"
There are other values. Watching what you want, when you want, is extremely valuable to many people.
I might suggest that either you have already watched a lot of movies or your definition of interesting is rather narrow. I have hundreds of films in my instant queue. The number of critically acclaimed TV shows is pretty large, too. Have you seen all of Mad Men? Battlestar Galactica? Breaking Bad? Arrested Development or Louie? It would take a while just to get through those. There are, of course, many more. Lots of documentaries and smaller films you might not yet have heard of, but that you might like a lot.
It's hard for me to understand why anybody would think there's nothing interesting to see there.
This is what Netflix has started to do with some movies/series (e.g. Arrested Development). The problem with this model is that it doesn't scale, even if you could make a deal with a handful of the top grossing artists you'd still need to talk with WMG to license the rest of the artists.
More and more I think we need to reinvent the way that big music companies work. Some independent labels are doing just fine without treating their users like crap so at we know it's a viable business decision.
Good article.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: we need to stop thinking of "Hollywood" as a monolothic, homogenous organization bent on a single agenda. We do ourselves a great disservice to view the entertainment and media industries in those terms. In truth, "Hollywood" comprises thousands of companies, millions of individuals, and just as many agendas, business models, goals, and products. We can no more speak of "Hollywood" as having a single org structure or driving agenda than we can speak of "America" as a unified political and cultural mass. Just as not all Americans wanted to invade Iraq, not everyone in Los Angeles and New York wanted to push SOPA and PIPA legislation. (In fact, I'd bet that a majority in the entertainment business are personally opposed to SOPA and PIPA; I know I am).
Within Hollywood, there is a large and growing segment of content creators, producers, actors, writers, and directors who'd just as soon develop for technology ecosystems as they would for major movie studios and TV networks. And I believe technology firms are leading the way. Netflix is attempting to develop original programming. Microsoft is rumored to be doing the same. Apple's iTunes and App Stores represent entertainment ecosystems just waiting to be filled with direct-to-consumer content from Hollywood's best creators and production companies. Kickstarter offers an appealing platform for marketing and funding independent content. A major shift in production and consumption of entertainment isn't going to happen overnight; nor will it progress in linear fashion. More likely than not, a few big breakthroughs will inspire others. I am very optimistic that, sometime within the next two years, we'll be speaking of the first "Hollywood" series released directly -- and successfully -- to a tech platform. Once that happens, the floodgates will open in earnest. And, perhaps selfishly speaking, I am crossing my fingers that the new season of direct-to-Netflix "Arrested Development" finds a bigger audience than it did on TV.
Don't forget that this was the era when Fox also cancelled Family Guy and Futurama. Both of these series were able to be resurrected due to their DVD sales and syndication numbers. Fox made a lot of mistakes during that time, but were just learning about the secondary sales potential for their shows. I'd like to think that a similar set of shows would be able to stick around longer now. Those shows were able to be resurrected easily because they are animated. Firefly, not so much. But another show (Arrested Development) cancelled by Fox in that era is getting resurrected by Netflix, which while not straight to consumer is more direct than through the studios.
Also, Joss Whedon (and the rest of Hollywood) I think learned a lot about distributing directly to the consumer with Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog. I think that this grand experiment was a good template for future direct-to-consumer productions.
Unfortunately, you still have to deal with the problems of initially funding large movies. I can imagine a system where instead of having dedicated studios, you have smaller one-off production companies. These companies would then be funded VC style by funds that seek to mitigate their risk by diversifying their pool of movies. You could fund a few flops, so long as every now and again an Avatar comes along.
I predicted this would happen when Starz pulled their programming. Given how much Netflix is paying for content, they can produce several pretty high end shows, which makes them a direct competitor to HBO, Showtime, etc. But, they have a much better delivery method, from the consumer perspective. This was a no-brainer, and good on Netflix for recognizing the opportunity that Arrested Development presents for them. It's relatively cheap to produce, has huge marketing value, and has a cult-like following that will sign up for Netflix specifically for access to these new episodes.
"I don't use it. None of my friends use it so it's not popular and won't be successful."
Ah, I really dislike this mentality.
Ever heard of "Everybody Loves Raymond"? It's a TV show that I didn't and none of my friends watched. But guess what? it was the most-watched show in the early 2000s.
How about "Arrested Development"? I watched it. My friends were watching it. Some of my friends still talk about it on Facebook. But guess what? It got canceled because of poor ratings.
What I learned is that in some aspects, I'm not part of the mainstream. My guess is a lot of people in Hacker News aren't either.
Let us not make conclusions on something based on what we or our friends use or like.
I see this as a benefit too, especially for TV shows.
If you are the type of person that enjoys "critically acclaimed" but "unpopular" shows (Arrested Development, Pushing Daises, Better Off Ted, etc.), the signal-to-noise ratio is dramatically lower than regular Cable TV.
I'm another person who cancelled cable and started watching things I normally wouldn't on Netflix. I'm rewatching the Doctor Who new series now and loving every minute of it. Wife and I watched Dead Like Me, Arrested Development, Pushing Daises, and lots of documentaries and movies.
Couldn't help but remember a TV show from my childhood called Roc about a garbage man. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101184/
I couldn't remember any shows that centered around postal workers. Seinfeld had a regular character and a few episodes about the postal system (but then that show had an episode about almost everything). But it did make me think about "Get a Life" which starred an adult paperboy http://thetvdb.com/?tab=series&id=76500&lid=7
Construction crews was the same, I could think of several shows off the top of my head that center around the "idea" but none that landed right on it. There's Arrested Development which centers around a land development company (but really isn't about that all that much). Home Improvement, which isn't actually about home improvement and is more about a guy who has a show about tools. You said "show" but I'm guessing you meant sitcom/drama based on context so that rules out Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, since that's really reality-vertising. No worries, I'm sure someone on HN will figure this one out.
A truly gifted writer could make a show about almost anything interesting
I totally agree, including a cop/doctor/lawyer show. :o) One of my favorites was "Ed" on NBC ... first season only, though (http://stuckeyville.com).
Obviously, you've done a good job on keeping your landing page clear, and done a very good and simple description of the service.
However, even here on HN, you'd find that most people are consumers and not contributors. Therefore, getting a sign-up on the homepage and not providing access to the content is likely going to hurt your growth.
I love arrested development, which I saw on your page. So I clicked on it, expecting to get rankings, reviews, or recommendations of other things i might like.
Unfortunately, I didn't get that. So I don't get to try out your technology. I can only see what you liked.
also, why have the type way off on the right hand side (tv show, film)? I had no idea what Angel was, and with the light grey AND the positioning, it took a bit to figure it out. I like the idea that they type isn't blaring out, but I think better placement would improve it.
I assume others have recommended that you provide filters by media type?
This reminds me of the last episode of Arrested Development.
"Why am I not sinking? OH GOD! WHY AM I NOT SINKING!"
Calling them "screenshots" and using the word "development" both in the present tense when talking to potential customers is telling them implicitly that not only do you have the skills and competency to deliver this functional piece of software, but that you are already in the process of doing so. Unfortunately none of that is actually proven explicitly by what you're showing, as all of the functional coding implied doesn't actually exist.
Unfortunately for everyone involved, if all you've done is paid a designer to give you some visual and functional mockups, well, that means absolutely nothing about your ability to actually code and deliver the product.
Also the fact that they could write the code to support the designs isn't the issue. The issue is that they didn't, and didn't say so. It's giving the impression that they are operating at what seems to be an amazing speed supporting what presumably appears to be a fully fleshed out user experience, etc, when all that exists might be a design/pitch doc and some jpegs. Programmingprowess is implied. Frontend to backend functionality is implied. Progress is implied. When you leave things implied, then blame your customer for not catching the fact that you weren't explicit about details and therefore you weren't lying to them after all, you're doing it wrong.
It's like that episode of Arrested Development where they go to show clients a model home, only to have one of the walls fall down to reveal nothing inside but a bunch of air, and two people who thought they were hiding inside making out.
They may not be lying with this approach -- they do have screenshots, the same way the guys in that sitcom really did have four walls and a roof -- but they're also setting themselves up for a pretty killer "I don't think you've been entirely honest with me" conversation with a client if one of those walls happens to fall over a bit and reveal what's inside.
The common iFart example isn't a reflection of the store, it's a reflection of culture.
In 2007, "Pirates of the Caribbean 3" grossed nearly a billion dollars while "There Will Be Blood" never even got to 100 million. "Two and a Half Men" is a hit TV show and Arrested Development is off the air. The Arcade Fire were lucky to go gold with "Neon Bible" while Fall Out Boy went multi-platinum the same year.
Given your logic, nobody should bother creating anything of quality. Sometimes quality is successful, sometimes its not. But it's always regarded.
Nah. The creator of Arrested Development, Mitch Hurwitz, never wrote a crappy television show from the start. He climbed the learning curve by going to Georgetown, outside of the television industry. Writers shouldn't be paid to make crap just to help them climb the learning curve.
Why is it always the Mac users that get upset over "dick waving contests"?
I can't answer for "Mac users", because I'm one person (who, incidentally, has seen more than his share of Linux users get upset over similar contests), but here's how it works for me. I take discussion of stuff like this seriously. When somebody says that an OS sucks, I try to legitimately find out why they dislike the OS, because very often it teaches me something about my computer that I didn't know. So I find myself drawn into every fight that goes like this.
Part of it is because I hate the antiMac backlash that pops up just because it happens to have a very firm following. I love debating OS with people. It's a fascinating subject. I love talking with Windows enthusiasts and Ubuntu enthusiasts: I find out new stuff about their respective systems each time. I like talking about people who legitimately have criticisms for the Mac, because oftentimes it makes me go looking for better solutions to problems I've been having, and that makes me enjoy the experience of using my computer. And when somebody insults the Mac without saying anything meaningful, that sets me on edge. It's like somebody who disses Shakespeare or The Wire (two other things I have passionate feelings about). If they give criticism, it becomes a discussion. If they insult it needlessly, then it becomes personal, because this person is dismissing something that to me is a culmination of a long, long process.
But if you say "Macs suck" to a Mac user, you get a long lecture about the experience and how awesome it is to use a computer like it's 1995 and blah blah blah (or something, I usually zone out after the first sentence).
This is exactly the problem: when I use a Mac it feels awesome. Perhaps you feel the same about Linux, but I never hear Linux users talk like this. When I open my Mac, I feel a sheer childlike joy at the computer I'm using. Every time I find out something new, it's this incredible marvel for me. It's this wonder that somebody else anticipated what I would try to do and made it work that way. As a result, I'm not just a fan of my Mac, I'm an enthusiast. That's the right word for it. I actively talk about my Mac to people. I find it incredibly exciting. When I meet other people as enthusiastic as me, I talk to them about it and it's the thrill of meeting somebody with a similar taste as me. I'd call it the thrill of discussing art. That's how I see my Mac, both the hardware and the OS and pretty much every aspect of Apple. I view the entire thing as a masterful work of art.
Other people don't see computers like this. I'm aware of that. When I open an OS, the first thing I do is drag the cursor on the desktop to make a selection of material, and look at what the OS does when I drag over the initial point. On Windows the line disappears; on Ubuntu the line becomes 1px; on a Mac, with a 3px width the entire selector box moves over 2px as you drag, so that the line on the one side replaces the line on the other side as the boundary. That's the level of introspection I focus on my computer - and I talk about it, too! I was thrilled when I saw that. To me, there's a visual poetry to that one simple action, to the mindset that decided on that course of action. That's a feature, to me. That's something that I find wanting in other operating systems.
Do you at least comprehend that mindset? I understand why you Linux users like Linux. Some mindsets like picking things apart and tinkering with them. I, on the other hand, look for products of human creation. I look for a powerful controlling mind determining everything. I call that the "artist" mindset because every artist I meet has it. It's the feeling you get when you understand that everything you do ought to be plastered with your personality, ought to work according to your mind, and when you start to appreciate the results of other people's minds. When I use my Mac, I don't see it as a tool. I don't open it with the mindset that this is built just to let me do things. I look at it as an experience to be had. Every small little detail is a part of that experience.
It's why Mac users photograph and document the process of their opening their cases for the first time. Why they gossip about the welcoming video. Why they watch the keynotes. It's why I watched the keynotes when I wasn't a Mac user yet. It's the thrill of exhibition. My Mac is a gallery, not just of my own work but of the incredible work that went into making this computer what it is.
Instead of providing actual reasons for anything, they make up some emotional bullshit to justify their strong feelings for something not worth feeling strongly about.
It's because they feel that. It's not bullshit. I could take your need to tinker, to customize your computer, and call that bullshit, and I would be just as wrong. "What sort of dumb motherfucker wants to type shit into a terminal? Who the fuck cares about programming languages if you can do anything with pretty much one if you know the basic commands? What sort of stupid turd would want to use an application library or think about window management?" But I don't say that, because I understand that different people see different things in their computers. The reason I get so pissed off at people who blindly attack the Mac - as you do every time you post anything OS-related, from what I've read - is that you don't seem to have that similar comprehension.
When I talk about stuff I like, I don't talk about technical details. You might call it cultlike, or you might call it simple emotional response. (Last time I checked, emotion was natural.) Say I'm explaining to you why I like Arrested Development. I could say, "There's a running arc of a joke between episodes 1.01 and 1.03, there are several cleverly twisted stereotypical characters, and the concept of an overall narrator allows for certain clever jokes to be made." Or I could say, "You have to see it. It's seriously the funniest show I've ever seen. I can't even explain to you how wonderful it is." And if you were to say, without having seen much of Arrested Development, something along the lines of "Arrested Development sucks, 2 and a half men is better," my initial reaction WOULDN'T be the same as if the position was reversed, because with Arrested Development I've devoted a considerable amount of time to something that I consider is worth an extended intellectual effort on my part. Damn right I'm going to get pissed off, because this represents a valueset that I have, and if you insult this then you're insulting my standards. (Arguing that there are no standards at all, or that standards aren't worth passion, is disgusting.)
Maybe, but it's possible you have settled on something that's acceptable, rather than "the best".
No. Here's the problem with that. I've used everything. I've run varieties of Linux. I've used Windows XP and Windows Vista. I've tried everything I could get my hands on. After that, after years of painstaking research, I settled on the Mac as the clear victor in every way that matters for me. I know my Mac in-and-out. I know all the keyboard shortcuts, the various drag-n-drop effects, the menubars and how they're laid out. In my mind, the design of the Mac is as close to perfection as any computer's had, and it continues to improve. I have nitpicks, absolutely, and I'm vocal about how irritating those small little things are, but that's like nitpicking the first line of Lindsay Bluth on the pilot episode of Arrested Development. Yeah, I'll say I "really dislike" that line, but it only stands out because the rest of the series is so close to perfection. So I might gripe because right now, my Command-Control-D is broken and I don't know what's breaking it, but the fact remains that C-C-D is a command that no other operating system has, and that it does something incredibly elegantly, and that my not having that doesn't make my Mac less than the very best, because it absolutely is.
If you want to tell me my Mac isn't perfect, ready your list of critiques. I've got several virtual Linux boxes running, and if need be I'll open them up and point out specific things with screenshots to explain what I mean, because this is what I do. I compare operating systems and software with a ridiculously anal eye. I do that to everybody. I fight with people over things that are very, very good, because I think they could be better. And if you want to join in on that debate, then you have to be prepared to do the same, otherwise Mac users will get pissed off. A lot of us spend this incredible effort constantly because it's our passion. People who dismiss the stuff that we love without any sort of thought really, really piss us off. The reason is this: you see your computer as a tool, some efficiency system. But us? The hardcore Mac users? We see it as an essential part of living.
If I have some wine sipping Kafka reading man in a top hat telling me that the things he likes are the definition of quality, he's no more right than the surfer dude who swears by fart films.
I prefer Beckett and I've lost my top hat, but I'll argue back as to quality. "Enjoyment" is subjective, "quality" is not. To take humor as an example: a fart joke is extremely generic, requires no thinking, and therefore can be utilized by anybody equally. For most people older than 15, this means fart jokes lose their value in humor. It's not that a fart isn't funny, it's just that it's old and it's been used again and again. Compare this to the opening of The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa awakes to find he has become a giant beetle. Yeah, there's an artistic point to be made about him losing his soul and humanity, but MUCH more obviously, here's a guy who's just turned into a bug. The first we hear of him, he's a bug. That's hilarious! It would be less funny if it suddenly became a comedic gag used by everybody, but as it stands it's rare and it's clever. Fart jokes can be clever, but most of them aren't. And, for the record, most surfer dudes are a lot more sophisticated than they get stereotyped as.
The problem with a lot of modern society is that people tell us what we're supposed to regard as high brow - because a film is made by fox searchlight does not mean it's qualitatively better than a nollywood film.
No, the problem is that people assume that another person's opinion matters. Fact does - some humor can be argued very formally - but that's not the same as a title meaning anything. I like HBO shows because they allow more freedom to the creators, but I think that Fox's Arrested Development beats the pants off Curb Your Enthusiasm, despite (and because of, in this case) censors, shorter episode lengths, and more restrictions on content. The Arrested Development DVD set contains an episode that's longer, more risque, and with censors removed, and it's less funny. So HBO's format wouldn't work for the show.
Intellectualism - our constant attempt to break through the limits of human thinking - seems nowadays to have built a fence around itself and defined what belongs in and what does not. That's what I dislike.
Of course. Real intellectuals don't do that. Roger Ebert doesn't do that with movies. Harold Bloom doesn't do that with books. (Bloom does insult lots of books - he hates Harry Potter - but his arguments are based on logic. While I like Harry Potter, his scathing criticism made me think much more about my liking it. I was suddenly more critical and judgmental, and just happened to find it wanting. Bloom dislikes postmodernism, though, despite its artsy airs.) However, what you're doing is responding by saying there are no standards at all, and that's just as heinous as saying that there are predefined standards in given genres. The proper response is to develop your own taste. That doesn't mean disregarding taste entirely. It means deciding for yourself what's good and what isn't.
To give an example, those wine sippers will overwhelmingly tell say that Jazz is a more intellectual musical form than country music. Utter bullshit, they are intellectually equal, one just happens to be inside the intellectual box and the other is not.
Au contraire! (Sorry, by the way: you picked humor and music as your two arguments, and those are two things that I spend a lot of time delving into, and I've already got a lot of these arguments rounded out in my head. Hope you don't mind.) Country music is defined by simplicity: the melody is simple, the instrumentation is simple. The lyrics - simple. Jazz music, meanwhile, is inherently complex. It requires a lot of skill on part of the musicians. I've played the flute for over 8 years, and I'm still mediocre at jazz improvisation. Meanwhile, jazz also deals with very complex tempos and melodies. As a result, it's got much more range in style - musicians have got a lot more to work with, and they produce more fascinating pieces.
I'm not at all a jazz fan, it's not my style of music, but at the same time I can intellectually acknowledge what's going on, and I like listening to certain jazz artists a lot. I've yet to find a country musician that really does interesting, nongeneric things. I like a few folk artists: Bob Dylan does some interesting stuff with his instrumentation, and he's got an incredibly unique sound; Sufjan Stevens takes folk and minimalism and creates some beautiful orchestrations. I don't have any country artists I can say the same about.
The people who listen to country almost all to a T are less diverse in their music than jazz listeners. This isn't because listening to jazz makes you smart. Some jazz fans are pretty stupid about their music. At the same time, though, if you like music for music's sake, and you give everything a chance, you find that certain genres have much more to offer than others. Jazz is one of the most unique in that it shares few elements with any other style of music. Country, on the other hand, is the opposite: it deals with the bare essentials of music style, and so elements of country appear in rock and even in some strands of orchestral music. A local band, Fountains of Wayne (they had the hit Stacy's Mom), has a few songs that borrow heavily from country. When I'm in the mood for that sound, I go to them, because there's nothing that "pure" country has to offer that I can't get from their few songs. There might be more to country than I think, and if so I'd have to judge that other music on its own merits, but at the same time, your assuming they're equal intellectually is hardly right. In fact, I'd counterpoint you by saying that your saying everything is equal is just as much an instance of fencing things out as assigning arbitrary values without thinking, because you're not giving each item a chance to make its case.
The intellectual box is very often full of shit, because not all intellectuals think. What I ask is that you don't deny the value of intelligence just because some morons try to fake it. At the same time, don't deny the value of quality to yourself. If you do, you will find that you will churn out items of much lower quality than you are capable of, and the only people that flock to you are the people who agree with you that quality doesn't exist. Then you'll realize you've created just as awful a box as the other camp - and worse, your box isn't creating anything for anybody.
Something related to this: when you have a constraint, use it to your advantage. Make that constraint into your edge.
I think my favorite TV show of all time was Arrested Development, which is odd because it's nearly the only show that I like that wasn't either British or on a pay-for network. And one of the reasons for that is that they took the things they knew they couldn't do - like swear - and turned that into a joke of its own. One of my favorite early jokes in that show featured an incredibly lengthy censored story. I don't think you'd ever look at that show and feel like it was avoiding any subject because it was a network show.
The West Wing is by far the greatest television show ever created. Second would probably be Arrested Development.