Hacker Cinema
Ballers
2015 · TV series · 5 seasons
Created by Stephen Levinson
Looking at the lives of former and current football players, the show follows former superstar Spencer Strasmore as he gets his life on track in retirement while mentoring other current and former players through the daily grind of the business of football.
1 positive3 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
All of this makes complete sense, it just felt shocking because HBO has such greater cultural cachet and prestige than Discovery, which I didn’t even know owns an empire of reality shows aside the ones on its channel. Guess that really illustrates how what is seen as good TV is increasingly decoupled from what is actually watched on TV. There was a recent meme about how the “little-known” ABC drama The Good Doctor was obscure to the Twitterati but is, in reality, a long-running series with viewership that dwarfs the Succession set.
And on the subject of reality TV, this is a good retrospective of how many cable channels from MTV to Bravo have drifted from their once lofty, even high-brow identities into domination by reality television. It really is a ubiquitous trend.
https://youtu.be/Vd1gqLVHZWo
I wonder what genre will succeed reality television. Maybe they’ll find a way to adapt Twitch streaming or vlogging for television, and then they will have to pay even fewer people.
> We may all want to watch Ballers or some other a tv show starring The Rock
As an aside, apparently not, judging by what happened to Young Rock. :p
Amazing how much the TV series "Ballers" seems to reflect what's going on behind the scenes in sports. I've felt for years that NCAA rules has treated the athletes like a virtual slave class, while everyone, other than them, makes huge amounts of money.
Season 2 of Westworld had fewer viewers than Ballers. Ballers. You're right; it's a huge-budget show, and one HBO clearly hopes will be a tentpole. But it's no Game of Thrones.
Same, seeing or reading about more misery never makes me happier, just worse. Watching happy things makes me happy. It's the only reason I watch a stupid show like Ballers on HBO or Bollywood movies. Not necessarily deep but they are happy and fun.