Hacker Cinema
Breaking Bad
2008 · TV series · 5 seasons
Created by Vince Gilligan
Walter White, a New Mexico chemistry teacher, is diagnosed with Stage III cancer and given a prognosis of only two years left to live. He becomes filled with a sense of fearlessness and an unrelenting desire to secure his family's financial future at any cost as he enters the dangerous world of drugs and crime.
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507 comments on Hacker News
there are, of course, a wide array of assessments when it comes to reading comprehension. the one you refer to, the GRA, sets the 'sixth grade level' as whether or not a reader understands the author's main points and is able to answer conceptual questions related to the text and apply derived knowledge to relevant situations. beyond that point is the ability to essentially be skeptical of a text and to know how to critically analyze it - so you get 'big words in complex sentence structure sounds smart and right so it is smart and right' even if the reasoning and process is poor
I think a lot about things, too, like the people who watched Breaking Bad and all they got out of it was that Walter White was a badass and not an emotionally stunted narcissist inflicting massive harm on his family and community (something that even the showrunners went far out of their way to try to make obvious, like with the scene where Skyler and Walt rehearse a creative work that was virtually a fourth wall break). it's also generally how people engage with movies and television - as passive, plot-and-character driven consumption (eg wow Arya is so badass) with no critical analysis of how and why the writers added ABC thematic element (eg other fantasy tropes about talented, traumatized teens in fantasy and how Martin specifically wrote Arya in that context), and the larger, downstream sociocultural impact that piece of media has on how people see the world (eg all the kids now named Arya)
I'll also say that I think Claude sounds the way that it does because it, like many other LLMs, are RLHF trained largely by lowly paid gig-workers, many of them ESL speakers. if their trainers were, for example, dedicated and highly trained academics, scientists, and other researchers, you'd likely see a lot more concise and more importantly skeptical reasoning and responses. but that won't happen in our current reality of capitalist-driven development so we get encoded solutions like MoE that still largely depend on the messy, imprecise RLHF training by the very people who aren't capable of understanding texts within sociocultural contexts and understand that all writing is opinion that requires critical assessment and engagement
TV shows on the other hand, have suffered extreme shrinkflation.
From 20+ episode seasons every year to maybe 8-10 episodes every 2-3 years.
Yeah, budgets/production values are higher. But characters and storytelling were often better in those old shows (Star Trek TNG/DS9, Lost, 24, Breaking Bad) where they could make those longer seasons every year for 5 or more years in a row. Simply far more screen time for character development.
Am curious, do you personally feel mdma would be more therapeutic with friends or at a therapy clinic? I find the use of mdma or lsd or shrooms weird in a formalised environment. Some of the stuff makes sense (like drugs used to desensitise people with PTSD to certain triggers (when it doesn't backfire spectacularly; guessing we don't hear as much about that just the not-formalised experiences of it)) to me, but I don't see how it translates for a lot of people (eg, people not in a semi-predictable environment; people in wartime generally either are around bombings or shootings or not, whereas people with other sorts of PTSD have more trust issues; I could see drug use backfiring for almost anyone but the former group. Generally non-complex PTSD responds better, yet it is fairly rare).
Still surprised tv hasn't brought us a show like Breaking Bad but with designer drugs (the newer 21 Jump Street movies don't count).
I might check that site out but more because I like reading case studies about outlying things than any particular interest in drugs. Thanks.
Most of this article is tilting at windmills. It's notable that they present a number of examples of minority villains pre-woke, and then decry that that can't happen anymore because of woke, but they also stop presenting examples.
Like, they show Giancarlo Esposito from Breaking Bad, saying what a good villain he was. And then they imply it can't happen again. But he was another fantastic villain in The Boys, which just ended its run.
> It means that if a black woman in a wheelchair shows up, you know exactly what role she’ll play; the supportive best friend, but never the lying, betraying femme fatale.
Maybe, but the real source of this is: black women in wheelchairs rarely get any parts at all.
Maybe I don't watch enough movies, but I don't think this page makes a good enough case that it's actually happening. As it is, it reads like something they thought up to get angry about.
The poor quality of macOS Tahoe is by design as it is a "transition" release - a transition OS release is often like a beta quality release (of some feature) and often features a "break" (like loss of hardware support or EOL etc.). It is meant to frustrate the user, so that the "next" OS release (which fixes all the bugs of the "beta" features is more "appealing" and hyped (just read all the comments praising the new release here and elsewhere :). Apparently Tahoe is going to be the last macOS that supports Intel macs - that means it will continue to frustrate Intel Mac users and force them to consider buying the Apple ARM models if they want to use the newer macOS. A similar thing happened with Catalina too after it dropped support for 32-bit apps - many people chose to remain in the previous version (Mojave) because it was less "buggy" / appealing than Catalina. Followed by the "hype" of how the next version (Big Sur) was "so much better". Microsoft also does this with Windows OS - e.g. Windows Vista and Windows 8 both can be considered "transition" releases that are infamous due to their "beta" quality features and / or frustrating UI features. (This tactic of boring and / or frustrating the viewers is more common in many popular TV series, where one or more episodes is often deliberately made that way - by focusing on something mundane and meaningless that doesn't really move the story forward, so that it makes the following and often climax episodes more exciting, fulfilling and enjoyable. E.g. Breaking Bad s03e10 - The Fly - the most boring episode of season 3).
You're moving goalposts. You literally said
> I fail to find anything in history that advanced the sciences or the arts through "collective effort of hundreds or thousands of humans".
> It's only for war or to consolidate power in the hands of the ruling class, never for the benefit of society at large.
I'm breaking it up into two statements because sufficient evidence has been provided to contradict the former, and some of your rebuttals did not align with the latter. Let's break those down:
> The moon landing is defintely a fruit of a war effort.
But is it only for war? Or did it "advance the sciences" + "for the benefit of society at large"?
> Wikipedia is the opposite of a top-down effort.
Your original statement didn't say it had to be a top-down effort. It's certainly "collective effort" + "not only for war" + "for the benefit of society at large".
> Aqueducts and railroads: responded on a sibling comment.
Scale and precision also matter and don't negate the fact that these are "something in history" + "collective effort" + "not only for war" + "for the benefit of society at large".
> LOTR films: I don't even know how it relates to the point, but it's funny that you cultural landmark that only worked because it's an adaptation of the works of a single individual.
I only picked LOTR films because they are notorious for being large scale and you never said it didn't have to be an adaptation. I could have picked The Simpsons, Star Wars, Breaking Bad, you name it.
I tried this idea for the books and gave up. No rules for book purchases.
But for something like netflix, I create a list. And when I start repeating something like Seinfeld, Breaking Bad, etc. rather than not-yet-watched items from the list, I cancel the subscription. And I don't renew till some time passes (6 months). Only then there are a few different movies/ series I can add to the list.
Yeah, I abandoned Breaking Bad around mid-season 2 because of how boring, slow, and repetitive it had become. Better Call Saul, on the other hand, was constantly clicking for me, from one episode to another. The writing is magnificent. There were a few slow-rollers, of course, but they were nothing compared to drip-feeding in Breaking Bad.
And yet with all these techniques easily available to them, modern filmmakers still churn out a lot of trash.
It’s a matter of taste and style, not technique or quality of gear.
But I don’t agree that old==good and new==bad. There was plenty of trash back in the day, and plenty of great stuff now.
Breaking bad had fantastic cinematography and it didn’t really use advanced techniques like dolly zoom, crane, drone, etc. It had buckets of style though. Compare it to one of its contemporaries, Dexter, which had completely unremarkable, boring, functional cinematography.
The single most important advancement for modern cinematography is to be able to instantly see what your shot is going to look like without having to develop film. This allowed filmmakers to shoot at night, use natural or diegetic lighting, etc. it used to be risky and require a lot of testing to do anything other than bathe your scene in bright light and then use even brighter stage lights for highlights, to give cameras enough light, and to ensure that performances and stunts are visible in the final product. This is way way more impactful than drones and dollies.
They were more human and relatable in the very early seasons. It was just a bunch of people dicking around trying to run a bar (for the most part).
As time went on, they become more and more awful.
I'd say it has a pretty decent parallel with Breaking Bad. In season 1 almost anyone can relate to and cheers for Walter. By the last season, you hate him and are happy he dies.
Breaking Bad, if we're lucky. More likely some superhero movie with a title like ThunderMan VI: Dawn of the Mayhem Battalion.
Maybe he had some idea that his buddy ran away with and he attributed his success to his idea, while he was homeless? There was a whole TV show around a similar idea (Breaking Bad).
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.
His primary dislike for cable television was the amount of "garbage" it offered, while seemingly ignoring that Netflix also has plenty, if not more.
> But it doesn't matter... they're all available at once
I'm sorry but streaming everything is not a panacea. The spigot of worthwhile content is not endless. Ok great you binge-watched the entire season of Stranger Things over two nights. What will you watch tomorrow? And the day after? How much of the show do you actually remember? You lose out on the fun of discussing each individual episode with like-minded people, the wondering about how the next episode will resolve the last episodes drama, maybe watching an episode a second time and catching some additional detail.
I can assure you that watching great television - Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Larry Sanders Show, Homicide: Life on the Street - one episode per week is vastly superior to binge-watching it, even if it feels inconvenient in the moment. (Of course this is with the convenience of DVR so you can time-shift occasionally)
Being “widely consumed” has no bearing on its correctness or relationship to reality. Should we also use Breaking Bad as a reason to surveil high school chemistry teachers in case they are drug kingpins?
The Wire is not a documentary. It is, above all designed to be entertaining. If they thought having a character reveal themselves to be a reptilian alien with bananas for hands made for a more entertaining show people would like, they would’ve done that. The Wire is not a proxy for reality.
24 was Fox, if I'm not mistaken, and its format is very much the same as all broadcast shows.
Breaking Bad isn't the same format. No obvious commercial breaks, no saccharine Hays-Code-like bullshit.
Others mentioned The Shield, which is FX, and I tend to think of FX shows as not being of the broadcast mold. Monk was USA, I think, which as a network was borderline, but seems like a few of their original programming shows were not-horrible. Then someone said Deadliest Catch, but that's just cheap reality tv sludge and I feel dirty having typed out its title. Even the worst 1980s NBC sitcom was better than reality tv shows.
It's come to my attention that you're all, every last one of you, watching tv wrong.
This is the best show I’ve seen since Game of Thrones. It’s so unique and mind expanding.
The problem with the modern data driven approach to TV production is that it optimizes for the shows that are just good enough to get people to keep their subscriptions, and the truly visionary stuff gets cancelled.
The best shows always take a while to build up popularity because they’re so new that people aren’t willing to give them a chance at first. Breaking Bad and Mad Men didn’t become popular until season 2 or 3. TV execs have no vision anymore, it’s all run by hill climbing algorithms that look for the nearest maximum now.
The golden age of TV is behind us now. It’s just yet another example of enshittification.
I think this is an important point - it's very easy to find oneself slipping into the protagonists' viewpoints, in a lot of media the protagonist is 'good', we see the story unfold from their viewpoint, then sympathise and empathise with them, even when they make mistakes, their motivations were pure, and what’s unfolding isn’t due to problems with them exactly.
But in shows like this, in quite a lot of sitcoms with more cringey aspects, the protagonist is not necessarily a good person and they are often undone by their own pettiness, selfishness etc. Certainly in UK comedy anyway. Look at Fawlty Towers, The Office... Blackadder to a certain extent.
So when the article says this -
> It’s natural when experiencing any story to identify and sympathize with the protagonist.
Yes and no - this is something that creators can play with and may make deliberately jarring. See 'Lolita' for an extreme example. The article even brings up Walter White, saying - "we are drawn to root for the primary subject of the story". If you're still rooting for Walter by the end of Breaking Bad... were we watching the same show?
> Andor succeeded despite the bureaucracy porn.
I am not sure what specifically you're referring to, but take this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKl0F640914
A master class in gripping tension, moreover one that--like Breaking Bad--puts you in the awkward position of rooting for the bad guy. Because, as you say, we care about the protagonists, and in a way she is one.
And then in Season 2 when Krennic is talking to Meero? (towards the end - I am deliberately keeping it vague for those who haven't watched yet)
Meanwhile I thought the beginning of Season 2 was by far the weakest.
But yeah. Book of Boba Fett was bottom of the barrel. It feels like in an alternate universe he would have been the main character of The Mandalorian, and BoBF would not have existed.
I'm not sure just why it was so bad, maybe like late Game of Thrones it's obviously lazy, but contrasting with the scene above, at some level you have to care about the character and start to identify with them, insomuch as you become invested in them succeeding in their task: their goals become your surrogate goals. What was Boba Fett's goal and why should we care?
Contrast with Meero the spy hunter. Meanwhile Boba Fett was a crime lord who didn't do crime and constantly changed his mind to whatever the other person suggested instead of his original thoughts and plans.
For awhile, I couldn’t get ChatGPT to give me summaries of Breaking Bad and Better Cañl Saul episodes without tripping safety filters.
There's high praise in some movies or animation where they depict the mundane; the long sequence in Ghost in the Shell just showing the city as it is, away from the main story (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARTLckN9e7I), most of Studio Ghibli's films, a lot of Breaking Bad and especially Better Call Saul, where there's a lot of scenes of people just going about their day, John Travolta getting a can of paint and a pizza in the opening of Saturday Night Fever (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfwQ_7xqO7Y), etc.
And this is exactly where I disagree. Andor does not stand very well on its own outside of SW (and that takes it from great tier to very good for me with the other minor squibbles that I have). If you don't know the lore, things will be less clear and the writing will feel strange at times. FWIW, I have recommended this show to many friends who never watched anything SW, they mostly liked it but found some things odd.
WARNING, SPOILERS
The story is not properly resolved. If you have no SW knowledge, the threat isn't even very clear. Some galaxy government lead by an emperor is building a weapon, shown once. If S2 is the end it's pretty unsatisfying in general. The politics are kind of unclear.
The sacrifice of Mothma is very unclear without a SW background. A senator said something and had to flee to a planet (oversimplified).
Without knowledge of R1, the killing machine super droid is down right comical/a sloppy resolve for things.
Without SW knowledge the (imo) best part of the Imperial machinery, bureaucracy, power hunger also becomes awkward at times and frankly less interesting. Syril is my favorite character and Dedra probably second. I found their arcs great, every single non-SW viewer I talked to found them "boring", "that guy with the annoying mother was strange" and "why did they have to be a couple, that's pretty unimaginative writing" etc.
END SPOILERS
My personal quibbles are that the crashed tie episode was pretty bad filler. I have not heard anyone say anything good about it.
Someone else already mentioned minor technical problems (field scene).
I found Diego Luna's acting ok but not great. It felt wooden at times. To some extend that's subjective but it doesn't compare to the lead acting I have in my personal top tier (Breaking Bad for example)
West Wing, Chernobyl, Westworld Season 1, Breaking Bad
There was a large section of The Boys viewership that didn't understand that Homelander was a bad guy until season four, or that Walter White was Breaking Bad's biggest villain.
Time after time, an astonishingly large number of readers and watchers assume that main characters are good and are unable to fathom that a main character can be bad. Luckily for the rest of us, this is emotional shibboleth that once identified serves as a high-accuracy litmus test for personal engagement.
"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?
Eh... just watch Breaking Bad and pay attention to all the scenes taking place in Mexico. You'll get the point. It hits as hard as the green tint in the Matrix movies when they are in the Matrix. They might as well all be Simpsons characters.
"But I guess a show making that particular social critique isn’t going to get funded by a major studio or tech company."
You've never heard of Breaking Bad? More recently, Emily the Criminal is an absolutely superb movie and great example of exactly this - Aubrey Plaza's best role in fact.
""Saddled with student debt and unable to find work, a college graduate becomes involved in a credit card scam, acting as a dummy shopper and buying increasingly risky products with stolen credit cards.""
For the medical debt angle, the macabre and outrageous 'Repo Man'(2010) is a pitch-dark and fascinating examination of the end-game of medical insurance.
""Set in the near future when artificial organs can be bought on credit, it revolves around a man who struggles to make the payments on a heart he has purchased.""
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My completely unscientific impression is that other services are making the effort to produce high-quality films and series, including Apple TV+ (Slow Horses, Silo, For All Mankind, Foundation, etc.), Max/HBO (Barry, Curb Your Enthusiasm, GoT, The Last of Us, etc.), FX (Shogun, The Bear, The Old Man, Fargo, etc.), and AMC (Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Night Manager, etc.). Whatever you think of the quality of shows in those services, they at least show genuine effort to make things that don't suck.
> no one wants to take a risk on unproven idea
I think this one's the gist of it, and the big irony we'll all suffer from: While it gets cheaper to produce new things, not a lot of things will be original anymore.
I once heard that the 90s were the decade of references, and that might have just stuck a bit for too long: The boom of second-hand, mid-century furniture, the "industrial" look, rounded edged everywhere. Hell, even smartphones are just a reference to Sci-Fi flicks from the 60s (the case was Apple VS Samsung, I think). On demand services and the easy piracy of digital goods... I feel while there has been an perceived increase in quality for each individual at first, all these things helped everything to converge into "the average" for everyone.
We still see originality here and there, but you can just feel their competition against big budget productions. The movie Mandy (2018) was great, so was the show Scavengers Reign (2023), Breaking Bad etc. Landscape FM produce really interesing audio gear. I'm sure Open-Source (Hard- and Software) makes a lot of this possible, but for small and big equaly alike - depending on business practice, small might even be in danger to suffer from it.
I'm sure we all have our gems, but they just feel rare in this huge landscape. I just wish it would be a more common practice to support local artists and individials that take this mentioned risk, without having to turn it into a growth hacking startup idea.
Maybe Gen Z, but I'd say Millenials definitely had their generational Pop icons. Those icons simply did not live a good life once they left the spotlight. Like, most people I know don't really want to talk about Brittney Spears nor Micheal Jackson, even if they loved their music.
But I agree with your core point. There is no "Spongebob" of animation for Gen Z (except for... Spongebob. Maybe). There's no Friends, nor Breaking Bad of the 2010's/2020's. There's barely any individual movies that break the cultural zeitgeist period.
>The intense political push from the Left to make any form of social cohesion and loyalty undesirable also hasn't helped. The dismantling and removal of tradition, religion, and nationalism/patriotism from society means there can't be a "song of the people" from outside of entertainment either.
we can have social cohesion without resorting to nationalism nor religion. It's just that when you give people infinite choice, we diverge at best to the pareto principle. But 20% of society not being in the know is still a lot of society you fail to connect with.
While I mostly agree with your overall point about wealth distribution in the US vs Europe (based on my purely anecdotal understanding of Europe), that Breaking Bad analogy I keep hearing over the years is just wrong in terms of what happened in the show (even though that analogy being bad doesn’t defeat your larger point at all).
Walter (the protagonist) didn’t start manufacturing drugs as the last resort to pay medical bills. From the get-go, Walter got offered a job by his former co-founder friend Elliott (who ended up turning their startup into a successful corp, while Walter ended up quitting and becoming a teacher), with the explicit mention of their health insurance being sufficient to cover any medical expenses Walter might incur.
That happened literally in the first few episodes of the show. Walter refuses because of his stupid pride. Later on in the show, Elliott and his wife straight up offer Walter to cover all medical costs (current and future ones), and he still refused. He had many many fantastic outs that didn’t require him to continue manufacturing drugs (or even starting to do so in the first place).
I am mostly upset about this inaccuracy, because it undercuts one of the most important aspects (if not *the* most important aspect) of the show. It is a story about a man who lived a life full of regrets, feels impotent, and found an excuse to do all the bad things that make him feel good, self-important, and inflate his ego to crazy highs, all without feeling any remorse whatsoever.
>The US series Breaking Bad talks about a well-behaved chemistry teacher who resorts to manufacturing and selling drugs after he gets cancer and finds out that his savings are no where close to covering the medical cost.
This is an incredibly bad example and a meme that clueless people (usually Europeans) love to bring up time and time again but if you watch the show carefully, you'll see that Walter actually had health coverage for his chemo therapy from his school insurance but he resorted to selling meth because he wanted the best chemo therapist in the sate of New Mexico, and one of the top 10 in the whole US, so he had to go privately out of pocket. In Europe you'd also need a boatload of cash or a top private insurance if you'd choose the best private chemo therapist and clinic in the country outside the public health system where Walter would be on long waiting lists if he were in Europe.
And reason number two, he mainly sold meth because he had a huge ego that prevented him from accepting charity for his treatment and he loved the danger and thrill of it in his mid-life crisis to compensate for being a looser/push-over his entire life holding his career back despite his scientific brilliance, nothing to do with the US health system, that's why the show's writing and character development was so good.
Anyway, pointing at a fantasy TV show as an argument for real life issues is just silly. It's not real.
Isn't the film industry struggling too? Perhaps not as much financially but still.
Holywood is dominated by Marvel and a handful of recognizable directors like Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott and Quentin Tarantino, and they are struggling to fund and distribute their projects too. Actual cinema theatres are dying a not-so-slow death, accelerated by the pandemic, and streaming seems to be very ineffective for movies unlike TV.
TV is doing okay, but it has obviously declined from the golden-age of Breaking Bad, early Game of Thrones, early House of Cards, Stranger Things... Just off the top of my head. There is still some good stuff coming out but the overall density in quality has dramatically gone down. Netflix and Amazon Prime are not doing great financially, HBO just about managed with the weird Discovery merger, Apple TV remains small (seemingly intentionally).
And the music industry? All but gone really in terms of a real money-maker. There's Talor Swift and all the Spotify beggars.
Is there any creative industry that is actually in a healthy growth stage? Podcasts? There's just too much supply and not enough demand at this point, people have only so much free time.
> One of the first things I learned in film school is _nothing_ in a production at that level is coincidence or serendipity.
Perhaps they should have taught you to be less sure of that. So many takes in movies that ended up being the best one are where a punch accidentally did land, something is ad-libbed, a dialogue is mixed up, etc.
To take an example of a very critically acclaimed show: in Breaking Bad the only reason we got Jonathan Banks in the role of Mike is because Bob Odenkirk had a scheduling conflict, and Banks improvised a slap during his audition. Paul Aaron even complained about it indicating that he would not have agreed to it.
An interesting coincidence that Cranston also had a significant supporting role in the 2011 film Drive [0] (after he was already in breaking bad).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_%282011_film%29
Amazon thought people would say "Hey Alexa, buy more paper towels, a pack of soap, rent breaking bad season one, and tell me about the top rated blender in the store"
Instead people say "Hey Alexa, set a timer for 10:00"
> the fact is that bad data in C-00000291.sys in combination with bad validition in the driver causes it to crash
This is, in fact, not a fact. We really don't know yet.
CrowdStrike blue screened one of my laptops twice right as the incident was getting started, before a fix was available. There was no boot loop in my case. I was back up and in the middle of an episode of Breaking Bad the second time it got me, 30 minutes after the first. Did the agent wait that long to load a content update it had already loaded before? Maybe, but it's at least as likely that the content was loaded the whole time, and that some activity pattern set it off. Thus, I'm skeptical of the problem being simple content validation.
What I find really interesting is that all these studios who ran TV channels for so many years fumbled the bag when it came to streaming.. It's like all these people who basically were in content distribution didn't really wise up to the next, new thing in their business even as it happened in front of their eyes.
It's pretty wild that Paramount+/Disney+/Peacock or whatever really struggle to get going, especially given that they provide access to top shows that people really want to watch. It's like having Breaking Bad-esque product but really screwing up when it comes to wanting people to watch it.
Given the extent to which the tech behind streaming platforms -- storage, CDNs, tie-ups with telecoms -- have been standardized (and democratized, to some extent) by big players like YouTube and Netflix, you would think that a basic ad supported layer of any of these studio specific platforms would make many multiples of what they actually need to put in to setup a basic platform.
The tech's cheap and they already have the content. Most of the older content would be relatively low traffic -- hell, most of these old topical Comedy Central late night shows barely broke a million views when they were new and I don't think jokes about Saddam Hussein and GW's folksy demeanor would click now. How much would it really cost for any big studio to let people view these archives? Am I missing something big that causes somebody like Paramount to go $14B in debt trying to get people to use their streaming service? Is it a function of the business they're in or is it just a case of LA movie studio types not understanding tech?
Cowboy Bebop: The Movie
Your Name
Violet Evergarden
Perfect Blue
Paprika
Metropolis
There's a bunch of great animated movies.
If you're referring to series then among the best Seinen classics are shows like:
Berzerk (1997)
Monster (2004) [My personal favorite]
Cowboy Bebop
Steins:Gate
Vinland Saga (newer)
Frieren (newer)
There's a lot of Shounen classics as well, my favorite probably being
Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood
granted there's several tropes in it that aren't going to be as enjoyable to watch on repeat for older folks. But the storytelling and plot is practically like Breaking Bad but in anime form.
The Americans was awesome, especially that last "showdown" climax. Best TV ever, along with parts of Breaking Bad.
I watched a couple episodes of The Diplomat and couldn't get into it. I'll give it another try.
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
The best screenwriter I know of is Vince Gilligan (best known for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul). Although he -- like everyone else in the TV business -- works in a writer's room, his writing style and his method for "breaking the episode" has led to some incredibly nuanced and compelling characters.
It may (presently) be inappropriate to compare him to Tolstoy (a towering figure in literature) though it must be said that the novel, at one time, was considered a low status medium compared to epic poetry and Greek theatre.
> Try yourself: think of a TV show that was big in the last 10 years, then search for it on YouTube.
I did. I thought of "Breaking Bad". Searched for it. There are indeed many reviews and shorts, and on the side of the search result in a separate box I see the official show with a big "buy" button. Apparently I can buy the first season for £10.49.
> In the off chance that the actual content of the show is actually on YouTube, the odds that you'll get the episodes of the show in your search result in any sensible order seems like zero.
Not for me. It is all organised neatly into seasons. I can buy individual episodes or whole seasons.
> But if you pick one (say CNN) and go to their page on YouTube, you can see a list of clips. But the clips seem randomly selected and unordered a a week old. So there is no way I can play their "news"? At least not at first sight.
Not in my experience? I typed "CNN" into the search bar and it displayed a big box on top of the organic results saying "Latest from CNN" with the latest video uploads of theirs in order.
When I click on the CNN channel it indeed shows various programmes CNN has. If I want to see their latest videos I need to click on the tab "Videos". It can be ordered "latest", "most popular" and "oldest" where "latest" is the default for me.
There's some precedence of pop culture has influenced criminal behavior. But it's usually superficial, by groups that were already engaged in the behavior. Mafia media from The Godfather onwards were reportedly popular with the mob and maybe influenced them to imitate the fashions and manner of speaking depicted on screen (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/movies/godfather-mafia.html). Hong Kong Triads youth did the same after John Woo's films with the Mark Gor Lau. Wall Street, and probably other financial thrillers to The Wolf of Wall Street and further also influenced brokers' styles, and sometimes behavior (https://slate.com/culture/2007/09/how-wall-street-s-gordon-gekko-inspired-a-generation-of-imitators.html).
You also hear examples of "suburban father tries to make meth because of Breaking Bad" but those are one-off individuals who are probably not of sound judgment.
I think the thing I really miss is that episodes still had to work on a standalone basis. If you look at an episode of Mad Men or Breaking Bad, they still had a structure to them with an arc and multiple storylines in an episode. You had to be satisfied with a single episode for a whole week.
A single episode of The Mandalorian may literally have nothing happening and no memorable moments and only exists to be consumed between two other episodes.
I'd say give Breaking Bad a try. It regularly comes up in "Best TV Show of All Time" conversations.
I noticed that the watchtime of `You` was split half-and-half between the new season 4 and the prior seasons 1-3. I was curious about the total results by show, including all seasons. Here's the top 25:
TITLE TOTAL HRS WATCHED ----- ----------------- Ginny & Georgia 967,200,000 The Night Agent 812,100,000 You 766,300,000 Outer Banks 740,400,000 The Walking Dead 738,600,000 The Glory 622,800,000 La Reina del Sur 616,800,000 CoComelon 601,200,000 Suits (2011) 599,100,000 The Blacklist 596,900,000 Manifest 581,900,000 Grey's Anatomy 560,300,000 Wednesday 507,700,000 Gilmore Girls 505,800,000 Breaking Bad 505,000,000 Queen Charlotte 503,000,000 Friends (1994) 448,500,000 Love Is Blind 439,300,000 Lucifer 434,300,000 The Big Bang Theory 420,400,000 Shameless (U.S.) 392,600,000 PAW Patrol 392,300,000 New Amsterdam (2018) 375,500,000 Brooklyn Nine-Nine 358,900,000 Firefly Lane 342,700,000
These are not all Netflix exclusives - I see "Breaking Bad: Season 5" on here, Minions: The Rise of Gru, etc.
> Netflix (or any streaming service) users are not captive audience. The network effect for such services is next to nil.
Their moat is in the content and licenses they've acquired.
You can't watch Stranger Things anywhere else. They make a lot of original content to widen their moat and keep eyeballs returning to their platform.
Netflix also currently has (I believe) exclusive streaming access to Breaking Bad (though you can "purchase" episodes on other platforms). And they maintain lots of these licenses to bolster their in-house content.
There will be more industry consolidation and eventually the content you want will live under one platform (when not sublicensed).
It's because games are more like media than software from a consumption perspective.
People want to watch a movie while it's still new, which is why theaters want up front exclusivity. Songs are "hot" for a while. TV shows are better when you're watching it around the same time as a lot of other people. Sure you can watch Breaking Bad for the first time right now, enjoy it, and have some good conversation about it with a few people. But it was different when every week half of your office or classroom was talking about the latest episode.
I still don't recommend buying games on launch date most of the time because of the current state of the industry. But it makes sense to me why people do it.
Actually I've watched much more, be it movies, or TV-Series. It's just that the ones I've listed above left a more lasting impression on me, than some blockbusters I didn't mention, or that I'd consider them 'rewatchable' (Which I rarely (want to) do anyways).
Let's take Breaking Bad for instance, I did binge-watch that (while being stoned) and remember it as cringe-worthy. Nope, won't watch again. Then there was Continuum, which I know I've watched in full(sober, this time) and I can't even remember anything. Had to be too generic for me, I think?
What else, the Sarah Connor Chronicles. Mostly boring, except the scene where some hispanic Chica outstared her, and she learned that from her. That was funny for me :-)
Oh, one more, because I sometimes felt like that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Down
Not GP but I also find it somewhat hard to like a TV show, so hopefully that qualifies me :)
The last one that blew my mind was "Severance", and before that "Devs". Both have a very different mood/aesthetic than Breaking Bad, though.
When "The Wire" came out, "The Sopranos", "Breaking Bad", "Better Call Saul", I thought "woo hoo! We are in the golden age of television!"
Then I read about the billions(!) being dropped into new productions of classics like "The Wheel of Time" or a spinoff of "Lord of the Rings"
This was a great feeling!
Then all of those billions started delivering. If you were _lucky_, season one was put together with tons of care and picked over. It was also based on a novel series where the author had done the same. If you were unlucky, the TV became like the radio used to be: just background stuff while you do something else. You don't even pay attention to it.
No matter what, season two almost always had the dramatic quality of a baked potato.
And heaven forbid the algorithmic numbers don't work. Then the thing is a dead series walking no matter what the quality.
You can't make quality art by throwing money at it. Very strangely, it actually has the opposite effect: people stop wanting to take risks. You can make a somewhat mathematically-sound four-quadrant marketing pitch hoping to hit the right taste clusters with a guess at whether it'll work or not, but you're not looking at emotional impact over time. Hell no. Hence the current tidal wave of edgy mediocrity.
I leave the TV on in the afternoons when I'm not working and trying to decompress. I have seen a few good series. They are all lower-budget attempts by high-quality artists using a preexisting literary work. Too often, without a solid canon of literary work, season one is great and the rest of it is just doubling down on whatever stimulus was in season one that the algorithm said people liked.
My opinion is that people are going to like "classic" TV the same way they like classic rock. There'll be something about it that they'll argue about endlessly, but there'll also be a lot of derivative work trying to recapture the lightning of actually knowing what the hell you're doing and being lucky.
I'm now imaging a Breaking Bad style AMC television series centering around 3D Printers. "He's smuggling a small gear he's guilty full cavity search."
"You think it's harmless when kids start playing with legos, but soon that isn't enough, they just gotta go bigger."
"Listen we get one seed printer in and we can dominate the rest of the competition!"
"Waltuh, the filament is making me light headed Waltuh!"
"Breaking Bad". Not a movie but series.
Replace drug with any other product and the ingenuity of Walter White to scale the operations, hiring people, shifting operations to different locations, responding to competition makes it interesting.
This reminds me that the Alamo Drafthouse used to have a program called “TV at the Alamo” and it was brilliant.
It was $5 to reserve a seat, and that $5 went towards food and drink purchases. They would show the previous week’s episode while the current episode was airing, strip out the ads and then project the current week’s episode. I watched Mad Men and Breaking Bad this way.
I just assumed the labido waned. After experiencing trauma, both myself and partner haven't really been into that. Add the pandemic, and it's a downer. I now have a tumour in the nethers, and that's kind of killed all opportunity. Appreciate it while you have it.
But one thing that annoys me is the thin line between perversion and respectability. And it swings drastically all over the place.
It's normal for people to want sex, fantasize etc. And quite healthy. But express that in the wrong company and you can be castigated.
As for films I barely ever see any kind of believable relationship. Better call Saul and breaking bad did well. And there are few dramas that make the right nods.
Single people make the effort, those in long term relationships not so much. I remember my partner saying something along the lines of, will you still love me when I am old and fat? I hope so. Then I got old and lost my teeth and partner looks at me and sighs. We still love each other.
Yet in all the tv/movies (breaking bad coming to mind) they are careful about this. Taillights working, don’t speed etc.
I would say that's because those that literally control the narrative have a vested interest in not providing the actor's side of this.
But parts of it are quite simple.
One thing they want: The actors want to be paid residuals for their likenesses.
Right now, if you want to make Breaking Bad, you have to pay Bryan Cranston for months of filming. He has to be on set, he has to hit marks, remember lines, sit for hair and makeup, etc. Everything that is involved in creating a filmed product.
What the studios want to do is pay an actor for a day's worth of work, scan them, perform some motion capture, do some voice work, then be able to use that digital representation in perpetuity. Feed that data into ActorGPT and get years of films and shows out of that data. And never have to pay that actor another cent.
Another thing they want: Be paid streaming residuals. Streaming has made things more complicated for everyone in a lot of ways. The old system was easy enough to grok. You made a show. You put it on air. Sponsors bought time during your show. You could sell a syndication deal and sell even more commercial time from your show. You could sell physical media of your show. You could track that data.
Then Netflix came along. I think originally, Netflix paid NBC/Universal a flat fee to be able to host The Office for a set number of years. There's effectively no residual on that. And the streaming model is a bit different. Most services don't have ads. And those that do, I don't think they're geared towards individual programs (yet). They're just sort of algorithmically inserted. So really, you're looking to where someone's $12.99 is going. What they're trying to do is determine what percentage of a streaming service's revenue should be paid back to the creators of the content. And what percentage of that percentage should everyone get.
But the various streaming services don't really release that data.
I know this is conventional wisdom and also is very true.
however, the funny thing is, when eventually a film maker comes along and makes a film that is both new, unique, and outlandishly successful, then suddenly its "obvious" and Hollywood starts to copy that, but it takes forever for the right person to be in the right place for that to get moved forward, so you end up with rinse wash repeat stuff for the longest time.
For example, HBO taking a risk on Game Of Thrones or the initial conception of the new Marvel movies (I'm talking about Iron Man, the first one from 2007, and so on, when it was still novel), Breaking Bad was novel when it came out too. Same with The Walking Dead (the plot elements, not so much the idea of a zombie horror)
Its so weird how this industry appears to work from the outside
> We're going to look back on the era of prestige TV fondly.
I don't think prestige TV is necesirely expensive though.
The wire, breaking bad, Andor, the bear, severance all can achieve incredible results without hollywood budgets.
If anything big budgets have not translated into quality, see GoT, Rings of Power, Stranger Things all getting worse the more moeny thrown at them.
prestigue tv is about talent, and having longer story lines, it just allows for more character work than a movie, but not because of that does it have to cost exponentially more.
This is a big problem I have with modern movies; they're unable or unwilling to simply show, they need to show and tell. It doesn't matter the theme, even wholly unpolitical themes are far too often explicitly laid out, multiple times, with blunt dialogue exposition to the audience who are presumed to only be half-watching the movie.
The smart writing (and smart audiences) have all moved to TV. The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, True Detective, Better Call Saul. These are the shows that respect their audience's intelligence.
The movie business has turned into Disneyland with guns.
The streaming rights for Friends, South Park or Big Bang Theory seem to still be a big deal, and their first episodes are 29, 26 and 16 years old respectively. Breaking Bad is 15 years old, one year older than Avatar (the James Cameroon one, Last Airbender is 18 years old). And then of course there are classics like Star Trek (TOS is 58 years old, TNG is 36 years old) or Star Wars (Episode IV is 46 years old).
99% of media is forgotten about after 20 years, but the rest makes up for that in profit. Of course for some of them you could argue that having the old stuff freely available would boost the popularity of the newer adaptations, spinoffs, reboots, etc. But I think that's rocking the boat too much to be viable, and some content does genuinely take years or decades to start to be appreciated.
It’s not even close to Netflix . You paid a 5$ monthly FIXED fee and can watch everything.
Loot boxes on Netflix would be, you have no movies when you start:
You pay 2$ to add Random 3 movies to your library. Wanna watch Breaking Bad? Pay 2$ until you get “lucky” (and maybe get only Season 3).
Ah, and maybe because it’s premium show, there is only 0.5% chance of getting it in every “loot box”.
So you might spend thousands of dollars, and not get what you want… Because usually there is not even a way to spend 10$ to buy it like a movie on Aplle/Amazon, you have to gamble!
Aside from WorkAudioBook I consider this the greatest language learning tool to exist.
I watch Breaking Bad dubbed in Spanish, subs don't match, and paused to try to guess what they were saying every sentence and did tons of look ups. This took 600 hours. Yes about ten hours per episode. By the end I was ready to find a 100% MONOLINGUAL teacher and communicate with her through the whole of every class (incredible feeling btw) to learn things formally. Learning becomes incredibly exciting and productive when you're ready to go full monolingual with it.
((Was I a false beginner? No. I wasn't primed in school, I had about 1 month Spanish in 9th grade before being forcibly expelled from the class with an F. I was definitely racist against the language age 13-17. I found the teacher playing and making us sing Macarena especially distasteful and that was part of what made me hateful.))
I would soooo re-binge-watch Breaking Bad dubbed in Innu-Aimun!
I think the aesthetic of Koyaanisqatsi had a large effect of on film aesthetics. Breaking Bad's best scenes IMO were the Timelapses which I found very reminiscent Koyaanisqatsi.
Many shows have hit their strides in later seasons. IIRC I found Breaking Bad a bit boring in season one. (Granted, probably the writing was already better than season one of Foundation.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30379919
DonHopkins on Feb 17, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?
I know a naughty person who decades ago hijacked a /8 IPV4 network block when the company that owned it went out of business, by registering their expired domain name and sending in an email from that domain, transferring ownership of the block to himself.
It was "hot" so he couldn't just squat on it or sell it in the open, but he laundered it by trading it to some shady company in exchange for free network services for life.
If I were him, I would have printed out all the addresses on little slips of paper and taken an "IPV4 Address Bath" like Huell's scene in Breaking Bad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HrmD_vIMIk
>(sexy lip bite) ... "I gotta do it, man!" ... "Mexico, all's I'm sayin'!"
icedchai on Feb 17, 2022 [–]
Was it really an /8? I could believe a smaller block...
DonHopkins on Feb 17, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?
Yep, it was a long time ago, and he was one of those "old net boys" who worked on the early ARPANET, but I won't say anything else that might identify him.
I have another naughty friend (not the same person) who worked at SRI-NIC implementing and maintaining the ARPANET TACACS database, and as a personal favor, he created our mutual friend Devon his own ARPANET TAC card.
So Devon's free vanity TACACS account was named "DEVON", while most other accounts like mine were something ugly like "DH32", using initials and numbers. One day his boss summoned him to his office and showed him a print-out of the TACACS accounts, with "DEVON" right at the top, and asked him who the hell that was. He sheepishly prevaricated that "DEVON" was actually a control code to turn the printer DEVice ON, which accidentally got printed at the beginning of the list because of a bug in his program missing an escape code, and he would fix it right away. And that's how Devon lost his TAC card. We still tease him about his name as a printer control code, and call him "DEVOFF" when he talks too much. I'm pretty sure his boss knew what was up, but just let it slide.
Network security was a lot different in those days. TAC cards only happened later when they finally put passwords on the dialup TACs/TIPs -- you originally could dial up and connect to any host on the ARPANET without a password, then you could ask nicely for a free tourist account at places like the MIT-AI Lab. It didn't even require any social engineering, just being polite and curious, reading documentation, and following instructions.
I asked BBN nicely about the TIP manual, and they helpfully mailed me a free hardcopy of the "Users Guide for the Terminal IMP", which documented how to take control of other people's sessions and even divert their output by prefixing @ commands by their terminal number! See "Section 5: Unusual uses of the TIP" page 5-7, "Setting Another Terminal's Parameters" and "The DIVERT OUTPUT Command":
https://usermanual.wiki/Document/ADA014398UsersGuidetotheTerminalIMPAug75.1728500100/view
The guy who originally wrote that TIP manual in 1971 was none other than Will Crowther, who also developed Colossal Cave Adventure with Don Woods! You're in a twisty little maze of IMPs, all different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Crowther_(programmer)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
ARPANET Psiber SPACE (circa 1986): This is the network of IMPs (Interface Message Processors) that comprised the ARPANET in 1986. The ARPANET is history now, but thanks to the magic of Pseudo-Scientific Visualization and the ScriptX language and class library from Kaleida Labs, you can now experience what it was like to be free ranging packet hopping around the ARPANET in 1986!
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/arpanet/index-large.html
MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73b77075631
“The MIT machines were a nerd magnet for kids who had access to the ARPANET,”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15080221
Keith F. Lynch wrote up a fascinatingly detailed and accurate history of the ARPANET from his perspective:
http://keithlynch.net/history.net.html
Keith mentions that ARPANET TACACS passwords were installed in 1986, and even mentions how Jerry Pournelle got himself kicked off the ARPANET for being obnoxious in 1985, which I can conform with the email messages he mentioned. The first message is about TACACS, and explains how MILNET TACACS was implemented in 1984, before ARPANET TACACS (in 1986). It was addressed to the same DEVON, and HN's own GUMBY chimed in with some salty remarks:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/pourne-smut.html
jacquesm on Feb 17, 2022 | root | parent [–]
Your text is garbled:
"then you could even anity TACACS account "
DonHopkins on Feb 18, 2022 | root | parent [–]
Thanks, fixed! The "Arpanet" episode of The Americans featured a classic scene with an academic computer science professor dude bullshitting about the ARPANET -- I'm sure we both know somebody exactly like that from that period, who made eloquent hand-waving metaphors about Virtual Spaces and Post Offices and God and Disembodied Brains, trying to explain to skeptical people how vast and important the ARPANET was (with its 8 enormous bits of address space). But he kinda had a point, calling the PDP-10 "The Beast".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVth6T3gMa0
But the thing The Americans "Arpanet" episode got wrong is that you didn't actually have to slap on a Frank Zappa Soul Patch and a Beatnik Wig, dress up like a janitor, and brutally murder an unlucky grad student to get on the ARPANET, you just had to ask the right people nicely! (But it's still one of the best episodes, with the scene about passing a lie detector test by clenching your anus.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpanet_(The_Americans)
I don’t think it’s only helpful to the algorithm. It’s also helpful for me as a subscriber.
If I want to watch episodes of Breaking Bad, I don’t want you to randomly throw in episodes or M*A*S*H (even though both are good).
TV shows I've already seen are my go to as well. Parks and Rec is a staple. Office, Scrubs, That 70s Show, Big Bang Theory are all great as well.
Sometimes I get into phases that need a little extra. The Marvel movies phase 1-3 are solid, as is Breaking Bad.
I swap to prog rock music (again stuff I've heard multiple times before) if I have something particularly creative and demanding to work on.
That's mostly because filmmaking is ceasing to be filmmaking, at least for big movies and TV shows.
I tend to ignore new TV shows these days. Why? I just know they're gonna be great for a few seasons at best then start sucking, and I don't feel like wasting my time in the meantime. I can count on one hand non-episodic TV shows in the last 25 years that have maintained their high quality throughout.
The Wire The Sopranos Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul Mr. Robot
Honourable mention for Twin Peaks: The Return, although Twin Peaks didn't exactly maintain its quality throughout season 2 even if Lynch swooped back in to save it near the end.
All cases where one person or a couple people had strong creative control of the project throughout.
I could sit here all day listing shows that started out really good but then it became clear the writers had no idea what they were doing, or the writers who did left.
These shows are all written by committee now. All these garbage Star Trek shows. Westworld has really neat sci fi premises for each season but other than season 1 they always devolve into action schlock because the writers don't understand how to actually write good sci fi.
As for big movies, they feel like they're written by marketing people not writers. They're optimised for getting people into the theatre and everything else is an afterthought.
There's still a handful of auteurs making great movies you could think of as big. People like Tarantino, Scorsese, the Coen brother. Christopher Nolan gets lucky sometimes, but most of his sci fi is ruined by sloppy writing for me(Interstellar...)
One thing is certain for me though. I can't think of a single recent movie I've enjoyed that had lots of CGI in it. The movies with the best writing are pretty much never the ones with huge effects budgets.
The true art of filmmaking lies in the writing. You can have all the effects in the world, the best actors and directors. Doesn't matter one bit if the script is terrible.
> So in the Breaking Bad episode, Saul didn't really need the dollar to magically "seal" the conversation and have it be treated as confidential.
He may have needed it to persuade his clients that the conversation had been magically sealed.
This is a bit of fiction. In most jurisdictions in America, an attorney has an obligation of confidentiality to a potential client during an initial consultation. That's true even if the client or attorney decline to formalize the relationship later on. Anyway, that's the ethical rule as applied to the attorney.
The evidentiary privilege also generally applies in situations where a person is consulting with an attorney and reasonably believes the information exchanged in the consultation is confidential. So in the Breaking Bad episode, Saul didn't really need the dollar to magically "seal" the conversation and have it be treated as confidential.
Interestingly, confidentiality (returning to the ethical rule, as distinguished from the evidentiary privilege) *may* be waived by an attorney to prevent reasonably certain loss of life or substantial bodily harm. Note, the attorney *may* choose to waive confidentiality -- but is not required to!
The obvious solution is to wait until series are done before watching them, if lack of narrative closure upsets more than watching with everyone else excites you. E.g one of these days I might get around to The Wire or Breaking Bad, but probably not Lost or Game of Thrones or Twin Peaks, because I'm aware people were annoyed at how they ended. On the other hand I'm perfectly happy with seasons 1-3 of The Office or season 1 of Stranger things, or Season 1 of Severance even though it was a total life hanger, so it's not impossible to make something that's good even if it's not clear how long it'll run.
I used to watch his programs on cable TV, back when he was still alive. Even after death, I recall that his videos were still being sold by his company/estate, both on VHS at one point and DVD. But I can no longer find evidence of these direct sales, so I guess only used copies for sale are available now.
Trivia: the character on TV series "Breaking Bad" named Huell was a nominal reference to Huell Howser, according to the video commentary.
It’s great for summarizing content, or lengthening it. It used to be great for writing insane, outlandish versions of stories such as “a version of the movie Saw as an educational cartoon for preschoolers” or “a breaking bad scene where Walter White reveals himself to be a gothic Satanist” but the woke and copyright edits killed that. Bing will probably do that once I get access tho
It also doesn't have TV shows like Game of Thrones, House, The Wire, Breaking Bad, etc etc
> The entire movie is a teenaged cringeworthy fever dream.
I think you might have missed the entire point of the movie. It legitimately criticizes and satirizes Tyler, the narrator, and everyone involved in project mayhem as immature edgelords with their entire premise being self-contradicting.
I am still baffled by how many adults watch that movie and get the entire opposite message of what the movie was trying to tell. It's like watching Breaking Bad and coming to a conclusion that the point of the show was to show Walter White as a great human being.
Yes, I fully agree. I was hesitating while pressing the submit button, but there was this thought of a never ending show in my head which felt uncanny.
It could evolve to a point where the my version of Breaking Bad would be a completely parallel universe to the one you would be offered. Suddenly one variant could become more interesting and so popular that it would become the official version. There's a lot that can be thought and discussed about such a capability.
But in essence you're right, unlimited binge-watching is already a reality.
Recently someone gave me this book called "Difficult Men" by Brett Martin. Nope wasnt about mass shootings. It was about the protagonists created in the most popular TV shows in the US and the minds of the writers behind them. So Sopranos, Mad Men, Dexter, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Deadwood, Six Feet Under etc etc. Its a super impressive and ever expanding list of writing. But the common thread is dysfunction. They are all coping badly with whatever situation they are thrown into or run into. And the costs and consequences keep building up and nothing ends too happily.
While reading it I was feeling, this too is a sort of mass attack on the minds of people. Cause its a hope and faith killer. The message is always - here is some entertaining and mesmerizing hypocrisy your small chimp brain hasn't imagined and guess what? Whatever move you make you loose. After reading that book, I see that same message in stand up comedy, in the news media, in tech and business news etc. Probably exacerbated since social media finds and amplifies such things. But I feel the messaging and signaling underneath really needs to be different.
I'll second this. Zen and stoicism saved my sanity towards the end of the 2010s and through the pandemic.
For me it's not so much about the infinite list, because I've always had many thousands of tabs open and surf so much that there's no way I could ever bookmark everything (since the mid-90s).
It's actually about the opportunity cost of distraction and finally work itself. Beyond a certain level of experience and mastery (perhaps 10 years), no job has enough variety to satisfy the ADHD mind. We all become Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad: manning a parking booth that could be fully automated while we secretly plot ways to escape and "get real work done". Which is the central theme of movies like The Matrix.
The only thing that finally brought me out of burnout back to living was to realize that life is both a pointless game and the most sacred thing there is. Meaning that once I turned off my inner monologue completely and finally just observed, I found gratitude for all of creation through non-attachment.
Applied to HN specifically, it might help to step back from the rational and look at it holistically. You and I might be missing out, but the whole world is learning and growing together. We're part of a higher consciousness now, a virtual mind overlaid on us that will transcend us before 20 years is out and we enter the New Age. These are the memoirs of Gaia (insert deity of choice here).
The milestones (from the source code):
//<10 seconds 'A single frame of a film': 100ms, 'It would take light to go around the Earth': 133ms, 'A blink of an eye': 400ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the moon': 1255ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 pit stop': 1820ms, 'The fastest 1/4 mile drag race time': 3580ms, 'The fastest Rubik\'s cube solve': 4221ms, 'The fastest 40-yard time at the NFL Combine': 4240ms, 'The fastest 1 liter beer chug': 4370ms, 'A skippable Youtube ad': 5000ms, 'A full bull ride': 8000ms, 'The fastest 100m sprint': 9580ms, //10 Seconds 'The Wright Brothers first flight': 12000ms, 'The fastest 200m sprint': 19190ms, 'The fastest 50m freestyle swim lap': 21300ms, 'The Westminster Kennel Club dog agility record': 28440ms, 'A typical television ad': 30000ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Daytona': 40364ms, 'The fastest 400m sprint': 43030ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Talladega': 44270ms, 'The fastest 100m freestyle swim lap': 47050ms, //1 Minute '"Just a minute"': 60000ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monaco': 74260ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monza': 81046ms, 'The fastest 800m sprint': 100910ms, 'The fastest 200m freestyle swim lap': 102960ms, 'The fastest Kentucky Derby time': 119400ms, 'An NHL penalty box time for slashing, tripping, or holding': 120000ms, 'How long it takes to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge (without traffic)': 135000ms, 'The duration of the "Millenium Force" roller coaster': 140000ms, 'The longest Super Bowl national anthem': 156000ms, 'One round of a boxing match': 180000ms, 'The average song length on Spotify': 183000ms, 'The fastest 1,500m run': 206000ms, 'The song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley': 215000ms, 'The fastest 400m freestyle swim lap': 220140ms, 'The fastest 1 mile run': 223130ms, 'The duration of the "Steel Dragon" roller coaster': 240000ms, 'The duration of "The Beast" roller coaster': 250000ms, 'The song "4:33" by John Cage': 273000ms, 'The longest sky diving freefall': 276000ms, 'The Any% speedrun of Super Mario Bros for NES': 294948ms, //5 Minutes 'An NHL penalty box time for fighting': 300000ms, 'The average duration of a typical sky dive': 330000ms, 'The average time for a drive-thru order': 356800ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $1 million': 402000ms, 'The fastest race car lap around the Nurburgring': 403300ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the sun': 500000ms, 'The time it takes a rocket ship to reach outer space': 510000ms, 'A typical marching band show': 515000ms, //10 Minutes 'The length of the first space walk': 600000ms, 'The longest a human has held their breath (non-oxygen assisted)': 695000ms, 'The average duration of popular Youtube videos': 702000ms, 'The time it takes an average human to walk 1km': 710000ms, 'The fastest 5K run': 757350ms, 'The average time to bake a pizza': 810000ms, '1% of the entire day': 864000ms, //15 Minutes 'A typical commute in the United States': 960000ms, 'The fastest superbike lap of the Isle of Man TT': 1002778ms, "MLK's \"I Have A Dream\" Speech": 1020000ms, 'An average baseball inning': 1200000ms, 'The song "2112" by Rush': 1233000ms, 'The first angels to appear in the movie "Angels in the Outfield" (1994)': 1275000ms, 'An episode of The Office, Seinfeld, or Rick & Morty': 1320000ms, 'The time it takes to drive the entire Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel': 1380000ms, 'The song "Octavarium" by Dream Theater': 1440000ms, 'A typical Super Bowl halftime show': 1500000ms, 'The fastest 10K run': 1584000ms, 'It takes for Bobby Boucher to get his first game snap in the movie "The Waterboy" (1998)': 1719000ms, //30 Minutes 'The average time to bake a cake': 1950000ms, 'The time it takes until the launch in the movie Apollo 13 (1995)': 2081000ms, 'It takes WALL-E to arrive at the Axiom in the movie "WALL-E" (2008)': 2164000ms, 'The shortest war in history (Anglo-Zanzibar War)': 2280000ms, 'It takes Harry Potter to arrive at Hogwarts in "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer\'s Stone" (2001)': 2381000ms, 'The album "Thriller" by Michael Jackson': 2539000ms, 'The album "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd': 2589000ms, 'An episode of Breaking Bad, House, or Firefly': 2640000ms, 'The boot camp sequence in the movie "Full Metal Jacket" (1987)': 2730000ms, 'The album "Abbey Road" by The Beatles': 2823000ms, 'It takes Simba to become an adult in the movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 2849000ms, '10% of a typical work day in the United States': 2880000ms, 'The album "Kid A" by Radiohead': 2996000ms, 'The time limit for the essay portion of the SATs': 3000000ms, 'The time it takes a standard ice cube to melt at room temperature': 3150000ms, '0.01% of an entire year': 3155692ms, 'The album "Fearless" by Taylor Swift': 3221000ms, 'The time it takes for the basketball game to start in the movie "Space Jam"': 3222000ms, 'An episode of Game of Thrones, True Detective, or The Sopranos': 3300000ms, 'It takes Harry and Lloyd arrive in Aspen in the movie "Dumb and Dumber" (1994)': 3394000ms, 'The album "Jagged Little Pill" by Alanis Morissette': 3443000ms, 'The fastest half-marathon': 3451000ms, //1 Hour 'An episode of Top Gear': 3600000ms, 'The inception of Robert Fischer begins in the movie "Inception" (2010)': 3847000ms, 'Riding the longest subway line in NYC from Queens to Inwood': 3900000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $10 million': 4017600ms, 'It takes before Sean Connery says "Welcome to the Rock" in the movie "The Rock" (1996)': 4022000ms, 'A flight from Syracuse to New York City': 4140000ms, '5% of the entire day': 4320000ms, 'The album "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" by Elton John': 4580000ms, 'The album "Scenes From A Memory" by Dream Theater': 4626000ms, 'The movie "Primer" (2004)': 4740000ms, 'It takes to fully charge a Tesla (at 440V)': 4788000ms, 'The ferry duration from Long Island, NY to New London, CT': 4800000ms, 'The movie "Toy Story" (1995)': 4860000ms, 'A drive from Syracuse, NY to Rochester, NY (87.5 miles)': 4920000ms, 'The movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 5280000ms, 'The longest State of the Union address': 5280000, //Duplicate time... //1.5 Hours 'The movie "Mony Python and the Holy Grail" (1975)': 5460000ms, 'The movie "Monsters, Inc." (2001)': 5520000ms, 'An average duration of a soccer game': 5700000ms, 'The movie "Reservoir Dogs" (1992)': 5940000ms, 'The longest Innaugural address': 6300000ms, 'A drive from Orlando, FL to Tampa, FL (84.6 miles)': 6660000ms, 'An SR-71 flight from New York City to London': 6896400ms, 'The movie "Alien" (1979)': 7020000ms, //2 Hours //'25% of a typical work day in the United States': 7200000ms, 'The average duration of an NCAA basketball game': 7200000ms, 'The movie "Star Wars: A New Hope" (1977)': 7260000ms, 'The fastest marathon time ever ran': 7299000ms, 'The time it takes to listen to every studio album by Nirvana': 7667000ms, 'The movie "Dogma" (1999)': 7680000ms, 'The average duration of an NBA basketball game': 7860000ms, 'The movie "The Matrix" (1999)': 8160000ms, 'The movie "Fight Club" (1999)': 8340000ms, 'The movie "The Shawshank Redemption" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'The movie "Forrest Gump" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'A drive from New York City to Philadelphia (94.6 miles)': 8520000ms, '10% of the entire day': 8640000ms, 'The movie "Inception" (2010)': 8880000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Infinity War" (2018)': 8940000ms, 'The movie "Pulp Fiction" (1994)': 9240000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 100,000 miles': 9360000ms, 'The movie "Avatar" (2009)': 9720000ms, 'The average duration of an NHL hockey game': 9750000ms, 'The movie "Saving Private Ryan" (1998)': 10140000ms, 'The movie "The Godfather" (1972)': 10500000ms, 'The movie "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001)': 10680000ms, //3 Hours 'The average duration of an NFL football game': 10800000ms, 'The total time limit of the SATs': 10800000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Endgame" (2019)': 10860000ms, 'The average duration of an MLB baseball game': 11280000ms, 'The time it takes for a standard ice cube to freeze in a freezer': 11700000ms, 'The movie "Titanic" (1997)': 12600000ms, 'A drive from Boston to New York City (215.9 miles)': 13560000ms, 'Alex Honnold\'s free solo climb of El Capitan': 14160000ms, //4 Hours 'Half of a typical work day in the United States': 14400000ms, 'The flight time from New York City to Los Angeles': 19800000ms, 'The time limit of one session of the Bar exam': 21600000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 250,000 miles': 23400000ms, 'The fastest swimmer to cross the English Channel': 24900000ms, //>8 Hours 'A full typical work day in the United States': 28800000ms, '0.1% of an entire year': 31536000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $100 million': 40173000ms, 'The time it takes to assemble a car': 57600000ms, '1% of an entire year': 315360000ms, 'It takes for the Lōʻihi volcano to rise above the surface of the ocean becoming a new Hawaiian island': Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER //285,616 years
Yes I would argue that it's an extremely difficult skill to keep an intense story going forever. A 4-9 episode miniseries is probably my favorite format to watch because the parameters are known ahead of time and it's not a long enough shoot that real life gets in the way of the writers and actors. Breaking Bad was a rare exception.
it depends on what you're doing (as far as I understand as a criminal news nerd)
the police-justice system is usually broke for commoners. So yeah, if you're not doing a serious offense, they will never catch you. Where I live, you can buy weed. Even if the government says they're motivated to stop it, they don't have the resources to plant police everywhere. If your home was 'visited' by burglars, they would just take fingerprints. They wear gloves, and that's enough to avoid the state actor.
if you're doing a real serious crime, you can kind-ish avoid attention, if you know retention laws and stuff. if the (mostly digital) traces you generated are too old, they would have disappeared or would not be usable in court. if you appeared on mall CCTV months before you did the crime, have been browsing sites over a year before, ... these data should technically have been deleted.- Just don't create new data in the meantime.
In a similar fashion, some white collar criminals host data in their lawyers office. it is so hard to have a warrant for a lawyers office that you can be safe. A law teacher at out engineering college said it was convenient to hang out with a lawyer - just drop your phone in their purse if cops show up.
then, you can avoid some digital communications. Putin and friends are well known for being mostly offline, unlike some ministers at western governments, for example. Send letters, and you will have that perfect forward secrecy.
there has also been some stories about plausible deniability ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability ), especially among rogue corporations and corrupt politicians. ie when you create data, you can do it in a way where it says what it says, but it's not meaningful in court.
don't drag attention on you. cops shows teach you how so many criminals are found out after a traffic stop, when they were speeding or ran a red light. The government can't check everyone, so they check those who stand out.
Lastly, I remember watching a youtuber who got out of prison, and who said that three people could only keep a secret if 2 are dead. it's a bit pessimistic and dark, but maybe don't just involve everyone in your crimes.
I would like to know if series like Breaking Bad are (or were) realistic. I know some criminals learned a lot from movies.
Edit : or just befriend politicians, you would be above any law in most places.
The key is to remember that everything portrayed is a choice by the author or the director, cast & crew. Ask yourself, "why are they telling me this?" Make some hypotheses, then whittle them down (or add to them) as the story progresses. Try to determine the characters' motivations, the necessity of the setting, what virtues and vices the characters display, how they interact with objects and each other. Try to think if any of the characters, settings or objects in a story represent anything else or are allusions to other stories. For instance, Christ is an extremely common allusion, from Walter White in the finale of Breaking Bad to Bruce Wayne/Batman in the Dark Knight trilogy. And the One Ring to Rule Them All isn't just an ancient, magical object from a constructed myth, but has parallels that we should recognize in our world and recent history.
Many movies and books don't have a terribly deep meaning, and that's okay. I watched John Wick for the first time a week or so ago, and it was shallow but good fun.
I find that superb movies, books or shows leave me thinking about them long after the end credits or the final page (I stopped thinking about John Wick immediately when it was over). The best stories leave the interpretation up to you, the audience, and they also tend to give you more insight on repeat viewings or readings. Once the factual matter in the pages is known, it might be easier to see the symbolism (if it exists).
I agree, I wasn't trying to rag on Breaking Bad. But BB didn't use the Mexico orange color grading for the entire series, they used it to convey a specific sense of location. Meanwhile The edits I linked were applied to the entire film indiscriminately.
A similarly awful change was made to the color grading for several streaming releases of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. It feels like whoever did the color had just watched Breaking Bad and decided to imitate the "make any scenes in Mexico have an orange color grading" style but for the entire movie: https://imgur.io/a/Ub5MO5R
> ... Methamphetamine has a chiral center, so you can produce the pure (D) isomer, the pure (L), the exact 50/50 racemic mixture, or anything in between. (L) methamphetamine is a pretty good decongestant, but it is otherwise unenjoyable and has no market as a drug of abuse. The classic P2P reductive amination will of course give you the racemate; there’s nothing chiral about the synthesis at all. At the other end of the scale, reduction of pseudoephedrine starts with a pure chiral material, and you get only (D) methamphetamine as a product.
What he's talking about is molecular mirror images. Our bodies can tell the difference between the (L) and the (D) form. The former drains your sinuses and the latter gets you high.
This is a tangential plot point in Breaking Bad. In the episode "Boxcutter," Walter White asks: "If our reduction is not stereospecific, then how can our product be enantiomerically pure?"
There's a lot to unpack there, but it implies that Walt is isolating (D) methamphetamine exclusively. It also implies that this is occurring through a selective reductive procedure.
The first few seasons established that the synthesis relies on methylamine through a reductive procedure called P2P. But that procedure produces (D) and (L) forms in equal quantities.
What Walt is revealing in that one sentence is that he's developed a way to do the reductive amination step in the P2P cook such that just the (D) form is isolated. His use of the term "stereospecific," implies that the selectivity is close to 100% in the bond-forming step itself. The process therefore doesn't just produce highly pure product, but does so very efficiently.
At the time period of the show, such a reaction would have been very close to cutting edge research.
I watched AMC when they showed older American films of some note. Same with HBO, when they showed movies before they were available to rent. All the shows they produced themselves never appealed to me. I tried to like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad but they just got repetitive and uncreative.
AMC alone doesn't say much about the greater TV industry since people have loyalty to specific shows and not the channel. Breaking Bad didn't become popular while airing, it became popular because it released on Netflix. Cable channels have outlived their purpose. Emulating cable channels by partitioning shows into streaming services is pushing people back to piracy.
The traditional TV industry is continuing to fail to adapt to the different way in which people watch content. Youtube demonstrates really well how people are no longer loyal to a network, they are loyal to a creator or topic. There have been certain groups of channels that sort of remind me of an old school TV channel, like MatPat and his youtube channels Game Theorists, Film Theorists, and Food Theorists could have been a TV channel in combination with some other video game or theory crafting channels but people don't search by a bigger topic. People find content based on recommendations, either algorithmic or popular things watched by friends. Netflix Originals and Amazon Originals seem better, but I can't understand the metrics Netflix uses when deciding what to cancel.
As someone who has shifted to online media as the main form of content I watch, I can't tell you what makes a cartoon network show a cartoon network show. I know because of the logos between shows and during ads, but I struggle to find a strong underlying identity.
The easier access to international media has also caused an oversaturation of available good media. I no longer need to worry about what part of the world a show is made in, if it's popular enough, you'll be able to find it sailing the seas. HBO Max, the supposed online equivalent to the cable channel HBO will drop Westworld from its online catalog. Some fantastic Disney+ Marvel shows, like the critically acclaimed Loki, have no announced plans of getting a physical release and Loki released back in Jun 2021. When a TV show enthusiast sees those two pieces of news back to back, a normal conclusion is that the only "sure" way to own shows is piracy.
Mandalorian's pretty consistent about it, but it really stood out to me in the shootout when Breaking Bad's chicken man had besieged Our Heroes in the saloon. There's a crack to the impacts, and a speed to the bolts, that really makes you go "oh shit, those might hurt!" in a way that no Star Wars media I can think of (and I've seen/played/read just... way too much of it) had before.
And it was mediocre in the way that basically all the Mandalorian episodes were, but I really enjoyed the use of the AT-ST as a Robert E. Howard, Summoned from the Darkest Jungle by the Forest Savages and their Witch Doctors, primeval monster-beast, in that one episode. Really made the thing seem scary, at least at times. Absolutely perfect example of how to rip off genre media then paint it Star Wars to turn out an above-average Star Wars thing (not that that's a high bar) with minimal effort.
This really comes down to opinion, and I happen to think there are comparable shows which have aired in the last year (Better Call Saul is as good as, if not better than Breaking Bad in my opinion)
But I think it's silly to argue about that ;) The golden age for you might not be the golden age for me, and most people. Personally, not having to sit through a million ads when I watch TV now makes the TV-watching experience leagues beyond what we had in the late 90s (and sure, we've had some phenomenal shows since Breaking Bad; I'd personally nod at Atlanta, High Maintenance, Maniac, Severance, Game of Thrones S1-5, Undone, and The Expanse)
But we also have access to everything from the 90s and noughts, without the ads and waiting for new episodes
The point I was making in the GP post was that people now have easy access to the long-form storytelling of TV shows, without interruptions and nonstop ads, in a way that didn't exist 10+ years ago. Whether or not you think the TV shows today are better than the ones from the late '90s, people nowadays are choosing watch more TV and less film.
> I'm astounded that this article doesn't mention what to me seems like a no-brainer: We're in the golden age of television.
I disagree, the golden age of television was the late 90s to early 2010s, from the start of the Sopranos, to the last episode of Breaking Bad. I can’t name a series in the last 10 years that is on par with Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Deadwood, or The Wire.
Streaming services killed quality television, House of Cards was the beginning of the end.
This is an amazing tool, but I'd caution it's using IP lists for groups of specific organizations. One of the 2 IP lists provided by the author is just the US military: https://gist.github.com/artfulhacker/a6eb800e58f2eb6f9231
The section "MOST ACTIVE ORGANIZATIONS" shouldn't be taken as a list of the most active organizations in the world editing Wikipedia, just the most active organizations that made an IP list the tool is using.
Anyone using the very large number of static IP addresses on these lists will be pooled as an edit by the organization that maintains that IP range. This means a seaman in the Navy editing a TV show article on their free time may be pooled into the "Navy Network Information Center (NNIC)". It doesn't necessary mean the NNIC has a special interest in editing 'Breaking Bad' episode synopses.
I think the author's fundamental misunderstanding is that most people, even people like himself who "take learning seriously" don't read popular non-fiction to learn. Most people read for entertainment. So you shouldn't be evaluating how much one learned from Guns, Germs, and Steel, rather, you should compare how much you got from Guns, Germs, and Steel compared to a TV show like Breaking Bad. So, to answer the author's question: what should be done about it? Nothing.
The reasons why textbooks work is because you don't just read a textbook. You go over the same information repetitively via exercises. And it's natural that a course is even more effective than a textbook. You can never ask a textbook a question for clarification like you can an instructor. That doesn't mean the textbook is bad, it just means that that a textbook + an instructor is better.
Writing isn’t there for Marvel sure. But to me the achievement is reliably producing B grade movies. Entertaining, worth a chuckle, easy on the eyes. None deserve an Oscar, but none (or few) are really very bad. Even if that were easy to do with one movie, and I’ve watched a lot of real garbage, doing it with a string of 20 interconnected films? Culminating in Endgame? That required the steady hand of a few really solid people. It was the first of its kind by an absolute mile, a totally new achievement in cinema. Spielberg and his ilk have been obsessing over all the CGI and sleeping on the real achievements.
For reference my favorite movies would be No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Fury Road. I like The Wire, Breaking Bad, True Detective season one. But I think Marvel is a different sort of thing altogether. The sheer reliability of it is unrivaled. Which is why I say that’s what Rings of Power lacks for me. The writing doesn’t have to be groundbreaking. Just keep the thing competent despite all the cooks in the kitchen. Many pieces of media seem to fail at this.
Lately I will say the formula has worn thin. I consider their run to be from Iron Man to Endgame.
That'd actually make for a good movie or tv show, maybe breaking bad style. Insurance adjuster housewife struggling with a sick kid, starts running it as a side project to pay the bills or something, maybe she's in cahoots with the insurance company CEO, they do the murder for hire thing, and then frame the relative, and keep the insurance money for themselves. Or maybe instead of sort by new, they sort by highest risk (oldest/sickest) and find ways to frame the beneficiary.
In hindsight, it is amazing how much happens in the first episode of Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad. I recently rewatched both, and it felt like watching half a season.
Compare it to the first to episodes of Game of Thrones, House of Dragon, Breaking Bad, Firefly or any number other good shows.
Its also not really a good slow burn either. If you want to see that done expertly check out True Detective Season 1. That story draws you in.
And this episodes were very long and all the story lines are slow.
- A Story: Galadriel wanders around without doing much in the first episodes and swims around not doing much in the second episode. She has basically 1 expression, her motivation is the most basic revenge story plot ever and its totally clear that she is right and everybody else is dumb. The scene of going to Valinor standing on boat in full armor looked dumb and it was totally clear she would not go, but I guess show runners wanted to drop a couple million on special effect.
- B Story: Hartfoots mostly slice of life and some interaction with a mysterious wizard that amount to nothing so far. Kind of cute but not interesting and totally different tone then everything else. Including with slap stick humor.
- C Story: Basic Elf-Human love story with neither of the characters being very interesting and they have little chemistry. Also evil is rising, but I don't really care about those characters so I don't really care, for now its just random orcs. Nothing to connect to, no large conflict or the other characters. This is even worse then the love-story the added to the hobbit.
- D Story: Elron goes to the dwarfs and we get lots of exposition about (mostly nonsensical) backstory that is required for the current plot to make sense and some character setups for the dwarfs. Honestly maybe the most interesting part of the first 2 episodes, but not actually that interesting.
The tournament/birth sequence in the first episode of House of Dragon had more interesting character moments, character development, story progression then all of the Rings of Power had in the first 2h.
Or compare it with the story that happen in the first 2h of Lord of the Rings (~10h) total vs Rings of Power (10h).
Which Breaking Bad did you watch? The show literally opened with in your face action.
Just read to refresh everything that happened in episode 1, I pasted the first paragraph below, from here https://breakingbad.fandom.com/wiki/Pilot
> In the New Mexico desert, a man wearing nothing but his underwear and a gas mask erratically drives an RV down a desolate dirt road. In the passenger seat, another man is passed out, also wearing a gas mask. In the back of the RV are two bodies. After crashing the RV in a ditch, the driver climbs out, dons a shirt hanging from the side view mirror, and retrieves a video camera and gun from the vehicle. Recording a message on the camera, the man identifies himself as Walter White and bids a cryptic farewell to his wife and son. Sirens are heard in the distance. Walt walks onto the road and awaits the apparent approach of police, gun in hand.
>How the hell you are going to review a series based on just first 2 episodes?
The series may turn out to be worthwhile, but the first 2 episodes are objectively not good. The writing is poor, the dialogue isn't good, the characters are not compelling and the episodes themselves aren't well put together. I don't see how anyone can watch the first 2 episodes of this series and then watch the first 2 episodes of breaking bad and see any comparison. The vibes I got while watching this show reminded me of the last season of Game of Thrones after it had gone off the rails. The difference here is we haven't spent years getting invested in the story line and the characters, which kept us watching even as the quality was poor. I won't be tuning in for episode 3 and certainly won't feel like I've missed anything.
Wtf are you talking about, the pilot of Breaking Bad was a great hook and draws people in. It sets up the world amazingly well.
Also, this is a 1h show, so you have 2 hours, that is the length of a full movie. And people review movies all the time.
People also reviewed the first to episodes of House of the Dragon.
I believe these reviews are targeted. How the hell you are going to review a series based on just first 2 episodes? The first few episodes of breaking bad were extremely sedate, and no way in hell the series or even the first season was reflective of the pace set in those episodes
Easily get employed as an entry level software engineer in a local company, shave your head and start selling blue meth Disclaimer. Thisis a joke referencing breaking bad TV series please don't produce and sell drugs in industrial scale
Is that worse that believing that people should be judged by their understanding of the deeper meanings behind the AMC prestige crime television series Breaking Bad?
Interestingly enough the opening sentence was
“I’m a little like Walter White in the TV show Breaking Bad.”.
The moral of the story in Breaking Bad was that Walter was so self absorbed and selfish that he risked everything in his life.
How clueless we all are about the machinations of our own ego.
By being able to pretend that you've seen a television show you won't be left out of the conversation when it drifts towards something that people feel passionately about like Breaking Bad. With books there might be even more pressure: demonstrate your knowledge or you might not get invited for brunch next week.
I don't buy it. Dwayne Johnson one the highest-grossing and highest-paid actors of the 10s is bald. Along him you have a host of action actors that are bald. Top tv shows like Lost and Breaking Bad featured bald main characters. Just to name a few.
Tod Lasso is pretty much universally loved by friends of mine who have watched it. You don't have to be a soccer fan to watch it.
I don't know as many people who have watched Severance, but it's an incredibly good show- as long as Season 2 maintains the quality, I think it'll rank up there with shows like The Wire and Breaking Bad.
To chime in about how the article is cherry picking rather than doing deeper analysis: Dark and gritty superhero deconstruction was a product of the '80s and maybe early '90s, and then the '00s had the gritty reboot/reimagining trend for TV shows and movies in general. You also had a lot of prestige drama doing gritty realism with complex, dark antihero male protagonists starting in that era, which kicked into high gear in the '10s. Sopranos to Breaking Bad. Also shows where society was the gritty complex realistic antihero. The Wire to Game of Thrones.
I wouldn't say contemporary culture is any more unhappy than that era, it's just harder to read because there's no GOT type "event" series that everyone is watching right now. Maybe there will be a new cultural phenomenon, or maybe with this glut of streaming content, there won't be. (And if we look at blockbuster films, so many of them are shiny happy Disney-MCU fare, which are definitely not dark and gritty.) It just feels like right now we have a huge array of choices. When presented with that variety, it's really hard to say that it's generally more or less happy.
I do wonder what will replace comic books as the dominant subgenre of pop entertainment. I was hoping we'd get a reconstruction trend with comics like Astro City or Kingdom Come getting adapted, but in writing the previous section, I realized there's no need. For every dark and gritty realistic The Boys, there's multiple Disney+ shows. Batman is a character who's inherently going to have darkness. The majority of superhero comic screen media is escapist and optimistic, and this not-study is cherry-picking.
Breaking Bad didn't work because the character was different. There was significant push back from AMC about casting Cranston.
Vince Gilligan went to bat for him because he was certain Cranston could carry the dramatic load after working with him on an episode of the X-Files.
Having Jackson even nominally involved in the project would be a pretty terrible sign for me, after the Hobbit fiasco (which in turn colored my appraisal of ROTK and, in particular, the extended LOTR editions).
As for the writer's room on this show, it looks solid to me:
* Jason Cahill wrote a bunch of episodes for The Sopranos
* Justin Doble wrote 4 episodes in S1 and S2 of Stranger Things, and those are the only two good seasons of Stranger Things
* Gennifer Hutchison won a WGA award for her work on Breaking Bad, which is one of the best shows ever to air
* Bryan Cogman wrote 11(!) episodes of Game of Thrones
* Stephany Folsom was a writer on Toy Story 4 and Thor: Ragnarak
The two show-runners (JD Payne and Patrick McKay) are people I'm not familiar with, but so was DB Weiss before Game of Thrones.
Except for Sean Bean, I didn't know any of the GOT actors either; they're all famous for GOT now. The Amazon LOTR show could be a debacle, but it won't be because they chintzed out on actors.
But Malcom in the Middle was in syndication (151 episodes), so plenty of people knew his face if not his name, because reruns were airing 2x a day in virtually every US television market, and this was back before streaming so syndication was a huge way to get audience awareness. . The That 70s Show comparison is apt, and while he wasn’t Ashton level of famous from the show, he and the actress that played his wife (Jane Kaczmarek) were both better known than the actors who played the parents on That 70s Show.
Cranston was also the perfect person to cast for Breaking Bad because his character was so different from who audiences expected him to be. It worked brilliantly, the juxtaposition between the kind of zany (if put-upon and long suffering) dad then playing a dramatic role of a high school teacher turned drug-lord.
Having a cast of mostly lesser-knowns and unknowns is one thing. Having zero even recognizable names for a production that costs half a billion dollars is something else.
And Bryan Cranston was a recognizable, if not super famous, name. That’s part of why Breaking Bad worked, it subverted expectations and brought in some character actors that were at least visually familiar to audiences.
Same with the LOTR films. Liv Tyler was actually really huge at the time, having been in a series of high-profile blockbusters and also famous as a pop-culture figure thanks to her dad her music video appearances. Cate Blanchett was already famous, having been nominated for Oscars and BAFTAs. Sir Ian McKellan had been knighted for 20 years and also had nominations and awards out the ass. Sean Astin and Elijah Wood were successful child actors trying to bridge to adult roles. No one was too big of a name to cost too much or detract too much from the story, but you had enough recognizable names to get people excited about the trailer.
The Marvel films followed a similar thing. RDJ, obviously extremely famous already but Iron Man was his ultimate comeback role. ScarJo was also already a huge name (which Marvel used to their advantage for the next decade plus, b/c she was A-list and at the top of her career), and they balanced that with lesser-known names that became big stars.
I don’t think anyone is saying you need a star-studded cast. If anything, that works against you for properties like this, because people have already seen the characters in their mind or in other adaptations. But you usually need one or two recognizable faces, at least with a budget of this size. A smaller-budget show can have a cast of unknowns that hopefully then blow up into superstars, but we’re talking about a budget that eclipses even the largest film properties, where you’re not paying a lot of it towards the above the line expenses.
I think Amazon execs think the power of the LOTR brand can overcome anything else, and maybe they are right. But I don’t know if I would risk $500m of a production with zero recognizable names in front of or behind the camera. Even Stranger Things had Winona Ryder, after all.
> Looking at the imdb page this seems like a corporate driven project rather than a creator driven project with lots of different directors that haven’t don’t anything remarkable and seem to have just done other Amazon shows.
With the exception of, say, the first season of True Detective, most TV shows use multiple directors. The director on a TV show is usually in charge of the technical execution of the writers script - they’re not making many creative decisions the way a movie director does. The creative authority on a TV show generally rests on the lead writer(s), not the directors. When people talk about the Sopranos, they talk about David Chase; Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan. And in both of those cases they had teams of writers under them who would write different episodes. This didn’t stop those shows from having a strong auteur-driven vision.
In the case of the LotR show, the lead writers are JD Payne and Patrick McKay. I think they’re passionate about Tolkien from what I’ve read. Look them up if you want to know more.
Not a great list for that premise. The Amazon Lord series not only lacks stars, it lacks famous mid-tiers as well.
West World had Ed Harris, Evan Rachel Wood, James Marsden, Thandie Newton, among others. These are mid tier actors that are quite well known (even though they're not superstars).
Breaking Bad had as its lead a very prominent television actor in Cranston. Malcolm in the Middle was a hit tv show that had a long run as far as TV shows go. He was already very TV-famous prior to Breaking Bad. Getting Cranston to carry Breaking Bad was them going with a TV heavy-weight with tons of experience and a deep familiarity for TV audiences.
Yes, some of the best titles have none or just 1 top tier actor at the time: Star Wars (Alec Guinness), West World (Anthony Hopkins), Game of Thrones (Sean Bean), Breaking Bad, The Wire. I'm sure there's other's I can't remember.
Some directors prefer fresh actors for some movies. It s not necessarily a red flag, but it could be. Time will tell.
What a surprise: TV shows are made to reflect the current public perception of the world so they appeal more watchers. News at 11.
Star Trek isn't alone in this shift. Budget and special effects aside, could anyone imagine the remake of Battlestar Galactica (a show I didn't like at all, btw), Breaking Bad, Lost etc. in the 80s along the cheesy shows of that time? Of course not as they could only be conceived after a certain set of events, which very likely are 9/11 and the following absurd Iraq invasion; those events changed everything in what we think of the world and the people around us, including our own governments. Actually, TV shows were already transitioning to a less optimistic view of our society, which, speaking of SciFi, is clearly noticeable in B5 and DS9, but I think those events marked a milestone.
Also, from the 80s to the early 2000s, the biggest change affecting our society has been the ability to be online and engage in public discussion with others, which brought even more stimuli and opportunities -whether for the good or bad it's completely subjective- further accelerating our normal social evolution; the world has changed virtually centuries in 20 years. I couldn't imagine anyone seriously thinking of shooting today a remake of The A-Team series in which they maintain its original thousands bullets shot every episode but nobody dies format.
Pretty much this. The least obvious at the time, but looks extremely obvious in retrospective.
You and your friend are tightly linked on the social graph. Your friend starts watching a new show and keeps googling and watching stuff about it and talking about it with other people online.
While the system won't recommend to you every single thing your friend watches and likes, it knows that for some of those the likelihood of your tastes matching is high. E.g., you might not like horror movies unlike your friend, so the algo wont be recommending them to you, despite your friend watching those. But the algo knows you both like crime dramas, so as soon as your close-social-link-connection-friend starts watching and googling and talking about Breaking Bad, the algo thinks you might like it too, so you start getting suggestions for it.
It is kind of silly, but it is indeed scarily way more accurate/effective to predict recommendations that way, as opposed to doing very invasive stuff like actually trying to listen to mic or correlate locations or whatever else (not even mentioning that on modern phone OSs it is somewhere between very difficult and pretty much impossible to do in a legitimate way).
Tldr: if you have close social connections whose certain media tastes match yours in some specific niches, don't be surprised that when one of those social links starts watching and enjoying something in those specific niches (and googling about it and talking about it to others online and etc.), you might get recs for that type of content too.
how did you watch the episode? many streaming services, devices, or smart TVs track what you're watching.
or more likely, you googled something breaking bad related while watching or talking about it.
or even more likely, it's a coincidence. my youtube recommendations also had a breaking bad clip in them yesterday, despite me not watching it, talking about it, or thinking about it. better call saul season ended recently, and people are searching for breaking bad clips. it doesn't have to be more complicated than that.
It depends on your privacy settings, the local privacy laws in effect, and what you did over at your friend's place.
If you watched the episodes on a device connected to your Google account in any way I think the answer would be obvious.
Another reason you might be seeing ads for it is that you might've looked up an actor or character on your phone which Google linked back to the show.
It's also possible that Google noticed your account was suddenly shared by someone who showed interest in the show and "infected" your account.
Another possibility is that Google picked up on the show if you used a Chromecast on the same network to watch an episode; media controls are broadcast throughout the network.
There are more far fetched reasons. For example, if your location history is on and the neighbourhood where your friend lives is seeing a sudden spike in interest in Breaking Bad (watch parties? Idk), you may have been flagged as interested purely by geographical proximity.
It can also be a combination of Baader-Meinhof and your behaviour around the ad (looking at it longer, possibly unintentionally out of surprise) that reinforced the topic in your ad preferences.
Tl;dr, Google can learn a lot about you through indirect means. It's kind of their business model. Compare to the famous case where a supermarket knew someone in a US household was pregnant before the other family members did based on purchasing behaviour. It's scary how much you can tell about a person from their shopping patterns alone and Google has their hands in so much more.
None of this should probably be happening if you've disabled personalised ads (https://adssettings.google.com/), at least not on Google's platform.
We are kind of already there (not having entertainment in common). It is hard to find a TV series or film that everyone in my friendship circle knows equally well -- the last one was Breaking Bad, and that was over 10 years ago. Everyone finds their niche interest I suppose. Its almost the same with music -- the last decade where our musical interests converged were the 90ies.
I do not think different is a good qualifier for good television. As much as I'd like to see more about the character Mike for example, I would not like to see him in some action movie. His character shines in it's very personal moments, while his prowess regarding violence etc. need only to be hinted at.
The action laden sequences are by far the least interesting aspect of Breaking Bad, serving at best as a somewhat believable and tension-relieving climaxes for emotionally taxing, morally difficult and thrilling parts of the show.
The team behind Breaking Bad managed to tell a cohesive, character driven story despite all the creative restrictions making a show for a large TV network causes (think profitability, playing to as broad of a set of sensibilities as possible).
Telling a thousand different stories in the same world and with the same characters drains them of believability and lessens the emotional impact of the stories significantly - they become arbitrary.
Better Call Saul was a good show because it divorced one of the more important characters (but by far not a main character) almost entirely from the original and focused heavily on humor, with light aspects of drama. Breaking Bad was the other way around.
Therefore, I cannot think of a show that is running for it's 21st season as anything more than at best the visual equivalent of easy listening music, at worst a continued cash grab by the studio producing and network distributing it. For a work of art to be meaningful, it needs to come to some kind of conclusion regarding it's content lest it reiterates the same points again and again, becoming boring in the proccess.
Of course, there is something to be said in favor of easy listening music or TV productions intended mostly for basic entertainment, I recognise this discussion is largely predicated on taste. But I think calling something like that art misses the point that has made art historically so important for humans: The intentional representation of thoughts and experiences of the artist(s) in a specific medium meant to elucidate active engagement with the topics at hand.
EDIT: Added a word for clarity.
Also one of several instances where the Breaking Bad writers put a lot of thought into amazing episode themes and titles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Breaking_Bad)
I am a (physical) abuse survivor.
I cannot emphasize enough that members of the tech policy community must abandon the "think of the children" line of rhetoric to weaken the internet.
I don't want to think about your children. I don't want to interact with your children.
I've met people who have. People who don't just go out onto the internet to be disagreeable, but truly believe what they are saying.
That context collapse of "oh, you're serious?" paired with my sincere view that those folks can get in the ground with Jeffrey Epstein, has been quite the journey.
(I crafted the above sentence after extensive therapy, to make it clear: I will not hurt someone just because of their "sexual preference".)
But there's a Breaking Bad episode that shows what happens when someone who is not your caregiver decides not to interact -- you will choke on your own vomit and die, or otherwise come to some end that wouldn't have if you hadn't been all alone.
(I'm on the autistic spectrum, and a huge prestige TV geek.)
You can engineer society to coerce folks, you can invent ever creative reasons to monitor folks who the data shows have always tried to give folks autonomy to make decisions paired with accurate data, but then... well turn on the news.
You will what you voted for. Power outages because your independent grid minus federal money rotten then got hit with a superstorm. Condos collapsing because no one did the checks. And the bridge the local tech savvy at risk youth called for help from under may literally fall down.
What "civil" society needs to do is believe victims.
Testimony is evidence. Value it as much as... computer stuff.
Or own that if you decide otherwise, there may be civil unrest.
- Greg, from Cub Scout Troop 262.
That just sounds horrible to me. Breaking Bad was interesting precisely because it had to end. It was about very specific characters, their changing motivations and development.
Rebooting every episode just because the premise is kinda cool and someone wants more of it diminishes what the series achieved both visually and conceptually.
But there is a limit on Breaking Bad episodes, for example. Just pump out new episodes. Could even have The Simpsons / Groundhog Day - style state-reset after each episode. Therefore the AI can make anything happen (Walter gets killed) and the produce another episode because you know that is just a multiverse branch.
Honestly I would rather blame some fans (Musk included) of great shows like Rick & Morty, IASIP, Breaking Bad or the Joker movie for mistaking protagonists/anti-heros/funny characters for people to emulate and completely missing the point.
If you cheer the part you're supposed to laugh at/feel sad for, I start to get a picture of what "dangerous" media could mean.
It's a poor approach for people like me. My main thing is video games, youtube, and reading. But I like really good TV series. I've enthusiastically watched Peaky Blinders as soon as it's available after I heard about it and picked it up after season 4. I didn't start watching Breaking Bad until Season 4 finished airing. Same with a bunch of other shows, Blacklist (S6), Game of Thrones (S4), Sherlock(S5), Mandalorian (S2), Ozarks (S3). That doesn't give a lot of shows time to catch my eye.
The ones I recall watching after S1 aired over the past decade are Fargo, Better Call Saul (because I saw BB), True Detective, House of Cards, Atlanta (because I'm from Atlanta), Lupin, because they got truly rave reviews. I'm even more conservative with Netflix shows now because it's pretty much a given that anything I even attempt to watch is going to get cancelled after a season or 2.
The paper complains that some of the answers are not perfect but half the humans I know would have gotten them wrong… (thinking about the octopus one). I just find this technology fascinating. Imagine once you can extend this to video (“Star wars but the Jedis are the bad guys”, “breaking bad but an 80s sitcom” … Netflix should be investing in this…)
> The Sopranos cost 2 million dollars per episode
well, actors like to be paid...
you can make an infinite amount of breaking bad episodes without Brian Cranston, Aaron Paul, Bob Odenkirk, Giancarlo Esposito, and Jonathan Banks, but I guess people won't be so keen to pay to watch them.
But even if you use digital avatars, you have to pay them the same amount of money to use their image, because that's what people want to see, there's no way around it.
Besides, the Sopranos is a great show because they spend 2 million on each episode.
I'm sure you can recreate the same quality with a couple hundred dollars, but I'm also quite sure most of us regular humans couldn't.
Totally disagree, all of my favorite shows would have made terrible movies. Breaking Bad is just barely long enough as it is, trying to compress that down into even a long movie would have destroyed the story.
This happened irrespective of Netflix streaming. Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, BSG, Lost, etc. The thing is serial was fairly annoying if you had to be in front of the TV on Wednesday at 9pm every week to watch something. People would do it for a must-watch miniseries. But as soon as you could do on-demand it was a nice format for a lot of things.
I've never heard of crash and burn I'll check it out!
Waiting on stranger things to end
I enjoyed Breaking Bad, Narcos, Battlestar, and some of the game of thrones seasons.
If you liked Narcos you might also like ZeroZeroZero. It's a miniseries on Amazon with really high production value.
This habit of cancellation is, for me, the biggest failure of the lot. Some of their shows were very high quality and quite unique: One Day At A Time, The OA, The Baby-Sitter’s Club. You know what else all of these shows have in common? They were cancelled at the top of their game.
People forget that many huge shows, e.g. Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica, only became hugely popular several years into their run. The Wire is even more extreme: it only really became huge after the last episode was broadcast. But in each of those cases, someone made the call that a high-quality show was worth running, either because they hoped it would find a wider audience or because they believed it enhanced their brand.
Breaking Bad was released by AMC, which was mostly airing theatrical movies. They had little original programming prior to Breaking Bad (and Mad Men one year before). Additionally, HBO and TNT, two TV networks with more experience than AMC, turned down the idea.
That's a very subcomplex idea of how media works. Of course, everybody understands that there is a difference between fiction and reality. And "reality TV" is fiction as well, even if some people might still be fooled by that.
Still the reality of US life does reveal itself simply by the "what" and "how" Americans create their media, like TV, movies, radio, podcasts, web video, and so on.
Or put in terms an American with a tech background would understand: Everybody knows Walter White is not a real person, and Breaking Bad isn't a documentary. Yet the reality of American-style healthcare and personal financial ruin for many people who are misfortunate enough to get cancer and have it treated, is not fiction.
It's a losing strategy though, with whitelabeling of streaming services it's easy for a content holder to just stick their stuff behind their own label or play Netflix vs Hulu vs Amazon Prime vs HBO.
Content generation was a good move, but they seem to be pursuing a strategy of trying to always have some mega-hit. This causes them to cancel shows that could grow into valuable content anchors.
Consider "The Office." I'm not going to say that everyone loves The Office, but a lot of people like it and enjoy tossing it on the TV when they are just looking for some background noise or just want to binge something they find enjoyable.
How much of Netflix's content fits this mold though? If you take a look at their longest running shows https://screenrant.com/longest-running-netflix-originals-ranked/ they just don't run their series for very long. On the plus side this means that they can go invest in other series, but it creates series that don't have the same sticking power.
They also seem to have a real hard time keeping quality up within a series, so you can have a show start off really strong with a great season 1, then season 2 is meh, and then they cancel it. I think this fundamentally makes their catalog less sticky because instead of their original content being something you can come back to again and again, it is disposable.
I've watched my fair share of Netflix original series, but where other series have grown to hold a special place in my memory and I can watch them over and over (Deep Space Nine, King of the Hill, {fill in your favorite long running series here}) I rarely find myself rewatching their original content. With 2 or 3 seasons, the series end up feeling like long mini-series, and not a whole arc that you can sit down and enjoy again and again.
And when I compare Netflix today to Netflix of year's gone by, the thing I find myself missing from the external content catalog was more of those "old favorites" of just watching through Breaking Bad again or enjoying the episode of Bones where they somehow scan a computer virus off of a bone and into their hologram thing.
There’s a movie with Natalie Portman where she’s offended by a boy calling her a lady. She thinks she’s being called old.
There’s also what I’ll call the Jeremy Clarkson ooo hello ladies, reserved for fancy done up groups of ladies in nice dresses and hats for example from the country woman’s association.
Distinct from the oooo hello ladies of a group of prostitutes making their grand entrance from the back of a hummer I recently saw in the breaking bad movie.
Boys I’ve seen used a lot referring to groups of men in the examples of dogging the boys at a construction yard, pulled the boys for an scv rush in sc2, hello boyyys for Roy and HG implying something rude.
> I feel there are plenty of good shows on Netflix.
Not sure who else feels this but for me:
There's a lack of "regular tv shows". I knew it was over when they got rid of The Office, that was pretty much the only reason I kept Netflix.
HBO Max, Disney Plus, Prime Video, AMC (temporary) all have the shows we regularly go to. Sopranos/Frasier, Simpsons/Star Wars/National Geography, The Office/Friends, Breaking Bad/Better call Saul (just need to see how it all ends).
Heck even Prime managed to bag many of the shows that used to be on Netflix. Aliens, Tora Tora Tora and even Independence Day is on Disney Plus. Lot of movies outside Netflix.
Netflix just has these one off good shows that frankly doesn't attract across the demographic. Sure there's something for everyone but its lacking those "must have and easy to access binge reruns".
> They need charismatic movies and set free artists with risky content. Not 20 episodes of Ozark.
Ozark seems like a directly bad comparison because it appears to be one of their last big content swings/risks (and is ending soon) from the first few years where they seemed to heavily curate their projects and who the creators were and who the talent were and give them enough seasons to tell the full story they were hoping to tell. (Ozark is one of the very few and seems one of the last to get its full number of seasons expectation and will get to tell a "complete story".) Ozark is not quite as successful as benchmarks like Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul, but it fills a niche and gambles on good talent pulling off a tough tightrope of "bad people doing bad things but you root for them in spite of themselves", which is still a very risky niche even with big "Prestige TV" breakouts such as the aforementioned benchmarks. (I've only finished the first season of Ozark because I have a hard time watching this "cringe" genre, but I recall it was very well made and I enjoyed it for what it was.)
Since Netflix ordered Ozark they have indeed seemed to move their Originals content much more to a algorithm-generated "shotgun" approach: building lots of single season shows (or maybe if first weekend and only first weekend views are high enough, or so it seems, they will get two seasons) and seemingly designed overall to take fewer risks (on creators, on talent, on genres). There's definitely a lot extremely generic or at least extremely low risk programming coming out of Netflix's shotgun at this point. Some of it has still been entertaining.
But calling Ozark out for being a product of the shotgun and "low risk" seems backwards when it seems so much more emblematic of riskier Netflix Originals projects than current ones.
>> They need charismatic movies and set free artists with risky content. Not 20 episodes of Ozark.
I think the exact opposite: Ozark was great, because it is basically a rip-off of Breaking Bad, which was made by a mainstream TV network (which has a lot of experience and research about what kind of stories people do like). The "risky content" from artists that were "set free" is a recipe for disaster: you spend a lot of money to produce a show that only appeals to some exotic audiences. Netflix has some examples of that. Only once in a while you'll hit the jackpot and have this risky content make you a lot of money.
“New Mexico is next to last on their list…”. If this means NM won’t attract the sorts of people who make life decisions based on media like this, it should be more widely circulated. It is this decade’s “Breaking Bad” for NM. If you are the sort of person who makes life decisions based on where TV shows are shot, NM isn’t really for you. Someone might write a comic book about how great Arkansas is, and you’d be forced to move again.
A word to the wise: always poke around in how they measure attributes, how they weight the attributes, and how they combine them in a single score (or sub-score). In the 1970s, there was published a Places Rated Almanac for US cities, by a NYC-based publisher. NYC (in the era of the burning Bronx) was inexplicably rated in the top ten…maybe top five. I looked deeper and saw they took, say, the crime statistics and simply truncated them, uniquely, for NYC. NYC was actually, say, 13 for crime and they said, well that’s too high, we’ll count it as 5. No justification at all. The fix was in.
Find your querencia and you’ll be happy.
I briefly considered applying for a job at the NRAO in New Mexico. Albuquerque seemed to be the nearest large town.
Was pretty interested, but then it seems that "Breaking Bad" is as much a documentary as a drama, so decided against it.
I didn't quite get what you're saying here.
I'm not claiming I got the overarching plot or character development of the series. It was the small plot hooks during the episodes that I found poor enough to make the show unwatchable. I've stopped watching a bunch of other shows for the same reason so it's not exclusive to Breaking Bad, it's just the most popular show to suffer from this style of writing.
I actually made it through the first 4 or maybe 5 seasons, and was pretty bored and underwhelmed the whole time. I found all of the characters except Amos and Bobbie flat and (unintentionally) off-putting. Unless I'm missing something, the plot and premises are nothing special. I consider myself a big fan of many TV drama series, as well as sci-fi, I just put this one near the bottom of my list. I just don't get what's so interesting about it. For reference, I consider (2000s) Battlestar Galactica to be an astounding masterpiece and among the greatest TV series of any genre, along every dimension you could measure a show by. I guess there really is no accounting for taste.
I've changed my mind before. I initially found Breaking Bad unwatchable, but eventually came around to thinking it's very good.
> One best example is Breaking Bad
Breaking Bad is my usual example of bad plot building. I'm sure I haven't given it a fair chance as it's universally so highly liked, but the plot events were very much built up so that you could see what's coming. You are already anticipating some events, or they feel predictable and made up, as if precisely to serve the show. They don't come through as authentic.
I stopped watching Breaking Bad in the first or second season due to this poor plot building, and Better Call Saul after a couple of episodes when I realized it's just more of that very same style of bad plotting. The difference to well written shows such as Sopranos is like night and day.
Negative comments about Breaking Bad and pointing out its flaws seems to often receive controversial reactions. I suppose it's because it's the favourite show for so many.
I call that sort of "good" plots "character-oriented plot". One best example is Breaking Bad, which is not movie, but it is a great show anyway. The episode of Fly is a good example how well BB portrayed character's personality.
with character-oriented plot, we have character first, and let them play drama. It is like having initial condition and seeing how things evolve in Ordinary Differential Equation. Everything seems natural. I don't think screen play is not that simple, but good plot makes people think in that way.
On the other hand, with plot for the sake of plot, there is a predetermined plot at the outset, and as the show progresses, the actions and personalities of the characters are adjusted accordingly. There is no real personality there, just a cog in the wheel.
Netflix has produced a lot of fairly solid content. Not at the level of the all-time great prestige TV shows like the ones you mentioned, but enough to keep a lot of subscribers happy for long periods of time at an accessible price. House of Cards (at least until the Kevin Spacey scandal blew up), Stranger Things, Orange is the New Black, BoJack Horseman, Disenchantment, etc are a few that come to mind that I watched and enjoyed.
I think Netflix has two big issues. The first is the way they drop seasons all at once prevents the natural cycle of pre-episode hype, post-episode interviews, speculation and leaks, fan anticipation, fan arguments (ship wars, etc), etc. Fan culture can't develop around this content as easily because there's never any breathing space for fans to collectively sit with the story so far. The shows that become a cultural force like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones need us to keep coming back to the conversation every week. They have us talking about what happened last week and will happen this week with our colleagues at work and around the dinner table. How can these Netflix IPs enter stable orbit in the cultural zeitgeist when they're once-a-year events? It devalues the work, positioning it more like a movie that you watch and then forget rather than a story you become invested in over a long period of time.
Full season drops also allow people to binge a whole season of content for a single month's subscription and then immediately churn (ask me how I know). I assume they have some data-driven reasons for doing this, but it makes absolutely no sense to me.
Besides that, I think they should put more wood behind fewer arrows. They've developed a reputation for aggressively cancelling smaller shows with passionate followings which makes a lot of people not even want to bother until something has become an established mainstream success. I think of them now as the Google of content-creation, putting out a lot of solid (but not amazing) products and then cancelling them once people start to grow attached.
I watch movies pretty much only at local film festivals. Pre-corona it was 2-3 movies twice a year since my city has sweet spring and late fall festivals. During corona festivals moved online and I watched a movie from each festival on laptop. Hopefully masks-in-cinemas will be over by the time spring festival rolls in!
Last series I followed was Breaking Bad. Used to torrent it and watch on laptop screen.
Discussing only on the merits of their content, and stipulating that this is neither here nor there with respect to Netflix's long-term prospects vs. HBO:
Breaking Bad isn't an HBO show. So I assume we're just asking, "has Netflix produced any world-class content". The answer to that is yes.
The jewel in their crown, their "Game of Thrones", is clearly Stranger Things. It's undeniably successful, each new season a cultural event. I'd put Stranger Things up against any HBO show for relevance and impact. (Perhaps not for artistic excellence; but, The Wire is the best show that's ever been on television, and it's far from the most watched).
Add to that Black Mirror, Bojack Horseman, Sex Ed, the annual Flanagan miniseries (Hill House, Bly Manor, Midnight Mass), Master of None, and Big Mouth.
They're doing about as well as any premium cable channel ever has. Doesn't, of course, mean you like their content! But I have about as much faith in Netflix coming up with a new prestige show than I do in HBO, most of whose recent stuff has left me pretty cold.
I only have Netflix disc rental (blu-ray, one disc out at a time, costs about $10/month).
The library is huge and goes back decades. There are usually good user reviews at the Netflix web site for guidance. I suspect there are thousands of theatrically released movies that Netflix only offers on disc, not streaming.
In the last ten years, I've rented almost 900 movies (including a few TV shows like Breaking Bad) on disc, so that's well below $2/rental. I live about 50 miles from the nearest distribution center, so turnaround is almost always just two days, because the post office scans the returned disk when I post it, so Netflix sends out the new one the next day, even before they receive my return. They did pull a fast one a few years back by silently stopping outgoing shipments on Saturdays, but I live with it.
Discs have great resolution, often have bonus features, and almost always have closed captioning, which I appreciate more and more as I age. And the credits don't get reduced to a thumbnail on screen so the next show can be promoted. And I don't have to log in, or enable wi-fi on my TV.
I use an old PS3 as my blu ray player, works great with a Logitech remote control, supports HDMI output. I also have a blu-ray external disk drive for my laptop if I'm on the road (only about $100 as I recall).
Since Netflix is primarily responsible for putting Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, and various local video stores out of business, I'd be really pissed if they ended the disc rental service.
This poem was used for the penultimate episode of the phenomenal TV show, Breaking Bad. It showed the downfall of Walter White, aka, Heisenberg, who came to believe he was invincible, much like Ozymandias did.
Another anecdote: an undergraduate at a top university I knew, with publications, leadership positions, and strong research experience at the time, was also into reality television, and specifically avoided dramas/prestige television (e.g. Mad Men, Breaking Bad).
In addition to not requiring thinking, I remember he also mentioned that it's harder to get "hooked" and end up binge-watching episodes.
The perspective is plausible to me. I do feel more drained or emotionally spent absorbing intense television series, or even accomplished for understanding them, when I could've spent that on real work. That said, I do think low-quality media affects the way I think and write in a negative way (by contrast, when I spend a lot of time absorbed with high-quality writing, it actually does positively affect my speech and writing for the next few days).
It's a continuum. You want content to go from idea(chat), to discussion(forum), to documentation(wiki). Most people should only have to read the wiki, if they have already read the wiki, they can drop down to the forums, and if they have read the forums and have an idea of their own they can do so within the chat. The problem is that pretty much no service has all three. Discord does fairly well because they do chat, and with their pins feature do a really bad job of being a wiki. So 1.5 is better than most services 1. StackOverflow is the only service I know that has all 3(Answers are wikis, the discussion underneath is a forum, then if there's enough messages they kick you into a chat).
I kinda see this as what happened to TV after we got DVR's and Netflix, where we went from episodic stores to serialized stories. That magnified the amount of nuance that TV shows were able to work through. As a result you get shows like The Wire, Breaking Bad, Squid Game - all shows that were fundamentally impossible before you knew that people who were watching episode 5 also watched episodes 1-4. Because no one can be sure that you have read all of the previous wiki content, forums are currently episodic in nature. They move very slowly. They need to repeat themselves many times. The bigger the forum, the slower it moves.
One of the worst features of Discord is that when you splinter conversations into different channels it becomes impossibly difficult to keep up with them. You need to click once for each channel you are tracking. Forums had this same issue. Reddit brilliantly solved this problem with their "an upvote pushes threads into the future, then we sort by most recent", but no other service(HN might? I'm not sure.) uses it to this day. I'm not sure why.
What I need on Discord is the ability to have multi-Discords like multi-Reddits where I see every message in a single interface, and clicking that message would allow me to send a message to that channel. So every message would look like this:
Server > Channel > Thread : Hi
AnotherServer > SomeChannel > GeneralThread : Some message
The big problem with chat is it quickly becomes useless as more people join the conversation, for example see Twitch chat, it scrolls so quickly you get an almost instant Eternal September effect of low quality content that reinforces itself. Even Reddit/HN falls over when you get over 1000 comments on a post. What you need is automatic sharding of users, an upvote system that would then push those certain users "up a level", and depending on the amount of users chatting in a channel there would be several levels of hierarchy involved. People who chat within your shard would then instantly reach you, but only high quality posts from other shards would reach you, but it would appear like a forum post, or be refined into a wiki.
I have a lot more thoughts on this topic, but I'll leave it here.
My other Four:
o Firefly - no brainer. Brilliant. o Battlestar Galactica - Has some issues mid-late course, but still pretty end-end enthralling. o Dark (I keep re-watching this over and over every few months. I have many notebook pages full of analysis. Seriously good SciFi for the most part.) o Altered Carbon (mostly Season 1 - but Season 2 was okay)
Big Recommendation:
Not really science fiction (even bigger themes explored) but far superior in terms of overall quality of work/screen writing, and has a similar "concept" that a lot of supposed science fiction shows have - "The Leftovers" - Which I put on my list of the 5 most brilliant things on Television (Sopranos/The Wire/Deadwood/Breaking Bad being the other 4).
I'll give a honorable mention to stuff I loved but I can't totally recommends:
o Travelers - I'm a sucker for a good Time Travel Show. o Foundation - Pretty - I watch it, but I totally would never recommend it. o Fringe - Wow - was totally into this. Definitely an acquired taste though. o Raised By Wolves - Interested in where it's going. Could entirely suck eventually I guess. o Black Mirror - Hit and miss, though hits often enough that I keep coming back to it. o WestWorld - I mean, we all watched it. Season 1 was *awesome* if you watched it in realtime and didn't read all the internet commentary when the aha moment hit you. Season 2 was pretty good as well IMHO. Season 3 was just dreck where the screen writing tanked *but* it paid an *awesome* homage to the very last of the Foundation Novels to bring it all home.
According to Hollywood one does not simply homebrew Phenylacetone. In movies like The Witness or the TV show Breaking Bad their entire plotlines revolve around people killing to get a drop of the stuff. It's not like it's anything new or that ephedra is some kind of natural produce that grows on trees. Skimming through your article it sounds like these cartel chemists are dropping dead in their laboratories trying to make it and producing a final product that's more like krokodil if anything.
>the first season of Breaking Bad (the only one I've seen)
Breaking Bad is one of those shows that gets better with every season (the Metacritic score goes 73 → 84 → 89 → 96 → 99 from season 1 to season 5). The first season wasn't really anything special but it's gangbusters by the end.
Human actors - Breaking Bad is about the process of a man changing into a monster. It takes great acting to make that story work
Video games will never do drama as well as theatre or film, because we can't see into the actors souls - video game stories are puppet theatre
Edit: thinking about this some more, I think I might be wrong - there are many animated films that I've found emotionally moving and involving that don't have human actors (Ratatouille for example!)
How exactly are Raiders of the Lost Ark or Breaking Bad storylines better than those of the first Mafia, The Witcher 3, Uncharted 4, Metro Exodus, Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Half-Life 2 + episodes? And I'm not even mentioning artistic pieces like What Remains of Edith Finch or Life is Strange. There are quests in The Witcher 3 you could make a movie from (Bloody Baron).
As dramatized in the television series Breaking Bad
I'm an ex-rower in my 40s and my usual cardio workout these days is 10km at about a 2:05 pace. Lately I've been watching Breaking Bad episodes during each workout, it's about the right length and a nice distraction!
Sometimes I do a 5k at about 1:55 instead. Between that and weight training, trying to build back my endurance before doing 2k sprints again. Maybe I'll get back on the water next year.
That's not really true historically. There's the whole Wild West ethos that still makes its way into pop culture (Star Wars, Breaking Bad, Clint Eastwood, Toy Story 2, Back to the Future Part 2, etc), which glorifies outlaw life and people making it through their wits rather than the support of authorities. There are cities like San Francisco and Las Vegas, basically built on criminals building a local civilization. Prison movies like Shawshank Redemption, the Green Mile, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest have us rooting for the inmates. We keep electing Kennedy clan members, even though the family fortune is built on Scottish distilleries and securities manipulation. American history includes bomb-throwing anarchists, 3 revolutions, massacres by private security forces, hippie communes, the KKK, police forces bombing their own citizens, and plenty of extrajudicial lynchings.
I think that the time period where this is true is the post-WW2 prosperity. There was a large premium on order and social stability here, along with creating institutions that kept (white, suburban, middle-class, male) Americans safe and gave them a stable upwards trajectory. Much of the support for law & order comes out of the demographic that grew up in this time period, with subsequent generations being much more skeptical of law enforcement and sympathetic to criminals. You don't see 20-somethings flying thin-blue-line flags, but you do see them calling to defund the police.
Thanks!
I tried PoI, but it didn't catch me (first ep only). Maybe I try again. I would love a good, techy private detective series. Would love to find something like Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as a series.
For me, in Germany, Breaking Bad was the series which changed the game. After breaking bad, TV became the superior story vessel. There were some good series before, but after BB "everyone" around saw the appeal. It's a different narrative style than traditional TV series. Even gems like Battlestar Galactica, feel more episodically contained and are not bincheable like modern shows. BB wasn't pioneering but rather the turning stone(?), I think.
And yes, I do recommend giving BB another try. It starts so slowly, but it will get insanely intense! However, it's becoming uncomfortably stressful story-wise. If you don't like that sort of drama, you may not enjoy it. Then Better Call Saul is even better, but also even more slow progression. Tho, if you got into the BB style, the wrinting, acting and cinematography are unmatched IMO.
I do. It's pretty decent. It does go a bit downhill later on, but I'd say in the late S3 and S4 (I blame it on the show being cut short and having to wrap up everything too quickly).
In the genre of "seemingly a crime show, but really a deep sci-fi", I'd strongly recommend Person of Interest, if you haven't seen it already. It contains what I consider to be, to date, the best discussion of the topic of general artificial intelligence, and all its ethical and safety implications.
> It seems a bit low-budget and oldschool TV
It's definitely not big-budget, but there's decent FX in there, just judiciously used. Future tech is impressive, but not crazy flashy.
> (pre-breaking bad quality of TV).
Could you elaborate on that one? I've only seen the first three episodes, after which I gave up, but from those three I thought Breaking Bad is a low-quality and extremely low-budget show.
> I don’t want to watch movies or read books where people are just awful to other people, I can open the newspaper on any given day to find that.
I am 1000% with you on this. The success of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones are mystifying to me. I get enough misery and awfulness from the news.
Just for whatever this is worth to you, and I know you probably already know this, but networks rejected Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, South Park, Mad Men, and, I think most infamously, Stranger Things.
There's nothing wrong with that --- perhaps the networks involved should have rejected those shows! You pick one, you gotta turn down another one. But having more venues specialized in a specific type of show means that, for instance, when BET passes on your thing, it can still find a home somewhere else.
I don't know anything about these particular shows. But look at the first couple episodes of Broad City --- not the extremely successful TV show, but the low budget web series that started it all. I'm inclined not to dismiss things based solely on production quality relative to what's on FX.
The rest of these points are probably well taken!
I do think Sopranos was one of the first but specifically left it off due to it having lots of filler compared to breaking bad. It's a weird middle point where it did tell a movie like story but still lots of the unneeded drama of syndicated shows that came before it.
Better Call Saul at its best is as good, if not better, than 99% of Breaking Bad. Of course, the best episodes of BB are among the best in TV history.
HBO had been doing it for a few years, with shows like The Wire and Deadwood. But Breaking Bad helped bring it to a wider audience, since AMC is basic cable rather than premium. (AMC had launched into that a year before with Mad Men, which was similarly TV as good film.)
I think Breaking Bad really set the stage for TV shows being good film. Whether you like the show or not it had a clear and defined story and ended after 5 seasons where most shows before would just run until their ratings dropped.
Thanks, I read this expecting not to like it, but it resonated with me a lot. This past Oscars show, I'd seen only two of the Best Films nominees, and they were both streamed. I also tried Nomadland and I turned it off.
TV has indeed taken over. The creativity of Breaking Bad or Succession or Yellowstone is what we used to watch movies for. Real creativity is always there and it'll go where it's appreciated.
I don't want to make this tl;dr so just one more thing: I hosted A.O. Scott at Google [1] and I mentioned that I never look at Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic. I read him, and whoever's on the Roger Ebert site. An 80% "score" from a bunch of stupid people is still stupid.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Kh3-DGU3l4
I don't share the opinion that it's "foced down the throat", but at least for young adults, many conversations are about the currently popular TV show or movie. So while it's not "forced down your throat", I think many people watch them to fit in. From what I saw it started with Breaking Bad, then Game of Thrones, and then it started getting faster and faster.
To me this sounds a lot like that he's built himself a solid foundation in evading critical thinking about himself, possibly to avoid a more serious psychological harm which he thinks he may face if he looks at the bigger picture.
He compares himself to the animals: "They never ask for anything different for supper".
> "People might think I’m not experiencing new things, but I think the secret to a good life is to enjoy your work. I could never stay indoors and watch TV. I hear London is a place best avoided. I think living in a city would be terrible"
As a bachelor, how will he know what it is like to look into the eyes of a loved with whom you form a new family? Without watching TV, how will he know that movies like "Up" (Pixar 2009) or series like "Breaking Bad" are well worth spending their time, without incurring a dramatic time penalty in your life? Take the TV out to the porch, if staying inside is such a pain. How can he be sure that a visit to the British Museum in London isn't worth the effort, or time, or whatever he thinks that speaks against it? Will he find laughing people in the cafes of the city?
All of this feels like a "too afraid to discover" that he disguises it as a "secret to a good life". Not a happy life, but a good life. His sheeps make him happy. Like his spouse or kids could make him happy, or a trip to the city or watching 40 minutes of TV once a week. Or a delicious steak. Or riding a bike on a trail, if he weren't so old by now.
I wonder if the Welsh radio station has told him about the current dilemmas which AI is confronting us with, or if he thought about where and under which circumstances all this gear he owns to exercise his role of a farmer has been developed and produced and if his lifestyle, if applied to everyone, would have made it possible for this gear to exist.
It's OK if he decides to eat the same supper every day, if he prefers not to live with people, but to me this feels more like an elaborate thinking system designed to avoid something which would cause him pain, which doesn't cause pain to others.
Sure there is a lot to criticize about our modern life, and many people aren't happy living in the city and with their day to day jobs, or with their family situation, but he has built himself a very tall wall in order to be shielded from him being possibly affected by these problems and calls it a good life. Not much of a difference to a suburban man who tolerates his job, hates his kids, but has the biggest amount of fun when he jumps into his glider on the weekends, watches his favorite TV series at the end of the day and loves to go jogging every day for an hour. Or have a beer with a friend.
At least his sheep are among themselves, maybe some of them enjoy spending their time together and are glad to get anything to eat at all. But how would he know, if he's just happy pretending to be a fellow sheep and calls it a day.
Then again, there are comments like the one from telesilla.
As an avid fan, I enjoyed how Breaking Bad wrapped things up. Checking right now, it has a 9.9/10 rating on IMDB as well. Dexter, one of the examples in this article, was falling apart before the final episode. The Simpsons, unfortunately, may end up having more bad episodes than good. Thanks to a user on Reddit, you can see the badness creeping in visually https://i.redd.it/edv7vzciu8r41.png
Video games are just a younger medium than books and movies. Even TV needed more time to be seen at a similar level to movies in terms of art.
We're getting there though. The past 15 years have given us many masterpieces of gaming that can absolutely be considered art, and they're becoming more and more common. As this happens more and more, the medium is taken more and more seriously.
Many games still suffer from feature-creep by way of trying to please users demanding "content". This incidentally make them feel like the primary goal is to waste time rather than to experience a high quality story. In other words, there are still too many "Big Bang Theory" and not enough "Breaking Bad" so that is why it still feels less valuable.
Because I told you I just binged The Queen's Gambit, you wouldn't look at me like I wasted my time, you'd ask me about the story. If I told you I just binged TBBT, you'd just think I'm nuts. (No offense if you like TBBT, it was a decent sitcom for a couple seasons, but … hey, you do you).
For example, I just finished Control. A wonderful, high quality game. Great storytelling, great mechanics, and … a crapton of completely useless busywork that is just there because it's expected to be there. A talent tree, repeat random side-missions, a crafting system, etc. None of this is useful to the core game. It's a shame because I believe if it had done less in terms of busywork mechanics and maybe focused a tiny bit more on puzzles, that game could have been a masterpiece of the same caliber as Portal and Portal 2. (Can you imagine if Portal 2 had a talent tree and a crafting system?)
Instead, it's a Season 7 of Game of Thrones. Great production value, but so hit and miss in terms of final quality because of avoidable mistakes. Could have been so good, you know?
I'm of two minds when it comes to this issue. I quite liked Fight Club precisely because in my younger years it was 'macho porn', but it left me with some thoughts that later on bloomed into understanding that the film is really criticising all of that.
I've had similar experiences with other works. Starship Troopers isn't quite the fascist power-fantasy that it appears to be on first sight. American Psycho can sorta be seen as a power fantasy, initially, but it's really about a pathetic guy struggling in his environment. And so on.
I don't feel it would do the world a service to criticize these (initially) ambiguous works because they're not spelling out the message they contain. And so while I often liked Ebert's reviews, I felt he was judging Fight Club in precisely the superficial way that doesn't do it justice. I imagine he might review 'Lolita' as a work glorifying adults loving prepubescent girls, when clearly the book isn't really doing anything quite like that.
Err, I suppose the counterpoint in my 'two minds' perspective is that I do get that there are cases where it does feel like the 'criticism' is a flimsy excuse to revel in its opposite. I don't think that applies to Fight Club, but it's an edge case. Better examples would be shows like Breaking Bad. I enjoyed that show a ton, but I could not find a proper excuse to watch it other than 'crime porn'. Any 'message' it tried to convey was clear from the first season. We all kept watching because we loved to see how bad Walter White could get.
Yeah it's a commonly held misconception spanning decades that cops must identify themselves if asked. I wonder where it originated. Needs some sunlight like:
Badger: "Prove you're not a cop." ... Undercover cop: "If you ask a cop if he's a cop, he's like... obligated to tell you -- it's in the Constitution."
- Breaking Bad, Season 2, Episode 8, moments before Badger gets arrested
Real tv fans have come to accept that the last season of The Wire and the last episode of Breaking Bad are pretty blah. We just shake our head and move on.
Game of Thrones^^
Friends raved about it, but I just am not into fantasy genre so ignored it for a few years. When I finally caved, after a few episodes I fell hook-line-and-sinker into what is an incredibly well crafted story about the human condition: greed, lust, loyalty, ambition, betrayal... you name it, it has it all.
What it has in common with other amazing writing (e.g. Breaking Bad) is realistic (i.e. human) responses to incredible situations.
Edit: ^^ excluding the last season and the horrid finale!!
Martin's books are exquisitly well written and the early seasons were a credit to them - not so much once they diverted.
Two finales:
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. When the seventh book came out in 2007 there was this fear among the fandom that JK Rowling couldn't deliver a great ending. I think most people agreed she did very well (even more than expected, considering the complexity of the story in the prior six books).
- Breaking Bad last season / last episode: there aren't many tv shows that can end in a high note (check Game of Thrones, for example). I think Breaking Bad - and in general, what separates the best tv shows from great tv shows - is that they are able to have a good ending.
I find the same with age. I've seen every plot, every type of character.
I have a friend who was working with movie scripts, and he described it like a factory. Generally every movie is a 5 act play, you get an intro to some typical character then something happens to them that's either funny or serious depending on genre, then there's a solution, etc.
But perhaps the thing to do is not to expect surprise in the general construction, but excellence in the execution. That's why I can still watch stuff that's highly rated eg Breaking Bad. Shakespeare is another one of those where you can how it's made, but it's made well.
Food is the same. It's gonna be a mixture of fat and sugar, with some water and flavourings. But some things are better done than others.
Truthfully, probably it would just be easier to watch the DVD for watching on the TV, but Plex lets you watch on all devices.
I really don't need instant access to tons of movies, but my kids watch a lot of the same ones over and over, so I keep those on Plex, rather than paying for Disney plus or whatever.
After ripping I usually increase the crf a little to reduce the file size to host on plex. Movies that we are watching a lot live on Plex, but if we stop watching something, or it seems like a one-time thing, then they can be removed from the library.
The burned DVDs are really more of a personal archive. Those movies could get added back to Plex someday. I don't need all of Lost or Breaking Bad on my Plex server, because I've recently watched them, so they'll live in the DVD drawer for a few years.
It’s basically the fucking fly episode in breaking bad
The fly episode of breaking bad comes to mind.
In the Breaking Bad episode "Salud" several people drink poisoned liquor, including the poisoner. The poisoner survives because he induces vomiting soon after drinking and has medical resources prepared to treat him afterward. That wasn't what I expected.
I actually expected the poisoner to have taken prophylactic naloxone and served liquor poisoned with a potent, short-half-life opioid like sufentanil. It could kill his enemies directly via respiratory depression or just render them unconscious so he could drag them all into the swimming pool to drown. This would be the modern version of the old murder mystery trick "poisoner gradually builds up his tolerance to arsenic from small doses, then consumes arsenic-poisoned food/drink along with the victim." It would have the advantage of not being as hazardous or laborious as building up a tolerance for arsenic. It would also have been a clever chemistry based approach to murder in a series that often showed off some bit of chemistry.
I don't know if this naloxone/opioid poisoning trick has been used in other shows or published works. A quick search for "murder" "mystery" "naloxone" didn't turn up anything likely.
Not entirely, the only TV show I know of that managed to completely leave on a high note is Breaking Bad. The final Seinfeld episode is one of the weakest of the entire series.
> "If a gun was put to my head, and they said, ‘Tell me the best episode of television ever,’ it’s this."
Better than "Homer's Enemy" (the Frank Grimes episode)? No way. While the Monorail episode is extremely good, I still have entire dialogues of "Homer's Enemy" memorized, and I haven't watched the Simpsons for over 10 years now. It's perfect in every way until the very last second ("Change the channel, Marge!"), has an extremely economic and concise narration (just think of all the sub and side plots: the factory, the school contest, the quest of Homer to get Grimes to like him) and just delivers one memorable line after another, non-stop.
"This is my son Bart. He owns a factory downtown."
"Simpson, you've got a 5-13!!!"
"You went into outer space? You?" - "Sure. You've never been there? Would you like to see my Grammy award?"
Also, the overall best TV show episode surely is Breaking Bad's Ozymandias, although I admit that you can enjoy "The Monorail" and "Homer's Enemy" as standalone episodes, whereas to fully appriciate "Ozymandias", you need to have watched the entire series up to that point.
I'm no TV show buff, but what I gather from my friends, your premise is pretty much false in many cases.
First, in the age of binge watching, people might be specifically looking for shows with tons of episodes/seasons out to sink their teeth in.
Second, some shows take a while to "warm up" and get the word of mouth out before they catch on. Some shows might be dozens of episodes in before they become wildly popular. You say that Breaking Bad and GOT break the dynamic, but I think it's far more common that very popular shows do so after they've been out for a while.
Third, with episodic formats it doesn't matter if a show is long running, people can jump in or out at any given time.
Fourth, people might enter your target demographic over time. You say that the potential viewers of season 3 are the viewers of season 2, but what about a new batch of viewers of season 1? Let's say your demographic is young adults. Every year you have teens entering your target demographic, and you could count those as potential viewers of your show. And again, on the age of the internet, is dead easy to start viewing a show from the beginning at any time.
> breaking bad or GOT
You're skipping over something really important about these shows.
Build up and word of mouth. If either of these series' seasons dropped all at once, I'm 100% certain they wouldn't have been nearly as big.
BB Season 4 was the absolute peak of "what's going to happen next???" for the internet communities I was involved in, my family members who were watching, my friends who were watching, casual chats at work. There was suspense in waiting week to week and discussions carried on while we waited.
Netflix releasing episodes all at once has completely destroyed momentum and build up. With everyone watching at their own pace, there's no collective presence. The episodes might have your mental space for a couple days/weeks while you binge, and then it's gone, and people who are also interested are going to be on different timelines.
You're less likely to recommend the show to others 6 months later, because you literally haven't watched or thought about it for 6 months.
I like AppleTV+'s move of doing weekly episodes. Everyone is on the same page again, and you get to share something together.
Totally agree! And I am convinced that now that I will give the Orville a shot. I am kind os disapointed with season 7 of DS9, the focus on the spiritual aspect was a little bit too much on the nose for me.
I like your theoretical story arcs, it would make for great stories around the federation and the moral superiority, assumed, percieved or actually true, compared to other entities. I guess after having a narowwly avoided a coup by star fleet and having fought an intergalactic war, that alone should have had a deep impact. maybe even a change with regards to the rpime directive. Why would you leave all these new worlds and civilisations upt for grabs for an adversary, right?
It is quite striking, so, how the way tv series told stories changed from the episodic approach from TNG to a more arc driven approach in DS9 and VOY. Both of which sit somewhere between the episodic style of e.g. TNG and things like Breaking Bad and the first seasons of prison break.
This is why I decided a few years ago to not ever even start watching new series. I hate the cliffhangers; I hate the one-episode-a-week shit; I hate the split seasons; I hate the waits even when the series is probably coming back. Best to wait for something like Breaking Bad to finish its entire run, and read how everyone liked it, including the ending, and then start watching the first episode. There is an overwhelming amount of good content from the past, more than I will ever be able to watch.
ALTHOUGH. Rick and Morty hooked me anyway. Love that show, and so pissed at how long it took to finish out this past season when it was delayed.
From my point of view the problem manifests in this way: I simply don't bother to invest the time to watch new shows until it's clear that they're going to get a proper run that allows them to finish well (Breaking Bad, Justified; even Sons of Anarchy, which was a real slog for the last 3 seasons, ended well).
I'm tired of investing time in shows that Netflix simply drops: The Expanse (though now thankfully picked up by Amazon), Designated Survivor, and Shooter (although that was total crap, especially after season 1) spring immediately to mind, but there have been plenty of others.
I also won't bother starting to watch shows that I know Netflix have cancelled before they've concluded (e.g., Glow), because what's the point? And this is starting to severely erode the value of Netflix's library to me.
Things that have worked incredibly well on Netflix are shows that tell self-contained stories within a single season, like Narcos or Fargo, or shows that tell have a self contained but are able to tell it in a longer form than feature film would allow. The canonical example of the latter for me is Godless, which is one of the best shows on TV, I think. Genuinely fantastic.
And this last point leads on to another, which others have made: US TV series are too long, typically 18 - 24 episodes per season, multiple seasons, often too bloated with filler episodes, and often suffer from ridiculous over-plotting after the first few seasons, which comes off as aimless thrashing around: Prison Break (season 3 onwards: just utter nonsense), 24 (SPOILER ALERT: I mean, seriously, WTF was that Tony Almeida betrayal storyline all about in, I think, the final season - multiple sharks were jumped and I'm still pissed off about it).
On the flipside UK TV series are often too short: 6 half-hour episodes is still quite typical, so you're only really getting into a show and then suddenly the season ends. With that said, for some shows this has been made to work really well: Line of Duty, or the earlier seasons of Luther.
I do feel like, for many shows, a happy medium would be 10 - 12 hour long episodes. You could then afford to make a much more polished product, whilst still probably investing quite a bit less.
Hard disagree.
First of all, most streaming shows are 10 episodes per season, 12 at most.
But as for the number of seasons, what's amazing about television is how deep and intimate your knowledge of the characters becomes. The kind of emotional depth and resonance you get with characters in the 4th and 5th season of a show is simply unparalleled -- we know their life histories, and the smallest of scenes can shake us with the amount of meaning they convey.
If you think of Mad Men or The Sopranos or The Americans or Breaking Bad -- my god, each season is better than the last because it's like they approach infinite richness. The last seasons get to levels none of the first seasons were able to.
Also, it's a huge rarity for shows to make it to 7–9 seasons. The ones that do are because they're hugely popular and people want to watch them. If Game of Thrones had still had books to work off of, I think pretty much everybody would have loved 3 or 4 more seasons.
So true. I don't get why American TV shows always need to be ran to the ground.
Like Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory are shows that should've gone past their 8th season. The Office should've never had those abysmal last two-three seasons. That '70s show should've never had those abysmal last three seasons.
I always like it when creators and producers recognize when a show has run its course. This is why we have good memories of Seinfeld. Jerry Seinfeld stood to make something crazy like 5 million per episode if they had done a 10th season but he knew the show had run its course and ended it on a high note (something, btw, that was a plot point on an earlier episode).
Same with Breaking Bad, they knew that they had a story to tell and that it didn't need to drag on and they delivered some of the finest 5 seasons of television drama that one could ever ask for.
With regard to Game of Thrones, I don't think the article argues that it necessarily got better in quality season by season but that it took a couple of seasons to find a massive viewership and become a cultural phenomenon. That said, I think the quality did improve between season 1 and 5.
And I vehemently disagree with the notion that "almost all shows get significantly worse". There are definitely many shows that do jump the shark at some point and significantly drop in quality. On the flip side, there are many examples of shows that needed a couple of seasons to find their tone and really hit their stride which they most likely never would have had the chance to do at Netflix. E.g: Parks and Recreation, Community, Justified, even Breaking Bad imho.
I've been wondering about the "economics" of long running serials for a while.
If you have a new series, all potential viewers are potential viewers. If you have a season 3, the only potential viewers are season 2 watchers. A genuinely huge show like breaking bad or GOT might break this dynamic, as people eventually catch up on old seasons and make the pool bigger. In normal circumstances though, new seasons have limited potential. They also have no upside. Season 4 is not going to be a blockbuster if 1-3 were average.
Maybe it makes sense to shoot single seasons, with multiple seasons being a rare circumstance thing. Just tell a story that fits in 6-12 hours.
Seems like it would be good for creativity, the opposite of cinema's recycling problem. Who says new shows are worse than new seasons. It even seems like a bolder choice to me. No guaranteed audience, but unlimited audience.
Essentially if the show isn't a hit immediately after release, it won't be renewed, and the threshold required to renew goes up exponentially every season, so essentially a show has to be a runaway hit in order to survive past the second season.
I buy it, but that sucks. I know my view is idiosyncratic, but I view making money like a biological process. Most things have to do it if they want to survive, but it doesn't deserve to be the thing that matters. The Silicon Valley focus on explosive growth, as opposed to healthy and reasonable long-term growth, is bad for the world.
I wonder if they are adequately assessing the risk of this decision model. People get deeply emotionally attached to media, and it's a strong negative when a series you love is cancelled, so this could negatively affect their brand over time. And that's not something which is so easy to design KPI's around as new subscriber numbers.
Right. This is especially true of series with defined story arcs. A sitcom can be ended at any time, but if Breaking Bad had ended at Season 4, it would have pissed off everyone.
For quite a while I used the rule that my favourite TV show could only be watched in the gym on my tablet. So if I wanted to really watch the latest episode of breaking bad or whatever it was I had to go to the gym and work out. It compelled me to get to the gym and stay exercising for 30+ minutes. Then I would also typically push out some strength on top of that cardio. Surprisingly effective to tie the two together and build a habit of it over a few months, starting initially lightly it can get you a long way.
> Should television shows been punished for cliffhangers because they hook people into seeing the next episode? Breaking Bad had an interesting plot and character progression that made me want to keep watching - are they addicting me?
Honestly, this is a super interesting question. I would say anything designed to succeed by hijacking human brain chemistry instead of providing superior or novel quality is probably worth regulating at some level.
From that standpoint, Breaking Bad would not have an issue - it's superior and novel. Shows that succeed in making a viewer binge with a combination of (effectively) mid-episode endings and autoplay, are somewhat hacky. You can't regulate cliffhanger endings, so autoplay should probably not be legal - Netflix already asks you if you want to continue watching, they should simply do so after every episode. Shows with good content like Breaking Bad would still be easy to binge (just press yes once an hour), and poor quality shows would have a harder time taking advantage of brain chemistry by requiring an affirmative act.
One problem with this is that it's easy to conflate "addictive" with "people like to use it". Should television shows been punished for cliffhangers because they hook people into seeing the next episode? Breaking Bad had an interesting plot and character progression that made me want to keep watching - are they addicting me?
One person might say "We created all these statuses and features to be addictive" but it seems just as true to say "We created this stuff because people liked it and we are trying to make something people like."
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.
> I was amazed at the series Breaking Bad, that a teacher would take a summer job to make ends meet. At a carwash no less.
Breaking Bad isn’t supposed to be a documentary. Teachers don’t have summer jobs at car washes. Tutoring is both easier and pays better, as does summer school. Working at a car wash is an example of shitty choices, as is his entire relationship with his wife. It’s like his decision to go into drugs in the first place. He’s a public sector employee. He does not need to make drugs to get excellent health care. He does it because he wants to. Working at the car wash is not something he needs to do, it’s a way of expressing his martyr complex.
Same with -The Thirteenth Floor", one of my favourite movie, make sure you don't read any spoiler about it though.
Nexts on the list:
Moon
Ex Machina - I personally have no issue with nudity but I wish there were less of it in that movie because I know it turned a lot of people off
The Green Mile - not quite changed my view, but reinforced it
Westworld 3rd season (first 2 seasons revisit themes from above movies, they are good but not necessarily new themes)
Breaking Bad - I tend not to like series and this is a really long one, but it really does make you question things.
The arts (TV, movies, music, and related fields such as tourism, architecture, design, advertising) are massive industries in the United States. Then of course there are the soft power benefits of having much of the world grow up staring at America at the movies, singing along to American music, wearing blue jeans, etc. Same goes for many other developed economies.
I admit I am someone who appreciates art for its own sake, but after years spent eroding the post-WW2 edge in science and manufacturing, creative endeavors are part of what sustains us materially as well as the intangible ways.
You need a bunch of artists for one Breaking Bad, the same way you need many startups for one Facebook or many scientists for one Einstein.
Have you really read the entire Western Canon? Listened to the collective oeuvres of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart? Watched the AFI top 100 movies or IMDB’s top 1000? Watched all of The Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad? Read the SF Masterworks Collection?
I was hoping someone would mention Breaking Bad. The third-to-last episode of the last season is called "Ozymandias" and it's probably the second-greatest episode of television ever filmed. The greatest is the very last episode "Felina."
You have to watch the whole series linearly though; if you skip to those episodes they won't mean anything.
Factoid for the day: Cranston's work on that episode won him the Breaking Bad role later. AMC wasn't convinced he could pull it off (seeing him as a sitcom comedy actor) until Gillian showed them his work in that episode and he was cast.
TV series might not be as long as books but all the multi-year long series people put however many hours into them as the series was long. Breaking Bad had 62 episodes, average 45 mins each = 46hrs of watching that show. That feels like more time than most novels.
> Many reasons, but a key one is that people are now paying for TV directly
This is an insignificant reason. People paid for cable TV and were soon shown ads. Even people who pay to see movies are shown ads before the movie and during movies via product placement. Hulu makes great shows but sells ads more highly targeted than any broadcast channels.
The biggest reason for the current golden age is that streaming services don't have to try to create the most broadly appealing content to fill the most valuable timeslots and can instead cater to each viewer's tastes directly. Breaking Bad was a great show before it got on Netflix, but it wasn't a hit until wide on-demand streaming availability helped it find its audience. Tiger King is the kind of hot garbage that would normally get an afternoon time slot on a second tier cable channel, but making it available on demand turned it into a megahit.
>In my opinion, this is no different from saying there's no need to watch new films or TV shows that come out, or even older ones that you haven't seen before. Why do that when you can just watch Seinfeld, Breaking Bad, the Godfather, and 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Indeed, why?
In my opinion, this is no different from saying there's no need to watch new films or TV shows that come out, or even older ones that you haven't seen before. Why do that when you can just watch Seinfeld, Breaking Bad, the Godfather, and 2001: A Space Odyssey? Why check out books you haven't read before when you have [insert childhood favorite]?
There's absolutely nothing wrong with repeatedly returning to old stuff you like. But I don't see how people can be satisfied doing nothing but that. Fantastic new art is being created all the time, and the amount of people creating art is also increasing all the time.
The point of endless digging is to try to find other stuff that you may end up liking as much as, or perhaps even more than, the older stuff. It's not simply to consume for its own sake: it's to discover things you otherwise might be missing out on and would be thankful you found. How can you even know if that'll happen or not if you aren't exposed to lots of new things?
Also, what does it even mean to "endlessly collect" music in the modern day? You just listen to stuff you haven't heard and turn it off if you don't like it and save it to a playlist/favorites list if you do like it. There's no cost to trying albums you haven't heard before, like there was in the past. If you do really want a physical copy for whatever reason, it's easy to listen online first and decide whether or not you should get the physical copy.
This seems akin to lamenting that people are "endlessly collecting" new shows, films, and documentaries by browsing Netflix.
Excuse my ignorance, but is there an atheist form of AA and similar 12-steps programs?
My knowledge of them is very limited to pop culture (like its depiction in TV shows such as The Wire, Breaking Bad and Grey's Anatomy), but their depictions always seemed annoying to me because they are all about god, submission to a "higher power", and "the original sin"/"flawed humans" in one way or the other. If you are actively atheist, you will find this approach off-putting and it won't help you.
> How many TV shows feature dwarfs or people with who are abnormal?
Oh I don't know...Game of Thrones (Tyrion), Stranger Things (Dustin), Breaking Bad (Walt Jr.) etc.
At the point where the Bitcoin was converted into bank account funds.
There's a reason why money laundering is a criminal specialty.
He needed to stop stealing and fencing the goods before getting caught, wait a few months or years without doing anything shady at all, then start dripping the ill-gotten gains into his account alongside an entirely legitimate cashflow, a little bit at a time.
Buying a mansion and a roadster out of the blue is an "stupid criminals get caught; all criminals are stupid" type of move.
Even if all you know of crime comes from the movie theater and television set, you'd know that after the airport job in Goodfellas, some of the guys got whacked for violating the "don't buy anything!" edict. In Breaking Bad, the car wash and the Pollos Hermanos chicken restaurants were necessary for laundering the methamphetamine revenue.
I think the mention of Bitcoin mixers was just chaff. The guy was caught because his bank tattled on him, and the IRS didn't buy his flimsy sourcing story. If he had just kept the proceeds as some variety of cryptocurrency, he might not have gotten away with it entirely, but the investigation would probably still be ongoing--the questions remaining to be answered being, of course, "how much did he steal, exactly?" and "how do we seize and forfeit those funds?" Someone might know that he was stealing something, but they wouldn't necessarily know how much.
My wild speculation is that the longer time people spend in the menu the more likely they are to close the app, and the more likely they are to cancel a subscription next month. The streaming services are all about reducing churn.
So for daily content. Show ends, you go back to the menu. Do you pick the next thing to watch? I don't know - but they've tried a number of "daily" or "weekly" shows before, and they haven't appeared to be successful. I suspect it's because they didn't improve metrics. Versus say releasing a show all at once - people binge for 3-4 hours and come back the next night to do the same thing.
I think going with amateur youtubers who produce lots of cheap, short content would be smart for like, Snap or Instagram but very bad for Netflix. Netflix's original content hit it off in terms of quality, long form narratives with dramas like House of Cards, while syndicating shows after air gave them second life (Breaking Bad, the Office, Friends) and absolutely crushing it with "must see" films (recently, the Irishman, Marriage Story, but also in the past stuff like Beasts of No Nation).
Conversely, their cheap shows from nobodies tend to die in the womb, and I don't think Netflix does that without good data to make such a decision.
That's my understanding of the first film as well. Michael, like most tragic heroes, was brought down by his own pride. Gangster and crime stories are often better understood as forms of tragedy; Scarface and Breaking Bad are also tragedies about men brought down by pride (and, in the case of Scarface, many of the other seven deadly sins as well).
I haven't watched a second of breaking bad or most top rated movies. How do you bring that experience to me? Movies and TV shows are just things I rarely have much interest in.
Something I think about is how there have been outstanding games that the majority of people will never play. Just in recent years - Red Dead I and II, Horizon Zero Dawn, Last of Us, etc. These have quality/polish up with Breaking Bad or any acclaimed movie/TV, but no one else in my extended family would have played a second of any of them. How do you bring that experience to people?
>Yet, without that external context, if someone were to watch Breaking Bad and was told it was a biopic
Reminded of exploration of similar idea in Galaxy Quest https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0177789/
Does watching Netflix, HBO, or Hulu count as watching TV? That's how I usually watch television shows and none has commercials.
If I watch broadcast TV it's through my DVR and I skip commercials.
Pretty much the only live TV I watch is sports and there's a lot of advertising there.
I'd argue that TV isn't trash though. There's an unbelievable amount of stuff being made and it isn't hard to find something great to watch. My to-watch list still has Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mr Robot, Westworld S2, Game of Thrones, and about 20 other series on it.
Wow, climb on down buddy. E.T. the movie is even referenced on Eternal Terminal's site. https://eternalterminal.dev/howitworks/#the-eternal-terminal-et
You remind me of the main character's wife from Breaking Bad, what's her name, oh yeah Skyler.
For me, I've realized that 80% of media is not worth my time. Unless it's something that is 'can't miss' like Martin Scorsese's movie that is debuting on Netflix or Planet Earth II, I can skip it. I use my family's Netflix account, I don't have my own.
I've tried to keep up with the Marvel universe but it's next to impossible at this point. All my favorite shows (Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Sopranos, Game of Thrones) are completed now too. I go to the movies once or twice a year now, at most.
It'd be nice to have an "I've already seen this" button that will mark an episode/season/show as watched so it doesn't keep coming back up. Netflix really wants me to watch Breaking Bad, but I've already seen it. I liked it; give me more like that, but not exactly that
Switching frequently between service is exactly what the companies don't want. I agree that this might be where we're headed, but the idea of a subscription is to have a recurring and predictable stream of income.
The best solution for the content industry as a whole would be to set up a clearing house, that provides access to all movies and series, streaming services should then be able to purchase the content they want on their service. That would allow the services to compete on the quality of their service, not their catalog. Let's face it consumers don't care if Star Wars is created by Disney or Warner Bros or that Breaking Bad is distributed by Sony.
If you've never heard "burner phone" before, you probably haven't watched Breaking Bad, which was an American cultural touch-stone she mentioned, and an excellent show you'll likely enjoy (and I envy you being able to binge watch it now, instead of waiting week after week for the next episode):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Bad
And then there's the "Breaking Phones" spin-off we really all wanted to see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNzS66iRcjw
The actual "Breaking Bad" spin-off "Better Call Saul" has a whole multi-episode sub-plot about burner phones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89wXeYOls7o
You can see how cool that burner phone must have made her daughter feel!
> If one finds Netflix, video games, partying, and vacations enjoyable; and they spend time pursuing those after becoming financially independent & retiring early, are they missing the big picture?
Each of us has to define the scope of his life, I personally have a hard time imagining that a fully developed human being will be deeply satisfied by consuming media. In French these things are called "divertissement", which literally means "diversion". There are many other things to explore than mere consumption. It's kind of the junk food of life, it makes you feel good for a short while but not that good in the long run. I doubt anyone will remember binge watching breaking bad as a milestone of there life (Or remember it at all).
I'm not saying these things are intrinsically bad, we should just be careful about how much of our life we dedicate to them, especially when work already takes most of our time already. If your life is work>consumption>sleep and you feel like you're missing something your probably are.
> GoT, Breaking Bad, Westworld
finished show with poorly received last couple of seasons, not a hbo show that's streaming on Netflix right now, 2-season old show with a silly 2nd season.
House of Cards was also kind of crap after 4 seasons (and even earlier if we're going to nitpick)
Breaking bad is now seen with rose tainted glasses, but I remember how some folks talked about it when the show was running (esp the fly episode).
Finally, if you're going to praise HBO, not mentioning The Wire is kind of ignorant.
Very few shows are good after the first couple of seasons. Breaking Bad is probably the only TV show I know longer than 2-3 seasons that maintains its quality from beginning to end. The Americans is also pretty good.
Even Game of Thrones went downhill on its last seasons.
Stranger Things has also gone down the hill. I watched the first 3 episodes of the new season and I'm done with it. It has gone from a sci-fi show to a teenager drama.
> Breaking Bad is not a great example, because the show was created with a defined length that fit the narrative.
Is that really true? Do you have a source? From what I’ve read, Gilligan only said that as they reached Season 5. The studios didn’t know that it will be 5 seasons. maybe Gilligan had the idea in his mind since the beginning but that’s what I’m trying to say. Studios should only green light shows with a predefined length. And of course they knew the narrative. You could stretch the narrative to 10 seasons or keep it at 2. Which is the point. Keep it short.
Breaking Bad spun off Better Call Saul, which I really hope they wrap up in Season 5. The Americans and Justified are two other shows that ended when they should have. Fargo is a fresh story every season, so it can probably go on a bit longer. Fleabag was a perfect two season show.
Breaking Bad is not a great example, because the show was created with a defined length that fit the narrative. It had a certain beginning and and end in mind before it became a show. The studio wanted it to run longer, but the owners of the show said no.
The only major departure from Breaking Bad on paper and Breaking Bad in reality was Jesse Pinkman. He was originally only to be a bit character in one episode, but the showrunners liked Aaron Paul so much that he became a part of, and changed the tenor of the whole show.
The Alamo Drafthouse used to do this in Austin, except it was the AMC dramas “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.” It was free - $5 to save a seat that then went towards concessions - but the networks threatened legal action on the basis that it skewed viewership numbers or some such.
What was really clever about it was that Drafthouse was playing the previous week’s episode without commercials while the new one aired, then edited out the commercials for the current week’s episode and played it right after.
Those were good times.
The problem with serialized TV is that sooner or later you realize that it's all about making you think that there's something cool that's going to happen in the next episode. Nothing cool ever actually happens, but you don't realize this except in retrospect, and, occasionally, when there has been so much hype that the lack of a payoff is impossible to ignore (c.f. Lost, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones...)
The only exception I can think of is Breaking Bad.
Agreed. I really liked Chernobyl but I honestly thought Breaking Bad and the first four seasons of Game of Thrones were superior, in no small part because of the high excellence that’s extremely difficult to maintain beyond a few episodes. It’s also much harder to make character development feel earned in only a few episodes.
Agreed, it's brilliant and imho the best series in years. The last TV episode that left me as speechless and uneasy as the first episode of Chernobyl (the shift worker looking down into the open reactor from the roof!) was the now legendary Ozymandias episode of Breaking Bad.
>The cultural, scientific, and commercial works that have been created in English in the past 100 years dwarf anything created in French or Latin by a gigantic order of magnitude.
I beg to differ. Compared to the Latin and French corpus, the body cultural works created in English is paltry and subpar. And that's the British ones, American ones, even less so. I can give you scientific and commercial if you feel any better.
>Why would we possibly switch to anything else, and lose 'access' to all that? All of the greatest movies and TV shows, the millions of scientific articles, the music, the computer code...
Yeah, pop music, movies, and TV shows. We'd lose Happy Days, I love Lucy, Breaking Bad, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, and Kanye West. OK, and Melvin and Henry James and Hemingway. Not much loss.
We would still have Racine, Rousseau, Rabelais, Rimbaud (and that's just part of the R).
Plus, all the huge variety and masterpieces of the peoples of the earth, before American commercial monoculture and its marketing power ate everything else.
I have worked on ultra-violent games but never did research on what actual killings looked like as referenced in the article. As the one quote said, context is important as well as how close something gets to realistic looking. That embedded Mortal Kombat trailer was pretty unrealistic looking IMO, the physics was cartoon like and several what would be real life death blows were not death blows until the fight was over. I was pretty disgusted by these sorts of things when Mortal Kombat came out when I was a child and didn't get the appeal of it so maybe I got inured to cartoon violence by exposure. OTOH, Breaking Bad had a few death scenes similar to one of those, and aired on prime time basic cable.
For one game I worked on, I was instructed to get blood splatters for cuts and slicing off of body parts (in a cartoon character world) like the movie 300 which were over the top and very obviously particle effects (the producer loved referencing current popular culture...). It never occurred to me to go looking for what blood spurts look like in real life, as I was given an order for a style.
Most of the games I have worked on were not realistic looking, though I remember doing internal tiger team testing for Warcraft 3 and there was one mission where you have to kill villagers. These characters are tiny and cartoon like but the voices of them suffering in this made me feel so bad and similar to stuff happening the real world I thought we should take the mission out of the game - I think they toned it down a bit but it was in the final version. This is kind of similar to the mission in Call of Duty series where one has to participate in the slaughter of civilians in an airport - I didn't like that one either.
I still have trouble watching some of the fight scenes in TV/film/wrestling when they look too real or wince especially with blades, even though it's obviously stunts with props and probably CGI for the most gruesome bits - I have retained sensitivity to realistic violence.
Weirdest yet is that I finally decided to watch Breaking Bad and the last episode I watched also mentioned Lily of the Valley :-)
I find this data peculiar. It's not like we see spikes of murders after horror movies get released or anything like that. All forms of violent crime have been on the decline for decades virtually without exception. And even shows that one might think "glorify crime" like Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, The Sopranos, etc. don't elicit this kind of copycat activity.
I wonder what it is about suicidal content that affects people so uniquely.
I could name far more!
Cosmos? Planet Earth? Or what about the myriad of documentaries you can find? Or shows about history?
I suppose this also depends on if you think fiction betters you as a person (I don't think the medium you receive it in matters all that much; so I don't think you need to read a thick russian novel). If you don't; I guess I just fundamentally disagree with you, and in a way, I almost feel sad on your behalf. Almost all of human morals and values, not to mention deep life lessons, have historically been taught through fiction. If you do, then obviously there's a lot of EXCELLENT fiction on TV, shows like Breaking Bad, or Mad Men. Or recent shows like Barry. Those shows rival even large novels in the amount of time it takes to consume them and what they can say, and they even have the advantage of being able to take advantage of music and filmography to set moods and make points that books cannot (books of course also have their own set of advantage, I'm not trashing them)
Can someone please suggest a movie or a documentary which talks about the dangers smd facts of drugs like these so that I can watch with my family and make them aware?
Please don't suggest "Breaking Bad" as it is a series. I am looking for something 3 hours or less.
Language might be English or Hindi or south Indian languages.
My family members do know that some powerful addictive drugs exist out there. But I am very certain that they have no idea how much powerful and how much addictive. I don't come across discussions or news articles (talk about the filter bubble) in the kind of social media friends circle and communities that my acquaintances frequently visit. (This is one of the very few cases where I am thankful that filter bubbles exist)
I am aware only because of hacker news and reddit (which others around me don't use)
I am aware that just because I don't hear about it, will not mean that things like these doesn't exist around me. It does exist and any of us can get influenced anytime.
With that context, I would like my friends and family atleast aware once of the intensity of the global risk snd problem, and it will be best to do in the form of video, movie, documentary.
So can someone suggest me please?
I think this goes to show how much of an impact HBO had on television.
There isn't an argument quite like this outside of maybe NBC's 90s sitcoms, arguing about Seinfeld/Friends/Frasier or AMC's late-aughts Mad Men/Breaking Bad/Walking Dead.
What i find amusing is that he only asked for $100,000 to build the network. To risk his life and his entire family for 100K ... even in mexico this is not a lot of money it seems.
The number should have been closer to at least 5-10 million range depending on the size of the family - enough $ to get everyone out permanently to a safe place somewhere far far away on a short notice when things go bad. (similar to that breaking bad guy who makes people disappear when things go bad: permanent change of identity, relocation etc. even that movie guy charged 250K to make that happen.)
But perhaps this IT guy was made an offer he couldn't refuse...
Also, i cant believe that someone running multi-billion dollar empire was too cheap to pay for bullet proof security system. You get what you pay for.
p.s. clearly you can tell i watched too many narcos episodes and BB.
I'm not the expert you're looking for, but surely we are not far from being able to generate movies with bespoke content for every person.
Performance art itself is about to be upturned.
AI can already string bad poetry together, surely in not long it can do a 5 act play, vary the characters a bit, jumble up the situations, create 3D realistic models, and put the whole thing together into your very own Breaking Bad that caters to your particular biases.
It can then take your feedback and do spinoffs, parodies, and so forth forever. You'll never be able to get up.
Highly subjective and therefor probably not welcome here, but since this was the comment I saw first:
My Top Netflix Shows:
- Better Call Saul
- Bojack Horseman
- Mindhunter
- Fargo
- Maniac
- The End of the Fucking World
- Master of None
- American Vandal
My Top Netflix Movies:
- Beats of No Nation
- Roma
- Annihilation
- Okja
And where I think your list is wrong:
- 13 Reasons Why
Very problematic show[1]. I found Netflix' response to the criticism lacking and season 2 doubles down on the mistake. Even if one can ignore that, I think the writing and characters are still insultingly thin.
- Ozark
Not bad at all. But also not nearly as good as Breaking Bad. If we didn't live in this gilden television age, I might've found it worth my time
- Altered Carbon
Visually very entertaining. But it's definitely pulp.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13_Reasons_Why#Social_impact
I'm just amazed somebody can come to this conclusion.
20 years ago you had to go to the shop, buy ONE film for $15 from a limited shelve, bring it back home, put it in a device you bought specifically for that film format and that does only that, navigate through a dubious UI, be forced to watch ads, then eventually get to the film. If you didn't like it... too bad.
Now for the same price, you have access to thousand of movies __and__ TV shows. No ads. Instant watching. Most of them were release on TV or on theater so basically same quality than other channels.
And people complain ?
I mean I do think the general level of quality of movies and TV shows is going down, but it has nothing to do with netflix. The good/sucks ratio is plummeting much the same on every medium (and I think it's because of us voting for crap with our money, like for most things in our society).
Well, I guess it's beautiful some people arrived at such a level of comfort in their life that they consider that amazing commercial offer to be not up to their standard.
> PC propaganda
While their original content do try to target specific niches including PC and SJW trends (it makes sense IMO), there are plenty of excellent content on netflix that don't follow this trend. Just opening my front page: Ajin, Rick and Morty, black mirror, battle royal, altered carbon, lastman, dirk gently, breaking bad, american beauty, pulp fiction, drive, trainspotting, house of cards, david chapelle, mad max furry road...
Yes, things like Sabrina, disenchantmenent, etc are pandering to a certain crowd. So what ? You can just click on something else. There is a lot of something else.
> ... be a large enough company that your internal operations make it too confusing to work out who to prosecute
But as illustrated in Breaking Bad season 5 (the Madrigal situation for those who have watched it), things don't necessarily work out going that way either.
yeah the progress is scary. it will possible at some point to have our AI generate highly addictive binge worthy tv shows real time.
imagine if you could watch breaking bad season 9 for example, Walter White Jr. breaks bad
The obvious TV series that went on far too long was Lost but even stuff like Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad is/was stretched out too far.
Just stop. If you need closure on what happens with some of your shows, read short synopses on Wikipedia. Don't pick up any new shows. After a while you will not miss it anymore.
The hardest thing will be that these days, TV viewing is at an all time high, and you will be out of the loop on a cultural touch point, just as if you stopped watching sports. You will also have to deal with people saying "oh, I know, I don't watch TV either, except for [Dexter/The Wire/Breaking Bad/etc]." Just smile and resist their advice. Make peace with the idea that yes, there is good content on TV, but there's also good content in books and in real life, like in your side business. Your life is not less fulfilling if you miss out on some of the good TV shows. You just chose to prioritize other things.
By the way, congratulations on trying to do this - I think this is one of the best things you can do to improve your life.
Anyone else thought this was going to be news about the tv series Breaking Bad?
I too initially perceived it as being Breaking Bad news. Tv show..
I'm amused by the title which can be read several different ways:
Breaking Bad news: News about the TV series Breaking Bad
(Breaking) Bad news: Bad news, hot off the press
Breaking bad news: how to break (announce) bad news
Breaking bad news: Breaking (disrupting) bad news
Intended meaning is the third, btw.
Does this mean that in the future we could literally be able to play FMV games?
Basically, an AI that has been trained on every digital film there is which in turn also generates unique permutations to further increase the training data....
Will be able to conjure up things like Breaking Bad Season 8: 'Lil Heisenberg and pretty much even helmet cam videos from war zones in Donetsk that you could control in real time....
Singularity indeed.
Those examples should credit Ford and Subway as director. :)
I'm the same. The Netflix version of Black Mirror loses so much impact from the addition of 20 mins of dead filler.
Don't forget overly long and overblown fight and chase scenes that all movies must now have. They just bore me senseless. The first one I saw was fun, probably Blues Brothers, but even back then they were taking the mickey. Never the choreography and humour of Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan. Nowadays at home when a movie starts a fight against the hero, or the car (spaceship) chase I tend to do something else for 5.
Breaking Bad was the best series to come out the US in ages. Even they lost the plot with the insanely long shootout with infinite ammo and insanely bad marksmanship. Thankfully that was a one off so very easy to forgive. :)
Brit series go too far the other way and cram far too much into too few episodes. I've been enjoying Last Kingdom but boy are they spoiling it by cramming two books into every season, with fewer episodes per series compared to the US average.
I don't think any of those shows are on the same level as the top tier HBO ones. The only show that I think reaches it is Breaking Bad (AMC). I actually think the best netflix ever did was with Bloodline (S1 only). House of Cards, while fun to watch, was quite one dimensional. And HBO deserves a lot of credit for supporting The Wire like it did (despite low viewer counts), and continuing to do so, more recently with Show Me A Hero. Shows that will not be popular for the general market but are good shows with a story worth telling. Quoting The Economist:
And second, because as drama “Show Me a Hero” excels. Younger viewers may find this hard to believe, but once upon a time American studios made films for adults, with nary a dinosaur, superhero or hunger game in sight. Directors such as Elia Kazan, Sidney Lumet and Spike Lee dealt with serious moral questions, and made urban realism riveting. Messrs Simon and Zorzi are their successors, but their work is richer, more sophisticated—and better.
I'm not furious about anything, did you notice that I'm not the guy upthread? Though I do find your assumption that I like Friends and Breaking Bad to be strange. Why do you assume that?
> "Netflix is providing content for a broader ideological range."
Furthermore, this is not actually the opposite of what I said. ("I think it should suffice to say that the range of netflix content is far narrower than the ideological range of the general population.") You use the word "broader", which is a relative term, but don't specify precisely what you are relating Netflix to. I assume you are relating it to traditional television programming (I assume this since the two shows you mentioned by name were traditional television programming.) But if you'll read my statement again, you'll see that's not what I was relating Netflix to.
I related the range of Neflix content to the ideological range of the general population. Not to traditional television, to the general population. Do I really need to explain that traditional television too only covers a small slice of the ideological range of the general population? I'll do so:
There are ideas and worldviews out there in which you'll never find mentioned or catered to in any mainstream television show or any Netflix show. The reasons for this are as varied as the ideas and worldviews themselves. Some don't get on TV or Netflix because they are difficult to monetize or run contrary to corporate interests. Some are too niche to bother recognizing, and others are offensive to other larger portions of society (I assume you assume it all falls under this later category, because you're eager to act morally righteous. I assume that about you because you assumed I was furious.) Some ideas and worldviews go unrecognized by television and netflix simply because they've gone unnoticed by television and netflix executives and filmmakers.
The sum of human ideology, ideas and worldviews is MUCH larger than the sum of what traditional television and netflix has on display. It's healthy to recognize this because failure to do so necessarily means your understanding of the world is contracted to the intersection of what mass media executives think publishable (that is, what they can agree amongst themselves to publish.)
Glee and Grey's Anatomy are from the OP, not my examples. Netflix is hiring the creators of these shows to make more shows, presumably somewhat similar. Breaking Bad is not from Netflix, neither is GoT which was interesting for about 1½ seasons. Even worse, Black Mirror was IMHO better before it moved to Netflix (but to some extent this is true of every show, creators have more pent-up, fresh ideas in the beginning).
While the tidal wave of capeshit is unwatchable and depressing, this is not all the competition Netflix has to contend with. First, you have every movie and tv show ever made. Then you can watch them again. Most shows can't even beat a 7th rewatch of Seinfeld.
Second, you can do something else than watching TV, like hitting the gym, writing a blog, taking your dog for a surprise extra walk, playing with your kids, making a steak instead of having takeout, cleaning your room while listening to Jordan Peterson telling you to clean your room... anything really.
And, I would argue, all of these are a better use of time than anything on Netflix right now.
There's tons of great TV shows nowadays. Mentioning Grey's anatomy and Glee does a disservice to TV.
Besides the obvious Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad there's Stranger things, Black Mirror, Westworld, just to name a few. Hell, all of the above are much much better than 90% of the crappy Marvel/superhero/blockbuster movie Hollywood keeps spewing nowadays.
Probably not far off. We might get to a point where we have an AI software that can run on any computer which will entertain us to eternity.
Combined with VXGI and other photo realism efforts, AI could produce any permutation of your favorite TV show that ended too soon. Ex. Breaking Bad Season 15: Walter Jr's Revenge or something like that.
There's also an AI that produced a clone of the game by watching videos so with this new neural scene representtion, you wouldn't have to train it with thousands of hours of gameplay footage, it could see a video once and figure out the game mechanics ex. stepping on a group of sprites which it recognizes as Enemy1, it should increment score count based on some generic platformer template model.
Once again, Deepmind delivers.
When I first arrived in London my English was not good enough to speak on the phone, I had no idea what the London job market for developers looked like, I had no idea where should I live and where should I settle.
So for the first 3-4 months, I did some wine waiting as a gig(agency work, no fixed place or hours. Like with Uber, you provide your own gear - like uniforms, bottle openers etc.) at the finest, the most iconic places in London. I worked at the Shard, I worked at the Cafe Royal, I worked at Four Seasons in events where celebrities like Victoria Beckham or Prince Harry were guests. I did my jubilee at BAFTA's after party, I was the wine waiter for the award-winning team that made the Amy Winehouse documentary. That night I had a chance to meet with pretty much every single celebrity(900+ guests from the industry), I was a huge Breaking Bad fan and I had the chance to speak with Walter White.
How to get into this gig business without ever working in this industry? 1 day of training and boom, I'm a waiter at the fines restaurants in the world.
It was such an amazing experience but whoever imagines living like that forever should have poor judgement. I was there to make some money until I get a real job and open a bank account(really hard to do because of catch 22) and most people who worked with me were either new arrivals like me or Australians who came to the UK to experience Europe for a year or 2(They come just before or after college with 2 year work visa, work for few months and travel Europe).
The world is transforming, the employment contracts are not the driving force. They are a reaction to the new needs. I think it's alright, an equilibrium will be reached.
Nancy, one thing I love about your style is that once in a while you'll stop amidst the lecture and teach about the scientific method, critical thinking, being humble and open-minded in your findings - the whole enterprise of science. It is very inspiring.
Of course, the content is insanely interesting. I am hooked like the first episode of Breaking Bad.
Only that's not the case at all. Popular cinema and TV are bursting at the seams with antiheroes. From Clockwork Orange through Hannibal Lecter to Sopranos, Dexter, Breaking Bad...
> He did not look cool, he did not act cool, and the writers of the show did everything in their power to communicate "This man is a moral monster and a horror of a human being." Yet some people that I otherwise respected still identified with him.
That's because nobody starts watching from the later seasons, they start watching from season one. In the beginning, Walter White is an overqualified for his work, struggling to support his family on a meager teacher's salary, and then a cancer diagnosis kicks in. Everybody identifies with him because most of us feel like we struggle with unfulfilling work and with money issues, and then the cancer diagnosis is the cherry on top - how can you judge somebody who's put in that position? Who will leave his wife saddled with debt and put in charge of raising her kids alone?
Breaking Bad reminds us that in human psychology, first impressions have outsize influence over our perceptions of other people. Battered women stay with their husbands because they still see the caring individual their husbands were when they were first dating, and hold onto hope that somewhere, their husband is still that person; if their husbands were originally abusive in the first set of dates they never would have stuck around.
I disliked Don Draper from close to the start of the series ( I hate watched it...) and disliked Walter White after he killed SPOILER's girlfriend by neglect until maybe the last episode of Breaking Bad (the unfolding trainwreck was compelling), and was pulling for Tony Soprano and Nuckie Thompson to die after the first seasons (those pesky survivors to the end at least).
This always perplexed me. With Mad Men and Breaking Bad too, people idolized the main characters, which is interesting not only because they are bad people but because they are deeply unhappy, too.
There's something extremely surface-level about people's takeaways from film characters. They want a certain level of panache that the characters can muster, but they ignore that even the characters themselves are miserable.
Though not a film, Breaking Bad has I think been exemplary in its treatment of this subject.
By and large now it’s a topic that sees much more treatment in TV than in movies.
“Boyhood” comes to mind.
I think author doesn’t understand opportunity cost. While I doubt few are rationally examining other tasks that will benefit humanity vs. watching an episode of Breaking Bad, this is the trade off decision made for each episode.
I think author is partially correct in that people could do more with their life, but watching video has other benefits- stress relief, education, edification.
The author comes off as an ascetic against pleasure as a waste of time.
I think the gauge would be whether it is impacting your work, social life, or emotional well-being. If not, then it’s up to the individual to judge. Otherwise, OP gets into some rathole of optimizing other people’s lives without knowing them. You may as well complain about commuting, cooking and eating meals vs soylent, commenting on message boards, sleeping more than 4 hours, waiting at stop lights, etc.
> You know that the English language doesn't originate in America, right?
Of course, but it's not relevent.
> I see the spread of the Spanish language a step in the Peruvianization of the world, which is a shame.
Peru isn't driver of Spanish-speaking culture the way the US is the driver of English-speaking culture.
TV shows, music, film, technology news and discussion websites, …. Most are US-made, and go hand in hand with the spread of the English language. An English lerner in ${X} will watch Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Spiderman, … (all in English, maybe with suptitles), will listen to Rhianna, Eminem, …, and will talk about "Performance", "Data Center" or use other English loanwords (if working with technology at least). It's obvious to me enough exposure to US culture does lead to a US way of thinking.
This is a massive delay of a reply, but I liked this response so much, I felt I needed to respond.
So, I think you've done a good job on listing modern narratives, but there are others, such as everything from the Sopranos and the Wire to Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy where those good/evil distinctions start to blur. You could possibly fit Walter White into the "good who is forever corrupted", but it's tough to say if he was ever good. He was already a somewhat petty, jealous man who was still bitter and jealous of his friends' success. And he was also the victim of some crap circumstances. Or you can look at a movie like Crash (2004 one) at the characters there. How do you fit Matt Dillon's atrocious and racist cop into also being the same guy who can be an amazing hero to even those he victimized? I mention that to say, depending on how you wish to view a narrative, modern or ancient, it can be either very binary or very nuanced.
Death, and Hades, are both judged and thrown in the lake of fire in Revelation 20:14, which seem to be the culmination of His punishments. I’m probably reading a lot into that, but it seems to be describing them as both concepts and individuals.
Ultimately, I would say that the binary definitions of good and evil go back into antiquity, but in some cases, I believe the haziness you see may be down to the ancient mind focusing on a different chunk of the spectrum of virtue than our modern minds. So perhaps, in the same way we emphasize compassion, love, kindness and bravery, etc. an ancient culture might have emphasized honor, fidelity, holiness, courage, etc. But in those cases, I’d say it’s just as binary, but we can haze it up because we hear some violation of modern tropes that the ancients would have ignored.
I saw this critique a while back on reddit: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BiCvPKWCUAA7Rtl.jpg:large
The long story short, Breaking Bad, wouldn't be a TV show. That's because of socialized medicine didn't try to profit on the sick. So he wouldn't have started making methamphetamine.
------------------
Edit: Sigh, at -4. I thought this added a valid discussion, that the idea of lack of any sort of medical program across the US is a definite detriment to all. Not only that, but saying he had insurance through the employer only reaffirms:
1. You're trapped at your employer if you're sick
2. You're bound by the quality of care the employer offers via agreements you can't have access to (chosen insurer)
3. Lack of choice by mandated "care plans" and coverage agreements that exclude you from treatment due to insurance not covering it
I really don't get HN some days.. :/
> As I pointed out in a sibling comment, I think Netflix actually has the same problem. There is a significant presence of long-running shows that people love to watch on Netflix: Friends, Breaking Bad, Modern Family, How I Met Your Mother, etc..
Is that really true though? As video content gets older it usually gets watched less, becomes cheaper and gets re-aired everywhere it can. Once you watch it many don't re-watch. I'd love to know if there were statistics on this either way!
Music, on the other hand, doesn't show its age nearly as much and old music is constantly replayed even in the latest TV shows and movies. Seems to be music is almost timeless whereas video is not. But, again, I'd love to see some data around these topics to valid (or invalid) what I think to be true.
After watching the educational documentary “Breaking Bad”, meth seems a lot more profitable: you can by the inputs legally and all you need to do is some cooking. Getting rid of the logistics of import is surely a money saver.
My issue with it was that it got too good.
I used to use it to identify music in shows or soundtracks, but it started just saying "Breaking Bad Episode 4" which while more accurate was less helpful.
Shortly after that everyone else had music discovery natively anyway.
Money-Laudering is sometimes confused with different crimes because, in the modern world, it is often a necessary adjunct to financially motivated crimes.
Criminals often do business in cash and can't report it on their income taxes. Money laundering is getting this "dirty" cash safely into a bank account or legal investment without revealing the crimes that caused the accumulation of cash.
In the US, banks are required to "know" their customers. Moving between cash and bank accounts is only possible with an account at the bank and every cash transaction over 10K is reported to the government. Furthermore, traveling with more than 10K into or out of the country requires paperwork to be filed with the government. All of this makes it difficult to use the cash sourced from criminal activity.
AirBnB appears to be an easy way to launder a modest amount of money. Heidi Fleiss was the Hollywood Madam and would have had a "dirty" money problem, not a huge dirty money problem like drug cartels, but nevertheless, lots of cash and no way to explain it to the banks: one million dollars in her first four months[1].
It doesn't seem like AirBnB would be practical for such a large operation; however, think of one of her operatives, they might be able to hide a couple of thousand dollars a week of cash income by pretending to be renting out their place as an AirBnB. The challenge would be on the payment side to AirBnB, setting up enough cards under fake names, etc. because the government also tracks these and would detect any trivial cycles between a set of cards and or people.
The Netflix TV series Ozark, a Breaking Bad kind of show, but staring an accountant rather than a chemist, revolves around this problem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidi_Fleiss
Good point here. There have been several episodic television series I've watched that I've experienced as unusually gripping (the usual suspects, Breaking Bad, Orange is the New Black, Man in the High castle).
One area where the long form exceeds the 90 min format is the depth of characterization it allows, and accompanying narrative attachment.
Soap operas have relied on this effect for years, allowing them to succeed despite low production values.
Coupled with the superior craftsmanship of modern episodic TV, is a pretty "gripping" experience.
The extended narrative structure also allows more justification for the characters actions to emerge naturally. In a shorter film, a lot of the characters' dialog has to serve as exposition, resulting in dialogue that sounds contrived.
I've also noticed shorter movies reliance on tropes to condense the timeframe of the narrative action so extremely. Things like voice-overs, montages, heavy make up to show aging, conventional narrative structures, the aforementioned expositionary dialog, (sub) titles.
The fact a narrative that spans years can be communicated effectively, in a 90 min film, is powerful evidence that the art of filmmaking does not use a visual medium to simply create an experience that relies on the verisimilitude to lived reality.
This highlights what I see as a...quirk of human inclination to try and recreate, or rather present as alternative perspectives, imagined realities.
Personally, probably related to my middle age, the prospect of technology to create virtual reality has minimal appeal.
In the other hand, technology that allows enhanced perceptions into actual reality is highly enticing, and seems to be an underserved area of human experience. I'm thinking of things, for example, like cognitive enhancing drugs. Or tools that can help control out of balance behavior.
Well, if its less expensive and more sustainable, then sounds great.
The only thing to get past is the way the idea reminds me of an episode of Breaking Bad.
Rick is more or less presented as someone who is so ashamed of his sentimentality that he is willing to go to great lengths to hide it, deny it, or discredit it, even if it means being abusive to other people. The only time he seems to buckle is when his family's lives are at stake.
The show is not "old-school" episodic. You're not going to get a little bit of everything in every episode. It has wider arcs, like most modern shows do.
So it doesn't make much sense to me that anyone would criticize the show for Rick's abusiveness... That's almost the whole point of him. If he weren't abusive, he'd be a "sitcom superman," but as it is, he gets to play the hero and the villain, which is a pretty compelling dynamic. (See Breaking Bad, for example.)
I think what you're describing is the difference between a soap opera that could, in theory, continue forever, versus a miniseries with a defined start and end.
I'd love to see a snow crash miniseries that covers the snow crash series. I'm not so interested in soap opera style "General Hospital, but in the snowcrash setting"
A mini series would cover the actual snow crash story, which is pretty interesting. On the other hand, a soap opera would be Hiro atarting as a beta orbiter and improbably having a romantic relationship of many ups and downs with YT or perhaps the rat thing becomes a long term pet or companion of YT, Rife would be the bad guy who always escapes to fight again next week, it could be pretty awful indeed.
Another defining characteristic of miniseries vs soap opera is soap operas run out of creativity and crash over time, think of the arc of "breaking bad" or "Downton Abbey" where the first quarter or so used up all the creativity, then a long coast to miserable end. On the other end a miniseries would end like King's "The Stand" or the book version of snow crash, exciting till the very end.
I think part of the problem is I'm old now. All the plots are reruns of older plots. They were great when I was young and the plots were new to me.
I've read where television is overtaking movies as the place where you get good stories and character development. Breaking Bad, The Wire and Game of Thrones are better than any movie I've probably ever seen.
I saw Wonder Woman the other day and the only thing I liked about it was the WWI setting, and they managed to botch that too. I mean it was an OK movie, but just like every other super hero movie. Get of my lawn I guess.
>The changes to the media landscape make great shows less likely. Companies simply stopped aiming for mass appeal in the same way.
Hmmm? The mass appeal shows were not great by any stretch of the imagination precisely because of aiming for "lowest denominator" mass appeal.
At best they could be good despite going for mass appeal, but aiming for the more tame and universal themes.
By going for smaller audiences the creators can take chances, what some church lady from Iowa or SJW from Portland might find offensive is not as much of an issue, and the storytelling and directing can be more demanding (as it doesn't have to aim to please any average Joe).
Shows like GoT, HoC, Breaking Bad, True Detective (season 1), etc are so much better than the "mass appeal" crap of yesteryear (with some exceptions, like MASH) that it's not even funny.
For one, they don't use "tv actors" as much, but Hollywood a-listers. Second the production values are 10x and 100x those older "mass appeal" shows.
>but in my opinion the vast majority of current tv shows/films/music/webcontent is utter undiluted mind numbing banal drivel and there isn't a circle of hell worthy enough to hold those responsible.
Well, for tv shows there was been a marked and well established uptick, if not in storytelling, surely in production values (huge, expensive productions) and acting (a-rate actors from movies).
That's how we got shows like Breaking Bad, House Of Cards, Game of Thrones and the rest -- unthinkable in scope and aspirations in the 80s and 90s.
They don't always hold up well for all seasons (the tend to meander after season 3-4), but generally there are far greater than tv shows in the past.
>Except, those things are purposely portrayed as bad.
Many lolicon manga do the same. Why is whether or not it is portrayed as bad the problem? Many are actually made interesting by portraying the siuation as morally ambiguous, such as in popular television shows.
>nowhere near as common and lustful as sexual and emotional abuse of individuals, young or not.
Why is that relevant?
>Normalization in causation to action requires that the actions already be happening and already be acceptable to some extent
Murder, violence, and war already happen, and war is acceptable (to most, though not I) - yet we have people who complain that violent videogames "normalise" violent beahviour. You haven't really provided evidence that (i) this "normalisation" is bad (beacuse this would be implying that it's bad for people to think or have opinions in a certain way) (ii) this "normalisation" has any effect upon the incidence of violent crimes, sexual or not.
>Again, distopian, which is very differnt from your own culture or beliefs.
Sherlock and House probably "normalises" drug use, even though it's set in present conditions. There are probably other examples of people doing bad things that are portrayed in media, but I'm not well versed enough in popular culture to give examples. I'm still not so sure why being dystopic has any effect or not. Would it follow that if lolicon TV/manga/art was set in a dystopic universe like the Hunger Games, it would be fine for you?
Or if the argument is based on being realistic, what is there to say of the many non-realistic things that happen in lolicon TV/manga/art, and indeed the unrealistic body proportions? Many, many anime are set with large towering robots controlled by little girls, for example.
Finally, many lolicon manga portray what is happening in a sad or twisted light, similar to how Breaking Bad shows Walt's activity, for example. There is one manga in which a girl is violently raped by a man claiming to check radiation levels in her house, for example. And this is of course ignoring the fact that many people are attracted to the material beacuse it is taboo in the first place, which is what's behind many kinks you or I would consider normal. As such, they don't want to make it real.
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.
> A zoo is still a zoo if there aren't any animals in it
Is it? Identity is an interesting thing. To use a commonly-cited example-- if I swap out the muffler of my car and toss the original in the backyard, I think most would say I am still driving the same car. If I do the same with the front left tire, it's still essentially my car. Even if replace all four tires, same. But what if I swap one part a day with a replacement, after a while I'll have all my original car parts in the backyard-- and am in effect driving a car made of totally new parts, but is this still the same car? If not, when would you no longer say it's the same car? And, if I assemble the collection of gradually discarded parts sitting in the back yard into another car-- now what? Which is my car? The thing I'm driving or the car made of the old parts? Or are they both the same car?
Am I really the same person I was when I was 10 ...or 10 months? What is the "me"-ness, or are we talking about a different person? Where's the line...
Or... when Captain Kirk uses the transporter-- his molecules are disintegrated, and then a copy of him gets assembled on some planet (using local materials I believe)... So is "he" transported, or is he being killed and replaced with an exact copy? (I think this question made its way to a Breaking Bad episode)
Anyhoo. Is a zoo without animals in it still a zoo? I dunno.
Few TV shows have had its depth of writing. The storyline on the growth of fascism on Earth explores and predicts post-9/11 hysteria as well as anything I've ever seen. The only show I can think of recently with such great writing was Breaking Bad, though I don't think I learned as much from it.
Also, personally found the CGI a problem only in the first season, mostly due to bad lighting. In the second season, after the lighting is fixed the designs of the ships for example, are quite lovely, with correct physics, even when looking a bit dated from other angles, such as resolution. No spaceships maneuvering like airplanes, yeah!
Definitely would be a great candidate to have the graphics redone, a la the Star Trek TOS.
>archaeologists suspect the Middle Bronze Age tomb, perhaps on what was then a hill, was used in the 5th century as a handy place marker for the hoard.
This is like a mix of that scene in Fargo (movie version) and the season finale of Breaking Bad where the drug dealer is about to bribe Walter with the location of the remaining cash. Fascinating.
Couching the discussion as a la carte channels instead of a la carte shows is some kind of jedi mind trick by studio execs.
Apple Season Pass should be like $3/season, not $5/episode.
Edit: Netflix didn't negotiate certain seasons or episodes of Breaking Bad, nor did it negotiate all of AMC's content. Netflix negotiated rights to specific shows.
I really strongly disagree. In our household we get a big cable TV package because we couldn't opt out of it to get the highest tier internet service.
The only networks we watch are rural cop shows and Food TV with some rare cable TV news and only one network out of the options there. There are hundreds of other junk channels that I never watch. There is one game show channel that my in-laws like to watch when they visit.
The other channels just have nothing that ever appeals to anyone in the household. We're more than happy to occasionally (like once every 2 years) watch a TV show like Breaking Bad on Netflix years and years after it was a popular event. Would be happy to downgrade to a package that has Food Network and almost nothing else.
Great show with great scripts, characters, and actors who portrayed them. I'd didn't care for season 2 when I was watching it but came around to really liking it when I'd finished the series. My favorite part, though, was the Hampsterdam scenes. It was as close as we get to actually legalizing drugs. I just can't call it best show ever when comparing against The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men. They're all in the top 4.
> I guess depending on how game of thrones ends, it may be a high contender.
I don't think you can really compare the two. The wire was literary and so authentic, Game of Thrones cinematic and epic. They are the two best television shows made - but in different spaces.
Breaking bad was good but sat in the middle and not as good as either.
But usually the literary honest film holds up better over time than the epic special effects one.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. If I may, I think that you have taken U.S. sensational news stories and popular movies as your entire context of the U.S. Since nobody else is respecting your point of view, I'll share.
1. Smoking tobacco is seen as a mild taboo, but many people still do it. As long as the smoking is done outside and away from a main entrance, it's unlikely anyone will comment.
2. A large amount of people are addicted to prescription opiates, but if you go to New Mexico or Ohio, it's not going to look like a scene out of The Walking Dead. The total amount of addicted people is estimated to be 2 million [1]. Out of 300 million people, it means that this tragedy is hidden unless you personally know an affected person. By the way, many in California are affected by this issue.
3. Tobacco isn't considered a "gateway" to cannabis use by experts or credible laypeople. Tobacco users and Cannabis users have little relation or overlap.
4. Cannabis is usually introduced in the same manner as alcohol (at parties or small gatherings of friends), though alcohol is far more socially acceptable. Cannabis has never been primarily considered a "trippy" drug in the U.S. ---though there are many people who do use it that way--- it's more of a recreational substance. Cannabis use has declined among the under 18-year-olds over the past decade, but has increased among adults.
4. There are many methamphetamine and heroin addicts in absolute numbers, but again, they do not dominate any metropolitan area. Sure, it is easy to find addicts among homeless populations, but it isn't like Crash, Breaking Bad, or The Wire in terms of pervasiveness and intensity.
1. https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/overdose.html
that's interesting to hear your opinion. Mine couldn't be more different. To start with in 2312, the science has largely been explained in the Mars Trilogy - whereas 2312 is more detective novel set in space than sci fi. I'm not sure why the service tunnel (or the rail system and city of Terminator itself, actually) are so far out there given just how far off things we are talking. You've got thousands of hollowed out terria and genetic engineering of humans where sex changes to one side and back again before settling in the middle are commonplace, and it's the metamaterials that defy your belief?
Part of good literature and movies is being sold the story so as to suspend disbelief. This has always happened with KSR's books for me. Funnily enough, it didn't happen with Breaking Bad - I couldn't finish it.
Anyway, diversity makes the world an interesting place!
Yes, read Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon's "Writing Movies for Fun and Profit" a couple times. There will be chapters that don't matter, and there will be incredibly important chapters (ex: "Every studio blockbuster should follow the structure of 'Die Hard'") but all of them will be fun to read.
One of the hardest parts is understanding the formatting expectations of screenplays. Read a couple (pilots for TV shows like "Breaking Bad" are great) and then use some software to help you get the hang of the format. You don't need to have blank page syndrome - in fact, I think the formatting of scripts is kind of liberating.
You don't have to be a writer to craft great scripts. You have to be a storyteller. The mechanics might overlap, but don't be afraid to try.
Breaking Bad. Personally found it the most rewarding (by far), and, from Wikipedia: (Season 5)
After receiving three nominations for seasons two, three, and four, both halves of season five won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series in 2013 and 2014. The second half of the season also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series – Drama and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series in 2014. The season's Metacritic score of 99/100 led the show to be listed in Guinness World Records as the most acclaimed television series in history.[5]
>> Netflix has no huge advantage.
Netflix has better data about what and how viewers watch, That gives it some advantage. than, a netflix one-hour episode cost about $5-$10 Million.Breaking Bad did costs $3M/ep. That's $5-$15 for a movie of content. About the cost of Iron Sky.
Than instead of spending a lot of money on marketing, they use their algorithm. And even if they do spend some money marketing online, it's easier, because consumption can be immediate and measured.
Than you have the favorable economics of TV series - it's basically a 20-30 movie sequels with very good customer loyalty. And there are no time limits - people can watch whenever they like, and the content has some value over years/decades.
If you're picking up Breaking Bad right now, you'd watch it on Netflix. The only reason you'd watch it on TV is if you're catching it the first time it's airing. I only joined on the last season so I don't have much context, but everyone I knew in college would wait for it to air and immediately torrent the commercial-free episode. For something huge like the ending I know some people that hosted small viewing parties to watch it live, but many were fine with waiting.
Also, Breaking Bad ended in 2013, and Mad Men in 2015. That list only has two entries. Maybe not literally everything on live cable TV is trash, but I think it highlights that there's a clear decline.
>TV just isn't a priority because the vast majority of it is pure trash.
>TV had it's heyday
I can tell you don't watch much TV. It's never been better. We're in a golden age of TV, it's just not on ESPN. There have recently been a lot of extremely high quality, hour long dramas, which basically amount to a movie every week. Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, The Wire, arguably Westworld, to name a few.
I'm native Romanian, fluent English and medium German. I've learned both on my own. School was terrible for learning anything.
Read, read a lot. But not hard-copy books. Read short articles. Read something you're interested in and already have some knowledge of. Technical stuff is easier than literature. No metaphors, no hidden meaning. You might not understand much in the beginning, but that's ok. If you at least get the gist of the article, you're good to go. It keeps you interested. Install the "Wiktionary and Google Translate" addon (if on Firefox, or similar for other browsers). Double-click a word to pop up it's definition. Or select whole sentences to instant-translate them. Every word definition is a click away. The more you see, the better you become.
Watch your favourite tv show with subtitles. If the tv show is in English and you already know English, that's all you need. Put on the subtitles in the language you want to learn and see the magic happen. You'll pick up words and expressions in no time. Dramas/thrillers work better than comedy. Comedy is usually fast-paced and has complicated expressions. Recommended: Dexter, Breaking Bad, SOA, etc. Not recommended: Friends, Big Bang Theory, etc. You get the idea.
It takes time, but it's better than learning all the grammar before you even have the chance to use the language. It's like learning the geometry of the hammer without ever using it. A little grammar right at the beginning might help, of course. But don't stay too long in that corner.
Reminds one of that Breaking Bad episode...
I agree - Netflix is becoming synonymous with binge watching. I've gotten months and months of value out of Netflix with Breaking Bad, Lost, The Office, The X-Files, House, etc... If I had to do the research required to get similar satisfaction out of the same number of hours of movie viewing? Forget it.
The alternative is to mint an evergreen series like Law & Order. Someone finds a dead body in NYC; investigation, trial, and silly social commentary ensue. Then vary the parameters a bit and you get SVU, Criminal Intent, et al. Characters are interchangeable, guest spots abound, social commentary changes with the politics of the day.
Walking Dead -- eh, it's getting a little old. I thought they were going to explore some primitive economics, and maybe they will, but the cliffhanger gag last season reminded me too much of "Who Shot JR?" Not sure I care. And the spinoff went too heavy on the social commentary, couldn't even finish Season Two.
Mr. Robot is more promising, but I haven't seen one yet that comes close to the satisfaction I got from the clear arc of the story in Breaking Bad. Sons of Anarchy tried, but fell short somehow.
You made a great point, I'm Mexican so I'm aware of all the ideas and stereotypes the entertainment industry spread to the whole globe about Mexicans.
I've met people from other countries who really think we live in a desert (old west style), with a poncho and a sombrero. I can't really count all the American movies or shows where they show Mexico in a old west style, sepia background, sand and cactus everywhere, women using old style dresses, people armed everywhere. I love Terminator and Breaking bad, but the way they show Mexico, wow, it's so laughable.
People tend to think we all Mexicans are just looking for an opportunity to go to the US, they don't stop for a second and think that that might not be true for most cases, I have family over there that would give everything to come back to Mexico if they could find a good job.
You know it's not easy crossing a desert risking your life, leaving your whole family behind, knowing that you might never see them again, just to take an unpleasant job cleaning someone's else toilet, just to live in a small house in an ugly neighborhood, experiencing racism, facing cultural and language barriers, praying God for good health.
I'm a developer so I have a reasonably good job over here, I've had a lot of offers from American companies but I've rejected all of them because I just don't see it as a necessity, right know money is not a factor to consider facing all the downsides a Mexican will face in the US, here I have everything that I need and want.
Its a decent and sometimes good show but certainly not one of the greats, and has more than a few major flaws. I'll try to minimize spoilers.
1. The plotline is pretty much Fight Club with computers and telegraphs this early on. This is clearly not on purpose as we see hints dropped all the time and the reveal is given with such a flourish. Lets stop defending Esmail here. The reveal is really hamfisted and the show borrows VERY generously from Fight Club, for better or worse.
2. The twists are largely unpredictable. Sure you can argue that some clues were dropped beforehand, but they're so ambiguous as to be meaningless. Anything can happen on that show and to me, that's lazy writing. The universe that show lives in should have a rational set of rules that govern it. Its basic world-building. If the finale involves aliens or time travel, it woudn't surprise anyone, in fact /r/mrrobot is full of people expecting this. Anything should not be possible, especially when you're 30+ hours in.
3. The pacing isn't very good and gets especially bad in season 2. I don't think we needed several episodes dedicated to Elliot being in [spoilers] or other events that look stretched out to fill episodes. This is a common issue in TV, and I'll let it slide, but the first few episodes of S2 are like pulling teeth and turns off viewers. I know people that quit watching during this period. Its a hard sell to say "Look there's about 10 hours of nothing, but it kinda picks up after an experimental episode where the characters are bizarrely on a 90s sitcom for artsy fartsy cred."
4. The content is lacking. My understanding is that Esmail and his team originally wrote a movie and pretty much retrofitted that into one season of television. Once the [big event] happens in season one, the show lost its footing. I would have loved to spend more time at Allsafe instead of jumping straight into [big event].
5. The politics and hacktivism are pretty naive, if not just stupid. Its a lot of alt-left/far-left politics and having the characters act dumbfounded and guilty when regular people lost their homes and jobs seems ridiculous. What exactly did they think would happen after [big event]? We never really get to see anyone's moviation for this, other than some throwaway comments about "evil bankers" and "evil ceos." We know Elliot has a secret motivation and master plan (of course we have no details of it), but what about Trent and Mobley and Darlene? Why are they doing this? None of them remotely seem to have the zeal of a revolutionary and very soon regret all their actions. Its like some middle class hipster kids decided to overthrow society on a whim.
6. The show has a lot geek fan service where it can alienate non-geeks. I think its possible to show hacking without getting into the weeds of it and have it be semi-authentic. I can go either way here, but it would be nice if the show was more accessible to people like my wife and her friends.
7. The exploration of mental illness seems hackneyed and, well, boring. Season 2's long strange cinematography focusing on Elliot's tortured face just doesn't make for good TV. I think this stuff works best in small doses and has been done better by almost everyone else, including season 1 of this very show! Thankfully, Esmail has moved away from this kind of thing about mid-way through S2.
8. Whiterose as an unstoppable mastermind is a cliche and she's tiresome to watch on the show. Writers please stop using the mastermind cliche and start making your characters have flaws and screw-ups. For a show that's suppose to be complex, most of the characters aren't terribly deep or anti-cliche. Its almost distasteful to play up "the Chinese are inscrutable" cliche and have almost all the Chinese characters be unstoppable, unpredictable, and near perfect robots, constantly toying with the dumb and emotional westerners. We see the Dark Army, Chinese state hackers, the CCP, etc win pretty much every engagement but the FBI is clueless and there's no NSA or CIA at work at all here.
9. Less so than Whiterose, but Price is written to be stereotypically evil. He's only missing a mustache to twirl. I wish he was a more complex character, not just a sociopathic CEO who cares about nothing but himself. This doesn't necessarily upset me considering the general low complexity of secondary characters on this show, but the actor playing Price is so good, it seems like a waste of talent for him to play a two dimensional character. Price has a lot of potential that has so far been ignored and perhaps anything humanizing him would upset the far-left politics of the show, which I find disappointing.
10. The show has slowly degenerated into Lost, where meaningless clues lead to a surprise. Fans argue on /r/mrrobot but no one is ever right because its all so damn ambigious. Or someone is right, but only by dumb luck or perhaps marketing plants. I wish the show had less of a mysterious air about it. I also don't like the marketing led approach of "Check out the finale to get the real answers you've been waiting for all season!"
I feel this show is a bit like Halt and Catch Fire. Its decent, but not very good and is constantly trying to find its footing. Like Halt, I suspect it will never really find its proper footing and will be passable geek popcorn fare with moments of brilliance. It doesn't seem to be reaching out past modest ratings. I've heard comparisons to Breaking Bad, but BB had a general appeal that Mr Robot doesn't.
That said, this is destined to live in geek fandom, which frankly has a low barrier to entry. I just wish it was a better and more accessible show. I do look forward to the shows that will be made after being inspired by this. Mr Robot 2.0 will be good. 1.0 is just too uneven and unfocused. Compare how tight Walter White's world was or the world of The Wire compared to the manic world of Mr Robot or how complex and flawed the secondary characters were on that show compared to Mr Robots'. Those are mature and very good shows. Mr Robot? Not so much.
One of the main purposes of Netflix is to show normal TV shows without commercials, though. And seriously, have you watched anything besides reality TV? The Office? Breaking Bad? Any decently reviewed show in the last 10 years?
Dialogue is now a playing field of TV series. In Mad Men, for example, all they do is talk all the time. Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Girls and other similar shows are very dialogue-heavy. Add to that what most established mainstream film directors (Fincher, Soderbergh etc) say about TV series: "Feature-length films are not relevant and TV is where most of the development happens in this sector of art" (something I personally don't think is true) and you get the drift.
I feel like I can one-up you on this. Here in Switzerland, the day after some popular shows in the US have ended (for example Breaking Bad, or a GoT season finale), some daily newspapers print two page spreads with all the spoilers from "last night's" episode - despite the fact that 100% of their readers are legally unable to watch that episode for probably another couple of months.
And even those that do follow the show through non-legal channels probably haven't downloaded the episode yet, since it has aired in the middle of the night for us.
Generally I don't watch the nightly network news. Experimentally I've tuned in. It lives in a parallel universe, very weakly connected to reality. One has to invest many hours in its fictional narrative to make any sense of it, much like you don't tune into episode 50 of a pop culture TV show and understand any of it. You're no better educated given one episode of the nightly news than you are when given one episode of "breaking bad".
In that way one isolated pop culture clickbait artifact from a year or decade ago is useless. I need a package of ten, maybe a hundred hours worth of content to make any sense of the pop culture references and the self references.
From the front page of Reuters right now, clickbait era journalism that makes no sense without extensive background:
Texas 'affluenza' mom has curfew eased
Fiat Chrysler to investigate crash that killed 'Star Trek' actor
Wall St. rally holds steady as Brexit chances weaken
Myanmar's Suu Kyi reiterates stance on not using term 'Rohingya'
VLMs rule, clickbait expands until the content is indistinguishable from noise, without extensive experience and training.
Many, many more people watched the final episode of Breaking Bad than just those who saw it during its original airing.
Does that include everyone who had purchased the season for streaming from Amazon? Everyone who watched it later on Netflix? Everyone who watched it through their cable company's on-demand feature?
Producing TV shows today doesn't make financial sense.
In the 60s to 70s, the US had 3 networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS), few shows, low budgets even for hit shows (think of Gilligan's Island and Brady Brunch), and massively greater viewership than today[1]. And the average American viewer watched 4.5 hours of TV per day and knew the name of every prime time show on TV.
Today, every point above is reversed: hundreds of channels, hundreds of shows, something like one-tenth the viewership per show[1], and people watch much less TV.
To give one example of budgets, an entire episode of Star Trek cost about the same as just the voices on a Simpsons episode. (Star Trek cost $185,000 per episode, or $2.2M in today's dollars; the 6 main voices actors of The Simpsons were collectively getting $2.4M per episode but cut to $1.8M a couple years ago.)
The only conclusion is that TV in the 60s and 70s was obscenely profitable and TV today is a marginal or money-losing business and covertly subsidized by other parts of the company's business.
[1] The final episode of MASH had 125 million viewers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M*A*S*H_%28TV_series%29
The final episode of Breaking Bad had just 10 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Bad#Viewership
If you create a show with the set design of Roseanne or even the Cosby Show in 2016, you're missing out on opportunities for product placement:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2012/04/brett-ratner-comments-ads-marketing-x-men.html
The logic is, "Well, I need to have a car in this movie anyway. Why not get a free car instead of paying for one, and in fact, the manufacturer will pay me to place their brand new car?"
The good news is more art is created at a lower cost. Great.
But the bad news is you perpetuate the idea that everyone has a new car (or new kitchen or new 3000 square foot house or whatever) all the time, no matter what their financial situation would be like in reality. This is especially insidious when there is easy consumer credit.
Here's a scene of a doctor buying a car from 1987:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKMlx5p6n8k#t=1m58s
The premise, if you don't bother to watch, is he doesn't want the car salesman to know his job, because then he won't get a good deal.
The quaint part is that 30 years ago, a doctor and lawyer raising a family in New York City were considered almost unimaginably rich by TV standards. Now they would be "middle class."
The sad part is it would be hard to justify a scene like this on a modern prime time TV show. "So, we're going to have a car in this scene? Great! I'll call up Ford. Wait, but what do you mean the car salesman would overprice the car? Don't you know they're running 0% APR or $2000 cash back for President's Day?"
Sure, there are shows that try hard to be more authentic. But for every Breaking Bad, there are 10 spinoffs of lawyer / doctor / detective shows where the characters live in a bubble of perpetual newness the article describes.
And even Breaking Bad did its share of product placements: http://www.bustle.com/articles/5963-how-breaking-bad-product-placement-helps-or-hurts-products-like-stevia
There are lots of prominent counterexamples. The Office was a pretty direct attempt at making a modern middle class show. Breaking Bad at least started with one man's middle class problems.
I think the main artistic factor here is that the sitcom, an awfully convenient medium for telling middle class stories, is dead. A 30 minute comedy where every episode was basically an island could be an oddly touching medium to talk about a teacher dying or a dad losing his job. But these tiny canvases were mostly the result of the constraints of 20th century TV.
Without those constraints, consumers don't have that much interest in slices of everyday life, just as most consumers don't read Raymond Carver stories. Our imaginations go to the rich, powerful and supernatural. I'd argue that other mediums - podcasts, reality TV, social media - fulfill the basic human need behind the sitcom: to simply bask in the company of agreeable/relatable sounding human voices.
“Cheers,” which ran for 11 seasons on NBC, starting in 1982, was the first great hangout show: neutralizing the depiction of class and removing the pressures of work. Life is hard enough, “Cheers” said; let’s just make TV. Ever since, television started taking it easier on us. Bill Clinton was in the White House, and the economy had improved. On “Seinfeld,” “Living Single,” “Friends,” “Ellen,” “It’s Like, You Know,” “Sex and the City,” “Girlfriends” and, much later, “Happy Endings” and “New Girl,” the commingling, childless men and women might have had jobs, but almost none had consequential careers. How many jobs did Elaine and George have on “Seinfeld”? And in how many fields? And Kramer — how was he paying to live across the hall from Jerry? Hangout shows placed friendship above family, obviating the typical economic ecosystem. Belonging to a family of friends probably means you only have to support yourself.
TV became — and still is — a medium struggling to understand “average,” “ordinary,” “normal.”
Why would you go into any of these shows expecting anything resembling reality. They are all clearly entertainment in the form of light drama and inconsequential, whitewashed sexual tension. To expect anything else is to set yourself up for failure.
Deeper shows exist - The Wire, Breaking Bad, House of Cards - but headlining TV shows are not created to address issues anymore. The shows reflect the main demographics of TV watchers, because that's what keeps them watching, and that's what generates ad revenue. So I'm not too concerned with the state of TV - it's an echo chamber for older, more conservative folk.
The tl;dr is "Netflix has no way to request 'plastic discs' via the mobile app or mobile website".
I guess that's fair. Personally I don't even own a device that can play "plastic discs" anymore, which I think is kinda the point (of Netflix not making that a first class use case).
Some commenters for some reason have seemingly just taken the title and extrapolating to the entire content industry (did all these people actually click on the link?).
A lesser point is finding content. Movie A is on Netflix and Amazon. Movie B is on Hulu. Movie C is on plastic discs only. This is a general problem (for consumers) as the content producers fight the inevitable commoditization.
The movie industry is suffering not from piracy or streaming (IMHO) but from TV. Streaming and "plastic discs" made long form serial content viable. There's something deeply satisfying about the almost 48 hours of Breaking Bad vs the 2-2.5 of almost all movies (most of which these days seem to just regurgitate the same superhero formula time and again).
Additionally, good TV can be produced pretty cheaply too compared to any modern movie budget.
And yet, have you seen the 4k content out there? Breaking Bad was awesome, but is that really better in 4k than, say BSG or Planet Earth? I bought a 4k TV to use as a monitor several months back and started researching content - Most of it is eyebrow-raising, to say the least. I remember when 720/1080 were first introduced, there was an expected dearth of content, but at least what was out there was worth high-def (flyovers of tourist destinations, PBS nature documentaries, etc). For example - Here's some of Netflix's offerings in 4k:
Series: House of Cards Marco Polo Breaking Bad The Blacklist
Movies and Documentaries Smurfs 2 Philadelphia Jerry Macguire Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Oceans (documentary) Forests (documentary) Flowers (documentary)
Edit:formatting
FWIW, this article has fewer than 1,200 words, just in case you were expecting any kind of in-depth analysis, and not just a tech journalist's opinion of what an "analysis" means (e.g. something not in listicle form). Sorry to sound negative and catty here, it's a problem among journalists and the information they put out for short-attention-span audiences...once something is in scientific research paper PDF format, it's worth writing headlines about; or, if it's longform, then it just must be an exhaustively reported piece that is meaningful.
I wanted to give the author/editor the benefit of the doubt, that the headline was merely just a sly joke about "Ha ha this article is surely the most you've ever read about Burger King selling hot dogs because you probably didn't even know BK sold hot dogs did you?" instead of just the result of their in-house analytics about what makes a headline more viral...but even on that scale, it doesn't hold up, unless you really think a huge multinational company doesn't heavily think through sales impact (and production and logistics implications) of introducing something as major as a hot dog (i.e. another meat product). You don't even have to be the type of person who subscribes to The New Yorker and reads their 5,000 word articles about the chemical flavor industry...you could've just remembered that Breaking Bad episode where the guy is taste-testing chicken nuggets and sauces in front of his scientists and gleaned that food -- even hot dogs -- is a business that necessitates a lot of analysis.
Bits are not copyrighted. This is just such a weird misunderstanding of information theory.
If bits were copyrighted, you could just transform them into different bits. Change a single bit and then it's no longer copyrighted. Or xor them all. Or only every other bit. Or xor the whole thing with a different file, like a one time pad.
You could also change the content itself. Say it's a video. Shift all the pixels to the right. Or tint it slightly red. Or play it on a monitor and record it with a camera, then invert the resulting video.
There are an infinite number of possible transforms that result an infinite number of possible bits. What matters is information, not bits. They are not the same thing! Information is the bits, and the method you use to transform them together.
Often it's proposed that you can compress a file by storing the index where it occurs in pi. The problem is the index where your file starts will be bigger than the actual file! So you no longer need the file, but you still need this other set of bits that represents the index. The bits have changed, but the information has not.
If you don't have the index, then the whole procedure is entirely useless. Yes, pi theoretically contains season 5 of breaking bad - and an infinite number of variations and derivative works of it. But you will never ever find it unless you already know where to look.
And no computer could possibly calculate pi to that many digits in millions of years, so the whole thing is impractical anyway.
Right, so the new check recipients will be people that were otherwise capable of sustaining themselves, as those who aren't are already accommodated. I suspect that the 'human capital' liberated by basic income will mostly find its way to level 400 World of Warcraft Death Knights and 40 000 word critiques of Breaking Bad episodes.
Should the legions of working folk try to actually use their new liberty for anything with more impact we'll ban it.
If this is indeed forced by content creators, I think it is counter productive. They will just give more incentive to Netflix (and Amazon and others) to create they own content, as third part content lose them money.
Perssonal view: the "Original Netflix Content" sign already give me a more value perception. Between a recycled TV show and a new one by Netflix, I always chose the new on by Netflix. So far I watched all of: Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Making a Murderer, House of Cards, Narcos, Sense8, Bloodline, Orange is the new black, Master of None, Better Call Saul.
And I'll probably keep watching the next seasons of all of them.
Outside of Netflix, I only follow the very best ones (IMO): Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad (that's over) and Walking Dead.
What this means? I consume only the very best hits that these other content creators produce. For casual, day-to-day entertainment, that covers 90% of the time, I stay with Netflix.
> they have a decent selection of British TV (ironically they have more BBC shows than BBC's own streaming service).
> Their selection of popular/well known movies has been decreasing over time though, as they've been losing some of those licences. But there's enough of them that it's good enough for "I want to watch some movie, let's see what's on Netflix".
Not sure I agree with either. They have some old UK TV, but not that much. BBC offers almost no archive tv on iPlayer, so that's not much of a comparison! And I had to spend a significant amount of time trying to find any film I wanted to watch. My impression of the services was a bit like renting access to 10-15 box sets (Mad Men, Breaking Bad, some BBC Dickens adaptations, etc), and about 50 randomly selected, vaguely entertaining films. I had it for about 4 months before running out of anything I wanted to watch.
Every time is see a post like this I get the urge to pretentiously rant about the ongoing decline of appreciation for aesthetic values. Tech culture often seems completely tonedeaf on artistic issues. Talking about the "value proposition" of the novel is borderline comical. If the fiction books you've read could be edited down to novella length, you should read better fiction books.
I have no idea how we got to a place where the value of Tolstoy, Cervantes, Flaubert, etc. needs to be defended from Breaking Bad and cinema (not that there's anything wrong with Breaking Bad and cinema). But apparently most people currently seem to be at a point where if they read the first few pages of "Lectures on Literature" they'd just squint their eyes, cock their heads, and proceed to not understand one part of what it means to "remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy—passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers—the inner weave of a given masterpiece"
Likely no. There is a dearth of 'literature' in terms of books and the like right now, it does seem. But everything is 'exploding' in the arts right now. Banksy is not a painter, but his work hangs in museums and is collected. Breaking Bad is not a play to read, but it is a strong work nonetheless. Iron Man is a movie, but Tony Stark is a character we all can reference just like John Galt.
I think the post-post-modern era will not be so easy to define. There will be common works, but nothing as ubiquitous as 1984 or Romeo and Juliet. Things are changing too fast these days, and it is unlikely to stop, we are splintering and that is not a bad thing maybe.
IMO there is a limited market for mature ideas that is often much smaller than the previous prediction. When startups start meeting this boundary, instead of reigning in expectations and become an efficient tool serving a small market, it's "go big or go bust" with desperate attempts to validate the previous market size predictions.
Sooner or later, you're bumping into the markets of other companies and it's impossible to compete against them b/c you're using your weaknesses against their strengths.
There is only so much money and attention (time) in the world for people to spend on things. The low hanging fruit in developed countries has already been plucked clean so it's quite hard to 'grow' new markets. Your new tv series better be REALLY good if you're competing with game-of-thrones and breaking-bad.
Interestingly enough, the Chinese companies actually have many more features and are often better (for their users) than the american counterparts. The population is more homogenous and has more of a crowd mentality. Network effects are huge. Monopoly-like companies also prevent too much fragmentation meaning technology as a tool becomes standardized. Rather than 20 different things competing for the attention of everyone, there is one big company with apps that do everything that is trusted and reliable and thus the 'best'.
While american companies compete for slices of a certain size of pie, one chinese company owns the entire huge pie. As long as the users have pie, they are happy.
In allocation of limited resources, this usually fails as equal distribution of resources leaves everyone poor which creates huge incentive for corruption and hoarding. For abundant resources that can be duplicated infinitely and have network effects to boot this is perhaps a better strategy.
After all, it's all about everyone having an abundance of pie, not who has more or less pie.
My general impression, based on the success of shows like The Sopranos (and Breaking Bad--although that's more complicated) is that at least a significant slice of the US audience is more willing to tolerate unsympathetic protagonists than was historically the case. Films have always been more varied but they don't require the ongoing commitment that a TV series does.
I can't tell if it's a joke or if it's really being turned into a movie.
Regardless, I'd love to see a tv show that was a cross between this story and Breaking Bad. Just imagine Walter White, surrounded by loads and loads of barrels with his trademark blue color.
Well I am actually different in that I am jealous of the future but wonder how much better things can actually get?
Think about the pyramid of human needs from food and shelter to travel and entertainment.. How much better can food get, how much more enjoyable can a TV show get after breaking bad? haha
I hope I am wrong but I feel we have achieved 90% in each of the 'categories'. The last 10% will probably take 90% of the time it too to get here.
Here's at least the press release with a little more details:
https://pr.netflix.com/WebClient/getNewsSummary.do?newsId=2603
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DO YOU KNOW WHEN YOU WERE HOOKED? NETFLIX DOES Netflix Unveils When Fandom Begins For Some of Todays Most Popular Series Sep 23, 2015 Los Gatos, Calif., September 23, 2015 -- It may have taken Walter White nearly an entire season to become Heisenberg and Frank Underwood 13 episodes to become VP (spoiler alert!), but it turns out fans committed to these series long before those plot twists unfolded. Hint: it wasnt in the pilot episode.
Netflix analyzed its global streaming data* across the inaugural seasons of some of todays most popular shows - both Netflix original series and shows that premiered on other networks - looking for signals that pointed to when viewers became hooked. It turns out that when commercial breaks and appointment viewing are stripped away and consumers can watch an entire season as they choose, you can see fandom emerge. That is, 70% of viewers who watched the hooked episode went on to complete season one or more poetically, when members were hooked and there was no turning back.
“Given the precious nature of primetime slots on traditional TV, a series pilot is arguably the most important point in the life of the show,” said Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer for Netflix. “However, in our research of more than 20 shows across 16 markets, we found that no one was ever hooked on the pilot. This gives us confidence that giving our members all episodes at once is more aligned with how fans are made.”
While the data identified the hooked episode, it was shy on pinpointing exact moments, but we have a few ideas of our own to help jog your memory... For starters, in Breaking Bad it may have taken the flip of a coin to decide whether Jesse or Walt would put the finishing blow on Krazy 8, but when the decrepit heap of a former drug dealer rains down from Jesse’s ceiling, theres no denying viewers would stay to see how the season cleaned up (episode 2). Speaking of messes, Crazy Eyes drops both poems and fluids in her roller coaster romance with Piper in Orange is the New Black, but it was likely the throw of a pie to defend her (then) bae’s honor that had members asking for seconds (episode 3). For Dexter another episode equals another body, this time courtesy of the “Ice Truck Killer,” but our money’s on Dexter’s trip down memory lane reliving his inaugural kill that was the real tipping point - after all, fans never forget the first time (episode 3).
“There’s a unique sense of intimacy with creating a show for Netflix. Knowing you have an audience's undivided attention and that in essence, they are letting these characters in their home, we unfolded storylines at a more natural pace,” said Marta Kauffman. “In episode four, we see Grace and Frankie having no choice but to confront their fear, anger and uncertainty head on, which to me as a creator was a nice turning point to shift the narrative to focus on the future instead of the past; it is nice to know viewers were there right along with us.”
While around the world the hooked episode was relatively consistent, slight geographic differences did present themselves. The Dutch, for instance, tend to fall in love with series the fastest, getting hooked one episode ahead of most countries irrespective of the show. Germans showed early fandom for Arrow whereas France fell first for How I Met Your Mother. In Better Call Saul, Jimmy McGill won Brazilians over one episode quicker than Mexicans. And Down Under, viewers prove to hold out longer across the board, with members in Australia and New Zealand getting hooked one to two episodes later than the rest of the world on almost every show. Despite these differences, the hooked moment had no correlation to audience size or attrition, regardless of show, episode number or country.
Methodology: The data in this research was pulled from accounts who started watching season one of the selected series between January 2015 - July 2015 in Brazil, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, UK and US and between April 2015 - July 2015 for Australia and New Zealand. A hooked episode was defined when 70% of viewers who watched that episode went on to complete season one. Hooked episodes were first identified by country, then averaged to create the global hooked episode. The hooked episode had no correlation to total viewership numbers or attrition.
Denotes shows where for one or more countries, the show was unavailable to watch on Netflix and therefore the average is comprised of data from less than 16 countries
*The Netflix research didnt indicate exact plot points, but it did confirm episodes.
>Many people mention Breaking Bad, but it's a completely different situation isn't it ? it's more a 'back against the wall' / idiotic heroism thing. He didn't go there to sustain a lifestyle, he was cornered.
That's why he got started, but he started empire building in season 2.
I just wanted to point out that plenty of people watch shows and movies that focus on characters they dislike. Personally I only saw snippets of The Sopranos and had no interest in the stories or characters, however I do love the 1st 2 Godfather movies even though I find the characters to be largely horrific.
In Breaking Bad, the motivation actually changes quite a bit over the course of the series.
My meandering point is just to say that millions of people watching a show or movie does not automatically mean they condone the actions of the main characters or admire them in any way.
"Admire" is a bit of a leap. We are blurring the lines between fiction and reality a little. Watching a film or tv program doesn't imply any approval or admiration of the content, it means it is entertaining to watch. People do enjoy the romantic mobster world Mario Puzo created, they don't go out of their way to promote the growth of organized crime syndicates in their towns. Nobody offers to pay protection money... ("...if only Salt Lake City had a crime family I could pay protection to....")
The fiction and its interest is interesting, I mean by the end of The Sopranos, I found myself wanting Tony to not get killed or go to jail but also knowing full well that he was a sociopath. It probably has to do with the writing and how they humanized him. You get to view this very different world and lifestyle and then you see some human properties and some similarities to things you know. The difference is what draws you in, but I could relate in ways to Tony the father and Tony the husband. Maybe it is even more simple, I liked watching the stories and I knew if something happened to Tony, the stories would end.
I enjoyed Sopranos, Breaking Bad, all those Godfather movies and more but in no way do I endorse or encourage that lifestyle or those activities.
I think the psychological distance only partially explains the reversal in public sentiment from scorn to adoration. Obesity was never a serious problem in the communities I have lived in. The U.S's obesity epidemic is an abstract concept to me (as I have never experienced it first-hand), and yet I don't have any nostalgia for it.
Surely, it must be more than abstraction and omertà. Some drug organizations do not brand themselves with a public services front - see the TED talk by Rodrigo Canales http://www.ted.com/talks/rodrigo_canales_the_deadly_genius_of_drug_cartels?language=en.
I only speak for myself, but I like crime movies/drama for the allure of ruthless power. It's a unique sort of power that can only be obtained illegally, and at some great moral expense. This Faustian device makes for intriguing plots.
Who else can have a mountain of cocaine? Who else can execute business with such brutality? What other line of work involves Zero Halliburton cases stuffed with Benjamins, to go with high-powered handguns and sharp suits? These are proxies for power that a pleb like myself can barely begin to comprehend.
There's a scene in the Godfather Part II that I really like, when the nervous money-grubbing landlord comes into Don Corleone's office and gives him cash so that a previously disagreeable tenant can stay in his inn. The absurdity of the scene belies Corelone's power like the tip of an iceberg, and it's visually interesting to see a normal-looking guy wield such mysterious power.
This is echoed by the common "crime lord is the manager of a pizzaria by day" trope (Breaking Bad, Drive, Road to Perdition), where a seemingly weak front has a hidden-dragon kind of vibe.
To summarize, I think that "psychological distance" theory only carries the audience halfway, in that they don't feel the revulsion towards mobsters because they don't deal with them personally. I think most of the allure comes from the forbidden power.
> Finally, I realized not even students were too invested. When my best friend visited my campus to give a talk, he observed one of my lectures. I've got many shortcomings as an academic, but lecturing isn't one of them. I've been on TV, radio, podcasts — you name it. By professor standards, which admittedly aren't that high, I could rock the mic. But while my friend sat there, semi-engrossed in the lecture, he found himself increasingly distracted by the student in front of him. That student, who like all in-state students was paying $50 per lecture to hear me talk, was watching season one of Breaking Bad.
Well, a lack of investment by students is a plausible interpretation. Another is that the OP isn't as good at lecturing as he likes to think.
It's sort of all of the above. Netflix et al increases the availability of backlog TV shows. Networks abandoned quality tv because lowest common denominator won the highest ratings.
Then cable saw the benefits of high quality niche programming. HBO started it. But FX and AMC showed you could make real money on regular cable with prestige shows like mad men, breaking bad and the shield.
> ‘I can’t commit to another show, and I don’t have the time to emotionally commit to another show.'
I don't have this problem at all. There are shows that are too intense of a commitment for me (e.g., there are only so many Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones that you can watch at a time), but I always find myself at a loss for the lower-key shows. I end up watching reruns of shows that I know I like, but there are only so many of those on Netflix, so either I end up watching the same ones over and over, or I turn to my non-Netflix collection.
> It's as if I finished all the entertaining novels out there have to wait a year for one or two more to trickle out one chapter at a time.
This is why I love Netflix originals. Aside from being consistently high-quality and high production value (comparable to HBO/Showtime), they're perfect for binge-watching. I actually don't binge-watch so much, but I do appreciate being able to choose my own pace, which Netflix is perfectly optimized for.
TL;DR: IANAL but money laundering laws are usually designed to prosecute a wide range of methods and usually involve attempting to prove intent as opposed to whitelisting specific methods of laundering.
The long explanation:
It's complicated. US law tends to be specifically designed for one application in mind and then ends up being expanded as new applications rear their heads.
The IRS (tax collection entity for the US federal government) classified BitCoin as an investment a few years ago (as opposed to a currency). This suggests that other non-state created digital crypto-currencies are considered investments as well (IIRC Canada's mint was trying a digital currency, hence the "non-state created" phrase).
Money laundering statutes aren't new enough to know about [1] crypto-currencies, but they are effective with dealing with the conversion of money to products/services and back for the purpose of obscuring the original method of obtaining the currency. I don't know much about money laundering except what I see in movies+TV (specifically Breaking Bad).
I've heard that buying large value gift cards (plastic charge card versions of "gift certificates") are required to be reported to authorities by the retailers.
Recently a school sports coach was prosecuted for violating money laundering statute when he divided up one payment of $10,000+ into multiple smaller < $10,000 payments after his bank started to get suspicious about the nature of the transaction (which is required by US federal law of the bank). He violated the because he altered his payments "to avoid mandated financial institution reporting" of his transfers. Personally I think the mandatory threshold is stupid since people know what it is[2], but I feel no sympathy for the man in this case since the payments were suspected to be him paying off a student that he raped/molested. And yes, I realize that being accused of something is not the same thing as being guilty.
[1] http://www.fincen.gov/news_room/aml_history.html [2] although the US Patriot Act allows federal investigators to use _any_ change in financial habits to trigger an investigation, not just transactions above the $10k level
Sorry, I meant that I have already read this article a long time ago, and the title of this post got me excited to read about some new developments.
As for your second point, I think you mentioned a lot of the main reasons. But I disagree that new media is unlikely to be better than everything made in the past. In fact, I would say that it's very likely that a new movie or TV show will be far better than something made in the past, simply because they have much bigger budgets now, better technology, and even a better understanding of filmmaking and storytelling. Especially with recent TV shows such as Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, True Detective. The bar has been raised very high.
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.
For example: Breaking bad (http://www.submetrics.org/#/show/1069) Top topics: Party, Gossip, Show...
I don't understand how it can help me pick similar shows
Edit: I played a little more for some TV shows it gives better results. For sure it is interesting but require a lot more work to be actually useful as TV Shows recommendation tool.
> It also gives a reasonable argument as to why subsidizing channels we don't watch benefits TV viewers as a whole.
This is something a lot of people don't really think about.
For example, Breaking Bad, while a critical success, was never a popular show until its final episodes. It and Mad Men mostly existed as a way to keep their parent network, AMC, in a more popular cable tier, so that it could continue taking in carriage fees.
There is a very high correlation between needing to know the exact time of day and having easy, commoditized access to electricity.
If you don't have electricity, and you are not navigating an antique wind-powered ship, you probably don't need a mechanical timepiece.
Also, I recall, from way back in the 1980s, a digital clock that was "powered by a potato", using zinc and copper probes. Even if we lost all grid power, and solar cells, and low-head hydro, we could still manage a zinc-copper cell battery.
Didn't you see that episode of Breaking Bad?
Netflix, but mostly decentralized. End users can be paid to allocate part of their PC's storage toward movies and shows that they stream to their neighbors, taking a lot of the load off the public backbones and central servers.
Of course, these are encrypted and only decrypted (transcrypted?) when they're transferred to someone nearby, intelligently based on `tracepath` or something. My thought (may or may not be feasible) was that the central server only gives you the public key for the data, and then provides the private key and a new public key when the data is transmitted. I'm not sure that's even possible with any level of secrecy, but if so it would remove a lot of redundant traffic and I imagine you could pay people less than you'd save on bandwidth/peering if you could just pay them to P2P content (securely).
Get theaters involved in the initial distribution since they're everywhere and have digital copies (and probably decent pipes).
Basically, my internet got really crappy every day at about 6 PM and I imagined that 90% of my neighbors were streaming the same episodes of Breaking Bad, and it bugged me that it wasn't just sent once and the distributed locally.
I did - the full quote is:
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
I feel the same way about Breaking Bad and Mad Men - the last few episodes are painful.
Perhaps in an advanced biology course. But, given that you have limited time in class, and DNA is just one tiny, tiny component of a Bio 101 course, just getting across the concept of DNA, RNA, CGTA, Inheritance, and the implications to cell division is a victory.
Trying to teach, "Hey, there are four bases, but no, not really, you can also have methylated cytosines, What is methylation you ask...."
And then 25% of the class doesn't even grok the four bases concept because you got side tracked on a detail that is not relevant to baseline understanding.
Admittedly, you can be too simple. When I took grade 11/12 chemistry in 1986/1987 in British Columbia, Canada - they did not teach chirality, and I didn't hear about it until watching an episode of Breaking Bad. So I see how one can feel cheated out of some pretty core concepts...
I'm with you. I don't have time to watch anything else. I have a PVR connected to a satellite dish with only free to air channels. I tape more movies than I can ever get around to watching - all you have to do is wait and everything appears. A new free channel just started showing Breaking Bad a couple of weeks ago. I didn't have to search any torrent site for it, I was just patient.
I wasn't referring to the format (episodic) but the content. Shows like Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad are not only addictive because they're episodic, but because they're well written and have something to take with after watching. The characters are extremely elaborate. Those shows feature stories that don't rely on exhausted tropes or even deconstruct existing tropes. I think TV shows are better produced and their bigger budget is a plus which makes it more accessible to a broad audience. But when I read how avant-garde and never-seen-before the next hot TV show is, I can probably name an anime that did it before. Lately though, I'd say I probably like TV shows more and it almost seems as if animes are in a generational change, which is for the worse.
I may be a tad harsh about Pixar, but I think they're merely "good" for adults. There are some exceptions to this rule (Wall-E and Up for instance) but overall they are more or less Lion King or Ariel with a different setting e.g.: you know what will happen. Ghibli movies have this sense of mystery and uncertainty that'll keep an adult watcher hooked. I also like that they are a bit more merciless, even though that makes them unsuitable for a very young audience. Pixar movies can be watched 6+ with certainty whereas you'd better check if the Ghibli movie is suitable for your child.
I agree that one thing that's lost is the ability to discuss episodes with people as a show progresses. Since you never know what episode a person is on you can't really risk discussing things until you're sure the person has caught up. With weekly shows like Game of Thrones for instance, you can feel pretty comfortable discussing an episode amongst other fans. Not sure if that's really something I'll miss when it's gone, but it's definitely a big change with Netflix that ultimately started as a smaller disruption with DVR devices...
I suppose personally my feelings on the matter is even though I might lose the few advantages that you mentioned, the disadvantages far outweigh it and I won't miss the airing of shows like Breaking Bad or Suits that took one season and split them in half with gigantic gaps in between (months or even years), to the point where you can't even remember where the show was going by the time it returns. I like the freedom to watch at whatever schedule I prefer, without any kind of arbitrary limitations that may or may not suit my lifestyle at the time, and the confidence to know I'm going to be able to see a story through from start to finish once devote time to it...
Atlanta native here, I want to support this view. I'm very happy to have moved to Silicon Beach (Santa Monica) because I finally know what it feels like to not want a concealed firearm on me all the time. From a statistical point of view, the YoY murder and assault stats in Atlanta are running about twice what they were last year. From a personal point of view, after almost 3 years in the LA area I don't have a constellation of stories from my social group involving violent crime. It seemed like everyone I knew in Atlanta had a story about violent crime impacting their life, no matter how tony their address was.
Don't get me started on the meth. I love how my "gentrified" friends out here swear up and down how Breaking Bad is such a wonderful show, yet I cannot even attempt to watch an episode because I've seen too much of that up close.
I gave up on Breaking Bad at Episode 3 for that exact reason. "Dude, that is too far." lol. I agree with your sentiment that kids will be kids, but they also need to be kept in check from time to time so that they don't cause a nuisance of themselves to the rest of society.
I really enjoyed this article. imho The quest/test for manhood theme is one of the most dominant in our media, yet it is also kind of a taboo topic. Breaking Bad and Fight Club come to mind, where "castrated" protagonists fight back for their manhood... The Big Lebowski is, among many themes, about how different people prove their masculinity in different ways too. The whole damsel in distress genre... Also, movie/tv male comic relief is often portrayed as asexual or incredibly dorky.
> Entertainment, in such a busy world, should be available at the leisure of the viewer, not some game rigged to keep interest over a time.
Well, it can't be. It has to be made first. No matter what, there will always be some kind of a delay in when you can watch the next X of Y, simply because we haven't invented time travel yet.
And I absolutely agree that the broadcast model -- where you see the thing only if you're at your TV at the right time -- is a thing of the past, but there's no reason that means serialization (which is what I think you mean by linear) should go away.
> I think because of binging, better quality content is being created that is more complete and movie like.
I won't argue, by any stretch, that scripted serialized storytelling (non-film) hasn't gotten markedly better over the last few years, but this kicked off long before Netflix dumped an entire season of HoC into your lap and can largely be credited to the shows that really raised the bar, like The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc. All of those were serialized. Netflix is a johnny come lately to this trend.
And there is actually value in having time to digest what you just watched. You're more likely to think critically about it and less likely to just swallow it as some giant mass of stuff. The social aspect of being in sync with other people -- even people you just met -- can mean finding new ways to think about the story that you didn't have before.
All the netflix model does is make it so our episodes of TV are impossibly long, and their impact on popular culture much much less. People absolutely talk more about shows they're actively watching during a season.
I experience this phenomenon on a less immediate time scale: in the days following a new episode of Breaking Bad, etc, there is discussion and camaraderie with other fans. With the "binge-only" model of House of Cards, that same social experience is not possible.
Winning moments of truth
We strive to win more of our members’ “moments of truth”.
Those decision points are, say, at 7:15 pm when a member wants to relax, enjoy a shared experience with friends and family, or is bored.
They could play a video game, surf the web, read a magazine, channel surf their MVPD/DVR system, buy a pay-per-view movie, put on a DVD, use a piracy service, turn on Hulu, or launch Netflix.
We want our members to choose Netflix in these moments of truth.
---------------------------------------------------
This nails it. When I get home (especially if I had a long day at work), I first go to Netflix and see what's on my list. This is because Netflix app is beautiful, it always works and they have my list of things to watch. As someone who loves to watch documentaries, I am happy with the selection that Netflix offers.
If I don't like anything on the list, I just watch an old Friends or Breaking Bad episode.
I think Netflix has absolutely nailed the user experience and depending on your taste/location, their selection is great as well.
I certainly hope so. I dropped out after the first 2, with the impression that it was among the worst shows I've ever seen. The second episode was just boring imo. The first was...well....a prime minister screwing a pig. I get that they were going for shock value, but usually there is a payoff for the viewer because the shocking part serves some larger purpose in a great story (like you might find in a show like Breaking Bad). No such payoff came in this case.
I really enjoyed this article. imho The quest/test for manhood theme is one of the most dominant in our media, yet it is also kind of a spoken taboo. Breaking Bad and Fight Club come to mind, where "castrated" protagonists fight back for their manhood... The Big Lebowski is, among many themes, about how different people prove their masculinity in different ways too. The whole damsel in distress genre... I've been writing an article about this topic, hopefully it will come out soon. Also, movie/tv male comic relief is often portrayed as asexual or incredibly dorky.
This is also incredibly timely, as I've spent the last weeks thinking about how joining the military would be like.
I always thought that the whole LOTR/Hobbit thing could to well as a modern TV series; like Game of Thrones, House of Cards or Breaking Bad -- movie-like quality but much longer, so there's possibility to tell a much bigger story and zoom in on many details which each can tell a story on their own. I for one liked how the LOTR extensions had more time for some quiet moments, and song. Maybe they'll do a longer TV-Show-like edit.
Although with the Hobbit they stretched it in really tedious and annoying ways, not adding much interesting to the story, just dumb action and and annoying characters. So now people want it to be shorter.
> I think something like Alfred Hitchcock Presents is very watchable today and I often do. You get a little mystery and murder and all within an hour. There were other watchable programs, like Perry Mason or something.
Those tend to be pretty good, I agree. I watch them on Me TV sometimes. (Digital subchannels are what UHF and cable were Back In The Day: Cheap timeslots filled with whatever someone has to hand.) However, they're good writing one episode at a time. These days, you get good writing a season at a time; it allows more characterization, more complex plots, and more flavor. Breaking Bad is a novel-length plot, something TV only did in soap opera form back then. And soap operas have never been accused of having good writing.
Breaking Bad is a high bar and Charlies Angels was always pretty low-brow fluff but I agree with your basic point. There were some good shows (Twilight Zone for example). But the list of shows from that era that are truly enjoyable today is pretty thin in a way that isn't true for movies. While a show like Breaking Bad isn't to everyone's taste--and arguably doesn't work without time shifting and even maybe the Internet--anyone who tries to argue that there's nothing good on TV any longer basically doesn't know what they're talking about.
It's strange to say, but TV has gotten a lot better decade by decade. There was simply nothing remotely like "Breaking Bad" in the 60's or 70's. I recently watched an episode of "Charlies Angels" and was surprised at how insipid and simply awful it was, and it was a hit show in its days.
The proliferation of options for people to watch has forced an upgrade in the quality of the writing.
I binge listened to Serial the same way I binge-watched The Wire and Breaking Bad. But I don't watch TV shows on a consistent basis. I rarely watch shows even by download. This might not be an important factor, but identifying non-traditional consumers being attracted to the content, consuming it and moving on might be a useful cohort or metric.
Second, I'd be cautious to say the format is the reason why it's popular. Such as saying that the TV-show like structure, and made it easy to consume, are the reason for binging. It is certainly why it is popular - for a podcast - but I doubt it's why it's popular in general. Content is king.
Not being a typical TV-show fan I only consume TV/podcasts that I hear (and turn out to be) exceptionally good from friends and reviews. Although I do listen to podcasts while I work (on a day to day basis).
Regarding the question of binging, well I think it could easily be 90% about quality of content. Quality such as Serial and The Wire are rare. So given the opportunity and access to all the media at once (thx to the internet) nothing stops us from consuming it all at once.
Anyone who wants to repeat this model, more quality content please. Which means content creators should focus most on good storytelling.. and less about the format and delivery. Hollywood should take note of this since they also seem to be obsessed with format over good storytelling. They seem to think CGI is an adequate replacement for good characters and drama.
He really needs to lay off the illegal drugs and the constant TV, concentrate on his real life, and get a nice quite place of his own. As someone who hears voices occasionally (not that odd considering studies show auditory hallucinations can come from caffeine and lack of sleep), just a TV going somewhere in the house three rooms away can make it a lot worse. I can't even image what it is like for someone "with plenty of hash", diagnosed schizophrenic, and who mentions so many TV shows constantly being watched in the article and even by his parents. Marijuana and constant TV might be fine for some people, but if you are hearing imaginary voices, maybe you should lay off. The situations in TV and particularly the shows he mentions, like Breaking Bad, are really not the sort of things you want a paranoid schizophrenic mind to seize upon. You may wake up thinking the cops are after you just like your favorite TV show.
This reminds me of a movie scene in Breaking Bad where they remotely "wiped" a laptop's content. Guess that's plausible now.
Yep. It's all been way overdone. Brazil and 12 Monkeys were different because it was all more or less new then. Both also had great arc and reveals, but It's Been Done Now.
I say "new then"; dystopian SciFi was a staple of drive-ins in the '70s - from Silent Running to Planet of the Apes to Logan's Run...
It's not like there isn't a huge backlog of great sci-fi to draw on that isn't dystopian. I'd like to see The Foundation Trilogy as a multi-year "Breaking Bad" style series.
It's basically a massive essay, but Scorcese's "Personal Journey" manages to explain why movies are in terrible shape without being hopeless about it. The reasons are profound.
Right -- in five years. Just like nobody will ding you for telling them what happens to Romeo and Juliet, or that thing about Darth Vader, because by now it's assumed that anyone who cares to experience that thing un-spoiled has already finished.
The last episodes of Breaking Bad have only been on Netflix for about 6 months. It's completely plausible that people who decided to start watching after the series reached its critically-acclaimed ending might still be a couple seasons shy of the ending. Hold your spoilers for another 3-6 months to be safe.
This hasn't been the case for a long time, although for some reason it remains a common misperception. I think it's mainly a marketing problem because people are always reading comments like this online, or hearing about such-and-such series that "is on Netflix" but disappointingly isn't currently available in the UK, while simultaneously being unaware of all the content that is available in the UK but not in the US.
For example, Netflix UK has the first 2 Hobbit movies, Pixar's Up, the original Danish versions of The Killing and The Bridge, all of Stargate SG-1/Atlantis, 24 and The Shield - none of which are currently available in the US. There's a load more I can't remember off the top of my head. The UK also got Breaking Bad a few hours after it was aired in the US, whereas US customers had to wait several months, presumably due to an exclusivity deal with AMC.
Obviously the UK also gets all the Netflix original content. Occasionally a new season will launch a few months ahead in the US, but that's not really a big deal. I can only assume this is done for same marketing reasons that blockbuster movie launches are typically staggered worldwide.
There are a small number of US shows like 30 Rock and Better Off Ted that I wish were on the UK service, and Star Trek DS9 is conspicuously absent, but that list is much smaller than it was 2 years ago.
You could also say that TV is increasingly for the young. Vice, House of Cards, etc. are great but they're targeting the 20+ crowd. There's an explosion of new shows and programs for kids on cable. Some of them, like Adventure Time, are so well done that I enjoy watching them. In fact, you could call this a bit of a "golden age" for this sort of thing.
Watching shows on the internet is great. The acting talent and quality there has really improved. But, I see this less as taking away from cable, and more as taking away from the box office. Kevin Spacey was doing great movies 10+ years ago, and now he's headlining Netflix's service. Honestly, I think these long running tv shows are a better format for a lot of actors. Breaking Bad just can not be done in a 2-3 hour movie, or in a syndicated format where each episode needs to be treated more or less independently (e.g. Law and Order). However, Netflix didn't really start that trend, cable did.
Also, cable/tv "owns" the coax cable running through the house: the fastest and most reliable way of moving information around the average US home. There's new technologies like Moca that are going to make a lot of things possible that currently are very flakey with current wireless/alt-ethernet solutions.
TV has always been (mostly) about mindless entertainment. I think the shows that are successful outside of a traditional cable package succeed because they were probably inappropriate for the cable programming format anyways. Services like Netflix are filling a new niche, but I don't think they can significantly take away the core value of cable for most people.
The nearest reference I know for sure it's the season 3, episode 26 "Sunset" of Breaking Bad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpDSn6odVzs
*The emphasis at the end is not necessary.
thanks for the clarification. you're right on that.
i've found that my social skills have dramatically improved from trying to learn them _conceptually_, rather than implicitly. I watched a lot of tv shows - walking dead, house of cards, game of thrones, breaking bad - and kept pausing the tv to discuss with my wife _why_ people were acting the ways they did.
doing this really helped me come to understand a lot of things, like the importance of staying calm if you want to be respected. apparently 'dispositional mindfulness' is mindfulness as a default state, as opposed to something practiced intentionally.
going about my day thinking about abstract things constantly seems like the opposite of dispositional mindfulness. i'll haveh to look further.
I don't mean this in a disrespectful way, but what kinds of drinks are you drinking and where are you drinking them? Yes, a robotic mixer might work in a crappy bar for standard bar drinks like a Rum and Coke, Long Island Iced Tea, etc., but anything beyond the standard pour-and-serve is probably best done by the human touch, especially if you're charging big city prices for them.
That said, there are some places that do use quick mixers to mix up the classics. Garduños, a huge Albuquerque, NM mexican restaurant (as seen in Breaking Bad, season 5!) uses pre-mixed margarita mix from a keg and dispenses it with a typical bartender's soda gun. They've realized that most people who order "well" margaritas aren't that discerning and appreciate the consistency that a factory-mixed 'rita delivers. Garduños serves them by the gallon and the pre-mix saves them lots of bartender time when they're mixing their most popular cocktail.
This would never fly in a nice bar, though. These days, most big city bars are chasing the money and the money is in "craft cocktails". It's all about the ingredients and the customized drinks that are tailored to the customer's preferences. Bartenders are making a big show out of things like twisting a slice of orange peel to release its oils. The presentation is hugely important here and a robotic mixer just doesn't have the right vibe, in my opinion.
> I never cease to be amazed at the creativity of piracy apologists in coming up with new scenarios where piracy is the only solution.
It doesn't need to be the only solution. It simply needs to be the most economically viable solution to the consumer.
Joe Bloggs is an Englishman. He likes high-quality US television imports - Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, House of Cards, True Detective. He wants to obtain them for his viewing pleasure.
His options:
1. Go old school. pay £100-£150 for all the box-sets.
2. Go new school. Pay £7/month for Netflix (BB, HoC). Pay £30+ a month for Sky TV subscription with Sky Atlantic for the others. Plus £x, plus £y for everything else he needs - not even to mention movies, which are very inconsistent across streaming services. (I fear that we Limeys get less out of our Netflix subscriptions than you.)
3. Go illegal. Spend an upfront cost of time, electricity, bandwidth and risk of malware apocalypse/getting caught to get all this stuff on his hard drive.
Forget the morality of the issue. Never mind the legality: if Joe is a driver, it's a statistical near certainty that he speeds; if he doesn't take drugs, it's not because they're illegal. It's simple economics. If three is cheaper - in terms of time plus risk plus money - he will do number three.
As long as The Pirate Bay offers real advantages over legal services - principally, beyond the monetary price, everything you could possibly want is there in one place - then people will choose it. And just as it's unrealistic to expect media conglomerates to share the EFF's view of DRM, so it's unrealistic to expect media consumers to put up with the enormous inconveniences for the sake of some mythical starving artist grubbing away at the bottom of the Hollywood food chain.
Their hope for the future is that the sellers are also middlemen. The studios/networks distribute and in some cases finance the content, which is largely produced by production companies (which often represent independent contractors, aka Talent).
The game Hollywood talent is starting to play is to flirt with companies like Netflix as sources of financing and distribution in order to play them off the studios. Talent benefits from more players on that side of things, which is why Netflix is able to get someone like Kevin Spacey (whose production company is quite forward-looking).
Netflix has a lot of cash to throw around, even by Hollywood standards. So far they're using it pretty intelligently, in a long, broad game.
They had an aborted earlier attempt with the DVD business to do something similar, Red Envelope. That was going to be their own distribution company. They were in here LA for a couple years, but from what I saw of them, the people running it were the wrong people. I think they've found the right people for their content business now. Seems to be working well, anyway.
They're also playing their strengths well, doing series instead of motion pictures for the most part. Series are binge-able, and that's something they have the networks and studios don't.
It's my perception that Netflix sort of triggered the start of binge watching as a phenomenon when they bought Lost for $40 million. There was a cohort who binged through that and talked about it, and then that got the idea out there. Then Breaking Bad was an interesting example when binging on Netflix and Amazon sort of retroactively moved the show from cult to huge.
They have lost exclusive distribution partners in the past, most notably Criterion (who went to Hulu) and Starz! Those hurt them, but they seem to be coming back from it.
What's the point you're trying to make? That you can't buy episodes of shows like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones separate from cable, they're too expensive, or that Netflix and its kin aren't good enough?
I don't know what to think about TV.
On one hand, there's a lot of progress happening. Streaming, on-demand and pay-per-view/download are really getting bigger and more prominent every year. HDboxes, are getting better too and achieving a lot of the same things (watch anything anytime).
The artform itself is improving. Game of Thrones or Breaking bad are better that any show could be in the stand alone episode paradigm of Star Trek. They are using the 10+ hrs hours of sequential viewing to do some serious plot & character development. Walter White wasn't possible before serials.
On the other hand, it's all such a kludge.The whole thing is built around creating and maintaining an artificial scarcity modeled on the slightly less artificial scarcity of a few years ago. We pretend that we're paying Amazon or Netflix's for a cable or pretending that we're paying Apple for a video cassette. Don't get me started on loaning.
I'm not claiming that copyright could go away and still have Game Of Thrones. This isn't that kind of statement. But… it's just such a kludge. Something this brittle and ugly can't be the right way to do anything.
I'm not so sure I agree with that standpoint. Sure, there is a population that doesn't watch any TV; but for a while, it was "Breaking Bad" this, and "Game of Thrones" that. People still like to watch their series, they just like to watch it on their time, be it anime (Crunchy Roll), recent TV (Hulu), movies (Amazon, Netflix, etc), recent televised news and pseudo-news (various news and private websites).
TV as an injestible X amount of time where you're fed pre-recorded or live content isn't going anywhere any time soon. In fact, many services exist to provide even live TV in brand new forms. Twitch.TV and LiveStream come to mind. For modern pre-recorded things, there's YouTube, Vimeo, Vine Videos to some degree, and so on.
TV as defined as radio with pictures (prerecorded, 24-hour, jockeyed video experiences) may be steadily shrinking right now; but TV as a video-based communications platform is far from gone.
Funny enough, I wouldn't be surprised if, if the TV as we know it fades away, new internet tools are brought up which create video playlists that follow your preferences, and play and suggest videos all around that concept so you can watch it in the background, like some TV viewers do. See YouTube playlists and a few other services for examples of this already.
Breaking Bad episode Ozymandias (s05e14) has a rating of 10!
http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0903747
> for $1.99 or some other trivial amount, until then they are just being ignorant.
How did you get to this number? Its pretty bold to call them ignorant for pricing it this way if you don't have the economics to back this up. Fact of the matter is, content isn't cheap to produce and at some point either the cost to produce a Breaking Bad goes down, or there is a model that can keep the lights on for these studios.
Those long tail prices ($1.99/ep on iTunes and the like) are heavily subsidized by advertising during the airing of the show. Cable networks make almost more than half of their yearly revenue from advertising. The true price of each episode may be much more than $1.99 once you factor in how much is being paid by advertiser. A day one $1.99/ep may not even be economically feasible. The fact that television media costs so much more upfront has nothing to do with (consumer) price discrimination.
Screw Netflix!
$7.99 per month and they don't even have the last half of season 5 - Breaking Bad.
Many movies are unavailable to US viewers, as services such as https://hola.org/ have shown us.
Large selection? It seems like every movie I want to watch is "Unavailable for streaming..." or is viewable for an additional $10 fee through their DVD service.
I like Popcorn!
There absolutely is a reason why it's expensive. In fact, I could easily make a case that as a society we'd be better off if more money was invested in creating quality content.
Believe it or not, the subscription costs usually only cover the delivery and printing fees. Historically, subscription revenue has never been a real profit center because it's always been the best interest of a publication to build a larger circulation to increase ad rates.
Now, the internet has brought certain efficiencies to what it costs to distribute content. But it hasn't necessarily impacted what it costs to create quality content. With ad rates being lower online than they are in really any other medium, ad revenue isn't supporting the creation of quality content like it used to.
While Game of Thrones exists on a no commercial network, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and many more of your favorite cable television shows rely on both ad revenue and subscription revenue to exist. HBO has a cost north of $15 per month depending on your cable network, whereas AMC (which runs commercials) costs about 27 cents in your bundled cable package which is about 2% of the cost of HBO. That's a colossal difference and yes, advertisers, are subsidizing that dramatic cost differential.
Oh, man, that link proves my point. IMO.
Doubtlessly, numerous people on this planet woke up this morning and said: "wow, this day would be great if I could see a 53-year-old movie in 4K. Because watching The Guns of Navarone in Blu-Ray just doesn't do it justice". No, I don't think that happened this morning (or any other morning).
Or maybe they all said: "If only I could see Dr. Peter Venkman get slimed in 4K quality, my life would be complete. Watching Ghostbusters in Blu-Ray doesn't let me appreciate the nuances of that 29-year-old film". No, I don't think too many people said that either.
I understand that Sony has to start somewhere. But there's no "killer app", or in this case "killer movie" on that list. (Though, granted, there was plenty of killing in Breaking Bad). Ghostbusters is one of my favorite movies of all time, but I'm not going to buy a brand new TV set just to re-watch it in 4K. Still, if they add Forbidden Planet to that list, maybe they'd make a sale. :)
This is not a mass market product. In fact IMO there's not enough of a market for this to be a profitable product.
But as Dennis Miller used to end his rants: "of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong".
I think binge watching takes something away, but commercial interruptions take a lot more away, and fixed-hour availability made intelligent television a rarity (Tivo and Netflix enable TV to accommodate a smarter, busier audience and have changed the nature of what gets made).
What most people seem to do these days is: (1) binge watch, (2) discuss what it meant for the week after, (3) re-watch a few months later to get a sense of what they missed due to binge watching. Shows like Breaking Bad have enough depth that it's worth it to watch them a second time.
Still, I doubt the release-all-at-once dynamic will be the norm in 3 years, but I doubt we'll have the arbitrary winter breaks designed to make sure the season finale lands in the 20s of May. I could see an every-two-days release cycle being the norm (so a show like House of Cards would unfold over a month).
This illustrates why the best model for content distribution is a hybrid between having the full back-catalog available for binge consumption while still releasing new episodes on a consistent schedule.
Exclusively going to either end of the spectrum has clear disadvantages:
– On the binge end, if everything is released at once, almost no one on the planet will be on the exact same viewing schedule. Some people will watch the entire season at once, some will watch an episode per night, and so on. It makes it difficult to discuss the show with anyone because you first have to establish how much each of you have watched. Does it make discussion impossible? Absolutely not, but it presents a barrier.
– On the other end of the spectrum, limiting the availability of a show's back catalog will obviously limit a show's audience. Most of the successful shows of the past few years grew their audience over time, which requires access to that back catalog. Netflix, being the most popular service for this kind of thing, is the logical place to license your content if you care about improving your show's future prospects. Again, not being on Netflix does not make it impossible to catch up, but it presents another barrier.
Breaking Bad is the ideal example for this model. It's a great show that built its audience through word-of-mouth; if their back catalog wasn't available, the word-of-mouth recommendation would be DOA because most people would not have broken through the barrier. Similarly, if they had just dumped season 5 onto Netflix, it would have eliminated the week-over-week hype cycle that built over the course of the season and climaxed with a finale that was watched 700% more than the show's pilot.
Also, releasing every episode at once almost entirely eliminates cliffhangers. That's no fun.
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.
Or maybe it is because Kevin Spacey is a fantastic actor and it has an excellent screenplay? Is the USA a meth addicted society because Breaking Bad has been one of the most celebrated cable tv shows as of late? Trying to pin the success of a well written show on Netflix to America's total hopelessness because Obama hasn't changed the world is a stretch.
I leave my house 90 minutes before I'm due at work. It takes me between 15 and 30 minutes to get to work, depending on traffic and public transportation. Instead of going into the office, I go into a coffee shop around the corner and write for 45-60 minutes, and then head up into the office.
I've managed to keep this up for 3 months straight now, and while I'm not anywhere close to being ready to publish, I've got more words written in my book(s) than I wrote in the last 3 years combined.
As another wise person once said: there's no such thing not having time -- only not making it a priority. Everything comes down to priorities. Do you not have time to do side projects, or is making side projects not a priority for you? Make a list of everything you do in your time, and fo reverything that is a lower priority than your side project, bump it off the list. Don't do it. Do your side project instead.
Drinking with buddies less important than finishing your side project? Schedule it for another time. Is Breaking Bad less important than finishing your side project? Watch it on Netflix later.
And so on. Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize.
I decided a few months ago that publishing a book was one of my top priorities. What wasn't my top priority? Watching yet another episode of some TV show on Netflix. Instead of watching 3 episodes a night, I can watch 2, go to bed an hour earlier, wake up an hour earlier, and have time to write in the morning before work with zero distractions.
Works for me, anyway. Good luck.
I have been having this trouble with all Tv shows lately. It's supposed to be the Golden Age of TV, and I have loved shows like Breaking Bad and Lost, but I can't shake the fact that the people producing the shows have no interest in anything other than ad views.
TV is just ads for ads. There's a reason Hulu sucks so much.
Kudos for voting with your eyes.
Also, availability is a huge issue. For me in Germany it is nigh impossible to legally watch a recent episode of Game of Thrones. And Breaking Bad or Doctor Who has only recently become available via the new service watchever.de. And even there they are published far too late if you want to participate in the online discussion of an episode.
Breaking Bad actually had relatively little violence as far as contemporary TV shows go. Most of it was tame, with very few instances of grislier brutality. That and it all perfectly fit within the narrative, rather than being wanton and gratuitous for no reason.
My ISP - Virgin in the UK - has a transparent proxy cache for streaming video sites. If I want to watch an episode of Breaking Bad then it is there, instant. However, that 1992 B-side tack with 200 views 'buffers' for a while. That probably is because it is not cached down the road or further upstream at some Akamai CDN. It probably has to come straight from the heart of the GooglePlex, Sergei's very own hard drive...
Given that most people watch what they are told to watch, i.e. the same stuff as everyone else, and, since almost all of that can be cached by the ISP, why would they throttle? The final mile I pay for, I could buy the basic 'throttled to 5Mbs' service but they kindly let me pay for a sensible level of bandwidth. How is this throttling thing different in the USA?
I'm not arguing that they weren't a criminal enterprise or that movie pirates are all closet consumerists waiting to be parted with their money. However, the article says that the vast majority of mega's money came from "premium subscriptions". The subscription part is interesting to me because it implies that a not insignificant number of people were paying regularly for this "service". They can't all have been dupes who never checked their credit card statements.
As to your statement about them reselling this stuff for "pennies on the dollar", I do have a major problem with creators not being compensated for their work. However, I'm also not really sure what movies and TV shows are actually worth anymore. The pricing seems totally crazy between Netflix, physical media, and iTunes. It's anyone's guess what an episode of "Breaking Bad" actually is worth. The answer is increasingly, "it depends".
Netflix is declining. Their selection of movies available for streaming has been steadily losing mainstream, popular titles. Now it's mostly B movies and kids shows. Probably the main thing keeping it going are the few popular television series that they still have (Breaking Bad, etc.); I can't remember the last time I actually watched one of their movies.
Warning: snark ahead.
"The result is an inherently boring web of data. Google’s Knowledge Graph promotional video is a great example of how boring this web can be. “Let’s say you’re searching for Renaissance Painters”…. Really? Who searches for that?"
Somebody with a brain that is used for more than gross muscle control over a TV remote?
" I really don’t care what Leonardo DaVinci’s height was or which Nobel prize winners were born before 1945. I care about how other people feel about last night’s Breaking Bad series finale. How did they find the ending? What other series or movies might I enjoy based on those experiences?"
This made me throw up in my mouth a little.
I can understand that the author wants results to be more applicable to the everyday life of the searcher, but I don't see his vision of a Semantic Web any more useful than the current one.
Finding out what other like-minded people think about my favorite TV show improves the Web, and thus my life? Really?
I'm all for more accurate classification of online data. What I don't want is "boring" (in the author's words) data being pushed aside in favor of what somebody thinks is "interesting".
We've already got companies doing that, in the form of "targeted ads".
"I feel so strange posting this comment, since those who would benefit from this advice are probably of dubious character"
I don't think there's too much social harm done in pointing this out. It seems to be so well known that it's referenced (visually or even verbally) in movies and TV shows like Breaking Bad, where the criminals take the batteries out of their phones as an extra precaution against being tracked.
1. In the example at hand, a possible solution would be to separate the mechanics of how the episodes aired from the content of the story itself. You don't need story details to have an explanation of how Season 5 of Breaking Bad was broken into two pieces that aired a year apart from each other.
2. The fact that a major character dies, is pretty arguably a spoiler. Obviously not for stories so common and/or old that they are tropes (e.g. Romeo and Juliet). Coming back to the example of Breaking Bad Season 5, knowing that a major character dies is probably universally accepted as a spoiler within the first year or so after it airs.
The article does have such a separation, but you navigated down to the section about the fifth season. Honestly, what were you expecting if not a summary of what happens is that season?
Also, who should spoiler warnings in an article about a TV series benefit? People who haven't seen the latest series? People who haven't seen it at all?
Should the summary say nothing about how Walt turns to crime (which wasn't apparent to me when I started watching it), and instead describe Breaking Bad in vague terms as the struggles of a New Mexico man to provide for his family?
Spoiler warnings are inherently at odds with writing a succinct and accurate summary of a given subject, which is what Wikipedia strives to do.
Other commenters here are right, if you don't want something spoiled for you then simply don't read encyclopedia articles about it.
You wanted some information about the structure of the aired episodes, there's plenty of TV-guide like sources for that that aren't encyclopedias.
WARNING: Do not read this article if you haven't watched the end of Breaking Bad. (This post is safe though)
I, like the author, am very sensitive to spoilers and completely agree that people for whom spoilers ruin the enjoyment of a work should still be able to reap the benefits of an encyclopedia for the work's "metadata" -- information about the cast, running time, season and episode count, production, etc. However, the article, ironically and much to my horror (Edit: actually the author has a warning at the top of the page, which I missed), spoils the end of Breaking Bad, one of television's most popular shows, a show that is/was still on my to watch list.
Nate Silver wouldn't have a job without advertisement. Neither would Glenn Greenwald, Walter Cronchite, Dan Rather, Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, or Peter Jennings.
TV shows like Seinfeld, Friends, The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, and M.A.S.H. would not exist without ads.
Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Peyton Manning, Michael Phelps, Michael Jordan, Michael Tyson, Tiger Woods, and Larry Byrd would not have done the things they did without ads - no one would have paid them to.
Ads pay for people who are good at what they do to do what they're good at what they do as a means to pay for the other things they have to do. You couldn't possibly be more wrong about advertisements - without ads, there would be no US as you know it today.
Would you rather have them cut off your internet access entirely when you watch too many episodes of Breaking Bad in a row?
I will agree that most ISP's are fairly evil, but I would rather know where I stand with them than just get a notice that I am cut off for no good reason.
I suspect you'll find even the meth business is tricky. Indeed, I believe there's a popular TV series about it.
Serously, Breaking Bad is an excellent primer on entrepreneurship. It covers everything: distribution, marketing, negotiation, finding business partners, scaling, exit strategies...
Yeah ours was monitoring just rubber stamped it. Afterwards everyone remarked, everyone could tell they were bad just looking at what was in front of them, our theory was she was too busy watching the breaking bad final episode or something.
After reading that slate article about how the writers brain-stormed the ending to fit their audience and get the "best" emotions out of them instead of following up on characters' development I decided not to watch any tv shows for a while.
edit: I thought that breaking bad was awesome but reading it being reduced as "drama" make me realize it was mainly drama in specific setting :(
I think your numbers are off.
Assuming that everyone cuts their cable and half of the 6 million people who watched the Breaking Bad series finale pay the $3.50 to watch it, that's $10,500,000. Less Apple's 30%, that's $7,350,000 in revenue left.
Bear in mind two things:
1) It reportedly costs $3M to $3.5M to make an episode of Breaking Bad.
2) The average viewership per episode in the last couple of seasons was substantially less than 6 million viewers.
Suddenly the numbers become a little murkier.
The Average american family spends 34 hours a week [1] watching TV, break that in half for shits and giggles and you're now at 17 hours per week or roughly 68 hours a month. At your $3.5 per hour of TV rate the average household is now paying $238 bucks a month ala-carte.
Want to charge less per episode? Breaking Bad's last season cost $3.5M per episode to produce just to break even on production costs they'd need to charge just over a buck per episode (3M paid) and you'd still be charging that household $68 bucks a month. That still real money right there.
[1] http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/americans-spend-34-hours-week-watching-tv-nielsen-numbers-article-1.1162285
[2] http://variety.com/2013/tv/news/mipcom-katzenberg-offered-to-pay-75-million-for-three-extra-breaking-bad-episodes-1200708639/
I have a hard time believing that I'm being subsidized for my lack of a cable bill. Could AMC really be getting more from me with transmission fees and ads than the $3.99 I pay (gladly, btw) for _each_ episode of Mad Med or Breaking Bad? If everyone cut their cable, that would be a lot of new $3-$4 purchases.
The last episode of Breaking Bad had 6 million live viewers. Assume that everyone cuts their cable, and only half buy the finale for the average price of $3.5. Also assume that prior to this no one is buying it at all. Yank the standard Apple-style 30% and that's still almost 15 million dollars. That's real money right there.
Hi there! Great feedback.
The bar chart isn't perfect, and certainly less so out of context. But I should clarify my intent behind it. The final episode of Breaking Bad pulled in roughly the same numbers that your average primetime hit (or even indexed basket of hits) pulls in every night. So when we're talking about the primetime averages, we're talking about indices with viewership figures roughly comparable to Breaking Bad's final episode. The point was that Breaking Bad was able to put a significant price premium on its finale relative to the nominal size of the audience it drew. It punched above its weight, so to speak. (Finale or otherwise, we're talking about 10 million Breaking Bad viewers vs. 11 million CBS viewers.)
Is the comparison totally fair? In that specific context, in illustration of that specific point, I believe so. Would it be remotely fair if it were used, say, to illustrate a point about Breaking Bad in general vis-a-vis the market? Considerably less so. The point was more about its value to AMC, and less about the show's ostensible superiority to any other network show.
To that point, I like your idea about contrasting Breaking Bad (finale, ordinary episode, etc.) with the average cost of an ad on AMC (though we'd have to control for the skew exerted on that index by Breaking Bad itself). That might be more apples-to-apples in certain respects, and it might have driven the point across a little bit better. Duly noted, and in as much as I am considering a followup, I may want to address that specific concern.
I see from the initial image in the post that it contains info about Breaking Bad. So I backed out of reading it until I know if it contains spoilers.
Before I go read it would someone please verify that it's spoiler-free? (beyond the initial image which spoils something about Walt/Skylar's relationship)
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SPOILERS BELOW
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I'm partway through season 4 at the point where Skylar makes Walt return the fancy car he just bought for Walt Jr. saying that "someone has to protect the family from the man protecting the family". Jessie is riding shotgun with Mike and Hank is starting to regain interest in the blue meth case.
Breaking Bad is a TV show. American Idol is also a TV show.
However, Breaking Bad is not American Idol.
... Did you finish Episode 2? Have you lost internet access for the last 6 years? Valve confirmed it waaaaay back in '07, and Gaben has been dropping little nuggets about it every few years.
You really need to understand how painful this is for HL fans. It would be like if AMC decided not to produce & air the final season of Breaking Bad... or delay the final season for 6+ years.
I watched most of Breaking Bad for the first time this summer (all but the final eight episodes), and while I really like Walt at the beginning, these last few episodes (really starting with Say My Name, the second to last episode in the first half of season five) my like started to wane. I still like the character, but not as much...
I think Abed Nadir from Community is more my type of nerd. Probably because I find the character similar to myself.
As a company that participated in the beta, I can unequivocally tell you that FlyWheel is legit (dench, for those of you in the know).
Designed beautifully, UXed with businesses and individuals in mind, fast, and priced right.
On top of that, the team over at Flywheel has been amazing to work with. Open to new ideas, willing to help migrate from about any other host and/or CMS, and well versed in T-shirt currency.
This product has dramatically set itself apart from the rest of the hosting world, as it relates to wordpress. If you are a designer, developer, or just somebody at home blogging about the recent episode of "Breaking Bad" (OMG, guys LAST NIGHT WAS INSANE), you should be using FlyWheel.
Honestly, unless you literally own a different hosting site, there is no reason not to be using this.
Hit me up if you want to talk about that episode from last night.
The timeless story of Ozymandias -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias -- (if you don't know the 1818 sonnet by Shelley, read it before downvoting. It's relevant and timeless)
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".
EDIT: Thanks for the link to the excellent Breaking Bad video. For what it's worth, I haven't seen an episode since season 3 so didn't realize the coincidence. My pop culture connection would have been to Watchmen.
I dropped around 60lbs (5'10" SW: 285) in first half of 2012 and have roughly maintained since (crept back to 235 - down to 230 again, still aiming for 200!).
I made two small habit changes that I feel made a drastic difference:
* Bring lunch to work everyday (brown bag, leftovers) * If I want to watch TV, I must be moving on the treadmill
I would still go out to eat at work about once every two weeks and I would sometimes sneak in an episode of Breaking Bad on the couch, but overall, I stuck to those rules and everything else seemed to fall into place.
What stuff could they do? Log into your AP to torrent Breaking Bad episodes?
> While its an unscientific poll, I have found it hard to find anyone I know that watches television who doesn’t love at least one of their hits: Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, and Mad Men.
One of those shows has only a few episodes left, while another has one season remaining.
Also, AMC doesn't produce Mad Men or Breaking Bad.
> Would you criticize Breaking Bad because you don't see as much crack being made in more recent episodes?
That would be like criticizing The Walking Dead because you don't see as many vampires in recent episodes.
Would you criticize Breaking Bad because you don't see as much crack being made in more recent episodes? How fucking stupid.
It's not stupid at all. The meth on Breaking Bad is not the plot, the plot is cancer-stricken man is pulled into the seedy world of illegal drugs and how he participates. The plot of Walking Dead is survival in a zombie world. If you aren't going to focus on conflicts with zombies then they should've just set it in a post-apocalyptic world sans zombies.
> Walking dead seems to be tapering off fans, turning from less of a zombie show to more of a drama ( each episode is 95% talk, 5% zombies ).
I'm sorry to derail, but I am so sick of this being considered as a "problem" with the show. The show is about human beings facing their inevitable demise. Even the title "The Walking Dead" is a play on words, referring to the survivors, rather than the zombies themselves. The show, the novel are both dramas first, and zombie stories second, where the zombie story is simply a backdrop to the very human drama of coping with one's own death and the death of loved ones.
The show has gotten worse, but that's because the characters have gotten more bland and the scenarios have gotten more tepid. It has nothing to do with drama:zombie ratio. Would you criticize Breaking Bad because you don't see as much crack being made in more recent episodes? How fucking stupid.
If this is a major problem to you, then you don't get the show and probably shouldn't be watching it anyway. I'm sure Fox will cook up some nice, bland, predictable zombie-loaded crapfest for you in due time.
I really dont agree.
Breaking Bad and Mad Men are ending shortly.
Walking dead seems to be tapering off fans, turning from less of a zombie show to more of a drama ( each episode is 95% talk, 5% zombies ).
The fact is, both breaking bad and mad men would make the price of AMC unrealistically high. If Netflix did want to buy them, they should wait until the season after when both shows are no longer on and get it for a song.
A much more astute purchase would be HBO/Cinemax/Shotime
Watching TV shows in English (with English subtitles) is a great idea, but I'm not so sure about The Simpsons. I speak English fairly well and I still have some trouble understanding the Simpsons (Homer especially). There are other shows that are much easier to understand and better suited for beginners.
For example, I would consider Breaking Bad much more suitable for beginners in English (most characters speak very clear), but it might not be an appropriate show for kids.
The good thing about sports is you can generally go to a bar or something and watch 'the game', on the plus side they have beer and food and other people to watch it with.
You can't go to the bar (at least around here) for the sole purpose of watching the latest episode of 'Breaking Bad'.
That's 33 cents for ALL of AMC, not just Breaking Bad. That's mad men, he'll on wheels, walking dead and the old movies. And they sell discs. And the sell in iTunes. And they get paid by Netflix, hulu, and amazon.
I hope it continues to work out, I tend to enjoy just about all of their original content and they seem to be hungry enough to not just do the lowest common denominator thing. Probably not as big as hbo but give them some time.
UK viewers would easily pay 50¢ to stream an episode though, that's only ~30p. For a series they'd be paying that once a fortnight it seems (USA sourced shows appear to be doing fortnightly showing now?), so > $1 a month.
How can taking 3 times the monthly subscriber profit for a single show harm them? Are they really making more selling that one show to other networks than they take selling their whole network to customers?
Instead it looks like it's $2 per episode on Amazon Instant, which is USA only or at least not in the UK. Instead UK has LoveFilm which doesn't have individual episodes and apparently requires mailing a DVD for you to watch Breaking Bad.
I've seen adverts for this show in the UK and find it weird that you can't just buy it and watch it.
Netflix doesn't pay per stream. Netflix pays for content in "windows". e.g. Netflix pays $20M to show Seasons 1-5 of Breaking Bad for 1 year. That's why content appears and disappears all the time.
It's the same how movie companies sell broadcast rights to HBO or other similar channels.
When people tell the story of great content they tend to focus on the very high points. "Breaking Bad" is much better than "Dexter". Even "Mad Men" which isn't as good as "Breaking Bad" is much better than "Dexter", which is arguable the best show on Showtime. Aiming for decent content isn't as meaningful as actually getting that content. Starz and Showtime have failed to get anything approaching HBO or AMC.
You can change your approach but you can't change your taste and if whoever is making content decisions at Starz or Showtime continues to have their jobs then it will not get them very far.
You see it now with the results of Microsoft copying Apple's strategy. Microsoft is doing the same thing that Apple did but since they're out of their element it's not going well. They would have been better off just being a boring company that made a great Office product and an increasingly 3rd party hardware partner friendly operating system. In the same way it would have been better for Showtime to just show movies that no one wants to see but pay for the opportunity to not watch.
Interesting, Australia gets breaking bad on cable the same time as US. Although there is always going to be a lot of piracy because you are looking at $100+ a month to get cable and the showtime/movies group of channels which show it.
Breaking Bad is laced with way more profanity and graphic violence than you could swing for a PG-13 rating. It's not True Blood, but then, The Matrix and Blade are two R-rated movies with vastly different severity of content.
It's not just available for viewers in the, it's available for viewers in US too: http://www.amctv.com/breaking-bad/videos/full-episode-509-blood-money-breaking-bad
All, full episodes are there.
"Pressing still further, AMC is giving new Breaking Bad episodes to Netflix viewers in the United Kingdom right after they air in the US, instead of the weeks-to-months delay that is typical for exporting top-flight US shows."
This. It blows my mind that in this era if your content doesn't require localization efforts why it isn't made universally available ASAP. Cult followers run off to news site and message boards and twitter and where ever else to talk about their favorite show and that gets more people interested. Not making it available spoils all of that momentum and waiting months is just shooting yourself in the foot.
I'm looking at you BBC/PBS-Masterpiece joints.
According to the article, they make about 0.35 cents per month from subscribers. Given 13 episodes per year, and a 30% commission that's $4.20 vs $17. I suspect that much less than 25% of AMC subscribers watch Breaking Bad given how bundling works so it can be argued that they're making more money from subscribers than from people buying on iTunes.
I'm also happy to spend $1.87 per episode for Breaking Bad
Compared to what they earn from regular viewers - subscription fees and commercials - that pricing is nuts.
I cut the cable about three years ago and I just subscribe to Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu. I'm also happy to spend $1.87 per episode for Breaking Bad. I don't miss cable one bit.
I think part of my problem might be that I grew up with an entitlement complex as I was valedictorian, near perfect SATs etc. and I never did shit in high school.
Forget about that. Who you were at 17 means nothing. If you're 40 years old and still have to mention that you went to an Ivy League school, that's not a good thing.
It doesn't matter. No one knows who you are. The good news is that you don't have to fear embarrassment. When you're "the smart kid" you can't afford to look stupid. Now, you can. The world is built by ex-smart-kids who weren't afraid to look stupid.
I make $130k as a 21 year old and I probably put in 3 hours of real work a day.
Also irrelevant. I think it might be part of your problem. Forget precociousness and all that golden child bullshit, because any job that pays a 21-year-old (excluding overt nepotism/connections) that much money is going to be stressful as fuck (and, as I'll explain, I think cumulative stress is part of your problem). I think you might want to be moving away from the high-stress jobs. If you actually want achievements that you can be proud of, you won't get them in the high-stress professional gigs; you're better off downshifting to the middling level where you're still surrounded by smart people but no one's gunning to be a millionaire in 5 years.
I think people are starting to realize that I'm a bit slower than I could be.
"People" are just as insecure as you are. They're mostly focused on their own survival and advancement-- not sizing you up. They probably don't think about you at all. If you stay out of their way, their evaluations (except for management) of you don't matter at all. People won't fuck with you just because you're working below your potential; almost everyone is working below capacity. As long as it doesn't mess up their shit, no one will fuck with you.
What you have is impostor syndrome, meaning that you think you're worse than you actually are. The dirty secret of adult life is people are just making it up as they go along. You're not the only one who feels "fake", and the people who seem to have their shit together are just as shaky as you are.
I secretly spend 7-8 hours a day doing bullshit at work (reading online, games, etc).
Not uncommon. Don't feel guilty. Don't try to stop per se, so much as you should be replacing less useful activities with better ones. If you say, "I'm not going to [X]" you're setting yourself up for temptation. Better to find things that interest you more. Maybe you could learn new technical skills on the job. (Do your building-- that is, things where you need to own the IP-- on your own time and resources though.)
Your work environment is probably partly at fault, too. You probably spend so much time on bullshit because you can't get in the zone with all the distractions and interruptions and petty social anxieties that rule the day. You've probably noticed that people who actually want to get things done at work either (a) show up early, (b) stay late, or (c) spend a substantial amount of time outside of the office. Very little gets done in core working hours in the typical office, because most people are at 100% CPU on reputation management bullshit.
Here's something you probably haven't been told about the adult world. The reason most people hate going to work isn't the work itself. It's all the pointless social anxiety generated by cramped offices, interruptions, the constant need to modulate social status to precisely half a notch below one's manager, et al. People enjoy work itself; it's a deep-seated psychological need to feel useful and productive. It's being at work that gets them down, because full-time social climbing isn't natural or appealing to most people. The best way to become happier at work, perhaps surprisingly, is to work harder. That's not a platitude, though; it's hard advice to follow because you'll actually need something that motivates you to work hard.
I know that I've been given a gift and that I'm a fucking idiot for wasting it, but I've just become a chronic procrastinator and it sucks.
A very large number of people feel this way. One of the problems with Work in most jobs is that it conditions people to associate productive activity with subordination.
You're not a fuckup, but you've been poisoned with bad conditioning. It's not about "willpower" as some immutable trait of a person. It's about the fact that we're animals that respond strongly to our environment, rewards, and punishments. (See: Stanford Prison Experiment.) There's no point in feeling shame about this; it's just how our bodies and brains work.
I could be changing the world but instead I'm putting in the bare minimum
You're not ready to "change the world". You have to improve yourself first. I won't lie; it takes time.
Spin up a side project. Or replace your at-work videogaming with Coursera. Or take more responsibility at work. Try to move to another team. Just do something where there will be meaningful feedback from the world. What's the worst that can happen? If you get fired, it's still better to lose a job while on an upswing than when comfortable (the shock of getting fired while comfortable takes months to recover from; but if you get fired while you're actively working hard, it's much easier to bounce back).
Any advice on how you taught yourself to focus on tasks, build willpower, and get shit done would be helpful.
Just try to make each day better than the last. Install RescueTime. Don't expect miracles. Just work toward incremental improvements. Again, each day better than the last.
Although, I wonder if I really fucked my brain/habits up so much that I'll never reach my full capacity.
Unlikely. You can build new habits in a couple of months, and unless you were using a lot of drugs, you'll be fine.
Most likely, what has addled your brain is low-level but chronic social stress from the workplace. That shit sucks, but the good news is that it only takes about a month to recover (once you get to a better work environment). Practice meditation to build up your resolve (and don't expect results quickly; the contemplative path is a lifelong one).
By the way, "full capacity" is unattainable. You need down time. You need to spend some of your time playing video games and watching TV. Just focus on quality. I generally allow time for one high-quality TV show (e.g. Breaking Bad) but I sure as hell am not going to let myself spend 4 hours per day watching it.
My dad is also very similar in that he's smart enough to bullshit through life but he only works at 10-20% of his full capacity and he never completes anything.
Don't worry about your parents. Just focus on yourself. One of the most important subtasks of recovering your emotional health is to stop dwelling on details irrelevant to the task at hand. Observe, but never stew. Your father can take care of his own life; you need to focus on yours.
This is big. Well, not that big, but kinda big.
Starbucks and the Barnes and Noble cafes near me both use the same incredibly slow AT&T wifi. The most I can pull down when the place is completely empty is ~ 150kbs, so I'm assuming they have a T1 circuit for internet.
To make it worse, the router they use appears to not do any traffic-shaping at all. So with just one person streaming video or downloading app/OS updates, it becomes excruciatingly slow. It's kind of rude to other guests when you use the wifi to catch up on the last 4 episodes of Breaking Bad or torrent something. There's also the wifi congestion when the store is very busy but what can you do about that?
With that said, I'm curious as to what the up to 10x faster than before means. If they offer a 10/15mbs connection, that would be a huge improvement.
All the independent coffee places in town either offer wifi backed by 20-30mbs cable or 6mbs DSL, so they are much better destinations if you know you're going to need decent internet access. Nothing like running 'bundle install' and after 45 minutes you just pack it up and leave because you're getting dial-up speeds.
It seems like I keep saying this in this thread, and others, but Amazon already meets this demand. I feel I must keep repeating it because it seems so many don't realize this. I don't pay for cable TV but I watch the latest seasons of Breaking Bad and Walking Dead on Amazon. The only catch is I see them a day after broadcast.
$25 for each season? More like $13-$15 per season. And I can watch them again anytime I want. $10 a month for AMC? Screw that, I already get a better deal on their shows I want right now, TODAY.
EDIT: I just looked it up; I paid $13.99 for Season 5 of Breaking Bad on Amazon. Under the $10 a month for AMC idea, assuming I only wanted this one show, it would cost me about $50 based on aired episodes and expected air dates of the final episodes. I did watch the third season of Walking Dead through Amazon as well but it has $0 for my order on that for some reason, but it lists for $26.99 currently. Walking Dead also broadcasted over five months but did not overlap with Breaking Bad. For those two shows alone at $10 a month would have cost me around $100, I got them both for $40.98. Since I do not watch any other AMC shows, even though I could watch some of them on Netflix, I think I came out ahead.
I agree with you, unbundling is not the future the cable companies are fighting. They are fighting on-demand viewing. The only thing I need cable companies for is the bandwidth to watch what I want when I want. Their arguments to the contrary fall on deaf ears.
Are there problems with this? Sure, I can't watch some shows because they aren't available as season passes on Amazon so I may have to wait for them to appear later. If the show never appears as on-demand? Well, too bad for them because my money just went elsewhere. There are enough quality choices out there that I just don't care.
At this point, there's very little cable TV can do to convince me to return to paying subscription fees for a hundred channels I don't want. The only way I see it is if they somehow get Netflix and Amazon Instant to be made illegal.
Engage in the future, cut the cord.
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.
I'm the exact mirror of you; I couldn't care less about Breaking Bad or Mad Men, the only thing I ever watch on cable TV is sports. This is how the bundled model works -- you pay a % of your bill for ESPN, I pay a % of my bill for AMC, and we get both. The %s are determined by the providers and networks playing chicken with each other over how many subscribers would leave if a network weren't included in a package.
A la carte proponents seem to have a particular bee in their bonnets for sports, but it seems to me that that's the kind of content most likely to survive a cablepocalypse -- it has the most value in being viewed live. In your iTunes model for AMC, producing high-quality shows like Breaking Bad or Mad Men suddenly takes on movie-like risk.
Would Breaking Bad be as good if every episode were released at once?
http://fogus.github.io/lemonad/lemonad.html#section-21 - nice breaking bad reference http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0903747/
I can't agree that cable tv quality has gone down recently. Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Breaking Bad? This stuff is not only the highest quality TV we've probably ever seen but higher quality than film as well.
So what about when TV shows are released on DVD/BluRay? Are we are to guess when the act ends and the next one starts?
Sorry, but I don't buy this. An episode of, say, Breaking Bad does not need several-minute "act breaks" to work, so that something will "sink in".
There is no series in existence so intellectually or emotionally overwhelming that one needs ad breaks to deal with them.
(Though admittedly I frequently have to pause shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm because I need some fresh air after all the social embarrassment, but that's different.)
> the every day detail gets mired in coworkers stopping by my office to say hello or ask about the latest episode of Breaking Bad. Nobody has ever asked me if this was a good time...
At my workplace, we're allowed to wear headphones. Nobody interrupts somebody wearing headphones unless it's really worth it, otherwise an IM or email suffices. I have ADHD, so I know all too well just how important not being interrupted is - those headphones are a great way for me to signal to my coworkers "I am having trouble focusing. Please let me get in the zone before quitting time!"
Given that example, have you considered that telecommuting was not the only way you could have reached a comfortable level of productivity?
Thank you. Finally a voice of reason.
I do agree that people work differently. A large part of my job is paying attention to detail, which becomes harder and harder to do when the every day detail gets mired in coworkers stopping by my office to say hello or ask about the latest episode of Breaking Bad. Nobody has ever asked me if this was a good time...
So I suffered through the distractions and the interruptions and slowly came to the conclusion that with every distraction, came a slew of insufferable minutes trying to get back into the same thought process I was in prior to the interruption. Sometimes I made it, sometimes I didn't and would have to pick up where I left off later.
People without my particular mindset, may not understand this thought process as I may not understand yours. But please, please, please, let me tell you that I am wholly more productive if I can either shut my door and lock it....or telecommute and work flexible hours.
>We live in a world of government-granted monopolies given to companies like HBO.
I don't even know how to respond to this... last I checked cable and Satellite companies don't force HBO on you. And while cable companies held a semi-monopoly before Satellites, that market got disrupted like 30 years ago. Let it go.
>You are claiming, with no justification, that in the absence of copyright there would be no profit available for people who make entertainment.
Not completely. I'm claiming there wouldn't be enough profit to support the current proliferation or high budget entertainment options. I highly doubt shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Downtown Abbey, etc. would have gotten the funding they needed through crowdsourcing. You typically need a large studio with deep pockets to take on a project of that size. And most of them rely on ad revenue during broadcast, something that would likely diminish if there was no copyright and any TV studio was allowed to rebroadcast with different ads/no ads. Or if people were allowed to video tape it, copy it w/ no ads, and resell it.
Let's take a look at that simple example of yours. So who pays for the pilot episode to be produced? The T.V. studio? And after they air it then what? Hope enough people liked it to both pay for the production costs and a decent profit as well as fund the next episode? And you think that's a sustainable model??
If systems like you mention would be profitable why aren't there non-copyrighted entertainment options raking in the money right now? The internet has been around for awhile. There's nothing stopping people from releasing high quality non-copyrighted content and making money from it. What's the hold up? Government Monopolies??
Honestly, as an Australian who has been in the design/development industry for sometime now I am not surprised. Adobe software might be the industry standard, but their customer support and ripping off Australian companies without reason is anything but first class. A quote from Jesse Pinkman a character in the TV show Breaking Bad sums up Adobe ripping off us Australians quite well:
"Getting the shit kicked out of you — not that you get used to it — but you do kind of get used to it." ~ Jesse Pinkman.
I've been haunted by moments in television as well, though.
The two final episodes of The Wire left me sleeplessly sitting in the garden, because of the events that transpired and the adrenaline involved.
The Body, one of the best Buffy episodes I can recall, left an impression on my young self that can still give me goosebumps when I think about it.
And the final episode of last season's Breaking Bad comes to mind, as well as the last episode so far.
I can't think of other occasions right away, but there are many more like it.
That said, on average books seem to have that effect more. Few things really topped how I felt after reading 'The Red Wedding' in A Song of Ice and Fire, for example. I think the main reason is that for television shows, the writers have to make many more concessions, because of producers, Nielsen ratings, and so on.
Only to a limited degree. Yes, there were soaps and other serials that had long-running narrative arcs, but not with the kind of sophistication contemporary writers are using.
Let's call it the 'Post-Buffy' school of thought, where character nuance, motivation, back-story, plot and sub-plot are all delivered with a kind of attention to detail formerly only used by novelists. There may be a few examples from the 60's -- The Prisoner comes to mind -- but even that can't really touch the narrative layers we've seen in the last decade: The Wire, Lost, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones (TV as novel if there ever was one), Six Feet Under, Dexter, Band of Brothers, and so forth. These aren't just books, they're novels.
This I think is partially the result of the ability of viewers to sit down and spend concentrated time with a series when they come out on DVD. The first time my wife and I did this was maybe 10 years ago with Buffy and Angel, and it was the most fun I'd ever had with television. This was a new experience. We'd lose 4 or 5 hours late on a Friday just chaining one after another, like the Battlestar Galactica skit on Portlandia.
What I think Netflix is doing, and probably what it has massive amounts of data to back up (I watched Buffy through Netflix, come to think of it), is that this new type of viewer engagement -- long sessions of series "gorging" -- has completely transformed the way we experience television. I think this is why they released the House of Cards episodes all at once. This is also probably why they're not releasing viewing numbers -- the new experience context of contemporary viewers has very little to do with the old Nielsen ratings arc, and would be a poor measure of the show's success, from Netflix' own point of view.
I really enjoyed the first 2 episodes. I wasn't sold after the first episode but after the 2nd I became a fan. The character development and pacing is great. It has this sense of foreboding and everything is always moving quickly. Since they expect you to binge watch there are no catch ups. If you're a fan of breaking bad you'll love house of cards.
Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, says that getting the technical details right ends up coming through even for those who don't know about the field. Somehow, it just reads better. They went to extraordinary lengths on the episode "Dead Freight" and I while I don't know anything about the stuff in that episode (no spoiler here) I agree. All the little touches add up and make it dramatically more engaging.
Click Episode 505 for relevant making-of podcast:http://www.amctv.com/shows/breaking-bad/insider-podcast-season-5
Easily. Most in our groups brought some sort of newspapers into the country, they were never confiscated. Our guides would actually ask if it was on to read the newspapers, and our guides knew about what's going on outside of their country. They would know about Assange, Occupy Wall street, Obama etc.
I brought an iPad, my laptop and my iPhone - they only took my iPhone when i entered the country - or, actually, they forgot, and I gave it up later on the trip, as I didn't want to get in troubles when leaving.
I could easily have left many devices there, with information etc.. In terms of communication devices, not so sure. There's absolutely no wifi in the country, and satellite devices are large, afaik.
I was war driving with my iPad in Pyongyang, searching for wifi.. NO wifi was detected, at all. Pretty interesting.
I lend my iPad to one of the guides for a week - the guide saw Breaking Bad Season 1 and heard Beatles and U2 :-) and even brought it home at night.
Pretty cool. I like the thinly-veiled SEO work in the "See also" section. Smart :)
On a show's page, I'm confused by the "Featured series" button that leads to the homepage as seen here: http://whenepisode.com/coming/t/breaking+bad Since it's a button I thought it would add the show to the featured shows (for my session), but it's just a link.
That's actually a "problem" I've been having with series I watch on Hulu, which made me check my queue every now and then just to see that, no, there wasn't a new episode of The Office this week…
My way to solve problems is mostly through Chrome extensions these days, so, here is the shameless plug for the extension I built: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/qulu-–-your-hulu-queue/iggfkakbafpkgjaocfjaoehcclhcjckb A badge shows you when you have new shows to watch from your Chrome toolbar.
Felt compelled to post because I hadn't seen Suits mentioned. Modern Family continues to be reliable for laughs and hasn't been added yet. The League is the other show which I find myself laughing out loud at least a few times every episode.
Hell on Wheels surprised me by having a strong second season.
I had high hopes for Copper, but it hasn't really grabbed me in the 1st handful of episodes.
Agree with all the obvious ones:
Homeland, Louie, Newsroom, Sherlock, Game of Thrones, Community.
My wife is addicted to Castle and I've come to really enjoy it too. Since we've caught up to date with that we've now switched over to Person of Interest, which I'm really enjoying.
I've fallen behind with the following and plan to catch up ASAP:
Dexter, Sons of Anarchy, 30 Rock, Breaking Bad.
PS: yeah, I watch a lot of TV :)
I had a difficult time reading this article, because it provided no source or argument for: "When photography was first becoming popular, it was mostly used as a form of artistic expression." Which completely ignores how photography displaced painting in the genre of portraiture, and made it more accessible. Then Mr. Curtis explains haughtily that communication is the new use for photography and that of course is an entirely different thing from artistic expression. In fact, artistic expression is bad because it inhibits us! I highly doubt the majority of people using Instagram are engaging in a visual language of symbol and metaphor (oops, that sounds like communication!)
So we have it that communication is better when it's easier and we are no longer shackled by the editorial desire to not produce a bunch of junk. Now, Mr. Curtis says, we can communicate that we like the hit television show Breaking Bad by taking a photo of our screen with a thumbs up! What a glorious age we live in.
It's easy to opine about things like educating the public or engineering 'crypto' for the common man.
In my opinion that would be an exercise in futility.
I think a proper response to this issue is to simply promote social depravity on a grand scale.
Everybody should just constantly read/watch/listen to media involving things like methamphetamine manufacturing, nuclear & home made weapons/chemicals, illegal currencies, human trafficking, hardcore pornography, armed rebellions, the middle east, famous terrorists, serial killers, bon jovi, etc
All of those are a lot more interesting to the common man than lessons on how to use PGP....which is theoretically breakable thanks to the advent of quantum computing.
If everything is being sniffed and stored, there have to be a number of very specific topics that are being sought after in that data.....in my opinion it'd be far worse if the government wasn't searching for things like human trafficking and nuclear weapons (things, hopefully, we can all agree are not good).
Television series like "Breaking Bad" are already pulling weekly audience number of around 3 million plus. One could argue that you wouldn't even have to do much promotion, as these topics already seem to be mainstays in much present day pop culture
"I won't be able to see Season 5 until Season 6"
I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but there will be no season 6. Season 5 is the final one – the first half aired this summer, the last 8 episodes will air next summer.
http://www.deadline.com/2011/08/done-amc-sony-tv-reach-deal-for-16-episode-final-season-of-breaking-bad/
I believe that Netflix premiered Season 5 in the UK. In other words, Netflix was the first place for Brits to legitimately watch the latest episodes of Breaking Bad.
Interesting. You're ahead of US Netflix on that - just checked and I do NOT have access to Breaking Bad Season 5.
UK pricing is very reasonable, the problem we have is things don't make it here until years after release, even with iTunes purchasing. I don't mind it much because I've got used to it and I'll just watch a show once it's available, but it does mean I can't partake in online discussions.
A good example is Breaking Bad, we got Season 4 on Netflix the same day that Season 5 was airing in the US. I won't be able to see Season 5 until Season 6- okay I just checked netflix and they have Breaking Bad season 5!! I love you for inspiring me to check. Hah... see you in 8 hours when I come back to finish this comment and the now invalid complaint.
I was recently thinking of how much money I've spent on iTunes in the past two years (since we've "cut the cable") and a lot of our purchases were from TV series seasons that we bought after we watched the first seasons on Netflix and wanted to catch up with the latest. (Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, Dexter, etc.)
Yes, they would deserve a cut on most of our iTunes purchases, but for one thing, I don't know what that would amount to. Maybe not enough. (I believe the iTunes affiliate rate is 5%, so that would be $1-$1.50 per TV show season, 25 cents per movie rental)
And indeed it doesn't seem to make sense: let's say they added a "latest season is on iTunes" link. It would tell the user "we are not able to secure the latest content for you". And if they added exclusive rentals on top of the flat fee, it would be tempting to delay the switch from exclusive to regular catalog for how long as necessary. It would be going against everything Netflix has been about from the start: flat-fee for unlimited consumption.
Netflix's problem is that there are no switching barriers to keep viewers loyal to Netflix.
Even they admit that their vaunted queue is worth much less in the streaming world than it was in the DVD by mail world.
Their strength would be the content deals they have, and their ability to obtain future content. But that right now is notoriously bad. Most of the current or best movies of any star or franchise are not available - the older movies are, or the less well known movies. And I can't get this season of Breaking Bad or any TV show.
As far as I am concerned, they only have two things going for them, the better player, with closed captions and reasonable browsing and availability on most platforms.
And their lack of buffering, that is, their infrastructure.
Unless they can obtain content, I think these two last strengths mark them for being bought out by someone that needs infrastructure knowledge and a good player and otherwise has ways of keeping customers loyal and preventing them from switching away.
The flaw in my analysis is that it predicts Amazon purchased Netflix in the past 12 months. Since Amazon has not purchased Netflix, I know I must be missing something.
I recommend Breaking Bad, there's some startup lessons there.
On S03E10, entire episode is Walter and Jesse trying to catching a fly. One small fly inside huge lab. Jesse wants to give up and continue cooking, but for Walter, this is absolutely critical issue. I thought this episode was quite boring, but then Walter explains himself and it finally hit me: It was like assertion code failure, something that should not ever happen under your assumptions. You don't just ignore assertion failures. Code could still work and you can still ship it, but that code is not what you think it is anymore. This small fly in lab is going to ruin your entire product. Drop everything and catch that fly first.
Another interesting thing is, you can understand what it means to "know your metrics". They have pureness metric to scientifically measure their product quality. Pureness is what makes their product best in the market and they never compromise on it. It is interesting that how they keep an eye on it and why it matters.
I completely agree about the commercials. I watched all of the available seasons of breaking bad on netflix. When the new season started, I was super excited, and didn't want to wait the 24 it takes to show up online. So, I watched the first episode of the season at my girlfriends house on her TV, and... It was awful! I couldn't get past the interruptions -- and by the way, I thought they passed a law that required commercials to not be 105db louder than the tv shows, no? I digress..
It's an absolutely terrible way to watch a dramatic series. I could only stomach that first episode. For all the rest, I just waited till they popped up on amazon and paid the $2 so I could watch them without interruptions.
This comment reminds me of an awesome episode of Breaking Bad in season 5, I won't ruin it but those who've seen it will know what I'm talking about. Are these passenger trains carrying Methylamine by any chance?
Google Fiber is supposedly about 10 times faster than that. Presumably, the bandwidth test server was being maxed out. His comparison based on the 91 Mbps result makes current ISPs look better than they should.
> For comparison, where with Comcast I can download a 1080p Breaking Bad episode (1.86 GB) in about a half hour, Google Fiber would get it done in under 3 minutes.
On Google Fiber, that Breaking Bad episode would be downloaded in about 15 seconds at max throughput.
I mean more like "People who pirate your show also pirate Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy, but of the people who pirate Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy, there's more pirating of Futurama than your show." or "Though you think your show appeals to Friends fans, the people who pirate your show tend to pirate 2 Broke Girls more significantly than they pirate Friends."
Even more interesting to me are the surprising highly trafficked music and movies that are long out of print. Might be a good indicator of when to bring them back, and what fora to announce that in.
I think you're over-discounting the zeitgeist effect. Breaking Bad, for example, is fantastic TV on its own, but the fact that lots of people I know (even those who aren't caught up in the current season) are watching it right now makes it a lot more fun to consume. There are thousands and thousands of books, films, etc in the archives, so why do we all get so excited about new stuff? Because there's something about enjoying these things together that's a big part of the human experience.
In other words, access to specific parts of the culture is still a big deal.
As someone who has lived in the US, AU & the EU in a few places I'd have to say this article is great. It's something you wind up doing if you live in other places.
America is #1 in quite a few things, such as software, just try naming non-US software companies that matter, it's an interesting exercise. Also the US highway system is excellent, the US's culture of entrepreneurship is also awesome. The best US colleges are the best in the world. US computer games, TV shows (Breaking Bad/Mad Men/Louie/The Sopranos etc) and other things are great from the US.
But in many things the rest of the rest world laughs at the US. US High School education, for instance, is not well regarded. The US health care system is regarded as scary and pretty poor.
There are even other countries that are really good at seeing things overseas and copying. Australia, for instance, got a points based immigration system from Canada, Universal Saving for retirement from Singapore and looked around the world for ways to reform the Australian Reserve Bank.
First off, thanks to all of you for breathing new life into something I wrote a couple weeks back.
Netflix doesn't have a perfect interface, but it's leagues better than anything else that's out there, particularly the UIs provided by the cable.telco and satellite pay-TV providers (collectively known as MVPDs these days - Multichannel Video Platform Distributors) Seriously, if I set out to design a bad UI, I would not be able to surpass them in awfulness.
I hear some of you are frustrated by the search and discovery functions. My company is in this space and we debate the best way to solve the 3 main use case scenarios: 1. I want to watch another 5 episodes of "Breaking Bad" 2. I want to watch a comedy movie, maybe something with Tom Hanks 3. I have no idea what I want to watch
There's a lot of grey between those three areas and that's why Netflix quirky genre categories are so popular.
In terms of search, there are a lot of 3rd party apps, both web-based and otherwise. I personally like Clicker, which is web-based and can also show you which of the services (Netfkix, Hulu, Amazon) you have can serve up the movie you want to watch.
"Rights issues" is a TV/Movie industry term that refers to the battle over which of the various distribution companies has the right to broadcast TV and movie content, on what platform (e.g. If Comcast is paying NBC for the right to broadcast their shows on TV, do they have to pay more to also be able stream them to your iPad or is that covered by the original agreement) Because so much of this is new and because the industry is very profit-oriented, the lawyers are having a field day.
Final point, which I noticed a few people picked up on, is that the Netflix all-you-can-eat menu lets you experiment without consequences: you don't like a movie, it's not like you've just wasted any money paying for it.
And for the XBox remote dropper - if it's really become a problem, maybe you want to find another place to keep it? Just a suggestion.
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.
Breaking bad is great. However, The Wire is definitely the best TV show ever.
I forced myself to watch about four episodes of Breaking Bad on the advice of so many raving reviews, but I just couldn't get into it. Though I don't enjoy watching much TV to begin with, so I'm probably not the best data point.
I wouldn't say The Wire is 'much better' but they are definitely 1,2 all time TV shows. Debatable which is first.
The best part about Breaking Bad is that each season just gets better and better. Season 4 was hands down the best single season of TV ever.
So yes, you should definitely try to get through season 2. You haven't even met Gus yet. I hate to use so much hyperbole in one post but he is the biggest badass in TV history. Far ahead of number 2: Marlo Stanfield.
I got hooked since the first season. This is the perspective of a huge breaking bad fan.
Personally, I watch it for subtle stuff, great scenes and the main plot(this can be annoying as episodes can end with unexpected cliffhangers).
Give it a try if it steers up your curiosity and you like the style.
The plot changes gradually, unpredictable, and awesome in my opinion.
The Wire is still down as my favorite show, but Breaking Bad is pretty close.
The great thing about Breaking Bad is it just keeps getting better and better. The plot and character development gets esp. intricate as season 3 unfolds, and is just nuts in season 4. Season 1 and 2 had quite a few incidences that I felt played more into shock value and were cartoonish... that vibe is pretty much lost where things stand now.
Obligatory reply about The Wire being much better...
I'm the only person I know that really dislikes Breaking Bad. I watched the first season in a single marathon session and loved it, but somehow everything fell apart in the second season. I've tried to get through the second season several times, but the plots keep getting dumber and dumber, in my opinion.
Is it worth powering through season two, or are season two style of plots consistent with the rest of the series?
Edit:
A minimal spoiler example of the type of writing that really got on my nerves: Walt sneaking out of a hospital and breaking into his own house in 2.3.
Unfortunately that is only enough cash to pay for one episode of Breaking Bad according to Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Bad#Development_history
If that happens I think we can say goodbye to expensive and well written shows such as Breaking Bad and the like. A show like that which has been designed to be played out for possibly years isn't going to ever get off the ground via a pay as you go per episode, or some type of piecemeal model. There needs to be a significant upfront capital in place to make it worth the time for everyone who would be involved. But if some other company somewhere out there can and will front the money instead, then by all means please do it!
If only they could get some form of deal to bring TV content over. I don't think there's any way to pay to watch Season 4 of Breaking Bad in the UK.
Mad Men, Breaking Bad are. The new episodes are released right away. 4 seasons of Mad Men are on Netflix, 3 seasons of Breaking Bad are. I can't speak for FX and AMC's other shows.
One major advantage piracy has over the current distribution model for most entertainment is its embracing of globalisation. It doesn't matter where you are, you can still consume the content.
Compare this to films and TV, where any non-US viewer has to wait possibly months before they get to see it legitimately. Considering these shows are discussed openly on the net, you have no feasible way of engaging in the discussion that surrounds these shows when the new episode airs in the US.
In some cases, the shows won't even see a DVD or Blu-Ray release outside of the US (see: Breaking Bad after season 2).
Maybe I'm naïve, and there's really not much profit in truly borderless global distribution. But assuming there is, the sheer determination of Big Content to enforce those borders and boundaries is really blinding them to simple opportunities to capitalise.
In fact, I think HBO are in the UK, now you can see some of their shows on Sky Atlantic. But generally, we have to wait a while before we enjoy something that came and went weeks or months earlier.
>But if what you say is right, the pendulum, at the consumer level, will soon swing back the other way the first time that someone can't access the "cloud" on a trip or forgets to pay their "cloud access bill" (phone/internet whatever) and then gets locked out of ... well, everything.
One day the idea that you don't have internet access will be just as silly as saying you don't have electricity. Its in the very infant stages but its coming. For what its worth Im typing this on my Cr-48 which has 3G so I'm pretty much there.
I'm inclined to agree especially in cases like movies or music. The idea that we all have a copy of a song on our hard drives is odd. Leaving aside ideas of copyright and licenses there really isnt a reason all media shouldnt live in some kind of shared music/video folder in the sky. I'm going to watch Breaking Bad S2E4 maybe a handful of times and eventually forget about it. Keeping it in the cloud frees the user from needing to think about keeping it or backing it up or deleting it.
Or maybe I'm biased from living in a fairly cloudy world already.
The thing that bothers me most about this is I credit HBO for leading the charge with innovative content that as a whole brought TV to a much higher level. They took big chances even when it wasn't profitable to do so.
I've had a serious love affair with the network beginning with Dream On, The Larry Sanders Show, then moving on to Oz (yeah it was a 'male' soap opera I guess :), Sopranos, 6 Feet Under, Deadwood - which I didn't particularly _love_, but highly respected, and most of all The Wire (best thing to ever grace the screen IMO - they lost $$ on it throughout its run)... and then I killed my cable sub and haven't seen anything of their's since.
Now Mad Men and Breaking Bad are my two favorite shows, they're both on AMC, and I can easily purchase each season on iTunes HD for just north of $30. Every episode is available hours after they originally air. I'd pay twice that much.
Of course, the problem is HBO is just too tightly coupled to big cable. They're one of the main attractions, and as such the kickbacks they get are tied to contracts that prevent them from wresting their content to any great degree. Until this model changes, their A content won't see the light of day, and more draconian measures are likely to be put in place to thwart piracy. It's not HBO itself per-see, but HBO as a proxy for big cable; as a defense mechanism to prop up a flailing business model.
Louis CK is popular in the same way that a band like Arcade Fire is popular. Arcade Fire sells lots of albums and is highly respected by other musicians, but the band isn't as well known among most of America as a top 40 staple like Rihanna.
This represents sort of a "high" pop-culture, which would include popular indie music acts like Arcade Fire, TV shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, and comedians like Louis CK and Jim Gaffigan.
False dichotomy.
I was blown away by Breaking Bad and can't wait for the next episode. I really enjoy it and it can be inspiring. But I don't kid myself into believing that I'm doing something productive.
The TV show Breaking Bad uses phone numbers like 1 (575) 147-8092. Since the local part of a phone number can never start with a 0 or a 1, it avoids the "555 problem" of obviously fake phone numbers catching the viewer's attention, while still being non-dialable.
The problem is that marketing is still what drives big numbers to watching a show. Lots of money is spent so that people know when the premiere and finale of each show is, every season. When shows are sold internationally, it's the local distributor who puts up the money to do all of the local marketing and slots in a local TV channel or other distribution. If a show was made everywhere internationally, the local distributor would miss out on the ability to monetize that viewer, since they went to the US site and watched it there. Some of the youngest, savviest audiences (ie the most valuable) would be lost.
This would go away if it was possible to synchronize broadcast episode schedules in all target markets, but that's almost impossible due to local differences. Also, it would mean that shows need to air the same time, and TV shows are really risky. Nobody is going to put up shows for international distribution until they've seen how it does in the US first.
This can also go away if a show goes exclusively pay-per-episode. This would only work for certain shows (can't see this for American Idol, but maybe for Breaking Bad), and only if streaming numbers were huge. Right now, they're pretty small. Hulu gets 6-7mm unique viewers per month across all of their content. It's safe to assume even a popular TV show is only going to get a few hundred thousand at the most. Breaking Bad's finale received 1.9mm TV viewers, so it's still TV that's driving scale. For more popular shows like Big Bang Theory, it's a few times that.
Very exciting times, but it will take a while. It was only in 2011 when we got services like Spotify broadly available for music, even though iTunes launched in 2001. Ten years to shift the consumer habits (ownership of bits; legacy of plastic CDs), industry thinking (signing the big 4; establishing royalty structures), and technical availability (3G/4G widely avail). Hulu launched publicly in 2008, so I'm looking forward to 2018.
But we already have a unified copyright law! The Bern Convention of 1886! If a work is copyrighted in the USA, the it's copyrighted in France. Before this, say, Charles Dicken's work was copyrighted in the UK, but not the USA. We already have global copyright works.
In a way, the global copyright causes problems like this. A TV show like Breaking Bad is copyrighted & shown in the USA, so it's copyrighted in the Netherlands. However the copyright holder doesn't show/sell the show in the Netherlands, so a person there (a) can't watch it, and (b) can't pirate it, since it's copyrighted in their country.
I think what's going on here is how instagram and social media in general appeals to a shorter span, in the same way that many people will happily knock back four 45 minute Breaking Bad episodes, but the thought of sitting down and getting emotionally attached to a whole new group of characters, for a whole 100 minutes?
It just seems like a huge investment of time.
I tend to use Netflix more as a cable substitute with TV shows than a full movie library. The number of full backlogs of great shows in the U.S. at least (30 Rock, Parks and Rec, Party Down, Breaking Bad, etc.) for 8/month vs. 100/month for cable is an astounding savings for me personally. The movie selection is meh, but I can live with that for what I'm paying.
That wasn't the case for AMC before "Mad Men". Now, in addition to "Mad Men", they have "The Walking Dead", "Breaking Bad" and "Hell on Wheels". Even more than that, they have my guarantee that I will at least try a few episodes of any AMC original show that comes out.
You're right that Netflix would have to build an audience, but if they are able to create exceptional quality shows, as HBO and AMC have done, then they can very print that certificate very quickly (within a couple of years).
I think you hit all the points exactly.
What I think these companies need to realize is that they're completely wasting their money not capitalizing on revenue streams. For new movies, sure, theaters only. For newly released DVDs, sure, stores and/or rentals only. But 6 months to a year after release, I expect every company to put their content online so that it's convenient for people to watch instead of relying on the $5 bargain bin for revenue. That's what makes sense to me yet it doesn't happen. They pull content left and right for what? So Netflix can't be the sole provider of the content? What makes sense to me is AMC putting the first several seasons of "Breaking Bad" on Netflix so that all can watch it to catch up to the current season on air. Do other programs expect people to purchase DVDs for a single view to catch up?
Ideally for me there should be company B and company C to compete with Netflix, each with its own set of exclusives from different companies, each with a ~$10/month no contract charge for viewership. I'll end up with ~$30/month cancel anytime for all content and stream it all off of a single convenient box. That sounds better to the status quo to me.
I like Chuck Klosterman's take on this show: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6763000/bad-decisions
tl;dr: "Breaking Bad is not a situation in which the characters' morality is static or contradictory or colored by the time frame; instead, it suggests that morality is continually a personal choice. When the show began, that didn't seem to be the case: It seemed like this was going to be the story of a man (Walter White, portrayed by Bryan Cranston) forced to become a criminal because he was dying of cancer. That's the elevator pitch. But that's completely unrelated to what the show has become. The central question on Breaking Bad is this: What makes a man "bad" - his actions, his motives, or his conscious decision to be a bad person? Judging from the trajectory of its first three seasons, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan believes the answer is option No. 3. So what we see in Breaking Bad is a person who started as one type of human and decides to become something different. And because this is television - because we were introduced to this man in a way that made him impossible to dislike, and because we experience TV through whichever character we understand the most - the audience is placed in the curious position of continuing to root for an individual who's no longer good."
I've only seen the first few episodes, but am hoping to find some time to go through it now. I get plenty of morality from shows like "Mad Men" and "The Wire" in which we feel conflicted because the characters we love are doing bad things (in fact you could say that this is the main theme of serious, dramatic TV shows now), but I think the appeal of "Breaking Bad" is watching a desperate man make the conscious decision to become "evil."
Besides of the health issues, Walter was working for a car wash company at the beginning of the first season and his pregnant wife was trying to get financial help from his ex-girlfriend who became millionaire thanks to an old scientific research of Walter White...
First question people ask is, is it ok for Walter White to cook meth for earning what he already deserves? It's the easy part of the question of Breaking Bad.
Walter White started cooking by blackmailing Jessie, one of his old students. (remember another student of him who disrespected and made fun about Walter when he was cleaning a car) From the first episode to the end of 4th season, Walter White has fucked Jessie's life up. He made many manipulations in Jessie's life to have Jessie work for him.
Hard part of the question starts here, is it ok for a teacher suffering from cancer to destroy one of his student's life for earning money?
To me, the answer is absolutely no. But I see that many people who enjoy how Walter White became a tough guy, think Jessie already lives what he deserves as a young punk.
They have a pretty good catalog of TV shows - Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Office, etc. Their movie content is pretty poor, but that is mostly the fault of Hollywood executives and their golf buddies at HBO/Time/Warner.
"Out of curiosity, can you describe what sort of 'deep wisdom' you think isn't/cannot be passed along?"
I assume you mean, "cannot be passed along Facebook, or other Internet-like communications network".
Mindfulness is one example. It's difficult to convey over the internet, and still challenging in person. It's the kind of skill that requires someone present to point out when you're being mindful and when you become distracted. You can't force someone else to be mindful. Hell, you can't force yourself to be mindful. Many stories disguise lessons of mindfulness.
Fear and dealing with fear is the biggest example. All fear roots back to existential fear. Some (not all) older people have a peculiar attitude because they see their own demise coming, accept it, and live on. The TV show, Breaking Bad is a great example, a man who saw the end of his existence, stripped away all the BS and decided to leave behind a legacy.
However, it's one thing to watch characters on the screen deal with fear, and quite another to deal with your own. The mind plays many tricks to comfortably avoid fear. Another person in the same room witnessing your discomfort has significant impact; if they are able to mindfully witness and convey a sense of safety, such interaction helps you gain insight about your fear, and possibly change habits and actions resulting from that.
"The pace at which technological change is happening has certainly increased since the industrial revolution, and I presume that has been a major driver of cultural change as well."
Though off-topic, you might find this interesting: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-history-of-the-corporation-1600-to-2100/
Venkat's blog post led me to a book, Lever of Riches ... which I think has a lot of useful insights yet seriously flawed. But, it is interesting as a survey of technological history and look at changes within culture as well. I did not know, for example, that clockwork mechanisms reached high art before the invention of moveable type. These clockwork mechanisms directly paved the way for industrialization, and accounts for the obsession some cultures have for gadgets and gadget making.
I've also asked this series of questions on Quora. Perhaps you might have some insights:
"How has the invention of moveable type accelerated the tempo of invention and innovation?" ( http://www.quora.com/How-has-the-invention-of-moveable-type-accelerated-the-tempo-of-invention-and-innovation )
"How has Open Source accelerated the tempo of software innovation?" ( http://www.quora.com/How-has-Open-Source-accelerated-the-tempo-of-software-innovation )
"How has Github accelerated the tempo of software innovation?" ( http://www.quora.com/How-has-Github-accelerated-the-tempo-of-software-innovation )
"How does the tempo of innovation within Github differ from that of a geographic technology hub such as Silicon Valley?" ( http://www.quora.com/How-does-the-tempo-of-innovation-within-Github-differ-from-that-of-a-geographic-technology-hub-such-as-Silicon-Valley )
"In fact what do you think of most western countries where population is actually getting older and there is a lack of young people?"
I have not studied up on Western cultures as much as I did American and East Asian cultures. I'll think about this.
As a distraction, I offer this story. Japan has a cultural value in which the elders (now mostly from the WWII generation) believe that they can and should sacrifice themselves for the future generation, the children. It's a sort of a, strange mix of bushi and Confucian values. Another interesting thing: the Japanese Shinto values of spirit ex machina leads to a great obsession with robots and androids ... and exoskeletons to help the rice farmers continue growing rice. Because many of the younger generation do not want to farm. There's big problems with social recluses.
Yet, I have also read reports of the attitudes of the generation just now entering ... post-high school. Unlike their older siblings (about half a generation older), they ... don't quite outright reject their boomer parents workoholic attitude, yet don't seem to run and hide away in a closet. I look forward to the stories coming out of this generation. Maybe I'm wrong about "rites of passage conducted by clueless peers" after all.
I could probably rhapsodize about the insights of Mad Men all day.
Something I find interesting is that Mad Men and Breaking Bad are superficially different shows, but actually extremely similar. Ignore the radically different backdrops and they're both about out-of-control egos and "men at work" drama. The difference is that one setting involves alcoholism and advertising and people who fall out just get fired, while the other involves methamphetamine and murder and failing (for Walter) means death. Mad Men is erotic, Breaking Bad is thanatoptic; but the shows are two different takes on the same society.
I don't know if this correspondence is intentional on the part of AMC's directors, but Mad Men and Breaking Bad are, to me, clear A-and-Z bookends of the American Era.
It's only after that happens when the soldier has time to process what they've done that they run into trouble. I saw a documentary on this and it was talking about how there's a real disconnect between the how of a soldier's actions and the why with the increasingly effective training.
Soldiers and policemen have a terrible job. For psychopaths (2%) killing another person is easy. For everyone else, it's extremely difficult (even in self-defense) and something people generally avoid. Which means that an untrained normal person drawing against a psychopath is likely to be shot dead. This may not be new knowledge, but 85% of guns issued in the American Civil War were never fired.
I have an honest question why should I pay when the product they are offering is inferior in every way to the setup I have been using for the last 2-3 years? For the past few years I have used a irssi script that is setup with the tv shows that I want to download and the quality i wish to have them downloaded in this takes about 5 minutes to setup and about the same to maintain every season after this five minute time investment I’m getting shows less then a half an hour after they air on the east coast in 720p with no commercials that means when I’m ready to watch them that night or later that year they are ready to go with no hassle no worrying about whether or not its on netflix or waiting a week to see it on hulu if i want to see breaking bad i can watch it 15 mins after its done airing on the east coast and be done before its even done airing in Texas until they can offer up something to match that I don’t see any reason to meet them half way.
Mad Men costs about $3m per episode (http://adage.com/article/mediaworks/mad-men-advertising/145179/), the same as Breaking Bad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Bad).
> AMC is ending Breaking Bad next season because of Madmen sucking up the budget
Thankfully, that's not going to happen. AMC tried cutting BrBa back to only 6 episodes next season. But Sony owns the rights to the show, so they shopped it around. AMC caved. For all the press Mad Men gets, Breaking Bad has ~2x the viewers per episode, and Walking Dead (which had it's budget cut due to Mad Men's cost) gets about ~2.5x the viewers.
[Edit: Removed my snarky comment about AMC's management.]
I'm in the same boat as you. I cut the cord about 5 months ago and haven't looked back. I have Netflix and Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV. I know I am missing out on a lot of great content and it pisses me off...until I get my bill, which is a fraction of what I was paying before. Also, the convenience of my current setup is unmatchable.
The thing is, like you said, the technology has changed. I want shows on my current setup. I am willing to pay more for more content. One thing I thought was very interesting is Apple removing TV show rentals. I never purchase movies or TV shows. I like to rent them, watch them once and I usually don't want to watch them again. If I do, I will rent it again.
Why can't content providers understand this? Netflix and Hulu need to start creating their own content, which I know they are both working towards.
One semi-related note: AMC is ending Breaking Bad next season because of Madmen sucking up the budget - Netflix and Hulu: go buy that show! I would gladly pay for a show-specific season pass just to watch Breaking Bad.
Energy hasn't been increasing in cost ( not even gasoline in the US, really - although it's a messy dataset ). Raw materials and food are "marginally free" - it almost costs more to figure out how much more you need than to produce it, so long as there is no speculative run on the commodity.
The Internet (apparently) produces much more consumer surplus than it sinks in cost. I'd say it's deflationary because:
1) 1980s models of radio are completely infeasible. 2) 1980s models of television programming are pure-cost infeasible. 3) Cable TV is dependent on movie-replacement shows like "Breaking Bad" and sports. 4) There's a strong probability that theater-movies will follow the same curve as CD sales did with Napster, and soon.
The only things that are not essentially deflationary are housing, education, government and healthcare. Housing might be teetering on the brink of deflation. Education... who knows? And healthcare is likely to see something like deflation as status-oriented (read customer-perception quality stuff) gets squeezed out.
Government? Who knows?
European who loves watching USA TV shows: it can literally take YEARS before very successful US shows make it to (non-pay) TV over here and quite often they are not being shown at all.
I was honestly surprised "Dexter" was on regular German TV here rather soon - I was on season three when they started season one here. I cannot say "Breaking Bad" is being aired yet nor "The Shield", "The Wire" or any other of my favorite shows. Not even "Battlestar Galactica" or "South Park" made it to non-pay TV.
Well, at least "Two and a Half Men" is on if you are so inclined.
tl;dr: Marketers control Hollywood production and are risk-averse gatekeepers. A bubble in independent/boutique production disrupted that side-channel.
It's not a complete picture; why doesn't the independent/boutique side fire back up? I think a better explanation is technology/distribution, i.e. HDTV + cable/internet. TV's mentioned in the article, but only as kind of a silver-lining; really it seems more like a classic disruptive technology. Shows like Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad are highly visual and would until recently have been better as movies; now plenty of people have nice TVs, and they work fine there.
So the movie theater's niche is now reduced to material which needs to be huge in size, enormously loud, 3D, or seen primarily by people who refuse to or can't buy HDTVs. Everything else seems transitional.
Or on a 'Breaking Bad' episode.
You mean except for The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The West Wing, Six Feet Under, Dexter, BSG (gak), Friday Night Lights, Lost, Sons of Anarchy, Deadwood, Extras, Damages, Weeds (gak), House...
What's tricky about this comparison is that there's so much North American TV. A lot of it is ABC sitcoms, yes.
Louie is a surprisingly good show. I think I like it for the same reasons I like Breaking Bad and Mad Men, which is it sticks out from the rest of tv (American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, Bones, House, Law and Order, etc.) I think what's nice is that its not just another over used trope, spin off, sequel, trilogy, reproduction--it's original. I especially enjoyed the episode with his mom. The authors arguments are really interesting and I tend to agree with her. There are flaws in everything though.
Watching 4 episodes of "Breaking Bad".
It is clear that she is not just sitting around on the couch watching soap operas with the time she frees up via outsourcing. She's hustling and making money (and presumably having fun). She can always learn to cook later if it strikes her fancy.
The idea of outsourcing your life makes a lot of sense if you spend a lot of time on petty outsourceable tasks and are a driven sort of person who can use every extra minute.
A lot of us don't fit that profile, and outsourcing more of our lives would just mean more time spent sitting on the couch or parked in front of the computer. I'm probably better off mowing my own lawn and only watching five episodes of Breaking Bad this week instead of six.