Hacker Cinema
Godless
2017 · TV series · 1 season
Created by Scott Frank
A ruthless outlaw terrorizes the West in search of a former member of his gang, who’s found a new life in a quiet town populated only by women.
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5 comments on Hacker News
I've moved from watching movies and TV shows without end to watching limited series/anthology shows. The format hits the sweet spot between watching a self contained story and the anticipation of a TV show. I don't think the format gets the love it deserves, but networks like Disney+ (most of Marvel's recent outings), Netflix (Godless, Russian Doll, Alias Grace, The Queen's Gambit, The Haunting of Hill House), and HBO (The Night Of, Watchmen, The Outsider) certainly understand the benefits and have been amassing a quiet army of content.
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.
Westworld (HBO) isn't a Western per se but it is a Western setting (exclusively so in S1). Godless. Longmire. It's definitely not the staple that it was at one time in the US but it's certainly not extinct.
Which is what I meant by my upthread comment. I don't expect or wish superhero movies to go extinct. I'm sure they won't as they have antecedents that are literally ancient. (Greek, at least, mythology.) I just wish there wan't such a glut of them and that they didn't tend to incorporate so many of the annoying features of typical modern action movies.
Movies have sequels - the Fast and Furious franchise is built on the same audience-character relationship development that you attribute to shows. And there are one-off long-form shows that are very unlikely to have sequels (such as Godless) which are more like 10 hour movies.
I believe it. As a film fan, this is why I really dislike Netflix—they seem a repeat offender at ripping off other artists. A few of their shows like Stranger Things (Alien, Poltergeist, Akira, Goonies) and especially Godless (Rio Bravo; Magnificent Seven; Good, Bad, and the Ugly) go beyond homage and into outright copying and stealing ideas. I understand tropes and references, but I think Netflix has shown a pattern of basically just making imitation products of other successful products. I can watch nearly anything on HBO, but can hardly find anything half worth watching on Netflix and it’s nearly all derivative of something else more interesting.