Hacker Cinema
Stranger Things
2016 · TV series · 5 seasons
Created by Ross Duffer, Matt Duffer
ActionAdventureMysteryScience FictionFantasy
When a young boy vanishes, a small town uncovers a mystery involving secret experiments, terrifying supernatural forces, and one strange little girl.
73 positive43 negative13 mixed166 neutralfrom 295 commenters
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330 comments on Hacker News
Looks like I am going to have some competition!
I think cable as an idea is fantastic, specifically because it has curated content. You can tell when a cable television channel went down the drain when their lineups either weren't consistent or started playing the same 4 things every day.
With genre based channels you can bring back a little of that monoculture we had and can share experiences with other people. Being able to watch things like the latest episode of stranger things debut at the same time in parallel with other people is just more fun that queueing it up randomly.
I have actually been working on this concept but focused on content creators at https://react.tv. It lets you use digital media to create a television channel. The hope is to offer this same kind of experience for creators without having to make a deal with a company like Netflix.
I was immediately reminded of the fake VHS line artifacts for Stranger Things - A Bad Lip Reading[0], which I assume are sort of a bit about the fake film grain things during the opening titles in the Stranger Things show.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-4rhjO6xYg
Their TV shows are definitely better than the movies by far but even then I can’t think of one that I watched that didn’t decline in quality as time went on. Even the last season of Stranger Things was pretty poor
listens continuing to decline year after year.
Streaming music is only the tip of the iceberg.
Most TV commercials are using 30-year-old songs. Add to that streaming series (think Stranger Things), movies, public spaces, internet radio, actual radio, and hundreds of other licensing opportunities await.
Is that really true? I find that more and more TV series have a lot more gruesome elements in there nowadays, also ones aimed at not-only-adults like Stranger Things for example. And horror movies moved from being a niche thing to Hollywood.
I cancelled Netflix long ago, they started cancelling their best shows (like 1899, etc) and producing absolute garbage. I mean just look at the quality of early/peak Netflix to now. Stranger Things is a great example, the decline is visible not just in the story but in the visuals. The documentaries are also bad now, I watched the "Manosphere" at someone's house, and while you can agree with the premise that these people are deranged, it was clearly a cash grab and didn't really move the needle. Then the catalogue has been gutted, and it's just mostly garbage now. Just awful stuff.
The last truly remarkable series they had was Dark. Everything since has slid into being for low attention span people on their phones, and for that reason I no longer give it my attention, or money. I guess it's working out for them, since they keep printing money...but I think it won't last forever. Look at Disney, the decline can come quick once the cracks turn into fault lines.
This is why Netflix broke up the final season of Stranger Things in such a weird way... they wanted new episodes at the end of quarters, to have good subscriber numbers for the quarter report
I dunno, I think it's clearly different if Spotify is using their platform to inject the ads vs the creators creating the content with ads included.
Like if Netflix let showrunners inject ads into their shows and provided a technical platform for that, and the Stranger Things creators added ads to every episode... nobody would be like "it's not Netflix showing ads, it's the Stranger Things creators".
Planet Money recently released an episode that mentions some of these points around drop vs drip programming
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/24/nx-s1-5646673/stranger-things-season-netflix-binge-drip-watching-tv
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All vaccination is now heavily politicized in the US. HPV vaccination was an obvious focal point initially because of why we'd do it when we do.
The initial data says you should vaccinate somewhere around 12-14 year old girls because most of them will be HPV naive but if you wait longer they won't be any more. But too many US parents cannot imagine their little girl ever having sex and if they never have sex they almost certainly won't contract HPV so, why are we vaccinating them? Are you trying to make my daughter a slut?
If you've been a teenage American this should strike you as very silly, and doubly so if you understand biology. Teenage girls are not, in fact, celibate by default, so some of them will get horny. And if you understand biology the viral infections aren't caused by the same mechanism as pregnancy "sexual activity" is a shorthand, you can easily get infected while steering clear of anything that would get somebody knocked up. A peck on grandma's cheek is unlikely to work, but if you're sucking face for most of a Stranger Things episode that's definitely enough that you might contract HPV.
Yeah, Stranger Things producers of all people should perhaps be cautious calling something "garbage". Rarely has a TV show fallen so far so fast.
Since people will at large not do this because they don't read Screenrant and how this needs to cut though the massive social media noise and we're looking at millions of viewers, what is the consequences with this particular episode? Viewing issues, or is it meant to be dark but won't be?
Last time I heard this reasoning about bad TV settings was during the infamous GoT episode that was very dark.
Producers generally don't warn about TV settings preemptively as if to warn, so it makes me a bit concerned.
Stranger Things already face complaints about S5 lately, having viewing issues on the finale would be the cherry on top.
The only garbage I'm turning off is Stranger Things. How did they manage to keep going after the train-wreck that was Season 3??
A lot of this is personal preference, but I still feel like the most memorable shows tend to be the ones that have a bit of both. Season-long stories, but also episodes that can stand on their own.
In a show like Stranger Things, almost none of the episodes are individually memorable or watchable on their own. They depend too much on the surrounding episodes.
Compare to e.g. Strange New Worlds, which tells large stories over the course of a season, but each episode is also a self-contained story. Which in turn allows for more variety and an overall richer experience, since you can have individual episodes experiment with wacky deviations from the norm of the show. Not all of those experiments will land for everybody (musical episodes tend to be quite divisive, for example), but there is a density to the experience that a lot of modern TV lacks.
Stranger Things creator is not aware of how stupid most Netflix viewers are. They literally watch algorithm-generated TV shows all day long, and he expects to explain relatively technical things to them. Good luck, Mr. Creator.
I agree. There are absolutely tons of movies and TV series with indecipherable dialogue, but Stranger Things isn't among them.
I hope AI tools allow for better fan edits. There's enough of a foundation and source footage to redo the later episodes of Stranger Things ... The Matrix ... etc.
And the scripts of most recent YouTube videos, and the dialogue in Stranger Things Season 5 (the last 3 episodes specifically).
It blows my mind that anyone can consider Stranger Things to be great anything. It's utter dross. It's like our standards have dropped massively over the last 50 years in almost every way, in literature, music, journalism, politics, movies, and TV.
There's way more good content available than an employed adult human has time to consume. I have watched five great seasons of TV this year (Frieren, Apothecary Diaries, Dandadan, Blue Box, Stranger Things, all on Netflix) and zero movies (no time with kids!), and have read twelve good books (ranging from prize-winning literature to incredible graphic novels). I have zero time for anything else besides two other hobbies, both of which involve the creative act: coding, and writing fanfiction.
When I hear "there's nothing good available," I assume the person is a dullard. Like where are you looking that you can't throw a rock and hit something worth watching?!
I appreciate the optimism, and it's definitely worth noting that this isn't the first or last time that the intellectual elite had freaked out about the lowering of standards for the garbage the proles are imbibing. But the hinge of this article is that cheaper access to mass popular fiction opened up a new market for great unknown writers. This was true because the medium in paperback encouraged, rather than undermined, the reader's interest in reading. You pick up a paperback in the train station before heading home... your attention span at least stays the same, or maybe gets longer as you learn to enjoy long form fiction. The paperback business model is still based on keeping your attention fixed on a something for a long time (you know, like "Stranger Things"). Media like TikTok are designed to turn you into a vegetable with an attention span approaching zero. So I don't think these are equivalent.
The paperback vs hardback is more like Netflix vs cinema. Tiktok / short form video is like newsreels in Roger Rabbit, where the 'toons make the content.
Cinema used to be a really good shared experience. I don't go to cinema anymore because we have a newborn at home, but we used to pre-order tickets in advanced for movies we really wanted to see (like Wicked last year, Fantastic 4 this year) and the theater was almost empty at opening night for both of those.
Contrast a few years ago when avengers endgame came out, and Spiderman far from home came out shortly after that, and No Way Home a few years after that... They were lively events. People dressed up, the theater handed out free swag and merch, and it was just a really cool shared experience, almost akin to a live concert.
I don't know exactly what's changed in that time, considering No Way Home came out after Covid and it was still a spectacle of an event, but I don't think cinema will get its magic back.
A few years ago I did go to a "Stranger Things" experience and I think that might be the future of shared experiences/narratives. It was essentially a week-long pop-up event, you'd get tickets, and it was basically a "walking simulator" that took you through a narrative within the Stranger Things universe. This wasn't just a bunch of people looking at a screen, it was live actors, holographics, sound design, lights, a lot of crazy stuff for a pop-up venue.
As a fan of the franchise it was really well done. A friend of mine want to a similar "Experience" for the Bridgeton universe, which I care nothing about, but she really enjoyed it as well.
So I think if Netflix were to reimagine cinema, it would probably be in that direction.
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.
Lol I wrote Avengers instead of Defenders, not sure why the downvote, but it was a really good series of shows, it was highly recommended on Netflix at the time any time a new season came out. Disney just wanted to pull it into Disney Plus that much is obvious considering they've only just started to do that, with the same cast.
Not only this, but there's also Stranger Things, which imho had too many long breaks between seasons. Black Mirror was another one that was really popular. Squid Game as well.
Narcos is another and one of my personal favorite shows of all time, really captures a lot of details that I had no idea about as known by the DEA agents who went after some of the biggest drug lords of our time.
They also fund and produce some of the best high quality documentary series.
https://screenrant.com/marvel-netflix-tv-show-cancellations-response/
But Stranger Things also feels kinda cheap. I am not sure what is it but there is just this "movie feel" that HBO production often achieve (Apple TV does this too) but with netflix it just isn't there. Not sure why.
I realize this is about money, and it's 2025 right now, and I'm probably just old, but what will happen to quality? I actually laughed, twice, because they did this, twice:
> Beloved franchises, shows and movies such as [list of some of the greatest classics of all time] will join Netflix’s extensive portfolio including [list of laughable junk], creating an extraordinary entertainment offering for audiences worldwide.
And then just a few lines later (and I won't snarkily shorten this one):
> By combining Warner Bros.’ incredible library of shows and movies—from timeless classics like Casablanca and Citizen Kane to modern favorites like Harry Potter and Friends—with our culture-defining titles like Stranger Things, KPop Demon Hunters and Squid Game, we'll be able to do that even better.
Like did I really just see Citizen Kane in the same sentence as KPop Demon Hunters? Might as well add Ow, My Balls to the list, that's how jarring the contrast was for me.
I cancelled all my content subscriptions and I'm back to torrenting. I barely watch anything made my Netflix regardless. I think either Dark or the 3rd season of Stranger Things was the last time. Snyder's SciFi movie wasn't much good either. By now the streaming services are en route to become as terrible as whatever they were set out to replace. Once one of them started heavily advertising their own productions everywhere inside their apps I would've cancelled any remaining subscription at the latest.
The Crown is absolutely a prestige TV show. Stranger Things is also high quality and high budget. You could probably include Bridgerton in there too, it's not my kind of show but I can still recognize that it's a well put together one.
It's worse than previous series, I've noticed myself zoning out a few times, but the entire Stranger Things schtick is that it's a homage to the 80s. It's story lines are cliched, that's the point. They're predictable because you have seen them before.
They even highlight and play with it themselves in the show, introducing the big bad via the D&D table in the first episode of each season, referencing the films they're doing, sometimes including the same actors from the films they're riffing off (Sean Astin as Bob, Robert Englund as Victor Creel).
Season 1 : Aliens/ET
Season 2 : Goonies, The Exorcist
Season 3 : Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blob
Season 4 : Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser
Season 5 : So far we've seen Home Alone, Lost boys, Terminator
Saying it's predictable and cliched is just saying they've done their job well! And missing one of the main points of the TV show. My friend was almost giddy that they'd used Technicolor in the Holly/Max world.
Seriously?
The Crown, Stranger Things, Unbelievable, Russian Doll (wow, just wow), Orange Is The New Black, Narcos, Narcos: Mexico, GLOW, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Ozark, Nobody Wants This, Altered Carbon, Dirk Gently, Mindhunters, The Queen's Gambit, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
And that's just what I can remember off the top of my head. And that's my taste, there's more not to my taste like Squid Game, Wednesday, Bridgerton, etc. And not including the films, documentaries, shorts, etc. they done like Love, Death and Robots.
The last Stranger Things series, of all things, is probably the single most expensive media production in history. More expensive than Marvel films, than both Avatars, than all of Games of Thrones, than Rings of Power per episode…
It even dwarfs the budgets of the biggest games ever and is roughly on the level of the upcoming GTA 6.
It’s completely mad! For a quaint small-scale mild-horror story set in the 80s. I get that it’s popular, but it would have been just as popular with 1/10 of the budget.
Exact numbers are often unknown, so I may be wrong for some of the examples above, but it’s in that order of magnitude.
But I agree that Netflix feels cheap. The Rings of Power felt remarkably cheap too. But it’s a lot more about the writing and the artistic merit than about actual production quality.
There must be more to that story. Netflix, HBO, BBC and a bunch of others keep pumping out these kinds of crime dramas exactly because they are quite conservative bets. They are extremely cheap to produce, a handful of mid-range actors on very mundane locations. They can stay as a miniseries or expand later on as wanted. And if the writing is good some of them become incredibly popular and profitable.
I mean, the last Stranger Things series, of all things, is the single most expensive production in history. More expensive than Marvel films, than both Avatars, than all of Games of Thrones, than Rings of Power per episode… It’s mad, for a quaint small-scale mild-horror story set in the 80s.
There is no way Mindhunter was simply too expensive.
But to be honest, isn't this also true of the basic Hollywood or Netflix fare?.
I've been watching season 5 of Stranger Things. It has a budget of approximately 1 gazillion dollars. The writing is utterly basic predictable, boring, cliché, it's either a marvel-tier quip or a hollywood trope. Most Netflix shovelware isn't better than this.
So I don't think it's unique to video games :)
Yuck!! My ex forced me into getting a Netflix subscription because she was dying to watch Stranger Things. It wasn't half bad for the simple reason I grew up in the 80's. The only thing I binge watched was Black Mirror, Sense 8 and a few documentaries.
Since I was forced to get a subscription, thankfully I never gave those bastards my CC info. I just created an account and went to Target or Walmart and bought a couple of $30 gift cards and put the code in. When my account ran dry, that was it. The only thing I pay for now is YouTube premium. That's about all the content I consume online. I figured I'd help support my favorite creators rather than using an ad blocker.
Edit: I payed for Disney+ for one month because she wasn't current on Star Wars movies. That was my first red flag with her.
Trash ? The Diplomat has as good a production value as any.
So does Bridgerton. Adolescence is basically a single shot marvel.
Others - Stranger Things, Money Heist, Black Doves.
Not to mention their true crime documentaries.
Warner Brothers makes quality content. I think this is an almost perfect fit.
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)
The highly anticipated final season of Stranger Things arrives on Netflix, bringing fans back to Hawkins for one last battle against the Upside Down. Season 5, Part 1 premieres November 26, 2025, with the first four episodes dropping simultaneously. This marks the beginning of the end for the cultural phenomenon that has captivated audiences since 2016. The series reportedly accumulating over 404 million viewing hours across its four seasons in just the first half of 2025 alone.
NPR had 3 stories last week in their NPR News Now Podcast about K-Pop Demon Hunters. Like I said it has 4 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 all in the top 10. It's the best performing movie ever on Netflix with over 236 million streams. It was so successful they actually did a run of showings on over 1,700 screens topping the box office charts for that week and grossing over 18 million in a weekend.
I'm not sure what else it would need to do besides dominate the music, box office, and streaming charts to be considered a success. It was widely covered in the news media as well. I predict that Rumi is going to be maybe the most popular costume with kids this year. My daughter and all her friends all claim they're going to be Rumi for halloween.
Stranger Things was huge, and maybe it's trailed off over the years. It never was quite as big as say Game of Thrones, but it was probably at least same tier as a Ted Lasso.
Wednesday is big as well, but hasn't dominated the work conversations as much as other shows, but I've heard it routinely mentioned in media. Wednesday Addams is also predicted as a top costume this halloween. The Wednesday dance was definitely a huge cultural meme last season.
But I guess to your point, there isn't something as big as a Game of Thrones out there right now on Netflix. But they have hit a pretty hot streak recently.
Netflix is right in its prime right now, K-Pop Demon Hunters is a smash hit and probably the biggest cultural thing going on right now, it has like 4 songs from it in the top 10. Wednesday is coming back this weekfor the end of season 2. Stranger Things is wrapping up in November,
I think you've got it backwards.
That was the hallmark of old TV, on networks. Since the start of TV in the 50's.
There are tons of modern TV shows that don't do anything you're talking about because they're made for streamers or paid TV without ads.
It sounds like you watch different shows than I do, but I watch a lot of TV and haven't seen what you're talking about in many, many years. Not with Squid Game or Stranger Things on Netflix, or Andor on Disney+, or White Lotus on HBO, or Severance on Apple TV+, or even something like Alien: Earth currently on FX/Hulu.
You might want to find better places for watching TV...
I totally get the sentiment but I also see the flip side of it.
I just…don’t have the time. And a lot of lengthy mediocre experiences could really use a summary.
I’m not sure I’m even agreeing with the concept of compression culture being a real thing when we are seeing things like streaming shows with incredibly long runtimes taking over cultural popularity over movies. Something like Stranger Things should really be a movie or movie series rather than a show with 34 hour-long episodes.
I would pay extra money for a compressed cut of some of these media properties.
> Even if someone today builds a better version of what Netflix used to be, it wouldn't matter. They won’t have the rights and licenses to the shows and movies. That’s what keeps people from switching.
What, apart from Stranger Things and Squid Game, has been enough of a cultural touchstone that it keeps people on Netflix? Those aren't things you keep coming back to again and again.
Netflix doesn't own Friends, Seinfeld, The Office, Community, Parks and Rec, etc.
I'd argue Max (nee HBO) has better legacy titles and franchises. They have both enduring IP as well as the reputation of being "destination television".
The thing that keeps people from cancelling Netflix is that they have a better content slate of licensed classics paired with new originals. And they do it in the greatest volume of all the streamers, so there will be "something" on, even if it isn't particularly good.
I'm surprised that the services don't seem to have updated for that reality yet; it feels like there's only one or two "hits" on each service per year. They did already adapt a bit by no longer releasing a whole season in one go, so you need at least three months of subscription for a 10 episode weekly series.
But what they need is rolling releases across the whole year, so that once one production is "done", the next one rolls around.
(maybe they already do, I don't know, I'm just thinking of Stranger Things which seems to be Netflix' main seller at the moment)
I think this kind of change is maybe more common than we think. I mean, when Nirvana showed up and was juxtaposed next to the hair metal kind of vibe of the day you had the same weird juxtaposition. Or think how weird that 90s vibe of movies like the Goonies or Raiders of the Lost Ark feels compared to Marvel (so much so that Stranger Things was able to feel nostalgic).
I think of it like fashion. Outfits get slim/tight then the next generation comes and fits get roomy/baggy, then then next generation comes and they'll get slim/tight. There is a swaying back and forth from formal to relaxed, even in politics. Like a Boris Johnson in the UK.
I think it can just feel like "the big change" when our own generational cohort makes the break. And baby boomers have been dominating the conversation for so long, that the particular change that happened in the 60s is banged on about so much. In fact, in the article the author themselves tries to downplay the change that happened in the 90s as a change in how billboard ranked artists. I think that is actually partially just a desire to see the 60s as exceptional or legendary in a way that plays into boomer nostalgia.
Laundering manufactured consent for cheaper, inferior products as consumer choice is a pretty old trick.
A consumer's perceived preference can be modulated by any number of issues with which the consumer is not properly informed, such as preferring one sweetener over the other, even if there are valid health concerns, thanks to generational brainwashing and an intentional lack of consumer training. What we have today is the consumer market equivalent to the unsophisticated investor market. People getting economically exploited and feeling like it was their own idea.
In the case of video encoders... Actual domain experts should not be forced to cede to the whim of an untrained eye simply for the purpose of capitalists extracting more money from them.
It's one thing for Netflix to experiment with the latest advances in machine learning, as a lot of us do. But when the opening sentence is to their blog is "When you are binge-watching the latest season of Stranger Things or Ozark, we strive to deliver the best possible video quality to your eyes", it's hard not to find issue with A) the commodification of entertainment and patronizing consumer speak and B) a misleading preposition about commitment to quality which the cited response article makes clear is untrue in the case of this product.
Deferring to domain experts in this case is better for every consumer, as they will not be duped into exchanging an increasingly degraded experience in exchange for increasing monthly rates. People feel very strongly about film quality, and for good reason. We're talking about the preservation of art and culture, but Netflix doesn't see it this way, as to them, it's all a commodity, and they manufacture consent for commodification. If the average user can't see this and push back against the degradation of quality that comes with commodification of art, I have a hard time deferring to them over an actual expert.
Yeah, I had one as a kid. My dad picked a few up during that same fire sale.
In the early 80s, when it wasn't yet clear that PC clones would dominate, it was a wonderful machine: it had a workstation-class (for the time) graphical display and was faster than any IBM product until the second-rev AT came out.
Microsoft was more focused on being cross-platform back then. Multiplan, for instance, ran on an abstract machine and so was ported to everything from minicomputers to the frickin' TI-99/4A. They even tried to consolidate Xenix and MS-DOS on a single unified API called "XeDOS"; fun fact: this is how MS-DOS 2.0 got subdirectories and piping/redirection.
Did you spot the Tandy 2000 used as a prop in Stranger Things? It was the cash register for the video store they used to search for Eddie in I believe Episode 2 of Season 4.
> maximum time spent on platform
Not even that, they optimize for acquiring and keeping subscribers. They gain nothing from you watching movies, it is just costing them bandwidth, at least on their ad-free plan, which was the only option until recently. It is completely different from YouTube and TikTok, or even oldschool TV, which get most of their revenue from ads.
They need a few good ones to attract new subscribers, and they do. Stranger Things and Squid Games are really good. For the rest, they just need enough content for people not to cancel their subscriptions.
If you want to encourage quality production, just subscribe for the month they are doing something good, ad-free of course, then unsubscribe. Many people are doing that, and maybe that's what it takes to get them to change their strategy. Maybe not for the better though.
Has Netflix done anything that comes close to the first and third greatest television shows of all time? No. They did Black Mirror, Stranger Things (hey: season 5 of The Wire was no great shakes either), BoJack, the Flanagan halloween miniserieses, Dark Crystal, and most recently Man on the Inside. Those are just the things I personally appreciate. They're holding their own with FX, which is not a small achievement.
> I'd assume residuals are lower / non-existent on the much-bemoaned formulaic Netflix fodder movies? Hence why they keep getting stuffed in services.
As I understand it, the residuals are for things beyond the original contract. So if you have a broadcast show, that gets paid out. Then it goes to syndication - residuals get paid. Then it goes to streaming - residuals get paid.
However, with an in house production by a streaming service... from the Fortune link ( and http://web.archive.org/web/20231001022043/https://fortune.com/2023/09/30/why-hollywood-actors-still-on-strike-2-percent-residuals-streaming/ if you have trouble with the link)
> So shows originally produced for broadcast television aren’t an issue. When “Friends,” which was originally an NBC sitcom, generates $1 billion dollars on streaming platforms, the five leads each earn 2%, or $20 million apiece. But a show like “Stranger Things” – produced and owned by Netflix – never goes to a secondary market as long as it is aired only on Netflix, so the stars earn only their original pay.
> The problem, then, comes from the fact that the existing residual model, per the expiring SAG-AFTRA contract, doesn’t take streaming into account.
> In the streaming era, all new shows produced by streaming platforms are concurrently reruns and original runs. Actors want 2% of streaming revenue generated by the show or film to replace this line of income.
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.
I have Disney and Netflix currently.
I have had Mubi. I think I will take it again.
Have Prime but cancelled it, runs out in a few days.
Prime seems to me like even more of a dumpster than Netflix, except for some nice things to have. But it has all these shows with names like Dunes, or Djanga or similar rip offs of really popular titles that they haven't bought (I scroll through all movies to see what they have), and it feels somewhat like they think they're going to put one over on you.
My feelings on Netflix https://medium.com/luminasticity/netflix-the-crap-you-put-up-with-4a672cf3790e - it could have been a premier service, but instead it's the crap you put up with, and https://medium.com/luminasticity/obligations-of-the-author-0c2f396f111c given its habit of cancelling everything you can't trust that it is worthwhile to devote yourself to a Netflix series until it is all over and you hear the reports of how things went.
I would get rid of Netflix but my daughter will kill me when the final Stranger Things drops.
Disney I don't have any complaints about, right now there isn't anything particular I am committed to on it, but I'm sure there will be. Of course I'm in Europe, I think the service might be more family friendly and bland in the U.S.
So as much as I hate to pay higher prices for things I sort of do feel like Disney has earned a price hike on the service.
But your mate doesnt have to stream them on demand to millions of people round the world.
They not only have to store the movies, but access and simultaneously stream them thousands of times from anywhere on the globe.
Imagine how many people are watching things like Stranger things series premiere at the same time.
I find that children rarely have much range, but they can be cast inline with their natural inclinations or personality. There's a number of tv shows where the kid actors get worse over time, as they're asked to do more kinds of storytelling (stranger things is a good example).
Reminds me of an exchange from Stranger Things (S4E3):
School counselor: Max, I'm… I'm sorry, I… I really can't discuss this. You wouldn't want me talking to any other students about you, right?
Max: If I were dead and it would help catch the killer, then yeah, I most definitely would.
https://subslikescript.com/series/Stranger_Things-4574334/season-4/episode-3-The_Monster_and_The_Superhero
The benefit of linear TV was that everyone was on the same schedule so all the post-viewing social aspects worked better. It also helped the social aspects that there were three or four networks with all major content, so the odds were very good that any particular person watched the same thing as you did.
Almost the only substantial TV or movie discussions I've witnessed in the last ten years were about fandom-style properties - Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, the MCU, Star Wars. TV and movies in general are rarely discussed. If you share a fandom with someone you can talk about the fandom, if not then the two of you may as well be from different planets regarding media.
I'm outside the Venn Diagram overlap on this one, but I preordered an AVP and do not have an active Netflix account. I subscribe to watch Stranger Things whenever there's a new season and then unsub until the next one. But I just don't watch a lot of tv or movies in general, so Netflix is right on not pursuing me.
> Not just books. I remember seeing a "movie" on Amazon (not sure if it was Prime or some other service I was subscribed to). It was called "how to pronounce 'Stranger Things'", and the total length was about 10 seconds. I'll leave the plot to your imagination.
That's a really common genre of video on Youtube. If you Google "how to pronounce 'Stranger Things'", you'll find dozens, including this channel with separate videos for "How to pronounce Stranger Things" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZygvdKNT15o) AND "How to pronounce Stranger Things 3" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD4Zae1rOgY).
Not just books. I remember seeing a "movie" on Amazon (not sure if it was Prime or some other service I was subscribed to). It was called "how to pronounce 'Stranger Things'", and the total length was about 10 seconds. I'll leave the plot to your imagination.
> I'd be very interested in hearing from anyone who experienced that sameness compared to today's more fragmented media on if they think it changed anything from a social point of view. Shared experiences and interests are fertile ground for building relationships and it sounds like everyone generally shared a lot more.
I very much miss the shared social experience. In the 90s, you'd go to school on Monday and run down the latest X-Files episode. VCRs existed, but worst case you watched it later that night. Otherwise you missed out on the discussion.
Then the next week SNL did a parody and everyone got it because everyone saw the thing they were parodying.
Now that happens much less frequently. It still happens sometimes. When Wednesday came out, even people who hadn't seen the show knew what it was about. Same with Squid Games and Stranger Things.
If you want to see some data, check this out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_television_broadcasts_in_the_United_States#Series_by_year_2
The ratings share is what you want to look at. That roughly represents the percent of all households with TVs who watch a show. Look at the highest rated show for each year and what percent of people watch it.
Back in the day to be the highest rated, you had to be over 60%. Now a top rated non-sports show is maybe 10%.
Interestingly what I see now that I have my own kids is that they don't talk about scripted TV much at all -- they talk about video games and YouTube/tiktok videos that they all seem to have seen. So that seems to be where the social aspect is moving.
License fee evasion is one of the top traffic sources in the British court system, the idea that it's done "on the honour system" is mendacious. There are people in prison right now for not paying it. The BBC is at its most foundational level a state-backed company built on state power.
Doctor Who is a children's show and dates from the 50s. Red Dwarf is a comedy and hasn't been made for decades. As I said: the BBC thinks sci-fi is for children or to laugh at, and barely even that.
> it may be the most popular in your circle, or your mind, but this is demonstrably, obviously untrue
It's a few years ago now but e.g.
https://tbivision.com/2018/04/25/netflix-ordered-more-sci-fi-after-genre-hits-says-ampere/
"following the success of flagship series like Stranger Things, sci-fi and fantasy was the most popular genre on Netflix"
If you look at the list of the top shows on Netflix then sci-fi, fantasy and horror are consistently amongst the most popular shows:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-watched_Netflix_original_programming
The BBC just doesn't do these, at all.
> what ideology is against sci-fi?
The BBC was fundamentally founded on a deeply classist Reithian ideology and it has never fully discarded this culture. It thinks its primary role is to improve the public and TV/radio production is just a means to that end. Given a choice of making an expensive period drama (what it calls "culture"), an expensive lecture on climate change or an expensive sci-fi/fantasy show they will never pick the latter, it just culturally displeases their executives at a very fundamental level to do so. Netflix also has problems with ideology [1] but it doesn't hold them back to the extent of neglecting whole genres of TV/movie output (with the possible exception of news, but you could argue that combining entertainment and news isn't natural and only an artifact of bandwidth constraints in earlier eras). Netflix's primary mission is just to give people what they want to watch.
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/netflix-blackwashing-parodies
> 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).
Wasn’t 1 hour long episode of Stranger Things about $30m per episode?
Definitely not small amounts of money, but relatively speaking…
One of the episodes of Stranger Things took like a one-minute break to do a soda ad. Probably the most jarring and disruptive “produce placement” (but really, it was more of an embedded ad) that I’ve seen.
I don’t think so, to be honest. The landscape for media consumption is so much different than 10-15 years ago. Without any supporting data, I have a hunch that, shows are mostly watched within a year of its original air date. New shows aren’t on a rerun (I recall Scrubs, House being on from time to time), they are not turning into a comfort background tv show (like The Office, Friends) or have a religious fanbase that’ll just follow along because there are 20 seasons of it (NCIS, Greys Anatomy and so on.).
On top of everything, media is extremely fragmented. So much choice that there isn’t any specific shows that people watch because everyone else is watching and will talk about it on Monday during lunch (a la Game of Thrones). So all these companies are left with churning new shows trying to find a holy grail of the Stranger Things size to bring them new subscribers. Until then, anything that doesn’t stick on the wall, will get cut off.
We have a huge movie industry scene in my city, so you hear from people who jump from working show A to show B. None of the shows I’ve ever heard of and never will. But producers are still hoping for a genre defining hit somehow.
Some streaming boxes will do exactly that; both Apple’s and Amazon’s will, and perhaps others. For example, if you search for a movie or TV show on Fire TV or in the Apple TV app (on that box) it’ll show you the title and what services currently have it available. Searching for Stranger Things and House on Apple TV, for example, return links into Netflix or the Prime Video app (where I’ve been watching the latter).
“Netflix programs continued to display much more tobacco than broadcast or cable. For both the 2015-16 and 2016-17 seasons, episodic programming on Netflix had a greater total number of tobacco depictions than programs aired on broadcast or cable TV, with “Stranger Things” continuing to show the most tobacco overall. Researchers found that 100% of “Stranger Things” episodes coded included tobacco.”
Georgia has ranked #2 in US film production by some metrics, and it continues to steal hundreds of productions from California every year [1].
Last year Georgia was host to nearly 500 movies and TV shows [2], and has been extensively used for some of the biggest hits and blockbusters: Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Black Panther, Stranger Things, The Waking Dead, Ozark, Halt and Catch Fire, etc.
Disney, Marvel, and Netflix have major productions here. Winona Ryder was even my downstairs neighbor for a bit during the Stranger Things shoot.
Last year they built a fake White Castle a few blocks from me and then tore it down about a month later [3]. It was so disappointing as everyone was hoping for a real White Castle.
[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/canada-georgia-benefit-most-from-california-runaway-productions-1235115921/
[2] https://www.gpb.org/news/2022/08/01/georgia-film-industry-sets-another-economic-impact-record
[3] https://atlanta.urbanize.city/post/white-castle-edgewood-avenue-downtown-disney-filming
And it's had a consistent presence in Stranger Things on Netflix, helping expose it to a younger generation who missed out on the D&D moral panic, BG/NWN, the first movie, and so on.
A studio creating pure AI personalities to star in their movies seems perfectly fine. There is no requirement that these AI generated performers are based on real people. Arguing against generalized AI in film and television is arguing against electric cars because it will put the ICE engine manufacturers out of business.
AI generated performers seems like a good idea. You can see the impact the passage of time has had on shows, e.g. Stranger Things. Why should a franchise be limited by the ability of a star actor to continue looking the same age decade after decade and eventually have to stop because the actor has aged out or just flat out died?
I know this is quite off topic, but does anyone else think that Mr. Robot was originally suppose to be a movie (or maybe a mini series)?
First season is good, it has some fluffy bits, but mostly it has a story it wants to tell and the technical aspect is pretty good. However it all falls apart in following seasons.
Season two is so slow and boring. It doesn't move to plot forward. It doesn't have (m)any technical things (just some hand wave-y "hacking"). The show just goes further and further from what attracted me to it in season one. To a point where I quit watching somewhere mid season three during the original run and only after the whole thing had concluded (and I think I was sick at home) I dredged through the rest of it.
Feels like these days everything has to be a series with multiple seasons. Writers aren't allowed to just tell a story, but instead everything is milked and it almost immediately becomes shit. Another example is Stranger Things. Season one was good and the last episode left me wanting more, but when season two rolled around they took such a big step back that I couldn't get through the first two episodes, I just didn't care.
> Whole episodes of Stranger Things revolving around Seven Eleven and Slurpees?
It’s kinda funny, as we don’t have 7-11 here, I simply associate them with TV ;)
So you get ads, and unlimited product placement? Whole episodes of Stranger Things revolving around Seven Eleven and Slurpees? You'd be a fool to say no!
> Unlimited ad-free movies, TV shows, and mobile games
I wish the USA believed in consumer protection, or had false advertising laws that were enforced, because most shows and movies are full of ads, they're just hidden. Ubiquitous computer logos, coca-cola bottles, car brands, etc
Maybe they meant unlimited-ad, free movies, tv shows, and mobile games and messed up the punctuation
> 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.
Reddit is, I believe, the highest US traffic website that runs entirely on the cloud (as in they never invested in datacenters or POPs for traffic serving). To serve every single request they have to pay AWS and Fastly. I suspect that is why the per request pricing they are trying to pass off to 3rd party apps is so high.
Unless things have changed since I left, it is just a highly efficient machine for shoveling investor money into the cloud furnace. I love Reddit to death and would go back in a heartbeat to fix it, but everything is just plastered in "don't touch my garbage" stickers.
(Quick edit to add before the comments come rolling in, Netflix runs its business on the cloud - the expensive parts of pushing Stranger Things episodes into your living room run on real servers)
> To keep growing in many areas, Netflix needs to break up account sharing.
That trick only works once and then they're right back to where they were with zero growth because everyone already has a netflix account or they've been so pissed off at netflix changing the rules of their service and with price hikes, and the decline in content, that they've already canceled and moved on to the many many competitors with bigger/better libraries.
Netflix (and most companies really) shouldn't expect or aim for endless growth. They should just strive to make a healthy profit and sustain that over time. Their profits will increase as their costs go down and global population grows, as well as by moving into new markets.
That said, netflix still has some opportunities to make more money. They can sell their shows on physical media (I have season one of Stranger Things on DVD), and sell merch for their popular shows. Now that netflix is heavily invested in production they have even more opportunities to sell things to fans. Their challenge now is creating content that people want to spend money on, and not pissing off the customers they have.
Time will tell if this is the right move. Personally I can't remember the last time I watched any content that came from NF. I think the last time I even considered something on their platform was when Stranger Things season 2 was released. Maybe.
Something tells me this isn't going to go the way the would have hoped.
> Nowadays the energy, ingenuity and talent that would have gone into making smaller films is instead going into making premium TV.
I hate this. I think 80-110 minutes is a good amount of time to tell a story. It's enough time to develop characters and build a world, but it's short enough that to be effective a film has to be ruthlessly edited.
Stories for TV are so bloated. Series like Stranger Things, Servant, The Last of Us and Russian Doll would have been perfectly suited to the movie format, but instead they get padded out to 8-hour seasons.
I should note I don't think this is true of all series, by any means. Lots of stories are well suited to the series format, like Succession, Dahmer or The Boys. And I know my opinion won't be a popular one because the runaway success of long bloated stories shows us which way the winds are blowing.
“Vice Media originally broadcast their news programs on HBO, which broadcast the Emmy-winning[13] weekly documentary series Vice, which premiered in April 2013.”
I’m not saying that they are interchangeable. I’m saying that Vice News programs were funded initially by HBO. It would be like if Stranger Things moved from Netflix to Hulu. It doesn’t mean that they are interchangeable terms, but that it started with Netflix and moved.
I would model things differently. In particular, I disagree with point #3:
"3. Engagement is negatively related to quality."
On Netflix, the two most watched TV seasons ever were Stranger Things Season 4 and Wednesday Season 1 [1]. Both were higher quality compared to "sensitive" shows like 365 Days.
Generally, I don't think engagement is negatively correlated to quality - rather, I think it's only negatively correlated (sometimes) when we restrict the domain to the most engaging content.
If you took random samples of YouTube uploads, I'm confident you'd see a positive correlation between quality and engagement, while simultaneously finding that the highest engagement videos are not the highest quality.
I believe I've heard this called splitting tails of the distribution, where if X and Y are correlated, the highest Ys are still unlikely to be the highest Xs.
I'd amend "engagement is negatively related to quality" as "the highest engagement items are not the highest quality items", which is a much narrower claim.
[1] https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/what-to-watch/most-watched-series-movies-of-all-time-hours-watched/
> Each view of a Stranger Things episode generates exactly zero dollars.
I stopped watching shows on Netflix and subsequently cancelled my subscription. The value isn't in Netflix having content. Rather, the value is in viewers' consuming of content. Surely each view of an episode contributes to the revenue generated by the viewers' subscription fees.
Is this not a problem that is easily solved in principle. For each 1 million views of a Stranger Things episode (after some date threshold), the writer gets n dollars. The contract would state that this clause transfers to any new ownership (just in case Paramount+ or whatever it's called now buys them and their catalog out).
Sure, they won't want to negotiate to allow this... but what's the difficult here besides unwillingness? It's basically the same thing as now, except that as rights to Friends and Seinfeld are bandied about, the value proposition for those is a little more clear (some network paid $1.1 billion to be able to air reruns for the next 14 years or whatever).
You'd think if there was some neutral arbitrator, they might settle what the format/pattern of that residuals clause would be, so that the two parties could just sit down and haggle out the actual numbers.
The lack of streaming residuals seems to be a big, big part of the strike, and man, that's a tricky issue.
On one hand, writer compensation has always been structured around residuals -- and it seems like pay for writers on streaming shows has stayed the same, even though residuals haven't. That seems unfair.
On the other hand, "residuals" as a concept make less sense for shows that live on subscription streaming platforms.
Each view of a Stranger Things episode generates exactly zero dollars. Obviously there is a lot of value in Netflix having good, popular shows -- but the marginal cost/revenue structure is very different from cable TV, where you can actually map viewers to income whenever you air an episode.
Clearly the writers want to capture some of the possible upside of a super-popular show, much like residuals did in the past (and like startup equity does in SV). I just wonder if the industry is ready for a new structure to try and express that upside-value.
Its interesting that he mentioned that mentioned that the music was used in Stranger Things, season 4. Season 3 used music from Glass's opera Satyagraha, Season 4 (at least in the scene I remember) starts the Koyaaniqatsi music but subtly transitions to music from Glass's opera Akhnaten. They're both exposition scenes where the bad guy explains what he's doing or his world view.
I thought the music was particularly effective in those scenes. Clearly there is a Philip Glass fan on that show.
I don't think that type of "modern Attention Span" is really criticized: If you do a 3 hour binge of tiktok, you could count that as a single span claiming your full attention, right? But nobody would say really that doing a 3 hour tiktok binge would make you a person with a great attention span.
I think the same applies to entertainment broadly: movies, podcasts, tv shows.
Instead I think that the real attention span is not consumer-based, but rather based on interaction with the subject matter. Simply put, I think the level of engagement with a material has to be on a certain level before you can claim it takes attention to consume it.
Yes, a Stranger Things season lasts 8 hours front-to-back, but if you zone out for an hour in between they're still looking for the alien mystery and they're not suddenly going to die because you didn't think along with all the plotpoints.
Contrast that with a university lecture, where if you zone out for 15 minutes you might never catch back up because you need to interact with the material in your head to be able to consume it properly.
I think that nuance is missing if you just say the words "attention span". "Attention" may just be the wrong word, and so I think nothing is really solidly refuted here, and I do indeed think that the attention span is dead.
So basically, you found the plot of Stranger Things to be too slow moving and therefore parents about binging marathons and collective attention deficit disorder is somehow wrong? Combining original claim and your complain about this show, I do not even see what people should watch to not be adhd for you.
Also, Stranger Things does not even have that many sex scenes? There is like one or two per episode and they are fairly mild.
Yeah, this and a few other comments: I'm firmly in the "a film should be an hour and a half camp", but if I'm captivated enough that doesn't matter. Last one of those for me was Everything Everywhere.
I also think there are two kinds of audience, in a sort of bimodal distribution. Some people are looking to pass the time. As long as you display some nice images, they're happy. They don't mind that the episodes of Stranger Things have got longer, because that's what they're spending their time with. At the other end you have people who constantly feel an awareness of what they could be doing with their time, and once they feel that a filmmaker is wasting it you've lost them.
(Last night's film was, in honor of the death of Harry Belafonte, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World,_the_Flesh_and_the_Devil_(1959_film) ; much of it is just beautiful long shots of empty New York, and the character parts make heavy use of awkward pauses or unspoken conversations, and yet it's captivating. I suppose I should warn modern audiences that it's also unremittingly ""woke"", and even more so by 1959 standards)
Upvoted but with a caveat. I don't have a TV so I don't have much exposure to what's going on, but last summer I was house sitting and because of the hype of Stranger Things I thought I'd binge-watch it. In two days I watched the first two series completely, then stopped. I got bored because fundamentally nothing really happened to move anything forwards.
I watch a lot of made-for-TV staff on DVD and see a similarity – in football terms it's just time wasting. Long pauses usually filled in with music to give the illusion something is happening, sex scenes, gratuitous violence, people taking offence with unrealistic ease, longshots, slow shots... Anything to hide the fact that there is a lot of empty air. (Oh yes, and the three minute intro that also recaps what happened last time).
It all suggests there's a lot of tolerance for "something happening on screen" independent of whether it's worth watching or basically nothing at all.
Stranger Things is generally a much better show than Game of Thrones (in my opinion of course, but I’m pretty sure I’m objectively correct). But Game of Thrones seemed to make a much bigger cultural splash. Stranger Things—a season comes out, and then we all binge it, talk about that season, and it it all done in a month or so. Game of Thrones had weekly episode-by-episode articles written about it.
To succeed they had to make streaming video easier than torrenting it, and cheap enough to attract the casual torrenter.
And like every company, v1 was run by the founders that understood their customer base.
Of course, we're at v2, with legions of sales, accounts and advertising execs, and layers of management whose performance and pay is based solely on company performance.
The other thing that Netflix dropped the ball on was the Spotify-esque "1 site to rule them all". There's now Disney+, Paramount+, Hulu, HBO, in the UK, BBC, ITV, E4, Sky, and so on. Movie + TV companies have always fought each other in a way that record companies never did, but both their products are just bits down a wire in 2023.
Competition is coming at them from all sides.
I know that they get precise viewing figures for their series, but cancelling some of them is just baffling. No more chance of "Growing The Beard" for shows given the crowded marketplace.
I cancelled a year or so ago after they cancelled some of the programmes I used to watch. The only thing left on Netflix for me is Stranger Things and that's not enough to keep me.
Yet somehow kids are surviving and thriving into adulthood. I don’t buy that kids are so fragile they have to be raised by the 1985 norm, even if it makes great episodes of Stranger Things. Human beings were been reared in concentration camps or horrific refugee camps and went on to live rewarding and happy lives. Likewise kids have been raised pampered as royalty and went in to live rewarding and happy lives. There are a lot of things you can do to screw up your kids, but paying close attention to them is probably not the worst thing.
I watched the 2000 D&D film before watching the 2023 film.
TBH, the 2023 film isn't that much better than the 2000 film. The special FX are better but the dialogue and acting is just as campy in the second film as it was in the first. It's just that our tastes have changed. The 2000 film reflects the way D&D was played 2 decades ago, i.e., more as high fantasy; the 2023 film reflects that D&D today is played more as action comedy.
EDIT: see, for example, Stranger Things, in which D&D is played a straight high fantasy. The 2000 has comedic relief (D&D isn't Warhammer), but it's first and foremost a high fantasy. The new film is an action comedy with a few serious moments, like Vox Machina or any of the dozens of D&D gaming podcasts.
I always thought that last attempt to limit 3rd party open content was because it was taking off with Stranger Things and also knowing this upcoming movie is going to continue that.
At this point I don't trust TV shows to be anything but sprinboards for subsequent creativity: you know the show's going to go rotten sooner or later, mostly each new season is a step down in quality and consistency. So the best thing to do is to take the story into your own hands for further what-if discussions.
An example: Jon Snow gets stabbed and somehow next season comes back from the dead... Well no sir, he is actually being replaced by the faceless man, Arya won't be fooled but all others will.
Just take the story from there and have fun discussing what happens next.
Same for Stranger Things after season one...
A few things clicked for me here:
The algorithms that show me “things to watch” are so utterly useless (and yes I’ve thumbs downed a whole lot of things but it keeps showing me crap). Especially bad is Netflix, I think once Stranger Things is done with the final season (5) I’m out. Which leads to:
It’s f’ing impossible to find things (especially on Netflix). The whole UI of a wall of rectangular cover art with a show name below with no additional information until you click it is seriously the worst UI ever designed, it didn’t work well for music and it definitely doesn’t work for video ESPECIALLY on the limited and slow interactions of a TV remote.
These points above partly explain low viewing figures for new shows: they are so utterly hidden from view, the first season barely has a chance to get started before it’s pulled because cost/viewer ratio is too low.
Moving on from that - I’ve stopped watching anything that’s not a wrapped up series or a limited series (Maniac or New Cherry Coke Flavor on Netflix come to mind).
Often before I even start watching something I’ll quickly Google for “<show name> cancelled” before I waste time watching it.
I completely agree with other commenters here about companies committing to a guaranteed number of seasons / episodes which wrap up the story neatly…
If you look at a great example: BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (reboot) - the writers knew exactly how long it would last, everyone committed to it and the story was told and it got critical acclaim. Once it showed its worth there was still room for “sequels”. “The plan” was a great example of how the exact same story could be told from another point of view.
Another thing that comes to mind is “the matrix” which as a trilogy came to a satisfying conclusion. The amount of money spent on Matrix 4 verses how utterly terrible it was (does anyone even talk about it any more?) show a good reason why things need a definite end.
That being said I’d probably watch a tv series that showed the matrix world from the machine world…
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 agree.
Stranger Things as a 1 season miniseries would have been the stuff of legends.
Stranger Things is the worst for this. The most recent season was terrific but it didn’t even come close to finishing its story! Super frustrating to watch a “finale” and be left feeling like you’re halfway through a movie
The problem isn't shows that don't end, but ones that keep dragging out the 1-2 season plot line because it was popular (lost, stranger things, etc).
I'm fine with a plot that is progressing and things are being answered (the expanse, b5, etc) or just a plain old serial like the original star trek or the simsons where each episode stands on its own. But these shows where the plot just never quite gets resolved because yet another thing happens to snatch it away at the last moment quickly become tiring. Or like stranger things the whole things is nice and complete with all the lose ends tied, and then oh, lets do season 2 because its our best show and we want the money. This BTW seems to have been most movies since ~2000s where everything is a sequel, prequel or comic universe movie. Its like hollywood has forgotten how to buy book rights that aren't themselves giant economic works already (harry potter anyone?).
Just checked up on this, currently there are torrents available for Stranger Things Season 4.
> Stranger Things S02E09 2160p NF WEB-DL DTS-HD MA 5 1 HDR DV HEVC-FRiENDS
So either the DRM Level was reduced after the release (why would they ever do that?) or it was cracked but takes some time to do so.
>It's not a gamedev situation, where DRM lasts long enough to make impact on initial sales. Pirated Netflix shows appear on the torrents
This hasn't been consistently true for a while. Stranger Things season 4 did not appear in high resolutions online for a month after release.
> Widevine has been privately cracked/bypassed.
Sort of.
Widevine has various levels, and there are exploits for the lower ones.
But the upper ones really only have a vulnerability if a hardware key gets extracted, and Netflix shows in higher resolutions are increasingly not available anywhere because of that. Stranger things Season 4 was only available at 720p for more than a month.
Let's not pretend that network television didn't have its fair share of shows being cancelled mid-stream.
It feels like the big difference is that Netflix is culturally bound to having very short seasons, which get pushed out at once but rarely (like, not even once per year). This has a bunch of effects, that make the cancelations more painful.
One is that the creators can't iterate and learn based on audience reactions. The classic network TV show pattern is a bunch of shaky episodes early on, until things click. If the first try didn't work well enough, too bad. You had your shot.
Another is that the creators get no warning for when the show will be over. The only thing they can do is plan for success. While a network TV show that's not doing well enough would often know "these are the numbers we need to hit in the early part of the season, or it's over". And then they can plan for wrapping things up. Sometimes this goes wrong, the ending gets rushed for a show that then miraculously finds another round of funding. But it is still better than the alternative.
The third is that shows have no time to build up word of mouth. When a new Netflix show drops, it is likely dead in the discourse two weeks later unless it was a once-per-year megahit like Stranger Things or Squid Game. When a once per week show drops, it'll get talked about weekly and (if the vibe is positive) pick up viewers. The most obvious case of this I remember recently is the utterly mediocre The Nevers. On the forum where I do my TV and movie discussion on, a Netflix show of similar quality dropping six episodes at once would warrant 5 messages in an omnibus thread, and then be forgotten. This got hundreds of messages of very engaged chat.
Plenty of promising shows got cancelled after Season 1 back in the pre-streaming days too. Firefly is the quintessential example. The opposite can be worse though. Stargate SG-1 did not need 10 seasons. I think Abed had it right: 6 seasons and a movie is the ideal. Of course, once Donald Glover left, that show became a tired repeat too.
I actually really liked the latest season of Stranger Things. Season 3 was the one that I really struggled with. Sure, I get that the kids are teenagers now, but why does that mean that the adults have to have dumb teenage drama too?
> the quality of films/TV produced in the west has been in steady decline for quite some time
I could agree the average quality has dropped. But surely you agree that the sheer volume of high-quality content has ballooned. How many high-quality TV shows can you name from the 90s?
Compare that to the last 10 years of shows like: Succession, Ted Lasso, The Queen's Gambit, The Handmaids Tale, Better Call Saul, Ozark, House of Cards, Stranger Things, Silicon Valley, The Crown, Fargo, Mr. Robot, True Detective, Veep, and even (controversially) Game of Thrones.
> _Contrast Netflix with HBOMax and Disney+, each of which have consistently incredible quality._
Agree on HBO, but I wouldn't be able to tell with such certainty whether Disney+ has consistently higher quality than Netflix, or Disney+ has simply the benefit of owning almost all recognizable world-building IP in the industry (Disney itself, Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, plus everything they acquired when they acquired FOX).
For example: Not being a die-hard Star Wars Fan and being oversaturated with the Marvel franchise for years now, content from these universes on Disney+ is in no way of higher quality to me than comparable-size content of Netflix i.e. Stranger Things, Mindhunter, Peaky Blinders,...
I find myself increasingly browsing Disney+ like "oh, interesting!...maybe another time...", but that might be just me.
In addition, I keep noticing how Disney+ is producing big-budget series which end up with only ~8 20-30min episodes, whereas Netflix and HBO still consider ~50mins to be the minimum.
I liked the nostalgic aesthetic and references of stranger things, it never felt gratuitous. Top gun had a lot of shot for shot callbacks and filler scenes/shots that could have been edited down/out to make for a tighter movie. It's like they couldn't decide if they wanted it to be a sequel or a remake, so they said "why not both?"
To add another entry, D&D skits are very common on TikTok. Dead Gentleman Productions has made at least 3 D&D inspired (and using) movies, including:
- Gamers - Gamers: Dorkness Rising - Gamers: Hand of Fate(??? I didn't see this one, I think that's the title?)
And AD&D was used as a major story tenant of Stranger Things.
I think that there's some detail here that hasn't been addressed in the replies that you've received so far.
My understanding (relatively naive, though I am a long time consumre of D&D products) is that Hasbro has been making some questionable decisions recently particularly regarding their golden goose, which is Magic the Gathering. Some of those decisions have really annoyed the fan base, e.g. the Black Orchid debacle (they replublished a bunch of cards that they promised would never be republished, at hugely inflated prices).
In an attempt to shore up their share price and profits, they've reviewed their other product lines to see if there's any slack that can take up the load: which puts D&D in play. The bean counters believe that Hasbro is leaving a lot of money on the table; It's very popular and has had something of a resurgance recently due to popular media like Stranger Things and Critical Role, along with the well received 5th edition.
Ignoring direct IP licencing (e.g. games/movies/etc.), the majority of the revenue is from Games/Dungeon masters (as I understand it, in line with my experience), and not the players. DMs buy the books and run the game. DMs are a fraction of their player base, and there's certainly many who depend on free/open products to save costs. The powers that be believe that some of that can be monetised more effectively and they're trying to think of ways to extract more money from more people.
D&D 5e does fill an important niche; it's the public face of table-top role-play gaming, and it's pretty easy for anyone to pick up and run/play, however it's not the only product on the market and there are many products that serve the customers better (even if they're less accessible and require an understanding of the genre to choose) - Hasbro/WotC have to make this work, and quickly, or they run the risk of losing everything.
Paizo (via Pathfinder) probably has the most to win here; it's well known in the community and has much better support for people who prefer a "crunchy" game. Paizo are probably kicking themselves for not removing their dependency on the OGL when they released Pathfinder 2e (which is what my group plays most frequently).
I agree with everything you wrote. We keep Disney+ because their family content is untouchable by anyone else. HBO/Apple we trade off every couple of months depending on what's new and what we are most interested in.
Netflix I subscribe to for about 1 month per year to binge the latest of whatever I'm watching (this year: Stranger Things, The Crown) and then cancel. Anything else (Hulu, etc) is a 1 month and churn kind of situation.
Netflix especially seems to be in a content death spiral of sorts. They cancel their original content so aggressively and often in such unsatisfying ways for the audience that I've decided I don't want to watch anything on Netflix until after it is an established success with multiple seasons produced. I wish they would put more wood behind fewer arrows. Or maybe just make a move toward miniseries so at least the audience can have a satisfying beginning, middle, and end to something they've invested time in watching. I would so much rather have 5-8 episodes that form a cohesive story, than a Season 1 that sets up a world and then never gets to go anywhere because some algorithm decided the show wasn't successful enough to continue.
They also have a tendency to edit, remove episodes, etc. And it does not even need to be for political correctness either. It could be licensing rights to music in shows. They will sometimes edit a show to remove the music or remove the episode altogether. (This happened with Scrubs.)
They will remove content that involves people talking about suicide. They will remove content that is offensive. They have even gone back and edited previous episodes and content. This has happened in Stranger Things (actual edits with no notice) and Arrested Development (a redesign of the fourth season that is far worse than the original version of it). (I could not watch the fifth season. It was way too terrible.)
> it makes you think what else is not accurate?
The answer is: all of it! 100% of Stranger Things is inaccurate, because it’s fiction. ;)
This is true for all subjects, not just computer hacking. This includes non-fiction documentaries too… there’s nothing you can watch anywhere that is “accurate”, except maybe live video feeds. There are always incorrect details.
Accuracy, of course, is not the primary goal of TV show producers. They like to slip in these somewhat period accurate-ish tidbits for the enjoyment of those of us looking closely at the tangential details, but the Amiga in the show has no bearing on the story, it’s just a prop. I’m sure if you looked as closely at all the other props, you’d notice many that are inaccurate for the time & location: lamps, furniture, clothes, cars, houses, etc. It’s not possible to shoot a large production and get every single detail (and it would be unaffordably expensive to even get very close.) To me, going to the trouble of recreating the Amiga screen seems like a lot of effort to put into a prop.
So here’s a question for you: would you rather they used fictional computer brands and fictional screen shots? Would that make it more watchable for you? Can you watch computer sci-fi when it’s not trying to include period props, like Tron, for example? I do have my own line for where inaccuracies will pull me out of a show and prevent me from suspending disbelief, but generally as a computer nerd who lived through the 80s, I like a lot of the ‘hacking’ pop culture, even when it’s extremely cringe (looking at you, “Hackers”).
It is kind of interesting, it looks like the Weyland timeline is kind of a mess. They apparently ignored the Alien vs Predator backstory when writing Prometheus.
https://www.avpgalaxy.net/forum/index.php?topic=45645.0
So Prometheus has Weyland Corp from 2012. AvP has Weyland Industries, which the folks on that forum think is supposed to be founded in the 80’s. So hypothetically there could be an AvP/Stranger Things crossover.
But I think a more likely explanation is that a character in the Stranger Things universe is a fan of the Aliens series, since the first two movies came out in ‘79 and ‘84. Hopefully the world will be sufficiently diverged from the real life timeline by the upside-down, and they will be spared the horrors of Alien 3.
Generally, I can't watch most shows or films set in the 80s because they get so many things wrong or add in things from a later date. The things that almost every show or movie set in that time get wrong is how bad the economy was for anyone that wasn't in finance or adjacent industries. If you were a factory worker in Indiana in the 80s then you likely have been laid off half the time and worked odd jobs (Same with folks anywhere else in the midwest and great plains). Stranger Things implies this with Winona Ryder's character in parts of season 1 and 2 but mostly they seem to hide the grueling poverty of the 80s under the happy face side of things (I guess the mundane horrors of capitalism is too much for some writers).
Hollywood has always been very bad at depicting tech! Till late 90s and also in the early 00s every computer in every movie had no GUI, no mouse, green phosphor displays and obviously beeped at every keypress.
There are exceptions: Jurassic Park, in 1993, featured a real UNIX system ("It's a UNIX system!"), a real SGI workstation with its GUI[0].
Modern online computers, aka the internet (with mouse and everything this time) made their debut in the mainstream "You've Got Mail" (1998).
As for Stranger Things, these are creative people, I guess instead of trying to be extremely accurate (and still get something wrong), they went for a credible yet not realistic way, featuring some easter-eggs in a post-modern fashion, so eventually geeks like us could scream: "Look! Iframes!!".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)
I grew up on DOS 6.22 and quick basic 4.5, so I have a huge amount of nostalgia for how low friction it was to start programming back in the day.
There's a scene in Stranger Things where Sean Astin's character tries to brute force a code using a basic variant, and it was surprising to me to see code on a popular TV show that was remarkably faithful to the original.
https://specularrealms.com/2021/04/21/strangest-things
I think you're absolutely correct. The show was campy, and in time, would have become grating and fallen apart.
Star Wars, once lauded, has been milked dry. There are a few good works, but by and large they're beating a dead horse.
The same thing is happening to Marvel. People checked out after Endgame.
Game of Thrones was so near to perfection. It had an unusually large cast of a hundred characters and an expansive world to draw down. But even if the new show is good, the magic is gone.
The mystery of Stranger Things after season one ended. We're getting a rehash with common character tropes you can find anywhere.
The allure of Westworld softened after season one attempted to open up to bigger themes, but actually cut down on the possibility space.
The third Godfather. Dexter. Every single Jurassic Park but the first. Jaws. On and on.
Chiefly, it's simply a function of multiplied probabilities to continue with a success streak. Eventually the odds do not pay off in your favor.
But I think another contributing factor is that our brains begin to fit the shape of the setting, the motifs, the character arcs, the narrative world - and we just aren't surprised or pleased any longer. Few people would ask for twenty seasons of a show. Or ten movies in a given franchise. Our brains learn the shape of the landscape and grow bored.
Listened to a few tracks, this is right up my alley, thanks!
It's a little less Tron and a little more 80's film soundtrack vibe (which is also awesome).. The style seems to have come back in vogue a bit (Stranger Things etc.).
This reminds me a lot of the Le Matos soundtrack for Turbo Kid. [1] Their soundtrack to Summer of '84 has the same synth vibe but adds the horror soundtrack vibe, also recommended.
[1] https://lematos.bandcamp.com/album/chronicles-of-the-wasteland-turbo-kid-original-motion-picture-soundtrack
Disney+'s marquee show is The Mandalorian which has been quite great so far but even that can't be stretched for too long. I don't see it going beyond a few more seasons. At least with its competitors like Netflix, it has a fantastic library of so many show like House of Cards, Stranger Things, Dark, Squid Game and a bunch of stuff for almost every demographic possible. HBO probably has an unparalleled library of shows and movies. Disney+ shows don't have the same kind of rewatchability. For example, they fumbled extremely hard with the Obi Wan show, which could have been another potential cultural zeitgeist like the Star Wars movies if they probably cut down the filler and did some more rewrites to improve the script and released it as a movie (either in theater or as a Disney+ exclusive)
Disney+'s marquee show is The Mandalorian which has been quite great so far but even that can't be stretched for too long. I don't see it going beyond a few more seasons. At least with its competitors like Netflix, it has a fantastic library of so many show like House of Cards, Stranger Things, Dark, Squid Game and a bunch of stuff for almost every demographic possible. HBO probably has an unparalleled library of shows and movies. Disney+ shows don't have the same kind of rewatchability.
Netflix is also doling out shows a few episodes a week to keep people from subscribing, binging, and unsubscribing. That works fine for something like Stranger Things but they're even doing it for shows no one is subscribing to see. Frankly, the ability to binge a show is like decanting a wine or heating sake. It can make a mediocre show a lot better. Taking away that ability should be used with caution.
As a long time subscriber, it's got me thinking about only subscribing a few months a year; since I'd usually rather wait to binge a show anyway...
Why they can't link account age and binge-ability isn't clear to me; guessing something to do with contracts.
Netflix should have bought out NBC, CBS/Paramount, Discovery, or (most significantly) HBO/WB. Or even just their perpetual streaming rights back in the 00's.
Letting Discovery acquire WB was one of the biggest mistakes they've ever made. Just imagine if Netflix had the HBO and WB slate. Game of Thrones, all of DC, Cartoon Network... HBO has the superior content lineup, and they let that slide through their fingers.
They should have bought the LotR rights. They still don't have a major fantasy, sci-fi, or superhero franchise outside of Stranger Things. And that universe is tiny.
Netflix, frankly, does not have content production as a core competency. Most of the shows and films they produce are terrible. Their in-fighting amongst top exec tastemakers is a testament to this fact.
It's really dissapointingly seeing the comments section do exactly what the article tries to avoid. There seems to be so much lack of understanding for the process of prescribing treatment for depression, and overreliance on endless anecdotes or other singular data points, directly at the antithesis of the study:
> “Every single study directly reports ECT works better than ketamine. But _people are still skeptical of ECT, perhaps because of stigma_,” Rhee says, or negative depictions in films such as “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and shows such as “Stranger Things.” “_We need to improve public awareness of ECT for treatment-resistant depression_.”
If we read the article carefully, we can see that the headline (as all headlines are) is lacking in nuance:
> Most people diagnosed with depression are offered an _oral antidepressant (in combination with psychotherapy) as a first-line treatment option_. But _if oral antidepressants don’t help, or if the person is at imminent risk of hurting themselves_, there are other, more rapid treatment options: ECT, and more recently ketamine or esketamine.
Firstly, oral antidepressants and psychotherapy are still the firstly line of defence, and for the majority of people enough. As it is, ketamine or esketamine is nowhere near close - has nowhere near enough evidence and longitudinal studies - to replace SSRIs and psychotherapy as the first line. Unfortunately modern medicine isn't advanced enough to fully understand what's going on with oral antidepressants (we have theories, but the majority evidence is simply statistics), let alone (es) ketamine and ECT. As a result, if oral antidepressants are not effective it can often be difficult to effectively prescribe treatment. Naturally a consequence of this is increased risk, from procedures that may not have much if any benifits, not even including the very real chances of a misdiagnosis!
If we look at the cited paper's abstract, the message is even more clear
> Question: Is ketamine as effective as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in patients with _major depressive episode_?
> Findings: This systematic review and meta-analysis of 6 trials with 340 patients suggests that ECT may be superior to ketamine in improving depression severity. Findings also suggest that ketamine and ECT each have unique adverse effect profiles.
> The overall pooled SMD for depression symptoms for ECT when compared with ketamine was −0.69 (95% CI, −0.89 to −0.48; Cochran Q, P = .15; I2 = 39%), suggesting an efficacy advantage for ECT compared with ketamine for depression severity.
> Both ketamine and ECT had unique adverse effect profiles (ie, ketamine: lower risks for headache and muscle pain; ECT: lower risks for blurred vision, vertigo, diplopia/nystagmus, and transient dissociative/depersonalization symptoms).
> Meaning: Although ECT may be more efficacious than ketamine in the acute phase, _treatment options should be individualized and patient-centered, considering different adverse effect profiles and patient preferences._
Both (Es)Ketamine and ECT are useful and sometimes literally life saving therapies for those with treatment resistant depression. Like any treatment some respond effectively and may never have to undergo future treatment whilst others may require constant support. The stigma around ECT and the uninformed experience and use of anecdotes is dangerous, and ignores the reality that there are no good answers, at least with our current medical knowledge.
I would advise not drawing any conclusions from limited evidence, and if they want to see more personal anecdotes explore both the positive and negative comments at /r/ECT and /r/TherapeuticKetamine
Can someone convince me / correct my logic here?
I used to be a huge film photographer as well, back to high school days in the darkroom and getting my hands smelly and watching images appear in developer bath. I too have nostalgia. I was entertained by the online meme/question where someone asked "what is the 'red room' in Stranger Things?", ah these youngsters nowadays.
But objectively, digital sensors can have their color profiles / output remapped to most film "looks", even adding grain, and of course you're not spending $ on film with every shot and waiting days to get the film back. Aside from if you need the medium/large format resolution, (and the nostalgia / anticipation / excitement of the image) there is no objectively better thing about film, is there?
I really get puzzled by people on r/analogcommunity sharing their "finds" of old expired film and wanting to go out and shoot on it. Boggles the mind. You take images hopefully to keep, and wanting to do that with unknown film to save $5 and see what comes out, is... exciting?
(I'm sure this is a religious-level debate, I'm not imagining that this will be resolved here, but at least some enjoyment in discussing it.)
Just asked her (she's been the one buying our collection haha) and sounds like fairly early on she had trouble with many of them and so eventually she just gave up looking. The only example she had off the top of her head was Stranger Things Seasons 3 and 4. A quick search on Amazon seems.. confusing haha.
On the flipside i'd be curious if you have had luck from any sources on buying boxsets for modern streaming shows. Any tips?
edit: She replied with additional items:
> Off the top of my head:
> None of the Marvel shows on Disney+ have physical
> None of the Amazon Prime shows have physical
> None of the AppleTV+ shows have physical
> The first 2 seasons of stranger things do but are out of print. Subsequent seasons and any other show from that time period on are not available.
> Star Trek streaming shows ARE available but insanely expensive (8-10 ep seasons for 50-70)
The streaming services are aggregated through fire stick, Roku, Google and Apple tv, etc. The payment model and delivery of content is different now though.
Streaming services are akin to channel packages from traditional cable. You get an aggregate of content for a price per month. The issue is the point of aggregation is meaningless to the consumer for the popular services (Netflix, Apple tv, prime).
In traditional cable it's done by topic (movie package with HBO, showtime, starz or sports package). With these more popular streaming services it's aggregated by production company and other arbitrary things that are meaningless. Leaving me with 8 thousand movies on a service where I only care about 10, but I pay either way.
The Crunchyroll model of "this is an anime streaming service" has it right for VOD in my opinion, as does WWE.
I think a micro payment setup would work better for something like Netflix. Something like pay $1/month to watch stranger things. $40/month gets you 40 shows per month. Free to watch first 5 episodes or something. I can't think of any better way to truly gauge what's popular than to let people vote with their wallet directly.
Right now with these services it feels like we're subsidizing content that nobody cares about leading to a big murky pool of trash content. Just my 2 cents.
> Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that a season one episode of Stranger Things had been edited retroactively to remove a shot of Jonathan photographing Nancy while she was changing.
You’d think this would easy to verify for the author - Stopped reading after this
No, because the article admits to the change:
> Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that a season one episode of Stranger Things had been edited retroactively to remove a shot of Jonathan photographing Nancy while she was changing.
In this specific case you could buy Stranger Things Season 2 on Blu-ray which would have the original version on it. But that is probably getting to be a rare case, especially since you can't buy Season 3.
They don't say why it's "dangerous". This is as close as they get.
>One day patches might become as commonplace in screen media as they are in video games, and that is a truly worrying precedent for consumers and the integrity of art alike.
>Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that a season one episode of Stranger Things had been edited retroactively to remove a shot of Jonathan photographing Nancy while she was changing.
In the long history of narrative art (books, plays, oral), editing, changing, updating is the norm not the exception.
And human civilization has survived. So I think we will also survive this.
Here ya go, Stranger Things season one on DVD, where no one can change it: https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Blu-Ray-Collectors-Exclusive-Packaging/dp/B076HTKKXC
Original article:
> Viewers who still have physical copies of Stranger Things season one noticed something odd having gone back for a rewatch on Netflix: a scene wherein one-time weirdo Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton) takes spying, lewd snaps of now-lover Nancy (Natalia Dyer) from a bush has been erased on the platform. And it's not the first time the Duffers have gone back to the cutting room after the fact.
> There's a difference between correcting factual errors (or typos) and changing the story to better fit current political climate.
It's a good thing that in this case the factual error was the assertion of "changing the story to better fit current political climate."
Without that fake bombshell (that they could have validated for $XX dollars by just buying the DVD) what is the difference between an article correction and a minor plot continuity correction?
From the article, here's the edit: It's a simple mistake of an expansive series costing $30 million an episode, really: the creative team set an episode of Stranger Things 4 on March 22, forgetting that it had been established as Will Byers' (Noah Schnapp) birthday in the earlier season.
So can someone explain to me why this is a plot hole? If the episode took place on March 22nd, Will Byers' birthday, we would expect... a birthday party?
Been going on for a while.
r/DataHoarder (of course) post for this news last week - commenters list minute changes they've noticed like reruns being cut for advertisements and copyright: https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/w38e1z/stranger_things_4_creators_reveal_theyve_secretly/
In other Netflix shows:
- 13 Reasons Why: suicide removed,[1] song replaced (edit: coinciding with condemnation of the show by the artist[2])
- Dark: details changed for continuity with later seasons[3]
[1] https://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=378736
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/CSHFans/comments/8tloai/oh_starving_was_removed_from_13_reasons_why/
[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/DarK/comments/ctbsbd/apparently_some_mistakes_have_been_corrected/
Is there anything more ironic than the fact that this article was corrected?
> Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that a season one episode of Stranger Things had been edited retroactively to remove a shot of Jonathan photographing Nancy while she was changing.
Princess Mononoke is one of my favorite movies of all time but Netflix is more or less straight up garbage. Even their flagship offerings like Stranger Things are creatively bankrupt references for bored millennial parents.
Those shows/movies barely register when compared with Stranger Things: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore/TIMESERIES/1658697600?hl=en-US&tz=240&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0131ln7y,%2Fg%2F11jmxk7kxl,%2Fg%2F11f4m382q6,%2Fg%2F11qqfygs81&sni=3
I'm not browsing netflix regularly but we have a few tv shows which are worth keeping netflix anyway like the current Stranger Things, The Umbrella Academy, Russion Doll, Better Call Saul, ...
Next to that we watch normally one old TV Show which is the easy way to go to. Right now its Friends. Bevor that it was Star Trek Voyager.
Thats enough for me already to not feel bad for paying $10 per month for it.
But than there is also something we don't have in germany: super weird tv shows like 'The floor is lava' or 'is it cake?'. I scroll through them and watch a whole season in lets say 1-2 hours by watching the start and forwarding to the end or so. And there are so many of them and surprisingly interesting like the glass stuff or the chocolate show with Amaury Guichon, which is crazy :D
No need for you to bashing netflix if you don't like their content.
Its $10 per month, 2 coffees.
I also do watch a lot of tv shows and movies for the last 15/20 years (also stuff besides mainstream) and there are pretty good tv shows on netflix. Stranger Things, The Umbrella Academy, Better Call Saul, Russian Doll, Love Death and Robots (the last season was weirder than usual though), Space force (super quirky, love it!), The Witcher, Arcane, Superstore, Squid Game
Didn't know netflix actually allows to download this.
Very nice, but now i'm way more curious than before. Like prefered weekdays, top tv shows (i watch and others watch) etc.
I would also like to see when its more or less 'netflix time'.
Like right now we have stranger things, the umbrella academy and better call saul. Could easily be visualized and potentially even inform me when i can unsubscribe temporarily (not that it matters that much for a few bucks per month)
Netflix has a pattern. They have stats from a lot of multi-season shows and know that there's a sharp drop off in viewers the more seasons a show runs for, even if they're all excellent. This makes the first season a great investment, but remaining seasons are subject to rapidly diminishing returns.
So, their solution is to put a lot of effort into season 1 and, if it does really well, put vastly diminished resources into season 2. If season 1 doesn't blow their metrics out the window, they just cancel it. Since season 2's produced under this approach are usually pretty rough (e.g. Altered Carbon), there are almost never season 3's. There are exceptions (e.g. Stranger Things), but there are an awful lot of Netflix shows that never get a second season despite a very respectable first season (e.g. Marco Polo).
The anime version of Cowboy Bebop is a classic. In general, it's hard to remake a classic and leave fans of the classic happy. When the first shots of the costumes and cast came out I almost completely dismissed the Netfix series. Harold from Harold&Kumar is Spike? Jet looked like a janitor. The hype wasn't there for me.
So, I delayed watching the series, heard the grumblings, and went in with low expectations.
This is not Netflix's A-game. They did a great job in some respects, but really cheaped out in others.
The casting is a mixed bag, but mostly good. John Cho is actually pretty good as spike and Mustafa Shakir is brilliant as Jet. Pineda's Faye Valentine was less good. While Spike and Jet still felt at least somewhat like the anime characters, Valentine in the Netflix series was just off, and far too comical. Ed shows up only in the last episode and, well... Yeah. Let's face it, Ed is a difficult role and has to be played by someone fairly young. If I were directing a series like this I'd definitely want to shoot several episodes from later in the series with Ed before shooting the introduction precisely because of how hard it is to jump into the roll. The actor who played Ed was set up to fail.
The effects are good and the Bebop plus Swordfish are very well realized. The action is fairly well choreographed. The sets outside the ship are where Netflix got cheap. The rewrote things to reuse several locations a lot, such as the bar. The same junkyard set stands in for an assortment of locations and seems to pop up every episode, minimally redressed and shot from different angles.
The writing is where Netflix deviated from the anime most substantially. The plots of some episodes are almost totally unrecognizable, and generally do not compare well to the anime. The writers chose to flesh out and make explicit more of the syndicate backstory, with far more of Spike, Viscious, and Julia's past shown. The show becomes more interesting because of this. If they'd done a more faithful remake there'd have been less reason to watch the show. I'd have preferred that Ein's treatment was just a little more faithful though. Poor dog got screwed.
If you're a fan of the anime, lower your expectations, expect something a little different, and you may enjoy the Netflix series. I'd watch Season 2 even knowing it would be one of Netflix's usual half-efforts with a greatly reduced budget. It's not the anime but, if you like the genre, it's worth watching.
'Stranger Things', 'Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels', 'The Usual Suspects', 'Pulp Fiction'... all immediately come to mind as man-in-hole stories.
Reductive/deconstructive literary criticism helps highlight novel elements of the subject story. I can't fathom being upset about it, but then again, I didn't watch 'Cars'. Maybe it is a particularly bad movie?
I haven't rerun the analysis but back in the day (ten-to-fifteen+ years ago) it was actually cheaper to subscribe to purchase new digital episodes of series you liked on Amazon VOD (at something like $2-$3/episode) rather than to pay for cable. Back then (pre-streaming) TiVo boxes would auto-download the new episodes overnight and poof there they are to watch. We are again getting to the point with subscriptions that just buying whatever content is becoming cost-effective again. The problem is that once I start bothering to hunt to buy something, it's not a lot harder to hunt for $0 versions so ethics becomes the only barrier. How much does it cost to purchase Stranger Things every few years vs pay Netflix monthly?
The approach Stranger Things (at least, in the first, best, season) uses to suspend disbelief is to invoke a sense of child-like wonder, AND terror. Our protagonists are, by and large, children, or emerging from childhood into the lived body-horror of being a teenager. We see the world (primarily) through their lens, a lens that magnifies AND simplifies things. They don't understand what's going on, they just _know_ things are happening. Their credibility is established on the basis of "are these things a kid could conceivably think/believe."
Contrast that to media like Moonfall, where the characters are supposed to understand what's happening AND convey that to the audience. That's a much bigger lift. Their credibility is established according to "does this correspond to things an engineer would plausibly say/believe," which not many films get entirely right.
Stranger Things also has one more screenwriting technique going for it - it shows, instead of telling. We are _shown_ 11 being submerged into a tank and transported to the Other, we aren't told that that's whats happening. We are _shown_ the terrors of a mother who's lost her child, we aren't told "oh she's so sad." Show, don't tell, is THE big rule of storytelling, and it's ignored because it's hard to achieve.
EDIT for grammar
it depends on how much you already know about computers...
I'm very very curious about the concept of 'suspend disbelief'.. which from my ongoing analysis, is all about how any fictional story is connected to reality.
I just watched the Moonfall movie and the most impactful thing for me is just how bad it comes out. While it's clear they've studied what's supposed to make a story work; and the dialog and exposition waste NO time, it fails to get me to suspend disbelief.
On the other hand, considering stranger things which does a better job, without being really good (it's just ok), still manages to get me to suspend disbelief much better than that awful movie.
Anybody have anything on suspend disbelief from a narrative (the technique of storytelling) standpoint?
Awesome writeup and very topical with Running up that Hill being popularized again by season 4 of Stranger Things (on Netflix, I would also recommend the series, by the way)
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.
My favorite sources of drama and tension come form horror and thriller movies. Something that gets me to pay attention, and get that feeling of *what happens next?
When I was watching the final episode of Stranger Things, there was a minutes-long sequence flashing between almost all of the characters, showing their struggles. I didn't feel engaged, because I didn't feel like the characters were actually at risk.
Harry potter movie changed directors a few times right?
Amazon is getting a 160mil tax credit in NZ.
Regarding the team: "The team who will be creating the “LOTR” TV series includes: executive producers Lindsey Weber (“10 Cloverfield Lane”), Bruce Richmond (“Game of Thrones”), Gene Kelly (“Boardwalk Empire”) and Sharon Tal Yguado; writer/executive producer Gennifer Hutchison (“Breaking Bad”); writer/executive producer Jason Cahill (“The Sopranos”) writer/executive producer Justin Doble (“Stranger Things”); consulting producers Bryan Cogman (“Game of Thrones”) and Stephany Folsom (“Toy Story 4”); producer Ron Ames (“The Aviator”); writer/co-producer Helen Shang (“Hannibal”) and writing consultant Glenise Mullins."
So they have established people in the background and a well known franchise. As for not involving Peter Jackson maybe they just wanted to start fresh, no idea but George Lucas isn't involved of the Mandalorian
Yeah, and look at Stranger Things, it started with a 6M per episode budget and now (due to massive success and fame the actors got their share) is at 30M per episode. That means season 1 was 48M and now season 4 is at 240M.
Maybe it's the nostalgia talking, but I finished season 4 of Stranger Things yesterday, and now I have a strong urge to pick up a copy of The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub. A great book, it really captured the magic that King's Dark Tower series lost along the way.
> As for a 'fracturing',everyone's talking about stranger things and obi-wan. Kate Bush is top of the charts because of stranger things. Remember everyone talking about Tiger King or GoT? Certainly doesn't feel fractured to me.
It's also losing sight of books. There's so, so many books out there, it could be called even more fractured than modern TV/streaming, and yet big hits happened. When I was in school in the late 90s/early 2000s, everyone at least knew of (if not was a fan of) Animorphs, Goosebumps, Redwall, Harry Potter (before the movies), etc.
I think you underestimate the scale of how “short tailed” everything used to be.
Yes yes tiger king, stranger things, etc. these things are popular.
In 1983 over 50% of the entire United States watched the last episode of MASH live as it aired on NBC. And people talked about it for 10+ years.
Of course things are much more fractured than they used to be. The audience for Stranger Things or GoT is minuscule compared to something like "Must See TV" on NBC Thursdays in the past. I think you might be surprised at the number of people who haven't heard of Stranger Things and certainly haven't watched.
It's fair that Netflix doesn't really carry long tail content--never did carry the longest tail stuff and now that content owners want more money in general and there's a lot more competition for subscribers it doesn't make sense to pay for back catalog stuff that others own. YouTube and TikTok are better examples.
It seems obvious that there is a long tail. But neither Anderson or most anyone else claimed that being in the long tail was a path to riches. And while I'm not sure it's valid to write off Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, etc., it's probably fair to say that the long tail has mostly not been a pile of gold for the aggregators either. But it does exist.
He actually explicitly mentions Amazon and Netflix as counter examples of what you've said.
Amazon - he says a lot of pundits claim their retail arm is not and will never be profitable, they have been saved by aws
Netflix - has cut the number of movies on offer dramatically, cutting out the long tail, and adopted a strategy of chasing blockbuster TV shows
It's worth reading the whole article, it is pretty good.
As for a 'fracturing',everyone's talking about stranger things and obi-wan. Kate Bush is top of the charts because of stranger things. Remember everyone talking about Tiger King or GoT? Certainly doesn't feel fractured to me.
I have an Amiga 1000 and I got a bit tear-eyed when I saw one in Stranger Things season 4! I had a hard-drive on it, an old RLL-encoded with ST506 interface (predates ATA?), and it booted up fine just last month even though the drive is from like 1988. I have much more recent PC disks that won't boot up anymore.
Having said that, even though all of my asm/bare-metal skills come from hacking the A1000 in asm for several years and I should have warm fuzzy feelings about it, it's a dreary experience starting it now and trying to do anything really.. It's fun for like 10 minutes. Even starting it in an emulator is an annoying experience. The UI on modern computers might look superficially the same as these old Amigas, Ataris and Macs, but a boatload of small details have been hammered out and super-optimized since then for usability..
Back on topic, I think a lot of the computers are still in the attics of middle-aged people. Or older.
I'm not familiar with Die Hard, but https://diehard.fandom.com/wiki/Argyle doesn't suggest anything about Argyle being a "stoner buddy". So the reference from Stranger Things to Die Hard is... simply the name Argyle? There's an Argyle in Arrested Development. Is that a Die Hard reference?
Is the entire article a ragedump inspired by the author basing his life experience on the #1 grossing action film of 1988?
Why would something being mashup for 80s films imply it is not good? Stranger Things are truly fun to watch. That makes it good.
Just to push that thought a bit further, it's fine if you don't like stranger things but a mashup of 80s ideas is "original" for more than half the US population (median age is 38 y/o).
I'm in my twenties, my parents watched movies in the 80s, and even then they were young. Discounting a TV show because it rips off ideas from things that are 40 years old seems like a harsh stance to take.
And Stranger Things isn't good, it's just a mashup of 80s films that are at least twice as old as the actors, no original ideas at all.
The problem is more celebrity rather than the filming process. Make it illegal to report any "news", ie gossip, about anyone under 18 for a start.
Major studios give creative concessions to foreign markets like China in order to be allowed into their film market. It was incredibly naive of Netflix to think they were too big that they could ignore feedback and input from strong audience bases. You can't build a mass market product based on servicing the needs of a woke minority in a functional market. The market will quickly remind you of this mistake when you don't have any more investors pumping funds into the business.
They need more than an ad-supported tier to come out of this. In the midst of a shaky market and lowest ever subscription numbers, they have no choice but to cater to all walks of audiences if they are to survive.
And spend less on shows, I was seeing crazy budgets to the tune of $30M per episode[0] on the new upcoming season of Stranger Things. That's now bad for the bottom line.
[0] https://decider.com/2022/04/21/stranger-things-season-4-30-million-dollars-per-episode/
Narcos and Narcos: Mexico were both good. Dark, Katla, Frontera Verde. I guess those are all non-English speaking, or in Narcos' case, mixed language. As long as you don't hate subtitles, there's been good stuff. Russian Doll, Big Mouth, and Arcane were all pretty terrific among English speaking. Brand New Cherry Flavor wasn't mind-blowing, but more than worth watching. Same with Stranger Things. That's just content from the last couple years.
Netflix honestly has plenty of good content. You just have to not use the in-app recommendation system at all and find content through traditional sources, i.e. word of mouth, professional critics, and industry publications, then search directly. As long as they allow you to find a title by name when you already know the name, they're fine.
I'm Curious if there's going to be a noticeable Stranger Things dropoff. Though there will probably be a big uptick for Squid Game season 2. Apparently season 1 was worth $1 billion dollars for Netflix.
It wasn't the first horror film my children saw (they watched Jaws, Alien, and Stranger Things) but the most terrifying and traumatic experience they've seen was the shipwreck scene in the Black Stallion. If you want to frighten children, murder what they love while they watch: their parents and animals.
Coincidence both Bambi and the Black Stallion were written during or in the immediate aftermath of world wars?
> Stranger Things and Critical Role
I was taking to a friend about this, Stranger Things and Critical Role, bought a lot of new players to D&D, meanwhile WoTC isn't doing half as much, they could be doing an animated series, to explore the settings. They are making a live-action movie, it isn't the first, but this one has a bigger budget.
> Are you really that shocked if we reframe this as you not enjoying a game that started out as a niche Half-Life mod, but enjoying a television show made by the most popular television network amongst young adults?
No, I am okay with that :). There are some niche things (the OA, Dishwasher vampire smile) I definitely like and some popular things I really dislike (GoT and Stranger things come to mind). On that note: no one around me (IRL) seems to like Rick and Morty :(.
> That the only stuff you like is American, while the stuff you dislike is entirely foreign, shouldn't come as a surprise, either. Pop culture isn't global, not yet.
Well, for what it's worth I am neither American nor living in the US :). At the moment I am into scifi german tv shows (Dark and Tribes of Europa) (buuuut also waiting for the new Star Trek Pike TV show while snobing Star Trek Michael).
A brief, incomplete list of Netflix series that would be horribly diminished by being movies:
Stranger Things, The Queens Gambit, Narcos, The Crown, basically all of the rest of them.
A complete list of movies that would be worse as series:
Anything by Michael Bay
This seems like a way of sugar-coating the actual content strategy Netflix deploys, which has much more to do with product placement than it does content production. Their strategy is to align their content productions with the brands that best correlate with their subscriber base. In so doing, they can create lucrative deals with brands where their products are intricately woven into the stories/narratives of the show.
As an example, Stranger Things featured an average of 9 minutes of product placement for each episode of their third season. [0] The company claims they did not receive any payments from brands for this placement [1], but they likely received other extremely valuable considerations in the form of payment instead.
[0] https://www.ama.org/marketing-news/product-placement-in-stranger-things-3-valued-at-15-million/
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90380266/more-product-placements-may-come-to-netflix-but-dont-call-them-ads
Readers here love to crap all over Netflix, but it's still the service I use most. Yes, the movie selection is lackluster and yes, they make a lot of mediocre shows (though often for niches where fans of that content may have few other options). But they also make some of my favorite shows of all time like Bojack Horseman, Big Mouth and Sex Education. And they've revived some of my favorite content of all time like Arrested Development, W/ Bob & David and Wet Hot American Summer (with mixed results, but still). Not to mention a lot of fringy comedy that may have otherwise never been produced, like I Think You Should Leave, Aunty Donna and Middleditch and Schwartz.
And they've brought content into the mainstream (in the US) that we otherwise may have never seen, like Black Mirror and Squid Game.
Throw in some flagship nature documentaries, a ton of stand up specials and the occasional cultural phenomenon like Stranger Things and I still feel like Netflix is easily worth the cost. And just because they produce a lot of crap doesn't negate any of the above. There is no number of Adam Sandler movies that will change how much I loved Michael Bolton's Big, Sexy Valentine's Day Special.
Ozark, Stranger Things, Grace and Frankie are all wrapping up. Archive 51 was great and very well received and cancelled immediately.
Right now there's kind of a shortage of Netflix-unique good shows. I'm not spending money that I worked for in exchange for... a nature documentary narrated by Obama.
Derry Girls is great but you can watch it months in advance on All4 with a dirt cheap VPN. There is a similar situation for Bodyguard.
They are expecting people to actually sign up (instead of sharing passwords lmao) and watch ads for the off chance that in a year or two maybe Squid Game season 2 is as good as season 1, or that they need to not miss out on Red Notice 2 and 3. It feels like they are literally betting that people need forgettable Gal Gadot movies in the same way that they need cigarettes.
Netflix suggestions are not good. It takes a long time to find something decent to watch.
I have enjoyed Narcos, Tiger King, Stranger Things, Queen's Gambit and others.
But there are so many bad shows, that are formulaic, unoriginal and overall, lame.
Then, I have nothing against noble causes such as social justice and such. But compare a good movie, such as Men of honor, or the Green Book, with the unoriginal content on Netflix. It is just not watchable.
They already did a Coke ad for like 5 awkward minutes in the middle of an episode of Stranger Things.
Incidentally, all this talk of how badly they're doing just reminded me to cancel, which I did, minutes ago.
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.
Netflix is screwed.
It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie, you could find it on Netflix, put it in your DVD queue and in a few days receive the DVD in the mail. Their inventory was really good, (with some exceptions) and the service had pretty fast turnaround. Phase 1.
Then broadband started becoming more available, so streaming became a natural extension. Here's where Netflix faced bigger challenges. Initially, IP owners were happy to sell streaming rights for pennies since they didn't have any idea of the real value. Netflix leveraged this to build up an even bigger catalog that wasn't constrained by the number of DVDs in their inventory.
Netflix started to dabble in producing (and buying) content for their streaming. Good stuff like Stranger Things. The Crown. Dark. Babylon Berlin. And IP owners started raising the prices for renewals for movies and series in their catalogs. Netflix decided to cheap out on the quality of their shows. And they started to cut down on their DVD catalog as well.
Now you have all of the IP owners with their own streaming services, so Netflix will find it really hard to stream anything but the crappiest stuff. And they've shown little ability to consistently produce quality series or movies.
Contrast this with ATV+. Apple knew that it had a huge potential customer base, but that licensing IP wasn't going to be sustainable; whatever they streamed had to be exclusive. So they started slow, trying to replace HBO for high quality content. And they had some meh shows like "See." Not bad, but not HBO. Then "The Morning Show," followed by "Ted Lasso." Now they're starting to get some traction. Having an infinite amount of money always helps, but they became pretty good at saying no. "For All Mankind" grabbed a chunk of sci-fi viewers. Greyhound captured the war nerds. Slowly, carefully, they've been building up a pretty solid catalog. Now you have shows like "Servant," "Slow Horses," "The Mosquito Coast," "Foundation."
Cap it off with a series and a movie that have set ATV+ on par with any streaming service: Severance and Coda.
Now ATV+ will never have the catalog that Disney+ has. They might be fine with that. But where does this leave Netflix? Netflix has no serious movies that could compete for an Oscar. They don't seem to have the ability to create must see TV anymore. Perhaps they're too driven by algorithms to give the viewer what Netflix "thinks" they want? I just can't see a path forward for Netflix as other than crappy shows. Even with their foreign content, they face increased price pressure and competition from the other SVODs.
Movie remakes might not be quite enough to make the 30 year number work. I feel like there is some confirmation bias here.
Consider "Happy Days", made in the 1970s to celebrate the 1950s. The wave of mods and paisley jangle pop in the 1980s to celebrate the 1960s. All the "Big Star" sounding bands of the late eighties and early nineties celebrating Alex Chilton circa 1972.
I would guess the movies are a lagging trend, the real number is likely 20 years, approximately equating to mid childhood, early teens as being idealised and getting expressed in successful adulthood at 30 in pop culture by those who experienced those times in formative years.
That would put the first wave of 80s nostalgia in the 2000s[0]
Stranger things is more like nostalgia for early 2000s 80s nostalgia.
Edit: the twenty year rule? [1] [2]
[0] http://www.inthe00s.com/archive/inthe00s/smf/1342451842.shtml
[1] https://decades.medium.com/how-1980s-nostalgia-ruled-the-2000s-69dbe3058dbf
[2] https://www.furious.com/perfect/culturecycles.html
Stranger Things is not a documentary. Life sucked in the 80s and things are better now.
Source: I was born in the 80s
Stranger Things and other modern movies like Wonder Woman: 1984 present an inconsistent idea of what the 1980s was like.
Case in point, there's a scene in a supermarket with a bunch of breakfast cereals from various pop franchises. That never happened in reality. In reality, the same cereal would be repackaged for whatever was the hot movie/brand at the time.
This is somewhat sent up in this video from UK's The Adam and Joe Show. https://vimeo.com/347912488
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.
> Netflix is on the very fast downward slope
I don't think the data is proving this out at all. Streaming will probably be a winner-take-most market and Netflix is on track to remain the leader.
We'll see what total 2021 subscriber growth was on Thursday, but estimates for Q4 are still around a net addition of 8 million subscribers. Compare this with Disney Plus growth in the same period of 2 million subscribers and I think the results are quite favorable.
If you pay attention to the details, such as in earnings calls, executives have reported that average subscriber watch time has only been increasing over the past few quarters. (Also see refs such as: https://backlinko.com/netflix-users#time-spent-with-netflix)
Keeping in mind that Covid has slowed production of content, in 2021 Netflix still managed to create the two most watched movies _ever_ on the platform (Red Notice, Don't Look Up). There are follow-up seasons launching for at least three of their strongest series, including Witcher (released tail end of 2021), Bridgerton, and Stranger Things. Plus the regular spikes of culturally relevant content such as Squid Games, Cheer, etc. which now happen fairly often.
> is destroying the business model that made them so appealing in the first place
I'm not sure how you are inferring that the business model has been destroyed here. It's certainly evolving over time but the promise has always been 'pay us a monthly subscription and we'll give you lots of things to watch'. I don't see how that has changed meaningfully or negatively.
Netflix has had naysayers at every stage of its growth. The landscape is always changing but I believe the critical idea is that Netflix leads in streaming and this has only strengthened over time. Total subscribers, revenue per user, and watch hours per account are all drifting up, and I fail to see how that represents a downward slope.
I think Stranger Things season 1 had a big buzz to it, but it feels like culturally, it completely dropped off after season 1. I’m sure the fans still like it, but I just don’t hear broad swaths of people talk about it anymore after that.
Game of Thrones had far more consistent cultural impact across all seasons (although they managed to nuke its legacy completely with the horrible last season).
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.
And product placement and revenue generating content masquerading as entertainment content has shot through the roof, too.
My SO is a huge The Walking Dead nut. There was a couple seasons (episodes?) that (from the outside) looked more like a vehicle to sell cars (pun intended) than to advance the storyline.
'Memba new coke? Stranger Things did, too!
Sure, go watch ET - there's obvious product placement too - what was it, pizza hut? Pepsi? M&Ms? It's been a while, but it was rarely the McGuffin in the storyline.
Did ET want to call home or did ET use the latest 5g sprint network on ETs new Samsung Flip mobile, exclusively at Sprint stores, everywhere, to call home?
It's so transparent, and then to have the audacity to charge $30 to view this 90-minute product placement informercial.. and yet the masses gobble it up and it's just a feedback loop of "Well, it's working! Let's _double down_ next time!" <Queue the KFC commercial>
TV shows are really pushing things too. Twenty years ago, a big budget show was a premium cable production like Deadwood ($4.5M/episode) or Rome ($8.5M/episode), but now you have mainline shows like The Crown, Stranger Things, and The Mandalorian, all costing $12M+/episode.
They referenced the movie on Stranger Things as well with a line similar to the one River Phoenix's character says: "It's fascinating what 50 bucks will get you at the county recorder's office"
Netflix is just another television network at this point, pivoting from being primarily a tech company. There's a bunch of content which jumps around between different streaming services, but Netflix produced shows and movies are on solid ground at this point (eg, Stranger Things is over 5 years old). It's weird that it's included in the same list as these others.
If they came out with a phone, office suite, cloud service, social network, or something of that ilk, then yeah they'd be more in "tech company" territory again. Until then their engineering is going to assist their content production, not the other way around.
I don't know what you are talking about. I can tell you the rough plot of Stranger Things, Squid Game, and Tiger King despite never having seen a single episode of those series.
Shows are still part of popular culture, it's just streaming instead of timed TV.
I think there are different kinds of better, so for some people the answer is definitely yes.
I think CGI is coming up on "effectively perfect", especially with the way it has gone from a post-production thing to becoming part of the world around the actors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StageCraft
So once people get used to perfection, I expect there will be a revival of "practical effect" productions, where people go for intentionally imperfect but more "human" approaches to making scenes. It'll be niche, of course, like low-fi games or fancy barista pourovers. But that's what feels like "better" to some people.
I'd certainly love that in the right context. In the same way Stranger Things was a success as an 1980s revival, I could imagine modern takes on sci-fi films of the 50s-70s that are intentionally done without CGI.
Netflix is finally coming out with more tangible details of the plot of Season 4 of Stranger Things. The streaming service means that Netflix was presently out with a teaser in which they showed how life was for Eleven and how it will be now as they have relocated from Indiana to California. Every one of you might have guessed that life isn’t quite so peachy even with all the sunshine as well.
> Alternatively, if 1000 people all start the same episode of Stranger Things within the same minute
It would be fascinating to hear from Netflix on some serious details of the usage patterns they see and particular optimizations that they do for that, but I doubt there's so much they can do given the size of the streams, the 'randomness' of what people watch and when they watch, and for the fact that the linked slides say the servers have 18x2TB NVME drives per-server and 256GB.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Netflix logo opener exists once on disk instead of being the first N seconds of every file though.
This level of architecture management on big server CPUs is amazing! I occasionally handle problems like this on a small scale, like minimizing wake time and peripheral power management on an 8 bit microcontroller, but there the entire scope is digestible once you get into it, and the kernel is custom-designed for the application.
However, in my case, and I expect in yours, requirements engineering is the place where you can make the greatest improvements. For example, I can save a few cycles and a few microwatts by sequencing my interrupts optimally or moving some of the algorithm to a look-up table, but if I can, say, establish that an LED indicator flash that might need to be 2x as bright but only lasts for a couple milliseconds every second is as visible as a 500ms LED on/off blink cycle, that's a 100x power savings that I can't hope to reach with micro-optimizations.
What are your application-level teams doing to reduce the data requirements? General-purpose NUMA fabrics are needed to move data in arbitrary ways between disc/memory/NICs, but your needs aren't arbitrary - you basically only require a pipeline from disc to memory to the NIC. Do you, for example, keep the first few seconds of all your content cached in memory, because users usually start at the start of a stream rather than a few minutes in? Alternatively, if 1000 people all start the same episode of Stranger Things within the same minute, can you add queues at the external endpoints or time shift them all together so it only requires one disk read for those thousand users?
> One subscription for access to ALL the content is the way to beat piracy. Anything else is anti-consumer at this point.
So what do you do when an Amazon Prime membership is required to access most contemporary books?
Or when you have to get several different all-you-can-read memberships to access all the authors you like. Eg. first there was just Netflix, now there is Hulu, Disney+ and Paramount+ as well if you want to see The Handmaid's Tale, Stranger Things, Game of Thrones, Star Trek: whatever, The Expanse, Star Wars & Avengers movies (to name just a few of the most popular and culturally relevant shows and movie franchises).
Whether there is a monopoly or oligopoly doesn't make much difference to consumers, though it does make some difference to content creators.
To make a system like you describe palatable over the long term, you would have to add in structural separation (content owners can't also be distributors) and strictly limit the kind of exclusive licensing deals that are allowed (eg. require statutory licensing of some sort) so new publishers and distributors can't be prevented from entering the market.
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!
Vaporwave is a different genre from synthwave. Synthwave is based off synth-heavy 80s music, especially action and thriller/noir movie soundtracks. If you watched Stranger Things that has a very synthwave sound track.
Vaporwave is more sample based and is traditionally about looping distorted samples of 80s/90s songs, though it branched out a lot. Personally I'm a fan of naturewave, which is looped and edited "nature" or "new wave" sounds. But, key difference, it normally doesn't use a lot of classic synth sounds.
Retrowave I think refers to the over all aesthetic genre; so vaporwave and synthwave both fall under retrowave.
I've got you covered. I watched the video, and here's what you can now do with Google Workspace:
* Be notified when packages are coming via "e mail"
* Send your own "e mail" to other people
* Organize events by date in a "calendar"
* Write an episode of Stranger Things in a "document", or if you don't happen to own the Stranger Things franchise, write about your viewing experience
* Write down a list of band names
* Sum the number of times a given child poops in a day in a "spreadsheet"
* Take part in a "meet", which is a sort of phone call but with video
I hope that clears it up.
Are you ready to watch the most anticipated production on Netflix? Well, stranger things season 4 is coming back with the upside-down. However, the filming started last year but did not complete due to the pandemic. But the good news is Netflix has now released the teaser of season 4. There are plenty of reasons why the peeps are excited about this series.
Ironically, one of the several reasons I waited for Stranger Things to come out on BluRay was because I've had the Netflix interface spoil far too many shows for me, with the spoilery episode summaries that pop up automatically whenever a video is paused.
I wasn't aware of that trailer though, because I don't actually have a BluRay player. I popped the BluRay into my computer and ripped the episodes with MakeMKV. :)
Blu-Ray is unforgivable. It is a straight-up anti-consumer technology. The Stranger Things season 1 Blu-Ray contains an unskippable, 5 minute long trailer for season 2 which contains spoilers for season 1:
https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/crqx8r/the_stranger_things_s1_blu_ray_has_an_unskippable/
Sure, it's kind of absurd that the same 4 people would be at the center of so many technological shifts, over a period of 20+ years. But, you really have to accept that as a conceit of the medium.
There are basically only two ways to construct a TV series that has any continuity to it whatsoever. You can either keep most of the main characters together for the entire series, and watch them grow and change, like most series do; or, you can do like American Horror Story does and just scrap everything and start anew every season or so. Some series don't care about continuity, like Seinfeld, so they fall outside the scope of this statement, but, the majority of TV series will be one or the other of these.
And, there's nothing really wrong with this construction, either. Like I said, it's just something you have to accept, kind of like how every TV home or apartment is absolutely massive compared to what real people live in, or how people are able to comfortably fly on airplanes without squishing themselves into the seats or their heads being within inches or less of the roof of the cabin. Or the fact that if anybody coughs on TV, they're usually deathly ill.
I'll have to check out Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, though. I've been putting off watching it for some reason -- maybe because for most of 2020, I felt like I was living in a Black Mirror episode.
Speaking of Netflix series that really get the time period correct, Stranger Things is 100% exactly like what it was like to be a kid in the 80s. Starting from the bowl haircut on Will, right on down to every last detail of the mall from season 3, and battling the Demogorgon in a friend's basement. Absolute 10/10 set design, and I never noticed a single anachronism.
Oh, do! I also saw a few early episodes as a kid, but didn't really have a chance to get what they were trying to do; it wasn't until years later, when I had a chance to watch the full series straight through thanks to a friend's carefully made VHS tapes, that any of what I was seeing really made sense to me. Nothing since then has even come close to replacing B5 at the head of my SF TV affections.
Reflecting on that experience, I think the major flaw of B5 is that, in structure and intent, it was twenty or more years ahead of its time. Given the handicaps under which the creators then had to labor, it's even more remarkable how much they accomplished - B5 might have been the very first example of what we today call the 'binge-worthy show', made on a shoestring in a time when syndication and time slots and missed episodes were still problems that a show could have. This show overcame them admirably - even so, I can't help but wish a little for the chance to see what the same people could've accomplished today, with the kind of resources available for something like Stranger Things.
That won't happen, of course, not least because the show is niche even by comparison with something like Firefly. For the same reason, even a Trek-style HD remaster is unlikely - a shame in its own right, since the then-revolutionary CGI space effects are by far the part of the show that's aged most badly, and a shame all over again because the creators were looking far enough ahead to shoot in 16:9 and 5.1 surround throughout, which would give an HD remaster the kind of payoff that, if we're being honest, the ones done for old Trek shows never really have.
In any case, it's a small miracle the show got made at all, and another that it ended up being so close to what JMS intended it to be. Anyone who can enjoy TNG or DS9 today can, I think, enjoy B5 at least as well, and on that basis I recommend it without the slightest reservation.
> They serve a real artistic purpose, as a gentle transition from the dream world back to the real one. No one likes to be shaken awake and bombarded with a new dream — especially when they haven’t yet made sense of the last one.
This really hits it for me. It's not even the credits that I need, per se, as long as the movie stop playing when it's done, whether with a credits sequence or a simple fade to black.
I waited for Stranger Things to come out on BluRay (currently waiting for the third season), and I'm 100% convinced I had a better experience than someone watching on Netflix, because the episodes actually ended after the credits. For a show few people will get to see this way, the writers really knew how to conclude each episode in just the right spot, so you had a nice place to take a breather and contemplate.
This is the primary reason I don't use Netflix.
I like endings, and I think they're important. When I get to the end of a Stranger Things episode (which I buy on BluRay), I want the scene to fade out, and I want the credits to roll, and then I want the universe to leave me in peace for a moment so I can contemplate what just happened.
Netflix absolutely will not allow this experience. You can turn off auto-playing the next episode, but Netflix will take over your screen with a giant promo instead. There's no way to let a video just end.
How much better would the world be if the Netflix engineering team tackled real-world problems instead of making sure we can all binge watch Stranger Things? Such a smart group of people.
A few? Off the top of my head:
- The Queen's Gambit
- Narcos
- House of Cards
- Russian Doll
- Ozark
- Stranger Things
- Tiger King
- Dear White People
- The Witcher
- The Umbrella Academy
- The Crown
- Space Force
And that's just TV shows. There are a lot of films they've put out that are very good as well.
I grew up going freely by myself most of the time, since I was 6/7 - even going to school (in ex-communist Bulgaria). Then in 1999 came to the US (Los Angeles), and start seeing the difference. But my first boss, who introduced me well to the society told me it wasn't so. He was growing up in the Valley (San Fernando) and going biking to school every day for miles. Also if you check the 80s movies - E.T., Goonies, and even now Stranger Things showing how it used to be - kids really used to roam the streets with bikes (same was in Bulgaria too - most of our kids movies were about parents going to the beach in the Summer, and kids in groups strolling around). Or my favourite kids' show - Verano Azul (spanish, and very popular in Bulgaria back in the days) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verano_azul - same thing - something changed much much later...
So they paid $1mm a 10 minute clip but don’t own the rights. Netflix pays that type of money for their their shows but owns the rights. Stranger things season 1 was $6mm an 60 minute episode.
In general, are you more likely to suggest a complete show or one that ends abruptly with several dangling plot threads?
Stranger Things season 1 would have been a fantastic show if it just ended there (without the final cliffhanger scene). I'd recommend it to everybody. If Stranger Things just ended now, I might still recommend it to everybody, but I'd be decidedly less likely to do so, and it would always come with the caveat "They didn't actually finish it." So not only am I less likely to recommend it, but the caveat means the other person is less likely to watch it based on the recommendation if I do. (I might also say, "Don't bother watching past season X," which is still bad for Netflix.)
Glow is a fun show, but once the wrestling show found an audience and the characters found a certain degree of fulfillment in their wrestling roles, the stakes seemed lower to me. I'm happy with the season 3 ending as a show finale.
But I would still recommend it, or Song of Ice and Fire, because there are a lot of good parts for both. Same for Stranger Things. Is * really dead? It's not that important compared to how well it nails 80s kids horror fantasia.
Agreed on the length of seasons for network prime-time shows.
However, that's not really what the article is about. The shows mentioned are 8-10 episodes per season (both the canceled shows and Stranger Things).
This is more about Netflix throwing shows against the wall so fast they never get to see if any of them stick. Which is silly - many of the best shows out there took a few seasons to hit their stride. Look at season rankings for Seinfeld or GoT - few people rank the first season of either as the best.
A lot of the shows they've cancelled just weren't that good, even the ones I watched.
They hold up 3 shows as an example, Stranger Things, Game of Thrones and Schitt's Creek. The first two were smash hits after season 1. Schitt's Creek was a really good show from the start but it wasn't well known until later seasons. It didn't "hit it's stride" it built up it's audience over time. The quality was always there.
The shows Netflix is cancelling aren't even close in quality.
> Would you agree reliable recommendations would be a value-added service?
Yes, and I agree it's annoying when they play games with these systems, when they could just make a product that customers like. In the case of Netflix, the interests of the user and the subscription provider are relatively well aligned. It's more of an issue in YouTube where people can be pointed to toxic lies. That kind of thing can have real consequences in the world, it's not merely causing people to waste their time online.
> How do you feel about, say, English subtitles not being available in a country that doesn't have it as a national language
If it's translation into a foreign language then that's a different matter. The disabled access point really only applies when it's a native language in the relevant region. Still a plus to have it, but I don't think it would make sense to withhold a show until it's ready.
> à la carte isn't always an option
Sure, I was generalising. These peculiar omissions do occur. There's still the option to buy/rent these things on disc, at least.
> curated, pop-ups telling me "what I've missed"
Good old FOMO-based marketing.
> these services aren't actually competing, since their content offering is mutually exclusive
That's still competition, they're competing on having the best shows. They're in no way obliged to all offer the same stuff.
If Netflix turns to garbage, downgrades everything to 480P, stops producing/licensing decent shows, increases their prices, and introduces adverts, then people will move over to Prime and the other alternative services.
> This diminishes the need for said service to distinguish itself on customer service, convenience and UX, since there's no one else offering the same content.
Not really, as they're not competing only on having the best shows. They compete on convenience and quality too. This is why Amazon has invested in support for Roku, PlayStation, Xbox, Wii U, Chromecast, Apple TV, many different smart TV brands, etc. Some competing services have made less of an investment in supporting these platforms, and are consequently less appealing to customers. Amazon are keen to highlight that with a Prime subscription, you get 4K content for no additional charge, unlike Netflix.
> That makes me question the added value of the middle man for the consumer, but I suppose content producers see Netflix and co as the consumer, not you or me.
You pay Netflix, and Netflix provides you with a streaming service and pays licensing fees to external content-producers. They're 'middle men' in a sense but they're earning their cut.
Content producers make money through Netflix, and through direct sales to customers through discs and through streaming rentals/purchases with services like Google Play Movies.
> They're competing like broadband providers are competing in the US, based on exclusive territory.
No, that's not a fair comparison at all. With the ISP situation in the USA, each individual customer has little to no choice about which ISP they will have to use. That's not the case here, where customers have many competing services to choose from.
This is competition in action. There's no reason they should all offer the same shows, instead they should compete to offer me the best shows they can, then I'll decide which subscription(s) are worth my money. Fortunately, this is exactly what they're doing.
> It's happened for some areas of retail and for the music business, why not for video content?
From the point of view of someone like Netflix, making a highly unusual show is a high-risk investment of tens of millions of dollars. I'd say they're doing a pretty good job of not being too risk-averse though: Stranger Things was hardly a sure bet, but we can be sure Netflix are glad they went for it. Competition with Amazon Prime is presumably one of the reasons they did it; they know they have to keep adding quality content to stay in the game.
> I'm imaging a blend of kickstarter mechanics and content aggregation systems
I don't know of any successful TV shows made through Kickstarter-style funding. I don't want to be dismissive of the idea but I haven't been given a reason to think it could be made to really work well.
I was incredibly disappointed they didn't film in Atlanta. Though most of the season takes place in the Atlanta metro, it's very obviously filmed elsewhere. None of the filming locations actually resemble Atlanta. As an Atlanta resident, I found it uncanny and jarring.
It's doubly strange considering Atlanta has generous film subsidies and tax breaks, making it one of the nation's top filming locations. They might have saved money shooting here. Stranger Things and a host of other Netflix shows are based here.
I don't normally nitpick about something like this, but it frequently took me out of the story.
> If you heard about Game of Thrones or Westworld or Stranger Things, or most recently, Tiger King, you'd realize this is very much still a thing for a large population.
This isn't the same thing.
In the 1990s, everybody watched The Simpsons. Even the people who hated it still watched it so they could complain about it. It was on broadcast TV so everybody had access to it. And Friends, and Cheers, and so on.
Game of Thrones is on HBO. If you have Netflix and not HBO, it's not there. Stranger Things is on Netflix. If you have HBO and not Netflix, it's not there. A lot more people watched Friends than Game of Thrones, because Game of Thrones was less available and had much more competition.
You can find a website full of fandom about Game of Thrones, but you can find a website full of fandom about Battlestar Galactica. Passion and popularity are not the same.
Popularity is what matters to the zeitgeist. It's not a matter of being able to find a place where all the Game of Thrones fans hang out and whinge about the last season, it's about being able to go into a room full of normies and make a reference to last night's episode and expect nearly everybody to get it. Which isn't really a thing anymore.
This could only happen in places out in the sticks, such as Ocala. Where I'm from, another south florida suburb, the drive ins were paved over and made into shopping malls decades ago. Our son has only seen them in a period movie/show, such as Stranger Things, so sometimes I would describe them in a bit of detail.
No one is going to these things for nostalgia. They are going to because they are bored at home, under quarantine, and looking for something to do. If the governor didn't excempt drive-ins no one would even bother.
> 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.
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What I find surprising is that despite their shallow catalog of content (my opinion), they fail to promote their shows to me that I’m actually interested in. When Stranger Things Season 3 was released and when The Witcher was recently released, it was no where on my home menus. Despite these shows being the exact genre I typically watch, I had to search for these shows. ?????!
>Maybe if the big studios weren't so focused on pumping out sequel after sequel after remake after lowest common denominator designed-by-commitee movies they wouldn't have to worry about this.
This is a common sentiment on the internet but it seems pretty clear that regardless of what people say they like they do go see these endless sequels en masse and they're (for the most part) hugely successful.
The reason Netflix doesn't do that to the same extent probably more has to do with the fact that it's a relatively young company who simply doesn't own old IPs to remake and reboot so it's cheaper to make new things. Look at Stranger Things for instance, they seem fine milking it.
Those are products that only exist on streaming platforms, though - as far as I know, Netflix hasn't negotiated any deals to have movies go from cinemas to Netflix and not get a physical release at all. Even some of Netflix's properties have physical releases, such as Stranger Things. So there's still just as much or more physical media available as there would be without streaming platforms.
> Oh come on. Are you really claiming that if you can talk with your friends about Stranger Things, but not Game of Thrones because you don't have HBO, then you face some kind of serious impediment to participating in society? That strikes me as completely ridiculous.
Perhaps not serious, but an impediment, yes. Stranger Things is not for everyone, but Game of Thrones actually was the #1 topic in the office at previous workplace for almost the entire time I've been there. But I have an even better example: Chernobyl. My wife and I were to Chernobyl, so we didn't feel in a particular hurry to watch the TV portrayal. But once everyone on our Facebook feeds - and I mean everyone, including people who can't spell "nuclear" half the time - started talking about the show, and started bringing it up in meatspace meetings, we kind of felt left out, so we sat down and just watched it.
That's how the popular culture rolls. You can't be in sync with it all the time, but you have to stay in sync with hit some of the time, if you want to participate in group conversations.
> Customers don't like a big monolithic bundle because the single bill is too expensive.
> Customers also don't like a la carte content (...) because each individual bill is too expensive.
You've just identified the problem with these two options :). Remember that video is one of few cases when people are just being nice by offering to subscribe to these streaming services. They always have the option of getting that content for free, or at a fraction of the price.
> So what's your proposal? It's not like the market isn't trying to cater to customers here.
I believe it isn't. The market is trying to gouge customers, and currently is in the state of balkanizing.
> Do you propose we pass laws that restrict companies from creating exclusive content?
That would be a start. But the emphasis is on "exclusive", not "creating" - an equivalent way of putting is would be a law restricting companies from exclusively licensing the content. So for starters, streaming services should get unbundled from the shows they carry and compete on the actual value they provide - UI and curation (i.e. categorization, sorting order; though honestly, that should be a separate, orthogonal service).
(You'll note I'm only talking about exclusivity here, not IP ownership. The money for streaming, say, GoT would still go to HBO regardless of where they were streamed, but HBO shouldn't be able to refuse to license other platforms to steal it.)
> Or should we pass laws that restrict content from costing more than a specific amount?
Nah, competition - actual competition - between streaming platforms would do the rest. Movies and TV shows are non-substitutable goods, so exclusive deals prevent competition from happening.
> Why? Just because customers insatiably want and want and want?
So the industry spends billions on brainwashing[0] people into wanting more and more, plays off the FOMO, and you're surprised "customers insatiably want and want and want"? Maybe they should stop hooking them on hard drugs. With companies telling people to consume more and more, giving them more and more stuff to consume, and with politicians and economists saying this is good, because our economy needs to grow exponentially - I find it funny... no, disingenuous, to see customers being blamed.
--
[0] - I'm past calling marketing and advertising anything less than that.
I cancelled my cable back in 2008 and while I agree with some of your points, the industry didn't evolve into the thing I envisioned when I did it.
> - No ads
Not really, Hulu still has ads for the TV stuff, even if you're on Hulu plus. But yeah, overall, way WAY less ads. For now. But I foresee this is more of a capture strategy. After most of us cancel cable, I think we're gonna see a lot of ads on streaming services. Greed is good. In the meantime, product placement galore. Stranger Things was IMO disgusting from this perspective. Ads just moved from interrupting you to basically taking over the shows.
> - You can watch on demand
I agree, this is indeed a good thing
> - Orders of magnitude more choice in what to watch
Yes, but no. Most streaming services have a lot of filler. A lot of garbage is counted against the 'we have a 10k catalog of movies' but in the end, you have a lot of choice, between a douche and a whole bunch of turds.
> - Writers have a lot more flexibility. They don't have to be advertiser friendly.
Nope, nope, nope. Yes from the show's structure perspective, but in general, It's the exact opposite. Now, they have to write in way more product placement pieces.
> - Writers don't have to write cliffhangers every N minutes so you come back after the ad break. - Writers don't have to worry about sequence like they did with TV/Cable, because they know you'll be able to watch the show in order. Meaning that their worlds and characters can change and have real consequence.
While it's true writers don't have the same problems, they have different problems. Now they have to pander to specific user-research needs, they need to create season-wide cliffhangers and because they know you'll watch the show in order, there's way less shit they can get away with.
Thanks for pointing this out.. I (like most other US citizens) have zero idea of what things are actually like in Russia. The news reminds us daily that Russia is a frozen hellscape filled with miserable savages, Russians are the 'bad guys' of choice in a disproportionate amount of high visibility movies and Netflix shows (Stranger Things season 3 comes to mind), our school system teaches kids next to nothing about the country.
It's a bit reminiscent of North Korea's daily news blasts showing fabricated footage of how miserable life in SK and USA is. Probably not as extreme a slant going on here, but there's an awful lot of anti-Russia sentiment floating around with no readily apparent basis in fact.
Are you saying Netflix hasn’t made quality shows that will last through 2039? I’d like to know which company you think has made close to the amount of quality shows Netflix has since 2014. Here’s part of a list I have for a content project. No company comes close to this output in recent history.
House of Cards launched February 2013 (7 seasons, finished)
Orange is the New Black launched July 2013 (7 seasons, finished)
Stranger Things launched July 2016 (3 seasons, 1-2 more)
—
Dark (2 seasons, 3rd is last)
Glitch (2 seasons, 3rd might never come)
Russian Doll (1 season)
Haunting of Hill House (1 season, anthology)
American Vandal (2 seasons)
Black Mirror (anthology, last season not that good)
The Crown (3 seasons)
When They See Us (mini-series, 2019)
Unbelievable (just came out)
—
Glow (3 seasons)
Kimmy Schmidt (4 seasons, finished)
Arrested Development (they tried, hard to get it all back together after years of being done)
Sex Education (1 season)
Bojack Horseman (5 seasons?) #animated
Mindhunter (2 seasons)
The OA (2 seasons)
Maniac (mini-series)
Wet Hot American Summer (2 seasons, but season 1 is the top notch one)
F is for Family (3? seasons) #animated
Big Mouth (2? seasons) #animated
—
Documentary mini-series
—
Staircase
Making a Murderer
Evil Genius
The Jinx
Wild Wild West
——-
There’s more I’m missing and I didn’t include a number of shows Netflix helps finance but isn’t the main financier or producer or original place of distribution. Shows like Glitch.
There’s a dead mall by an old office I used to work at. Stranger Things Season 3 rented a side of the mall and transformed it into an 80s mall.
This mall should die anyway. It has an H Mart and a Macy’s no one goes to.
https://www.gwinnettdailypost.com/multimedia/photos-stranger-things-season-at-gwinnett-place-mall/collection_f2d9b7f2-9df0-11e9-a599-2b125d10940d.html
Yeah, all we have so far is the names attached and a few words said on a big stage. We know very little about the shows, and obviously the people working on it will try to make it sound as good as they can. If I had a penny for every time some actor hyped up a movie or show that ended up being awful...
And I agree, Netflix goes for a wider breadth, but they have a significant number of quality and original content. Shows like Maniac, Our Planet, Russian Doll, Master of None, Ozark, Stranger Things, American Vandal and so on. There's something on there for everyone, and enough that you're never out of shows to watch.
Yes, but Jesus's revisionist take on it is worthwhile to keep in mind too:
"The sabbath was created for man, not man for the sabbath."
Disconnecting is good for many as a general practice. I myself have a "no technology day" once a month or so. And certainly taking a population recently freed from slavery and instituting a labor law ensuring a weekend was a great idea (whoever thought of it).
But that's the nice thing about weekends - each of us get to spend them as we choose.
If you are feeling disconnected from your loved ones and want to mutually agree to put away your phones, awesome.
But likewise, if you had a rough week and want to lose yourself in binge watching Stranger Things, that's cool too.
Let's not fall back into the ways of every generations before us in how we consider younger trends as we age. Even chess was condemned as corrupting the youth in its day.
A central theme to the success of all life in this world is balance. If you feel out of balance, adjust your own life accordingly to regain it. But it would probably be unwise to assume the balance that works for one works for all.
I doubt any one of us has an identical idea of what living the perfect life looks like. All we can do is figure out what our own version of that picture looks like and do our best to realize it.
That article made no sense to me, so here's a much better version on People: https://people.com/tv/stranger-things-fans-photography-darkroom-confusion-goes-viral/
This is the StackExchange question that went viral: https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/102266/what-is-the-purpose-of-this-red-room-in-stranger-things
* Except, annoyingly, for Netflix and Amazon originals. I waited a year for Stranger Things Season 2 to come out on BluRay. :(
The article viewpoints are probably right, Netflix and Amazon need a few more hits that people trust.
The Office was a big fallback show and Netflix needs a few of those of their own. Stranger Things probably fits that.
The Witcher might change things for quality on Netflix.
Netflix shows have high production quality in terms of cinematography, lighting, sound, color, sets, on location etc. Writing and big draw actors aren't there just yet, though they have a bunch of that going and started that way with House of Cards. Stranger Things was new actors except a couple like Winona Ryder, the writing was better and it was successful. Maniac and Sabrina are also pretty good in this area. Bojack Horseman has a cult following. Dark is amazing. Black Mirror was a great acquisition. I Am Mother was pretty good and premiering Annihilation was a steal. Russian Doll was excellent. Animation like Death, Love & Robots, Voltron, Castlevania and more are solid. Those are all the model to go for. What is missing in most shows is writing and casting/actors draw to make a staple series that becomes a fallback like the article mentions.
> Consumers turn to a trusted source when they don’t know what to watch on their streaming service
> Subscriptions like Netflix and Amazon Prime offer plenty of critically-acclaimed, award-winning content. But the thing is, viewers have to pick which movies and series they’ll watch, and observers say many are getting burned out from all that decision-making.
Now with The Witcher the writing is based on a really solid book series, they have a big name actor Henry Cavill that has read the series and it looks great. It could be their Game of Thrones.
Amazon is also trying this with Lord of the Rings and Wheel of Time.
These shows if they are done right, will get rewatched for a long time and draws in the mega fans that are influencers.
Netflix is doing pretty good with stand up comedy, maybe even the leader now. They paid Dave Chappelle and will forever be thanked for that by comedy content consumers.
Netflix and Amazon need some big hits like the coming epics, and they need some good staple shows like the Office, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn 99 (Netflix should have bought this), Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Friends, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm and more. When they have that they equal the content competition that has that trusted good quality. They need a few more of these always watchable fallbacks.
They are both still chasing HBO, HBO is still the top in consistently good content and shows.
Personally I love the competition, some real funding and creator freedom is being unleashed, some are big hits, some are average and some not so good, but I like the amount of content and like the vibe of where Netflix is headed. Their new intro splash where the N goes into color bands is even great, matches their really colorful catalog.
I feel like I might be in the minority opinion on this, but I don't enjoy any of the Netflix originals they keep pumping out. At least not enough to spend time on them. I don't like the Marvel shows, Stranger Things was okay I guess maybe, but I don't enjoy them enough like for example Game of Thrones or The Fabulous Miss Maisel or some of the others from HBO, Showtime or surprisingly Amazon. Most if not all the Netflix original content is B quality to me at best. Low production, not interesting, bad dialogue, bad stories, etc...
I have limited time. I try to spend it wisely. I'd rather use my wasted time on something far more enjoyable, like playing my NES or reading a book or movie, or even watch something of higher quality and production value (HBO is pretty reliable for that or a movie on my backlog). Or even just get out and go somewhere to see and meet people.
Right now my only subscription service is Funimation ($5/month). I like watching dubbed anime late at night too chill out before bed. Currently (re)watching Black Lagoon (it's so great!) and the Mix Simuldub. With a side of computer science books on my backlog with some related videos or courses as well as a good book which right now is Snow Crash (embarrassingly I have not read this yet).
Because Music isn't TV or film. The vast majority of revenue for most artists come from live performances.
It's not like the cast of Stranger Things can go and tour the world and perform a live Stranger Things inside stadiums. It doesn't work that way.
Additionally, Spotify, especially, has done wonders for obscure discoverablity with Discover Weekly which incentivize smaller bands to support it (because again they make their money from tours). Discoverablity is much easier tho when it requires a 4 minutes time commitment while commuting with headphones as opposed to a multi hour commitment of film or TV.
They're not at all even remotely the same beast.
Not the GP, but:
> Just out of general interest, do you watch foreign TV and movies at all then? If not, why?
Because it's an additional barrier to enjoyment.
Dubs are irritating and often lose cultural context. From your post I think we're in agreement there.
Subs mean I have to watch intently, I can't cook dinner/play a video game/clean the house/fold laundry while I'm listening and glance over at the screen every few seconds. And I don't spend much time doing nothing but watch TV, unless it's a show I really care about. Stranger Things 3 got my uninterrupted attention this last week.
I'm not against watching foreign media, but it's a negative modifier to my chances to watch it. If I get a recommendation from someone I trust, I'm much more likely, but then I have to set aside time to do nothing but watch it.
As a side note, if I get a recommendation from someone with an anime avatar, I'm much less likely to watch it. I don't care that "it's not a 12 year old girl, it's a 500 year old dragon that looks like a 12 year old girl." It's still creepy.
There is something to be said about the Nielsen hypothesis given -- finding something to watch takes effort, and starts taking more time the more one has already seen. My wife and I can spend upwards of 30+ minutes trying to find something we want to see and haven't already watched. Especially for just some casual 'background' watching, just putting on a channel on TV with some acceptable type of programming focus is alot easier than digging for it.
Btw, for Netflix I usually just do a trial when a new Stranger Things season comes out, watch it all and maybe a few of their new movies, then cancel.
In a meeting room somewhere, a young PM rubs hand sanitizer on his palms and loads up his latest deck: Okay guys, what we have here is something we’re calling Loyalty Seasons. Our recommendation is to make season 4 of Stranger Things, as well as the new Will Smith movie, available only to customers who have been subscribed for 3 or more months.
I’m a Netflix investor. I’ve posted my tech portfolio here before, Netflix was a big part of it.
Not anymore. I’ve decided to sell off in the after hours and be content with my 25%+ gain before things get worse. Or better. I don’t care.
I’ve had a bad feeling about NFLX for some time, but this earnings only confirmed it. And if they’re counting on a Stranger Things, they’re screwed. I felt season 3 was garbage, and so do many other people, the latest season of Black Mirror was also terrible. There’s just nothing here for me anymore, and because of that I can’t sleep soundly being invested in this company.
I'm not short Netflix because of subscriber count. I'm short Netflix because of their accounting. Capitalizing Stranger things season 1? Sure, makes sense, why not. But Stranger things season 3 is a lot closer to COGS. Their real income statement at this point in their growth curve (full saturation in the US) should be a lot closer to their cash flow statement, which is horrendous.
I cancelled but I sign up like once a quarter now, if that, to catch things I want to see like Stranger Things. But the quality of 90% of the content is pretty weak and seems to be getting worse. For that same price I’d rather rent two movies per month from iTunes (and they often have 99 cent rental deals).
Netflix is focusing too much on television series that are 10x too long to trick people into feeling they received value. I’d like to see more original movies.
The UX decisions are also very anti-user. No user reviews, just a worthless “percentage match” that seems to be randomly generated. Auto playing videos, changing movie covers randomly to trick you into thinking more new content is there than it actually is, etc.
It just sounds like they’re doing what every other network does. A bunch of it is trash you don’t care about but another subset of their customers do. It’s not all commissioned for us personally, and Netflix will always prioritise their own shows before others in the app.
It’s not like you watch HBO 12 hours a day expecting pure content that you love from start to finish.
That said, apart from the tent pole series they [plan to] push out each year (stranger things, better call saul, Fargo, mindhunter, nightflyers, etc.) the rest is clearly data driven garbage that doesn’t realise it’s working a cliche. With a couple of exceptions even the marvel universe shows fell into their pattern.
In that sense it’s Netflix Unoriginal Content. But you still get the diamond in the mine.
Being in the EU I get about 8 different translations of two different kinds of zombie story, but you’re not really paying for that.
And on the same level, it’s a shame that streaming is now split. American Gods, Good Omens, The Expanse, and Mr Robot are all on Amazon. Netflix definitely dropped a ball on some of that. The TV show costs the same but I have to pay 2x to watch because of the networks.
Netflix originals are hit or miss. They make (or take over) some good stuff, like Stranger Things season 1 or Bonus Family, but they also make some embarrassing, awfully bad things, like Bright or Bird Box. Even within the same show they are hit or miss, like when they took over The Killing or Black Mirror. I find there's no correlation between "made by Netflix" and quality.
The Hollywood ending defines them and probably always has, so far from recent. It's been a standard for everyone to take the piss out of as long as I've known of movies!
It's one reason I miss a healthy British film industry - sure those mostly ended happily, but rarely so cheesy, except some from the 1940s. Yet there was a decent proportion of surprise unhappy, cynical, tired and non-endings too. A twist would sometimes be something you actually didn't see coming, rather than a "surprise" set up from the start and regularly telegraphed like a five year old keeping a secret. :)
It's not that I dislike superheroes. Well, didn't used to. The whole Marvel universe thing started off well enough. I enjoyed Wolverine, Iron Man, Deadpool 1 plenty, and some others. I really like roast lamb and mint, but getting it for 2 in 3 meals would cure me by boredom within weeks. Maybe it's just too large a proportion of the canon. Except it infects all genres... Wolf of Wall Street? Great Gatsby? Chernobyl? Superhero movies - in style, in script, in camera work, and in tropes used. Now that's putting lamb and mint in with my choc cake and just spoiling every meal.
Chernobyl was the surprise disappointment. It didn't need to deviate so far from reality - the affected were dangerously radioactive too? Not in our universe's physics. Nor be quite so McCarthy child's comic book (and wildly inaccurate) in representing the Soviets. That kind-of suited Stranger Things, though even there it was rather overblown, or Bruce Willis' Red, but not here. Legasov was the superhero - except he didn't actually tear down the whole Soviet system in court, nor get arrested by the KGB after the show trial. The plant manager (I forget the name) was the absurdist villain, missing only a white cat. Do as I say or I will throw you into the reactor Mr Stark. Oh wait, that was Serbina in the helicopter.
Chernobyl was clearly set in a comic book universe. It would still have been bloody good, and well made without any of that bullshit. The attention to scenic correctness and actors resembling the real people was remarkable. Spoiling the plot for a ha'p'orth of reality then.
Suffice to say, I don't think we're going to agree, but it's been a fun back and forth. :)
> But Hollywood have always done this - recycling old ideas in new wrapping. And Hollywood have always been criticized for being vapid entertainment, empty spectacle etc.
Not to this degree. The last good year for movies was 1999. This is the list of major releases that year:
The Matrix
Fight Club
The Sixth Sense
Toy Story 2
The Green Mile
American Beauty
Being John Malkovic
Office Space
The Iron Giant
Magnolia
Austin Powers
American Pie
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Eyes Wide Shut
Dogma
Galaxy Quest
The Insider
Notting Hill
Man on the Moon
Analyze This
Detroit Rock City
Mystery Men
Bicentennial Man
This is not even the entire list, just the ones I enjoyed and I'm bothering to type.
You can't look at that list and honestly say nothing has changed, because it's just not true. The energy and creativity has clearly moved somewhere else, to TV and streaming services.
This year alone there's two FANTASTIC shows, Chernobyl and Stranger Things S3 that definitely deserve praise.
I don't think it makes sense to define monopoly as a binary state. There are ways that companies with monopoly power behave even if you can argue the company itself isn't a monopoly.
And, for what it's worth, copyright owners are the canonical monopolies. There's no suitable replacement for Stranger Things. What's new is that TV show copyright owners are now able to monopolize distribution.
I get that there's a more diverse set of good content, you'd expect that to happen with the explosion of the internet. But that's happening in spite of monopolist behavior, not because of it. Most of the wealth in movie/tv creation is getting captured by a smaller group of companies.
Hence the article focusing on Netflix canceling shows after the second season. The creators of shows make more money when they run a long time, Netflix would prefer to keep those people working for cheap if it doesn't create churn.
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.
I think they should do screenings for more intimate groups. Do couches, coffee tables, etc. Like karaoke rooms.
But compete by giving more flexibility about time and selection. Maybe even offer blockbuster TV shows, so you can book a Stranger Things party with a group.
I think IP licensing might be the biggest problem there, which would mean that Hollywood is stepping on its own tail to some degree.
All the web sites that go with British newspapers (and for all I know, other newspapers in the world, but I live in Britain) have been doing grey-SEO stuff that's bound to get hit by algorithm changes.
By "grey SEO" here I'm thinking of articles that are intended to get "natural" traffic as a result of people asking questions, e.g.
"When is the new Avengers movie out?" "Which channel is The Crown on?" "Was Michael Jackson a Paedophile?" "Who is that girl from Stranger Things?"
An encyclopedia is often the natural result for questions like these, or some sort of specialist fact database, IMDB for example, or a TV channel's own listings site. But the newspapers decided they could get some of those clicks. If some people who were wondering if that's the same girl in Godzilla (yup) click through and see four adverts and read speculation as to whether Kate Middleton hates her brother-in-law's new wife (probably not, also who cares?) that's more profit for the publisher.
Anyway, Google's thing has always been trying to put the answers you wanted at the top. In defiance of Babbage's oft-cited remark, Google wants to give you the answer you were looking for even if you ask the wrong question. This may often mean that a Daily Mail article trying to get you to click through to more slop about nothing is NOT the best answer when you asked a mundane question and Google may tweak their algorithm to prefer say, the Netflix video trailer for this season of Black Mirror, higher than a Daily Mail article speculating that Charlie Brooker might be gay when users ask it "When is Black Mirror new series?" even if the Daily Mail team worked really hard setting metadata tags and fiddling with the layout.
This was basically the plot of the Black Mirror episode "Arkangel" [0]
We need to give kids more space to discover their own limits, and to get hurt. I look at the kids in "Stranger Things" riding their unsupervised across town, playing in a junk yard, and I remember doing that stuff (child of the 80s/early 90s here.) Staying out until the streetlights came on. Yes, we got injured. Yes, I ended up in parts of town I probably shouldn't have been in. Occasionally, I got my ass kicked. This was all part of growing up for most of human history.
I never see the kids in my neighborhood doing that. I've never seen any of them leave the street, and always with the parents on the patio, chatting with each other. The last time I saw a roving band of 9-to-13 year-olds biking around town was probably the early 2000s.
I kind of understand what changed media- and culture-wise, but has the real world actually changed that much in 25 years to merit the sort of constant-supervision-every-moment-planned-and-accounted-for world kids now grow up in?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkangel_(Black_Mirror)
If they fail, they could always open a movie studio. I mean Netflix originals are some of the best shows and movies around... Dead like me, Stranger Things, Haunting of hill House, The OA, Sex Ed, etc just to name a few...
Friends is my most watched show on Netflix, but that's because there are 10 seasons with 24 episodes each (i.e. a lot of content) and it's just something that plays in the background while I do other stuff. I wouldn't care too much if it was removed, but I would if they took away Stranger Things, Ozark, Our Earth, The Crown, Altered Carbon, Narcos, Santa Clarita Diet, BoJack Horseman, Queer Eye, all the comedy specials and lots more.
Netflix just released its Q1 numbers.
They've added record 6.9 million subscribers. That's new subscribers - defectors.
I'm not sure what would cause the "masses" to re-evaluate the quality of selection, especially taking into account the fact that Netlifx is now adding tons of content they'll own forever, so 10 years from now "The Crown" and "The Stranger Things" etc. will still be there plus all the shows and movies they've added in those 10 years.
Competitively Netflix is safe because to watch those 250 top movies online in one place you can go to... nobody.
HBO has some big-ticket items, but Netflix is more consistent in dropping new series for me to try. It's still my go-to place for content since there's more than I have time to watch. I just looked up their list of original content[1] for refresh my mind, and quite a few were extremely good in my opinion.
- House of Cards: I only got a little into the second season before I got busy, but what I saw was high quality and interesting.
- Orange is the new Black: My wife still loves this series
- Stranger Things: An honest to god phenomenon. The second season was weaker IMO, but I'm not sure how it could be as good as the first. That's a high bar to hit.
- The Crown: I caught a lot of it as my wife watched. Pretty good, even if a blond Doctor Who was somewhat distracting.
- A Series of Unfortunate Events: The kids liked this, as some of them are going through the books.
- Altered Carbon: Refreshingly good science fiction. Main character casting a little odd, since it's more obvious now than it was when I was younger how odd and slightly off-putting it is to cast someone with the physique of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a science fiction lead. At the same time, it's now fitting (or a trope) because of all the science fiction he helmed in the 1990's.
- Lost in Space: Interesting, but ultimately spoiled slightly by the contrived plot. Better writing and this would have been extremely good rather than worth watching, but slightly disappointing.
- The Haunting: A nice interweaving of stories, and creepy series. I liked the ending. I have friends who didn't.
That's just from the drama section of the list. There's plenty in the other sections too, such as Maniac and Russian Dolls which I watched recently that were good, and documentary section has a bunch of good things I've seen as well. Some of he Marvel series' were pretty good too (season one of Jessica Jones was excellent on so many levels).
That's a small fraction of what they released. Looking at the list now, there's no way I would cancel Netflix before Hulu, and probably HBO also. There's things I want to watch on those (for different reasons), but now that I examine it, it's clear that I use and value what Netflix is giving me way more than the other two.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_original_programs_distributed_by_Netflix
It boils down to preferences. I personally feel the quality of HBO’s shows & series is dramatically higher than even the peak quality of Netflix or Prime original offerings. They are simply nowhere close. They’re not even playing the same sport.
Pretty much every Netflix darling I’ve spent time to watch (Stranger Things, House of Cards, Russian Doll, Maniac, Bird Box, Roma) has been a huge disappointment.
By comparison with HBO, I only feel that way about True Detective Season 2 and Crashing (the Pete Holmes show). Other shows have variation of course and some are more interesting or less to me, but none of them have been sincerely big disappointments, while nearly every single darling that Netflix puts out is pretty crap.
Even deadpool? I'm getting marvel/dc fatigue as well, but damn I can't get enough Deadpool -- fucking hilarious.
As far as depth, I can't think of a Netflix film I really remember as standing out, now Serials --I can name a bunch: The OA, Stranger Things, Haunting of Hill House, etc -- they may not have found a groove yet w/ movies but they sure have w/ original series -- though they did hit a few snags too, their Marvel world sort of fell apart, and some characters were good, some totally were lame (Iron fist esp.).
I agree Netflix is trending towards failure, but I couldn’t disagree more about why and the path leading them there. Netflix is and has been the least attractive of these services for a long time, specifically because other platforms have far expanded inventory and integrate the ability to instantly rent or buy additional content not directly included.
Ultimately what everyone wants is a super easy interface to pay for precise a la carte content, never bundled, never subscription-based. If a given person wants to buy everything from HBO, they still could, and maybe could get a discount for subscribing, but nobody wants to be forced to subscribe to watch just a handful of content items.
It doesn’t matter if it’s Disney streaming, Netflix, Premier League soccer, or anything else. It’s clear rent-seeking to create walled gardens of content only unlockable by bundled subscriptions, and the clear consumer drive existentially threatening the TV industry is that all anybody wants is a dumb pipe with an easy interface to individually purchase each content item on its own merit, flat out.
Many streaming services, particularly Amazon’s, offer this to a way higher degree than Netflix, especially in terms of sports access and new release films.
Netflix is betting that it can create locked-in content that will compel people to stay subscribing, but I think this is a long-term failing idea. Bird Box is a great example: really poor production, sloppy writing with contrived villains, lowest common denominator stuff. Stranger Things? I couldn’t see one reason to care about it. Not exceptionally bad, just overproduced blandness. The gimmick of making things into viral phenomena is not a stable business plan in this area.
As prices rise, Netflix just becomes another HBO. A walled garden of content, except HBO actually makes good television and knows how to do it. Netflix is trashing its own brand with mindless crap. It’s network quality for premium add-on prices. Especially if economic hard times hit, this is exactly something people are going to realize they can live without.
>But what it won't tell me is "we don't have the title you want".
That's by design, not accident. The Netflix catalog is much, much smaller than most people think, especially for films. They have just under 6,000 titles available in the US, but a large proportion of that is cheap filler that most viewers will have no interest in. Searching the catalog using a third-party tool reveals just how thin it really is.
https://unogs.com/
Netflix have focussed on recommendations over search because it makes their service look better. If you search for something, the odds are that Netflix don't have it. Recommendation allows them to promote their original content, which is Netflix's main moat - if you're hooked on Stranger Things or Orange Is The New Black, you're far less likely to cancel your subscription.
>they can definitely do "People like historical drama... people like boats... let's do a historical drama on a boat!" sorts of things,
Which is the Achilles Heel of all recommendation engines. Just because I watched one historical drama doesn't mean that I want all historical dramas all the time. Take a show like Stranger Things. The campy nostalgic thing worked for it, but that doesn't mean I want my next 5 shows to be campy and nostalgic. I want my next show to be something original like Stranger Things was.
For me there is just a glossy saccharine feel to them. No substance, all flash. Or things they have just bought cheaply from overseas and they are passing off as a "Netflix Original." Of course there are always exceptions. I found Stranger Things to be really high quality. Things like their Lost in Space so much less so. I don't want that bare minimum, or "just good enough" they put into it to become the new norm in filmmaking. To me, films should be an art form.
This is the nail for me. Their original content has been lackluster at best and for them to be pushing that as the reason for the price hike is no good. It was the reason for the last few hikes as well and nothing has changed. There have been a few that are interesting to watch (stranger things of course), but for every one that is good there are at least 20 that are garbage. If they want to put out original content fine, but they need to go for quality not quantity like they are. It's like they don't say no to anything people create under netflix. This on top of the fact that in the last 2 years and into this year they've basically butchered their catalog of tv/movies from other companies (fox,disney, ect..) to where if those are the things I want to watch I might as well go else where. I'm not saying that's their fault, but I'm sure they could strike a deal with these media companies if they like vs spending the money on originals that are just there to fill the UI.
See, I didn't mention Stranger Things because it's a bit of a special case. Joyce went crazy, so her eldest son had to step in.
(Of course, she actually wasn't crazy because her fantastical visions were real, this is a TV show, etc.)
Admittedly, we don't know what the son's role was like before Will went missing...
Mad Men didn't even have an audience when it aired (<2 million viewers most episodes), and airs on a network that likely won't exist in 5-6 years (or at least won't be producing new content), so it's not super clear to me what your point is about those shows as evidence of how a network grows. The way a network grows is by producing content people want to watch, whether that's disposable content made to last a minute or content made to last the test of time. HBO isn't growing because people are subscribing to watch Sopranos re-runs.
Past reporting suggests churn in most subscription content services is very low, so your Netflix cancellation may be unusual. I'd also add that exclusive content is one part of the story, but there's also a lot of licensed content that's very good on Netflix as on other services.
But for what it is worth, I would rank the following Netflix originals to be "top tier" within their genre -- some of these genres lend themselves more to rewatching than others, and some are closer to my taste than others, some held up in quality through their run more than others, so in a sense I am ranking shows based on their peak quality --
Orange is the New Black; Bloodline; Stranger Things; The Crown; Gilmore Girls AYITL; The OA; A Series of Unfortunate Events; Mindhunter; The Haunting of Hill House; Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt; Master of None; Love; Lady Dynamite; Santa Clarita Diet; GLOW; American Vandal; Maniac; Bojack Horseman; F is for Family; Disenchantment; Hilda; Dark; The Rain; Elite; Chef's Table; Making a Murderer; Shot in the Dark; Wormwood; Wild Wild Country; Salt Fat Acid Heat; Queer Eye; The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell; My Next Guest Needs No Introduction; Lilyhammer; Terrace House; Alias Grace; The End of the Fucking World; Collateral; Wanderlust; Longmire; Black Mirror; Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.
In addition to these, the following shows are Netflix originals in my region, indicating that although someone else initially funded them, Netflix bought them for exclusive distribution here, and also meet the above requirements:
Babylon Berlin; Bodyguard; Casé; Crashing; Cuckoo; Derry Girls; The Great British Baking Show; Happy!; Happy Valley; The Investigator; Peaky Blinders; River.
I have pretty broad taste in TV and watch a lot of TV while I am programming or running data analysis, so maybe the breadth of stuff I include here is surprising to most. But to the extent your post is a useful anecdote about how Netflix has no great shows, I'm responding to your challenge to "Name one show" that would meet that criteria.
(These are TV shows only, not films. I haven't really liked many Netflix original films although there are a few I would say are great, like Okja and Roma)
I've watched and enjoyed pretty much every episode of: House of Cards, Stranger things, Altered Carbon, Orange Is the New Black. What have you watched that you didn't get into?
On a tangent, I'm increasingly put off by incessant and obnoxious background music on TV - everything is drenched in emotionally manipulative sound - documentaries, drama series. Stranger Things is the one example that really stuck out to me - in the end I had to stop watching because I got sick of the music accompanying virtually every single scene.
It didn't used to be like this! For the most part I'd prefer to be able to form my own thoughts and feelings based on the content, with music used sparingly and appropriately. Ho hum.
Yeah, from my experience people from their mid-twenties to mid-forties are fans. People outside those ranges don't seem to care much. I'm in my early 40s (I'd have been closest to Will's age I think) and a huge fan of the show.
The best I could find was this:
https://variety.com/2017/tv/news/stranger-things-season-2-ratings-nielsen-1202605585/
> According to Nielsen ... each episode of ... season (2) drew more than 4 million viewers per episode, and with more than 3 million of those falling in the key adults 18-49 demographic within the first three days of its release (Oct. 27-29).
The article goes on to quote other statistics (including 15 million + viewers of the first episode). And then:
> “The data that Nielsen is reporting is not accurate, not even close, and does not reflect the viewing of these shows on Netflix,” the company said in a statement at the time of the original announcement.
I'm not certain how Nielsen collects data these days, but in the early aughts, our local Fox station waged a campaign to get younger viewers to participate in Nielsen studies because the data Nielsen had showed no one was watching syndicated episodes of the Simpsons, so advertisers wouldn't pay. (I suspect the advertisers knew people were watching and just wanted a discount.) The campaign seemed to work (and was also the one and only time I was in a Nielsen household).
Since then, I still take Nielsen ratings with a huge grain of salt, so I'm inclined to believe the Netflix statement that we really don't have any idea.
My fear is that Netflix is trying to hit the level of content volume where they no longer have to license shows/movies belonging to other studios/networks. They can finally turn into their own silo.
While Netflix's original content initially yielded huge hits (House of Cards, Narcos, Stranger Things), it's purely a game of quantity over quality now.
There is also the risk of Netflix falling into the same trap that Spotify is in now, being pigeonholed as focusing only on a certain type of "chill" music because that's what listening data points to. Netflix's selection would be awful if they created long-term commitments for shows that reflect today's tastes, and not necessarily what tomorrow will bring.
Netflix, Amazon and Apple are producing unique content which will ONLY be available on their respective platforms. Go look at the TV space where you can only watch Stranger Things, Black Mirror, 13 Reasons Why etc on Netflix. And they are talking about extending this to movies.
Seems pretty reasonable to me to be alarmist.
We recently binge watched both seasons of Stranger Things. Stranger Things and Altered Carbon on Netflix and The Marvelous Mrs Maisal and The Expanse on Amazon have been my most enjoyed shows this year.
Someone recently commented elsewhere that they were tired of paying for streaming access to a bunch of shows nobody wants to watch, and they wanted access to the most popular movies/network shows/whatever.
I didn't comment then, but FWIW: some of the best shows available are now streaming originals from Netflix, Prime, etc. If you haven't checked out specifically any of the Netflix originals, you're missing out. It's a complete replacement for the non-sports watcher.
As posted in response elsewhere below, here's a list of Netflix's best work:
- Stranger Things - Narcos - The OA - The Haunting of Hill House - Marvel series. All of them! - GLOW - Ozark - Altered Carbon - American Vandal - 13 Reasons Why
Also good:
- Atypical - Love - Flaked - Maniac - Master of None - Chef's Table - Making a Murderer
This is by no means a complete list, you can find that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_original_programs_distributed_by_Netflix
I tried to skim through it and provide my own short list of what I really liked, so this is just one person's opinion.
I agree with you, outside of a few productions the vast majority of netflix content isn't good. Black Mirror, Stranger Things, the new movie the Ballad of Buster Scruggs... I can't think of anything else I like from them.
Amazon has the same problem, both Amazon and Netflix seem to pump out tv shows without putting that much work into them going for quantity over quality. First Amazon show I actually enjoyed was the Jack Ryan tv show. Sneaky Pete was good for the first few episodes but it just seems to fizzle out.
In contrast, almost everything on HBO is good. I rewatched Band of Brothers for I think the 3rd time the other week and I enjoyed it just as much as I had the first time I had seen it.
As Netflix streaming phases out more and more actual movies, in favor of their original content, I'm finding it exceedingly difficult to watch anything of reasonable quality. To the point that I've reupped my DVD plan to 3 movies at a time, it's the ONLY way to actually find anything worth watching. Stranger Things? Don't get me started. Great nostalgia, but a boring and recycled story.
I definitely prefer their product placements over traditional ads. Some of them are very jarring though, and you can feel the actors' pain reciting the lines -- like the KFC in season 2 of Stranger Things, in a dinner scene all the shots are obviously centered around a bucket of KFC. For some reason they felt that wasn't enough and drag you straight out of the scene saying "finger lick'in good!!!".
Yeah, I think some of the factors that determine if a show is a massive hit is outside of the direct control of the producer. I think Netflix will get some home runs if they continue to invest in them, and keep giving directors creative freedom. Stranger Things was a really popular tv series.
And Netflix has got options for critically acclaimed tv series that traditional networks can't fully utilize. They can and do import foreign tv shows to an American audience without worrying much about taking airtime away from other shows.
Yeah, the Atlanta area is home to a lot of movies and TV shows at this point. There's even a huge movie studio built south of Atlanta (Pinewood, opened in 2014).
Most of the recent Marvell movies were shot here.
Recent films shot in Georgia include: Godzilla: King of Monsters, the Ant Man movies, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, Black Panther, Pitch Perfect 3, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House and Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Some television shows shot here: Stranger Things, Ozark, The Walking Dead, MacGuyver and Atlanta.
There's definitely a booming production industry in the Atlanta area.
I'll give you the standup comedy selection because I agree it's really quite good. I also like Stranger Things but can't comment on the others. But I actively dislike the Marvel content on Netflix. I find its characters one-dimensional and its plot unmotivated. Some of this is probably the transition from comic books to TV, but on the other hand I love almost everything from the cinematic universe.
I think the biggest problem is that the Marvel cinematic universe seems to have better acting, better writing, superior interconnectedness overall and stakes that are well calibrated to its cast of heroes. In contrast, I find most of the characters' hyperfocus on specific neighborhoods in Marvel's Netflix shows to be frankly ridiculous and annoying. I also find myself wishing the main characters would just kill the villains a few episodes into each series. It boggles my mind how much waffling and angst goes on.
As a followup to your last comment though, my point had nothing to do with HBO becoming Netflix. I don't even think HBO should try to become Netflix at all. I would prefer for HBO to remain the curated content space that it is, precisely because I'm concerned with the quality of content. Strictly speaking, the ratio of quality content to junk on HBO is far, far higher than Netflix's. It's not really about HBO or Netflix being more successful in becoming the other, it's about quality. Regardless of whether or not HBO is close to becoming Netflix, Netflix is so far from becoming HBO I don't even think they could recognize an interstate map outlining the route.
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.
Yes! For example I wanted to purchase Stranger Things Season 2 box set for a family member who has poor access to the internet. If you search for it on Amazon it looks legit but then you notice something odd. Zero retailers actually carry this. Only Amazon and eBay.
Turns out it's completely counterfeit. Worst yet I reported it and nothing happened to it and last I checked it's listed as "Amazon's Choice". They are still selling these.
Amazon seems perfectly fine with selling counterfeit products and it's quite frustrating.
This makes entire sense to me: When you're going to stream the episode of Stranger things to 15million people, who really cares what the one-time cost to encode is? Surely you'd take algorithmic complexity that was 100x or even 1000x the baseline if it provided you with even a few kB of bandwidth savings?
SyncOnSet Technologies | Full-stack Web Developer | $80k - $120k + equity + benefits | Boston, MA | On-site or Remote
Our customers: TV shows such as Game Of Thrones, Stranger Things, and Westworld, feature films such as Wonder Woman and Justice League, and pretty much every major studio including Netflix, HBO, Fox and Warner Bros. What do we do? SyncOnSet Technologies has revolutionized TV and Film production management. No, seriously, we have a Primetime Engineering Emmy Award to prove it. Our product, SyncOnSet, is an industry leading platform for creative professionals to manage script breakdowns, fitting notes, continuity photos, inventory, and much more. If you are interested in the entertainment industry and building great products, please get in touch!
Prefer developers for our Boston office, but would be open to candidates in other locations with a history of working with a remote team.
Tech stack: Node.js / Angular / React / TypeScript / Postgres / MySQL / PHP
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Contact: rob@synconset.com
I'm guessing there would be some sort of CDN edge node with optimistic pre-caching.
I'm sure Netflix would be willing to set up a Netflix Open Connect box on Mars so at least they can binge watch Stranger Things and The Santa Clarita Diet.
Plus, put enough people (a few hundred?) on mars and and the content they could produce on their own local domain might be compelling.
> but I honestly don't know anyone whose favorite TV show is a Netflix original.
I remember a year or two ago Stranger Things was a massive super hit. I mean that's all reddit could talk about that year - it overshadowed almost every other show at the time.
SyncOnSet Technologies | Full-stack Web Developer | $80k - $120k + equity + benefits | Boston, MA | On-site Our customers: TV shows such as Game Of Thrones, Stranger Things, and Westworld, feature films such as Wonder Woman and Justice League, and pretty much every major studio including Netflix, HBO, Fox and Warner Bros. What do we do? SyncOnSet Technologies has revolutionized TV and Film production management. No, seriously, we have a Primetime Engineering Emmy Award to prove it. Our product, SyncOnSet, is an industry leading platform for creative professionals to manage script breakdowns, fitting notes, continuity photos, inventory, and much more. If you are interested in the entertainment industry and building great products, please get in touch!
Tech stack: Node.js / Angular / React / TypeScript / Postgres / MySQL / PHP
Website: https://www.synconset.com/ More about this job and others: https://angel.co/wymsee/jobs
Contact: rob@synconset.com
Netflix knows their customers very well. It's likely that most of their original movies are crap because that's what their customers enjoy. People binge-watch engrossing series, but put movies on for background noise while hanging out with friends.
So it makes sense to invest in series like Stranger Things and movies from Adam Sandler.
You also won't find the 'popular excitement' that is late-night tv guest appearances, supermarket checkout magazines, radio spots, entertainment news, social media 'influencers', and so on, reminding us of the 'significance' of the netflix produced items either..
There were plenty of late night tv guest appearances, supermarket checkout magazine articles, radio spots, entertainment news, and quite frankly excessive social media influencers fawning over House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, or Stranger Things in their first two seasons. HoC especially is single-handedly responsible for Netflix's status today as a destination for shows (and the people who make them)
when hollywood itself is determining what is culturally significant, and neflix is basically a 'rogue studio', this is hardly surprising..
Hollywood doesn't determine what is culturally significant, people do. Netflix produces culturally significant shows...but not movies.
> Think about the films people will remember from the last decade: you won't find any Netflix films among them.
Films, maybe not. But House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Stranger Things, Black Mirror and The Crown have just as much cultural significance as Hollywood movies. And if we expand to HBO, then we can call in Game of Thrones, which has had far more cultural impact than La La Land. This is related to a cousin comment of mine: films are no longer the most important cultural medium. Long-form shows with high production values are.
It's also worth noting that Icarus, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, is from Netflix.
Putting the beauty and power of going to the movie theater aside, I think what is most powerful about Netflix, and something they learned from HBO, is how to give the directors/writers/producers more autonomy over their work. This is something TV execs have failed to do again and again. I think the problem is this does not translate to cinema. Films are a much more tight medium where spreading your wings and entertaining a multitude of ideas fudges the thrust of the narrative. With TV, we are willing to entertain long arches of story that wind and weave without a clear endpoint or direction. Let’s take Game of Thrones, for example, it’s rarely quite clear what is going to happen. We do have the specter of the Khaleesi and the white walkers arriving on the shores of Westeros, but throughout you have an overarching theme of uncertainty with any and all of the characters. Cinema would not allow this kind of uncertainty. And that’s exactly one of the reasons why superhero movies do so well. They have a clear and crisp narrative that we go to the cinema to satisfy. Being nuanced in film is much harder because in film you also have to be blunt. In film, you must pay more close attention to the heroes journey. In TV, you can hack and toy with it.
This is why I think Netflix thrives in TV shows but flounders in cinema. Cinema requires tight thinking and TV requires open thinking. Netflix, by its business model and Silicon Valley culture, is inherently an open culture. They are willing to entertain and support the ideas of creators. Now, you might argue, hey look at A24, they allow their creators a lot of space and still pull off great cinema like Ex Machina and Moonlight. I think Netflix hasn’t quite made it there yet but is inching towards it with movies like Annihilation. Annihilation also tries to do too much but it is succinct as compared to Bright. That’s A24’s strength it picks and guides its creators towards succinct storylines that, in the end, are powerful.
I think the best example of the above points is how weak Netflix superhero shows are overall compared to its big hits like Stranger Things and House of Cards. With superhero stories, they are inherently tight: the hero must win. There isn’t much room for subtlety and so these shows tend not to catch on. It doesn’t play to Netflix’s open-ended storytelling strengths (and granted their production value is usually B level). Whereas with Stranger Things, the open-ended nature of the story keeps the viewer entranced.
Unless Netflix hires some people who understand these fundamental issues at its top levels, it will be hard for them to really innovate on cinema. IMHO.
Netflix does release their popular original series on Blu-ray. I don't know if any of their movies have had that luxury yet, but they are starting to release them independent of their streaming service. As an example Daredevil and Stranger Things are both available on Blu-ray.
As a UI font, this is pretty great. Almost a mix between Circular and San Francisco, it should work well.
However, most disappointing and worrying part of font presentation is applications to different movies and TV shows. With the same typeface, they completely lose their identity.
Strong, condensed typeface of House of Cards. 80s-inspired typeface for Stranger Things. Minimal and geometric typeface for OA. Cyrillic alphabet inspired treatment of R in Icarus.
They all were different and appropriate, and here they are all very 2010's generic sans-serif, losing all personality.
I'm happy to see Netflix Sans in UI, but sure hope it doesn't go deeper, into actual show branding.
I have seen shark bites fail.
It is particularly problematic in inaccessible areas (hidden behind drywall).
PEX compression fittings with coupled 'sticks' of straight PEX makes runs easier (not having to straighten out the 'coil').
Also, check out the Milwaukee PEX tool. Expensive, but awesome.
PS
In the first episode of Stranger Things, you can see the hot and cold PEX runs in the kitchen of the diner. Very progressive.
SyncOnSet Technologies | Full-stack Web Developer | $80k - $120k + equity + benefits | Boston, MA | On-site
Our customers: TV shows such as Game Of Thrones, Stranger Things, and Westworld, feature films such as Wonder Woman and Justice League, and pretty much every major studio including Netflix, HBO, Fox and Warner Bros. What do we do? SyncOnSet Technologies has revolutionized TV and Film production management. No, seriously, we have a Primetime Engineering Emmy Award to prove it. Our product, SyncOnSet, is an industry leading platform for creative professionals to manage script breakdowns, fitting notes, continuity photos, inventory, and much more. If you are interested in the entertainment industry and building great products, please get in touch!
Tech stack: Node.js / Angular / React / TypeScript / Postgres / MySQL / PHP
Website: https://www.synconset.com/ More about this job and others: https://angel.co/wymsee/jobs
Contact: rob@synconset.com
I have worked 0 hours the last 3 days, but I did 90h/week stakes for 2 months continuously from December to January.
Have you ever been burned out? I wouldn't work 90 hours per week these days unless someone was paying me a really serious amount of money. For my current rates, I find it not unethical to work at a more relaxed pace, procrastinating, really maybe working for about 3 hours per day.
You might be unsure of the resulting reward from doing something. When I was an undergraduate, I've experienced poverty and hunger multiple times, which was proved to be (ironically) a great motivator. Unless off course I couldn't find a client to do a project for so I'd find myself in some serious depression instead.
I was (am?) a Matrix fan myself, but I wouldn't find it rewarding to rewatch the films or the anime again. I like re-reading the interpretations once in 2 or 3 years or so (<spoilers>I believe Neo is a program himself and Zion is also a simulation</spoilers>).
On the other hand, I binge-watched the two seasons of Stranger Things when the second one came out. Did I like it? Yes. Would I rewatch it, no. There's no reward in doing so.
I hate to give advice on the internet, as the variables that define each of us are haotic, but try to get along with yourself. Boredom might be a coping/survival mechanism of our bodies to not burn out (the reward must be greater than the energy/time you dedicated to a project).
The post seems to make its point by dismissing just about everything. Bright is "just another Will Smith movie" and Stranger Things is "pistache by design." Game of Thrones is probably just another fantasy-book-to-TV translation and The Wire is probably yet another crime drama.
Through that lens, is anything going to impress you?
I've had my subscription for over 10 years. Unfortunately the streaming side does not have what originally attracted me. Fortunately they still have a DVD side to Netflix that has what originally attracted me.
Don't get me wrong. I've found Marco Polo, Stranger Things, House of Cards (S1 & S2) & several other shows to be really interesting. I just don't have the time to watch that many episodes. I prefer a nice short movie to unwind to when I have time.
That said, I wish more books & comics would be turned into a series instead of movies at the theater. Netflix proved this with 13 Reasons Why. Star Wars, Marvel, etc would also benefit from this.
> The problem with legal movies are DRM, vendor/device lock-in, forced ads, regional policies etc.
This, right here. I recently tried to start watching The Crown. So I go to Netflix on my tablet and start it up. I get an error 5.2[0]. Following Netflix's advice, I force-restart; I reboot my tablet; I uninstall & reinstall. Hmmm … I am running LineageOS, so I do a bit more googling. It turns out that this is actually a DRM error. Oddly, I can still play e.g. Stranger Things.
Why the #*&@ does Netflix do this? I've been a customer for a dozen years; they've made quite a packet from me over that time. All I want to do is watch their content, that I'm paying for, on my tablet.
[0] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/65574
> Stranger Things season 2 is shot in 8K and has nine episodes. The source files are terabytes and terabytes of data. Each season required 190,000 CPU hours to encode.
High resolution video is larger than you might expect.
Does it though? Ten years ago it was trivial to surf to your local bay of pirates and get a copy of just about any popular film or series. This is still possible (hypothetically of course), but it takes a lot more effort (finding and joining trustworthy private trackers or setting up newsgroups), precaution (VPN, OPSEC), and diligence.
But that's not because DRM works.
Getting a digital copy of some bit of media is still trivial. Netflix forcing its DRM on its customers doesn't mean that you can't illegally download Stranger Things in excellent quality, and their DRM doesn't slow anyone dedicated to doing so down at all.
In fact, Netflix could stream all their stuff without DRM, and nothing would change (with one exception I'll come to in a bit). What's made piracy harder is a combination of factors:
* The legal way is often easier (just pay Netflix a small monthly sum and watch stuff)
* The legal way suffices for a lot of people
* Getting caught infringing copyright has serious consequences in many countries
* Downloading files from shady sources puts your computer at risk (Windows in particular; e.g., ransomware)
If Netflix turned off all their DRM tomorrow, then perhaps some pirates would have a slightly easier way to source their material, but otherwise nothing would change.
Except that the end-user gets a better experience.
At this moment Netflix is refusing to serve 1080p video content to anyone who uses a free operating system and free browser, because 'the DRM isn't good enough'. For 4k the rules are even more stringent; you need Microsoft Windows, Edge, and pre-approved trusted-platform capable hardware (which includes the monitor/TV).
For the rest of us, Netflix and the major content studios begrudgingly allow us to watch 720p video on our way too open computers.
This isn't about protecting the media streams from piracy, this is about making sure that the future of media consumption means consumers will run the media producers' software, using their rules, on hardware they control. We are not supposed to run our own HTPC, or do clever things with media we pay for (e.g., letting an algorithm watch ahead to warn the user of scenes with strobe light effects for epileptic patients, as the EFF mentions, or simply controlling a string of LED lights behind your screen for added effect, or downloading the streams to watch on holiday, or cut fragments out of a stream to use as samples in a lawful manner (e.g., a blog about films, or some cultural analysis), or …).
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.
There is a a new turkish TV show rolling on Netflix - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4320258/ - https://www.netflix.com/title/80127001
It's called Dirilis: Ertugrul (Resurrection: Ertugrul) which is about the father of the Osman, the founder of the Ottoman empire. I'm watching it, ignoring all the overly muslim overtones, praise to God (Allah), songs, etc. It has some good moments, but AFAIK it's based on very little historic facts. But it's no coincidence that the TV show comes at the time Erdogan is the "ruler". The knight templars are showed as very incapable fighters, the Kiya tribe as universally good (with very few bad apples), but apart from that is watchable (was binging on it, while waiting for my wife to catch up on Stranger Things I, so we can watch together II).
But I'm also watching it, just to see how things are portrayed from this side, since I've been told stories completely the other way (I'm bulgarian, so our history, myths & legends are all about ottoman repression, which was even called slavery while I was growing up, but recently the schoolbooks are changing that).
Then few days ago, someone mentioned that this show is in contrast how Islam was portrayed with another Turkish show released just few years before it, (also available on Netflix- https://www.netflix.com/title/80089596 - that's supposed to tell another story, but I guess without Erdogan's propaganda).
I still can't bear, the fact how his bodyguards beat so many people just recently, and nothing really happened after that... Here in the US.
To me, the most interesting part about those biofilms are why they're so wrinkly: Those folds form channels and Bacillus moves water and nutrients through them (http://www.pnas.org/content/110/3/848/F1.expansion.html).
After binge watching Stranger Things 2, that seems a little bit more like science fiction.
SPOILER WARNING: stranger things season 1
The reason why free range parenting has gone down so much can be seen in the series.
There was a believable scene in which one kid bullied another into taking an almost certainly fatal jump into the quarry, and was only saved by paranormal means.
A world in which more free-range parenting is the norm inherently implies a world in which kids more often pay the consequences of their actions, which can be death or maiming.
We, as a society, do not seem to have a stomach for this, to the point where free-range parenting has been equated with neglect.
I've felt a very small version of this in watching certain movies. When I saw Stand By Me, I understood Stranger Things and Super 8 a lot more.
Something as mass-market as Big Bang Theory did a D&D episode years before Stranger Things existed. It's been a much longer process than that.
Something more niche but still network TV (Community) did one a few years before that, even. That's around the same time I started noticing it popping up in more stores in suburban TX.
For myself and a number of friends, Community's D&D episodes were the cause. But the episodes, like Stranger Things, were probably a symptom of larger trends.
> I actually just subscribe to Netflix' DVD service. I get films in much higher quality delivered every other day
That probably doesn't help with things that aren't on DVD/Blu-Ray, such as some of their original content. I don't think you can get Stranger Things in that format yet.
> I'm not interested in installing DRM platforms on my computer
I believe the majority of people don't watch Netflix on their computer, but instead on set-top devices connected to their TV's That may also include hybrid solutions like Chromecast, where something may be installed on a local computer (likely a phone) as well, but those generally already have DRM platforms installed...
This is neat. It's quite difficult to see this translating to adult shows, but it does seem to offer some promise for a future "remix" ecosystem on platforms like Netflix.
Imagine there was a kind of "choose your own adventure" feature that allowed people to select any scenes in any order from the entire Netflix Originals catalogue, including deleted scenes, extended scenes, alternates, and bloopers. People could edit their own programs and share them. Imagine people editing their own version of Stranger Things down to a two-hour movie, or perhaps changing the entire plot to more of a bizarre high-school romance. It could be interesting.
> Netflix streaming, in my opinion, has degraded significantly in terms of programming choices.
One exception I'd say is that Netflix Original Programming is getting quite good. Narcos, The Crown, and Stranger Things are all fantastic.
But yes, in general their selection of quality 3rd party titles is horrible. It's rare to browse Netflix hoping to find a specific movie and not be disappointed.
I still get this feeling for some shows, like House of cards and Stranger things for example. Most people (that are commenting online, or talking about it at work anyway) are binge watching in the first week or two, so you know quite a few people are watching at the same time as you, even if its not exactly in sync.
Part of the problem is that they are combining US and British (bbc) tv production schemes. The US focuses on market data, the box ticking. But this requires ongoing feedback during production. That's why US pilots are so different than the eventual series. The bbc selects a show for production run without data or pilots. They rely on expert opinion to greenlight a far shorter initial run. If a show is a miss it disappears after six episodes. Netflix is doing both, resulting in shows that lack market feedback during a long season (iron fist) yet also seem to be boxticking (stranger things). This is a tricky path and while sometimes it works (stranger things) often it doesnt (ASOUE).
I loved Stranger Things, as a die-hard X-Files fan (and similar type shows and movies) it was perfect for me.
I can't speak to Sherlock Holmes, but Season 3 of Black Mirror is extraordinary. Nosedive could have been edited down substantially, but so could White Christmas or Fifteen Million Merits from the seasons before. I don't agree at all that there was any Netflix degradation.
Abstract is triple-A. A Chef's Table is triple-A. Stranger Things is triple-A.
We all have a sort of cynical habit of presuming that things once were good, and now they aren't. But Netflix has always been a mix of good and bad original content, especially when viewed from the subjective eye that what some of us think is great others think is terrible. They're trying to serve all markets.
> However lately Netflix' content simply seems to lack substance to me. It feels as if it's just the superficial result of throwing a promising combination of those very specific tags/categories the services is famous for onto the assembly line and ending up with a show or film that, while ticking all the boxes and not being bad at all, is still pretty far off the masterpieces of the medium.
That is very much the feeling I got from Stranger Things. It is solid in almost every way, but it also felt like it was written to maximize variables and checkboxes from a user survey. Add characters, references and stylistic choices to get the most 80's nostalgic feeling in the viewer as possible.
I thought this number seemed absolutely nuts to begin with, but actually, given their ~100 million subscribers, it's pretty much inline with what the BBC might spend in the same sort of set up.
As an observer, what still seems odd to me is the low number of shows or movies they are producing with that massive budget - last year "The Get Down" apparently cost $16 million per episode while the entire, huge hit, first season of "Stranger Things" cost $13 million.
I would have thought that would inspire them to look for more of these low budget, low risk, big payoff shows, especially when you run a subscription service - surely a series that people binge over 2 weeks, with the potential for more seasons to keep people subscribing is better for you than a one time film? Nope, $100 Million on a single film this year.
> But, it still is a very unique cultural work that is definitely more valuable than something created by another group of people with access to the exact same technology, but producing something of lesser value
Human cultural value != market-value. This is what I'm getting at.
What was the incremental cost to you to watch each episode?
How much did you pay to watch ET? Buy a Twin Peaks box-set?
> The secret sauce is the people involved and their life experiences, knowledge, and expertise, none of which are "free".
You can find free life-experiences (Medium, Twitter), knowledge and expertise (Github, Wikipedia, Quora) all over the internet.
I'm not saying that people don't need money to exist, or that as we're able to produce more, cultural exhanges are worth subjectively less to other humans (quite the opposite).
I'm saying that the costs of people producing things is decreasing rapidly. What is increasing is the net share of value which is captured by distribution platforms.
It's relevant that you can only watch Stranger Things on Netflix --- you can't 'buy it', you need to pay a rent in perpetuity to watch your favorite shows at your own discretion. This is only possible due to the power which the distribution platform (Netflix) has accumulated.
Absolutely, but that doesn't mean that it's still easy to produce the final work. If anyone can do it, then it's obviously not valuable.
Take "Stranger Things" on Netflix, for example. I normally hate sci-fi, but this was one heck of a great season 1 for a series. Did it take a lot less in terms of technical know-how/costs to produce than it would have taken in the 80's ? Sure, no doubt. But, it still is a very unique cultural work that is definitely more valuable than something created by another group of people with access to the exact same technology, but producing something of lesser value. The secret sauce is the people involved and their life experiences, knowledge, and expertise, none of which are "free".
Try West World, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, and Taboo and tell me they don't have feature-film-level production quality.
> Do you like stretched stories over many episodes?
Calling it stretched seems to imply that you're lowering the quality to make it last longer. That just isn't the case (most of the time). Look at a show like Stranger Things on Netflix - you could certainly trim and compress that story to make it work in a two hour movie, but it would probably be a very different story than what you get with the eight hour series.
> with superior quality unseen in low budget TV series
I don't know what your experience is with newer TV series, but there are plenty of them out there with large budgets and product quality to rival movies.
I liked Jessica Jones better, but it has the exact same problem. 13 episodes, but only enough material for about 6-7. They both feel extremely padded.
Stranger Things and Wet Hot American Summer were absolutely perfect in that regard.
(As regards Daredevil season 2, it was unfocused, full of ninjas and superfluous side characters. They completely lost the plot.)
It's more like there was always a lot of pent-up supply of amazing content available. The reason the supply was not finding an outlet was because of the problem that such content doesn't have the mass appeal required to be a hit show on non-premium cable (or, god forbid, a theatrical release movie). So the outlets were limited. HBO was one such premium outlet but it was always limited by the number of primetime hours in the day because of the cable based business model (still is).
Netflix comes along and starts ordering shows where they know the target audience is going to be very limited, say only 10% of all college graduates from big metro areas. That's enough for a show to be Netflix success. Some of them they contract with US production companies (House of Cards, OIT New Black etc.), others they source from non-US TV networks (Sherlock, Black Mirror etc.)
If they have enough of these shows, they can cover most of their target audience and make sure that most people have at least a few original shows keeping them hooked to the $10/month subscription. There's no limit on airtime since Netflix is all on-demand. So now there are dozens (or who knows, even hundreds) of these shows and all they need for you is to get hooked on one or two of those. And a few of them have been legitimate breakout hits like House of Cards, Stranger Things, OITNB etc. Maybe individually none of those shows is as big as Game of Thrones, but combined, they're obviously doing a great job for Netflix.
For HBO to truly compete with Netflix, they'll have to break their "Cable first" model and truly start thinking in terms of unlimited online hours. We'll see when they release their first online only show.
Netflix original content is amazing. IMO, they are the foundation of a new golden age of television.
Honestly, if you browse Netflix originals and choose one with 5 stars, and give it 3 episodes, you're most likely going to be hooked and start binge watching into the wee morning hours.
I speak from very recent experience -- first with Stranger Things, then Travelers (it's fantastic), and now Lovesick (possibly the funniest comedy I have ever seen and also my wife's new favorite show).
Even if you just consider the film classics based on his books (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Shining), he'll have staying power as people will find his books through the films.
Then there's the cultural impact he's had. Stranger Things was basically a Stephen King novel and even directly name-dropped him.
It has a lightheartedness and desire to be fun that I just don't see anymore. I don't know if filmmakers (directors, writers, and actors alike) feel the need to be serious in order to be taken seriously, or if they are just afraid of putting themselves out there in that way.
A good recent example is The Hobbit. It should have been a lighthearted adventure (like the book), but was instead dragged out into a overwrought, heavy, 10 hour bore.
In contrast, while not an adventure, I really enjoyed Stranger Things because it just went for solid entertainment, not trying to make statements or be deep or whatever. And since Spielberg won't make movies like that anymore...
Maybe if filmmakers realized that the Oscars are a joke and not having one puts you in as fine a company as having one (Hitchcock, anyone?).
Found the first episode really awesome, still haven't watched the second and it's been more than a month. I'm admittedly behind on the times but I've been watching The Sopranos (maybe 1-2 episodes a week) and have made my way to the 4th season now. Stranger Things is on my list of shows to watch though because there's a number of things I really liked about that first episode!
I'd be curious to know how you found Stranger Things, if you've seen it. As a rule I don't binge-watch either, but after watching the first episode of that show, I found myself quite strongly compelled to keep watching until it was done. Having previously had such experiences only with novels, and quite few even of those, I found it very odd that a TV show could manage to produce the same effect.
I've never really enjoyed Black Mirror, I've always found it too sneering and pessimistic (and I speak as someone who has enjoyed Charlie Brooker's sneering all the way back to his prank call days).
So I sat down to watch this series, and in some ways the first episode confirmed all my biases, hitting all the usual notes about technology we use and like actually being a terrible slippery slope and you should all feel bad about yourselves.
But then I got to the San Junipero episode, which is so magnificent in every way that I immediately forgave everything. Character driven, subtle, sentimental but optimistic. And probably, over Stranger Things, the piece of sci-fi 80s nostalgia that I'll remember most from this year.
It's great, Stranger Things definitely seemed less fun as a result of having watched this first.
On the other hand, it's an extremely successful crowdfunding effort, and still probably didn't make anybody any real money. In fact some people paid to be in it. And being a pastiche of bad movies allows a lot of latitude in production value. It's incredibly impressive for the budget, but no serious film would work with those production values. It's also a third of the length of a feature film.
Not a movie, but Stranger Things. Can't believe it hasn't been mentioned yet.
Implicitly, Netflix is pointing out to the studios that they may be charging more to license their content than what it costs to produce a directly competing property from scratch.
Why, for instance, should I pay as much for a season of X-Files reruns as for the production of an entirely new series of Stranger Things? Why would I pay as much for episodes of The Sopranos, that I have already seen, and have on DVD, instead of another new series of Lillyhammer? I wouldn't, and neither would Netflix. The original content is a reminder to the owners of distribution rights that Netflix is the one who owns the ball, and they're the ones that will be taking it with them if they decide to go home and play alone.
And Netflix originals are getting nominated for Emmy Awards, in competition with AMC and HBO shows. Producing exclusive original content was absolutely the correct play for Netflix at the time they decided to do it, and remains so for the present.
Their self made content is where it's at.
Who cares about 100k old movies. Good stuff like House of Cards and Orange is the new Black and Stranger Things with no commercials?
I don't think I mistook you. The Popular Mechanics piece gives an example of quoting body language from Audrey Hepburn in the 1953 movie 'Roman Holiday'.
I don't know how I'm supposed to interpret that loop, or how it fits into any context. I can think of multiple interpretations, and have no way to figure out which one is meant, or if that mixture of interpretations is the point.
It's "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" for me, but without even the search ability that the text phrase has to figure out how it's used in context.
Do you have an example of how quoting is used in a good way?
> "quotations of body-language "acting" depicted in a TV show"
Similar problems exist in TV shows when actors require the watcher to know the allusion (or "quote") in order to understand what's going on. I remember as a kid watching the old Loonie Tunes and recognizing there was a gag, but not understanding it. My mom would explain that it depending on knowing that they were referencing some piece of 1950s American pop culture.
When done well, the quotes fit in smoothly. You don't need to know it's from an external source, though knowing that it does provides extra depth and texture. For example, see "References to 70-80’s movies in Stranger Things" at https://vimeo.com/175929311 .
But in mixed media of text and video, it's very hard to make a smooth transition. That's why I wrote that the clips seem to stand out in large font, exclamation points, etc., as a "look at me!" attention grabber giving the quote far more attention as a quote than as a supplement to the conversation.
House of Cards had the British version to build on, so it's not entirely a Netflix taste triangulation.
But, the CEO or somebody from Netflix has actually spelled out in the past that though they're taking risks in making a bunch of their own content, the risk is smaller than it has historically been. They know the taste of their audience (on a nearly individual level) better than any entertainment company in history ever has. And, they extract the value of their viewers directly and without middlemen, unlike almost every other entertainment company in history. So, for them, a successful show is one that brings in X number of new subscribers and keeps them around through multiple seasons...and that X number is smaller than it's ever needed to be.
So, you're right; they are triangulating in on very specific sub-genres and very specific audiences in ways that entertainment companies in the past couldn't afford to do. This is long-tail television production. Stranger Things, while it is a niche market, is actually one of the bigger niche markets they've tapped into, thus far. It's gotten far more buzz than a lot of the other Netflix original programming.
So, they're either getting better at the triangulation (likely) or they got lucky with this particular toss at the dart board of niche programming, or maybe it's a little of both. And, maybe the people making this show happened to be particularly passionate about it, and it shows in the attention to detail; they're having fun with it, and it makes it fun for viewers who like this sort of thing (or, are at least nostalgic about it...I don't read/watch Stephen King novels/movies very frequently as an adult, but loved them as a kid).
I find the quality of the Netflix originals to vary pretty wildly, and I don't get hooked on most of them. But, I enjoyed Stranger Things. It's a fun escapist bit of entertainment. It's no House of Cards, or even Orange is the New Black, in terms of quality, but it delivers very effectively on what it promises.
I wonder how well Stranger Things is doing among viewers who aren't old enough to have grown up surrounded by this stuff? I know many of my friends on facebook are hooked, but mostly the ones really talking about it are around my age. It's an interesting phenomenon, I think; the stuff it is paying homage to and modeled after was mostly targeted at kids and young adults, but the people most excited about it are maybe middle aged. Weird how that happens.
Totally agree. The title sequence and music taps into some primitive nostalgic core parts of my history I can't even accurately articulate. As soon as it came on, it's like a light in my childhood blinked on. Wonderful.
But the show itself is just meh.
The acting is uniformly bad. Given that it applies to all of the actors, I assume it says more about the directors than the cast. Everyone is too loud and too over the top, all the time, which has the effect of making everything boring. There's no dynamic range in the emotion (except for the mysterious girl, who is pretty great).
I like the story mainly because I enjoy the all the tropes it rehashes. But the dialogue is pedestrian, the pacing is semi-random, and the episodes I've seen so far feel like more of a pastiche of scenes than something tightly polished.
The cinematography is everything I hate about digital film production. It's so easy to color correct every frame that now you're obligated too and everyone does it the exact same way: Crank up the shadows so 90% of the frame is pure solid black (with none of the subtle detail that would still be just perceptible in there if it were film). Get the that's left and kill every color that isn't orange or blue [1].
Cinematographers! You can do amazing things with color today. Stop always doing the same thing!
Still, having said all that, I do enjoy watching it. I think a more experience hand could tighten it into something more spectacular, but it scratches a nostalgic itch that not many other things do.
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=stranger+things&espv=2&biw=1366&bih=806&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiw6ujYyJbOAhUW2mMKHedHAkUQ_AUICCgD#tbm=isch&q=orange+blue+movie+posters
same. not just this show, but all the Netflix originals have this "uncanny valley" aspect to them, where you can tell they're being crafted according to an algorithm, and almost entirely derivative as a result. always very "safe" and according to expectations.
Stranger Things felt to me almost entirely like a sequence of tropes borrowed from other movies. From the Freaks & Geeks cast composition, to the Spielberg Sci-Fi, bald blue-eyed psychic child, etc. Just about the only truly original thing was the design of the threat itself, and it was easily the worst part of the show. Sure, it's a "love letter" to the era, but it's just that.
you can't really A/B test your way out of a local maxima, which is why in spite of most Netflix shows being decent, none of them have actually stood out as "good" in my mind.
There was a wonderful post [1] on r/italy (unfortunately in Italian), by a guy that works in cinema that explained all this and more.
He explains not only the motion blur and the film grain, but also things like how color shift when white fades out (it's about different color sensitivity curves in real film).
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/italy/comments/4te9hl/stranger_things_una_sequenza_dei_titoli_che/?