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The Walking Dead
2010 · TV series · 11 seasons
Created by Frank Darabont
ActionAdventureDramaScience FictionFantasy
Sheriff's deputy Rick Grimes awakens from a coma to find a post-apocalyptic world dominated by flesh-eating zombies. He sets out to find his family and encounters many other survivors along the way.
17 positive34 negative5 mixed88 neutralfrom 144 commenters
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154 comments on Hacker News
I could be misremembering but the Walking Dead season 1 and Game of Thrones season 1 came out around the same time, but didn’t really kill of any major characters until after the first season.
Both are based on pre-existing material but GoT source material predates the Walking Dead by 7 years.
I think this is a very funny question. Since different countries seem to answer this very differently.
In countries like the US the first Season of The Walking Dead was aired with an age rating of TV-14. At the same time the same in Germany this season was rated with an Rating of 18 (Germany uses 0,6,12,18 as ages for rating). So I am somewhat puzzled. Similar when a movie shows a pair of boobs or at least implies some sexual elements the US tend to rate the movie often with their MA-rating. However, in Germany thats different. It seems we have different children in both countries. As the ones in the US are more okay with violence and it does not affect them, where the childs in Germany are more okay with sexual elements.
This was just an example how stupid many rating systems are, their are very dependent on the country and the society you live in. So there is no inherent universalism to what a 12 or a 14 or a 16 year old should see or not.
My point, and I tried to argue this multiple times in this post, is that a goverment should not simply impose more and more bans and restrictions. This seems like the easy way out, but has always drawbacks. One is already described in the article, namely that the parents already start loosing awareness that the internet might be a dangerous place. Since they think: Yeah, there is a ban so its solved!
We should rather give the parents the time such that they can communicate often enough with their child to understand what problems its facing. In what kind of world the child lives and what they are consuming. If both parents are working 40 hours+ each week, they are not able to do this. Someone also mentioned in this thread "why is obesity not first fixed.", it might be a different issue, but the solution is the same. More time for parents mean that they can cook more healthy meals and do not rely on garbage food because they are stressed out.
What? It famously didn't on the streaming side. It had everything on DVD. For years I kept both parts of Netflix because a lot of popular shows—newer ones especially—weren't on it. So I could get DVDs of past seasons. Or go to Hulu for newer episodes.
Hulu was created at the same time, and launched in the same year as Netflix's streaming service, specifically to compete with less-convenient pirated streams of current-run TV with a free-the-next-day-with-ads alternative. And that stuff was never on Netflix at the same time.
High-profile not-on-Netflix-streaming-for-first-run things from the 2007-2014 time frame: The Office, Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, and honestly basically everything else broadcast and cable made during "Peak TV." It was big news and considered a big bet when Netflix debuted their own high-budget first-run content with House of Cards, because of how weird it was to see Netflix competing in the brand-new show space.
I was told I had a roll on "The Walking Dead". Interesting that it decided I was an actor, but didn't list the one adult film that somebody with my name was actually in.
There was a line in one of The Walking Dead TV show spin-offs, something like:
”I've known men who inspire fear. Do you know what they have in common? They never say how frightening they are.”
And here we are.
”I’ve known companies that work on AI. Do you know what they have in common?...”
I wonder whether The Walking Dead ever did episodes with a surviving Amish community among it's many spinoffs. Potential problem for them is being outgunned by any aggressive community nearby.
[Responding to all the comments, so you may need to read through the thread again if I miss context here]
> The war isn't happening as long as you don't look at it.
I'm not ignorant of the war, and yes I follow it; however my mentality stems from the sheer number of months of bad news happening somewhere. I can only give so much of my attention to The World when there's things at the local level to worry about. So I don't engage in "all of it" on the Internet. I have those conversations in person.
> But the answer is not about drowning yourself in pleasant fiction on Amazon Prime or ignoring current events.
I disagree, but also not drowning. Rather engaging online in the manner pre-COVID. You know, like Walking Dead "How would I survive a zombie apocalypse" or Game of Thrones "who's next to die". The 24/7 Internet chatroom known as "the comments section" just wants to deviate the conversation back to politics. I also disagree with the sentiment that we're in "Idiocracy", but I still enjoy the film.
> The fast moving clickbait media of Twitter and Facebook is trash. It's often incorrect, it's full of propaganda
So is every aggregator site. Agenda-Setting Theory [1] dictates what information you're receiving on any given day, and smaller scale Discords with self-promotion know how to gamify Trending algorithms (since most rely on some degree of 'velocity' based on time since post). Couple that with how we've over engineered attention by A/B testing thumbnails [2] and how the mind reads TEXT LIKE THIS [3] (which was also A/B tested for email campaign clickthroughs), I'm left with a curiosity of "what headline text is emotionally anchoring a sentiment"?
Heck, GET OFF THE INTERNET isn't even yelling [4], it's just me abusing that all caps does thing in brain.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda-setting_theory
[2] https://netflixtechblog.com/selecting-the-best-artwork-for-videos-through-a-b-testing-f6155c4595f6
[3] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.685756/full
[4] Reddit Version: https://v.redd.it/hlo2z6a6rctg1, Twitter Version: https://x.com/amgaweda/status/2040744192020717592; Gotta work on encoding cause something made my audio out of sync with the video
That’s basically what tv shows do every time. The pilot is great/awesome then the 10 episodes are boring and the very last one get exciting enough for you to wait the second season.
Best example: the walking dead season tv shows.
Reminds me of the Walking Dead tv show where they had communities being fed by a few raised beds with tomato cages and half a dozen corn stalks.
I'm still on Facebook (and Digg for those HNers that hop on to all the tech boards - you know I see you), but it's to keep up with some family that are there. But I adopted a simple catchphrase (GET OFF THE INTERNET) and time my posts for Sunday mornings to get all them folks that were waking up and immediately scrolling. Repeat that for a few weeks, and I think its helped give people the "please disconnect" message.
I'm a huge wrestling and movie dork, so... screens. And the embedded videos on Reddit didn't help since I could watch wrestling on /r/SquaredCircle rather than support the product I like. In conversations, I've blamed The Walking Dead, as that was the first show I recall encouraging people to "hop online to chat" while the new episodes aired. Then "live tweeting" became a thing and here we are.
Friends and family are still there, but they've at least gone from the "grow your business online" or "complain about politics" to talking about the NFL, or a painting they finished, or some music piece they're working on.
I still want to disconnect more, but we don't really have a cure for "shiny rock addiction" yet.
Or binge watch the entire Walking Dead series in a month
In 28 Days Later the infected starve to death, I can't remember them being overly supernatural.
It is The Walking Dead in which the zombies are basically immortal but useless. Unless the plot requires otherwise. After Season 1 it is a terribly written show. Don't get me started.
That gets really murky really fast.
Is 10 Cloverfield Lane a sequel to Cloverfield? They decided to throw the Cloverfield name onto it shortly before release for marketing reasons, the actual movie has nothing to do with the events and story of the original Cloverfield.
Is the video game Nier a sequel to Drakengard? Technically yes, but the connection is vague and distant. And there's also Drakengard 2 which is the sequel to a different ending for the original game.
How would you count Fear the Walking Dead, the spin-off series of The Walking Dead, itself and adaptation of a comic book series. Do the shows continue to get copyright protection so long as the comics are still being published? Or vice versa?
This clickbait title is about comic book movie actors making money at conventions.
"Fan conventions, where stars can take home hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for a few hours of time, once were the domain of has-beens and sci-fi novelties. But the business has become so lucrative — think $500,000 for Captain America‘s Chris Evans or The Walking Dead favorite Norman Reedus to appear — that current TV and film stars are popping up at events like Salt Lake City Comic-Con and Heroes and Villains Fan Fest."
For anyone looking for a nostalgic, but honest, revisit, check out "Farscape(1999) Retrospective/Review" on YouTube[1]. It is comprehensive and I think picks out the strengths and weaknesses of the show very honestly as a fan. My personal belief is that the show peaked in Season 2 (the heist arc is pretty epic) and then started going downhill after Crichton split, and the introduction of some legitimately annoying crew, but they regained some glory with the Peacekeeper Wars mini-series/movie. The chemistry between the two leads (Ben Browder and Claudia Black) was always a particular strength of the show. Highly recommended but, like with so many series (The Walking Dead, GOT, etc) if you skip the last season(s) you'll be fine.
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0POJFs5PUM
The expanse... Are they still working on a sequel? I wish they hadn't had to get rid of Alex.
Also season 6 of the walking dead still feels like the shows awkward finale.
I grew up playing a lot of computer games (PC). A lot of them. It mostly stopped once I went to university - for the following decade I played only newer versions of games I was familiar with (e.g. newer Civilization, newer Command and Conquer, etc). And even that was the once-a-year binge - not continual. Then I stopped altogether.
There were multiple reasons I slowed down. I was interested in my academics. I looked back at all the time I had played pre-university and (rationally) lamented the time lost. The genre I liked had died (adventure games), and I really didn't like 1st person shooters. And I didn't want to deal with the headache of upgrading my PC every 2 years just to play a game. Also, I switched to Linux, which didn't help.
I bought a PS3 in 2010, but it was only for Blu-Ray and streaming. Then in around 2016, on a whim, I decided to check out a game from the library. I picked The Walking Dead (Telltale version).
I loved it. I started checking out other games. Someone bought me an Xbox One as a gift. But this all lasted a few months before I stopped playing again.
Finally, around 18 months ago, I felt guilty that I had spent $100 on games back in 2016 when I got the Xbox (some big sale, so quite a few games), but never played them. So I told myself I'll try a few.
The first one I played was Life is Strange. Loved it. Then Oxenfree. Loved it. It's been 18 months and I haven't stopped playing.
Before, I'd spend 30-60 minutes per day watching some TV show. I've merely substituted that time with gaming. And it is so, so much more rewarding than watching a TV show - even a great show. It's counterintuitive, but I find it both relaxes me and invigorates me at the same time in a way a good show on TV wouldn't (and I love good stories). With TV, you're just staring. With games, you're actively thinking. It's more dynamic. You make decisions. You're in control. And games can have great storytelling.
I remember times in my life where my work was really stressful. Looking back, I wish I had played games back then.
The funny thing is, while I had earlier lamented all the time in my youth spent playing games, when I look back now I have only positive feelings. I still have good memories of certain games - heck even certain achievements in games, from 30 years ago. That time wasn't wasted.
I always find it amusing when someone belittles gamers as losers, but then they go watch TV.
The quality of the IP that they sold off w/ eOne, both on the music side in their 2021 sale and the tv/movie side with this recent one, is staggering.
Notably, the entire Death Row Records catalog, Grey's Anatomy, Criminal Minds, international distribution for The Walking Dead, etc.
I noticed that the watchtime of `You` was split half-and-half between the new season 4 and the prior seasons 1-3. I was curious about the total results by show, including all seasons. Here's the top 25:
TITLE TOTAL HRS WATCHED ----- ----------------- Ginny & Georgia 967,200,000 The Night Agent 812,100,000 You 766,300,000 Outer Banks 740,400,000 The Walking Dead 738,600,000 The Glory 622,800,000 La Reina del Sur 616,800,000 CoComelon 601,200,000 Suits (2011) 599,100,000 The Blacklist 596,900,000 Manifest 581,900,000 Grey's Anatomy 560,300,000 Wednesday 507,700,000 Gilmore Girls 505,800,000 Breaking Bad 505,000,000 Queen Charlotte 503,000,000 Friends (1994) 448,500,000 Love Is Blind 439,300,000 Lucifer 434,300,000 The Big Bang Theory 420,400,000 Shameless (U.S.) 392,600,000 PAW Patrol 392,300,000 New Amsterdam (2018) 375,500,000 Brooklyn Nine-Nine 358,900,000 Firefly Lane 342,700,000
This seems to be the case with virtually any profession. You have to just learn to live with it, mostly, maybe even laugh at it. It was damn near a pasttime when I was still in the Army to make fun of how the military is portrayed in film and television. Basic as fuck shit like almost no one even has a haircut that meets regulations. It also makes you doubly appreciate when someone gets it right. We all loved Band of Brothers for that. At least the first season of Mr. Robot stands out in light of so many ridiculous and shitty "hacker" portrayals. Having worked on classified projects is even worse. After working for the NRO for years, scenes of people willy-nilly taking over satellites are so silly you just have to take it as part of the way that fictional universe works, clearly unlike the real universe. The Mission Impossible movies are still pretty entertaining in spite of it.
Honestly, probably the worst thing I can recall is the first season of The Walking Dead when Rick hides inside of a tank turret. I was a tank commander back in my time. Do television writers really think there is that much space inside the turret?
I know this is conventional wisdom and also is very true.
however, the funny thing is, when eventually a film maker comes along and makes a film that is both new, unique, and outlandishly successful, then suddenly its "obvious" and Hollywood starts to copy that, but it takes forever for the right person to be in the right place for that to get moved forward, so you end up with rinse wash repeat stuff for the longest time.
For example, HBO taking a risk on Game Of Thrones or the initial conception of the new Marvel movies (I'm talking about Iron Man, the first one from 2007, and so on, when it was still novel), Breaking Bad was novel when it came out too. Same with The Walking Dead (the plot elements, not so much the idea of a zombie horror)
Its so weird how this industry appears to work from the outside
The interesting thing about sitcoms is I've never heard anyone talk about a new sitcom in years (maybe Brooklyn Nine Nine?), maybe people are rewatching Seinfeld, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, The Office, etc as those are the only good ones we have.
The entertainment is also different since a sitcom doesn't require much attention and is much more bingeable whereas regular shows are hit-or-miss.
But still you can't really mass produce Black Mirror or other shows without them going super downhill. Already for Black Mirror the episodes are always ranked by quality, by season and all-in-all. You mass produce these kinds of TV shows and you end up with The Walking Dead which just takes on a repeat of the same thing.
More seasons are fine and can add to the story. Game of Thrones should have actually been a season longer, but the directors got greedy and wanted to wrap it up so they could move on to their new contracts (that thankfully evaporated after the disaster of the last couple seasons).
Sitcom style shows are also perfectly fine being left open ended. It's kind of an annoyance that British and Japanese shows will spend time creating funny characters in an interesting environment and just end it in a season when there was plenty left to explore.
But serial dramas should have an ending planned from the beginning and an early cancellation should have some kind of early exit clause to wrap the show in a limited number of episodes.
The walking dead went from an intriguing story line to a complete waste of time when I read the show runner had no interest in exploring the origins of the outbreak or finding a cure, he just wanted multiple series to explore the outbreak in various parts of the world. Just a complete and total disrespect for the audiences time, since the thought of an ending wasn't even considered.
It's also completely disrespectful when networks pull the plug early. There was so much hype around Westworld with multiple seasons that were building and then HBO cancelled it without the final season and took it off the service, so there isn't even the option to watch the nearly complete series.
As a newcomer to the story (and i believe most redditors are as well) i absolutely love that they keep the zombies on the down low and more something that is something in the background.
I'm tired of zombie slasher movies/shows. I want a good drama show with great story telling set in a post apocalyptic world, and i dont want it to be like "the walking dead".
You’ve obviously never taken the LA metro episode of the walking dead. And the ignorance shows.
Also worth mentioning, Plex UI and UX is so much better than any of the apps I’m paying subscription fees to (7 currently!!!).
To pile up onto your example of Westworld, I was super annoyed when I subscribed to AMC+ to catch up on The Walking Dead, just to find out that only last few episodes of current season are available and since I was waiting for more to air, I am now SOL.
I've been slowly making my way through the Walking Dead season 10 on Netflix.
I legitimately will skip probably 60-70% of the episodes. They'll seriously skip from one scene of super-slow angsty bullshit to another scene with other characters involved in super-slow angsty bullshit.
I watch just enough to get the point and then skip the next 5-10 minutes until the next scene shows up, at which point I'll watch just enough to get the point ... ad nauseum.
----
It doesn't have to be like this, but JFC I'm not interested in someone spending 10 minutes expressing what a normal human being would express in 1 because the producer thinks slowing their speech patterns down to .0001x is somehow more dramatic.
I cannot wait for this trend to pass because it's absolutely not just the walking dead.
I watched this video and I think you've grossly overstated how disturbing it is.
The "theme" (insofar as anything high fashion really has a theme) seems like a mixture of grindhouse and apocalypse. "Child carrying a doll" is a borderline trope in that context: compare, for example, the first episode of The Walking Dead.
I don't know anything about the thing you haven't linked, because you haven't linked it. But the panic over this video doesn't pass the sniff test.
Thinking back to shows like Lost and Walking Dead as examples. The community aspect of episode based shows is better IMO.
I asked for "The Walking Dead directed by x" and got a content violation, I guess because my prompt included "dead".
This is going to be a disaster, Like GoT Season 8 level diaster. Mark my words. My reasoning:
1. The budget for the original LOTR trilogy was $281 million [1]. Obviously there's inflation but we're also talking film vs TV. Films tend to be much more expensive to produce to the point where only theatrical releases tend to make films economical;
2. The showrunners are JD Vance and Patrick McKay. If you check their IMDB profiles they have almost no credits. How on Earth did they get this job? To put this in context: films are run by directors. Producers work for the director. TV shows are run by showrunners, which are really producers. Directors work for the producers. There's good reason for this. The showrunners need to maintain consistency across the entire season while individual episode directors will manage the schedule for their own episode.
Producers are writers and you'd expect that any producer has a long list of writing credits and a premium TV showrunner will have lots of producer and writer credits.
3. No name recognition in the actors that I can see. There's nothing wrong with eelvating talented no name actors but you need to pepper in some name recognition. It builds hype and recognized actors tend to be recognized for a reason. GoT had Sean Bean and Peter Dinklage. There were also seasoned actors who just weren't well known (eg Lena Headley);
4. A lot of shows go downhill when they run out of original material. It happened to GoT in apsectacular fashion. It happened to the Handmaid's Tale (the book only covered Season 1). It takes a strong writing team to generate good original material. Being in Middle Earth is both a blessing and a curse. There is source material like the Silmarillion but that can also hamstring you in a way that greenfield writing isn't.
5. Statements made suggest the showrunners and Amazon just don't get the tone of Middle Earth, like they were trying to make GoT in Middle Earth. Not everything has to be GoT. Jackson understood LOTR. It's why his vision was so good.
6. Spinoffs are hard. The most successful spinoffs are organic. Frasier (from Cheers) and Better Caul Saul (from Breaking Bad) spring to mind. Both came from a successfully developed character that was proven to audiences and thus also had inbuilt interest. HBO is busy throwing mud at the wall to see if any GoT spinoff will stick. Even now I'm not sure HBO has any idea of how badly D&D shit the bed with GoT season 8. It undermined the interest in earlier seasons and nobody talks about GoT now. In seasons 3-5 they were actually showing episodes in theaters (even IMAX theaters). Think about that. Nobody cares about these spinoffs and D&D are a big part of why. But they're also not organic.
If you want to see what happens without strong leadership and understanding the source material, look at the Hobbit (yes Jackson was involved but he came in very late).
Amazon has committed $1 billion to this and I believe they are obligated to produce at least 5 seasons. I predict we'll see 2 or even 3 different showrunners in that time and the whole thing will likely be incoherent. Look at American Gods Season 1 to 2 or the downfall of The Walking Dead for just how much this can doom a project.
[1]: https://www.indiewire.com/2019/04/elijah-wood-lord-of-the-rings-amazon-1-billion-1202127879/
I have not enough karma to make the point above and not risking ending up underwater.
But the hell with it...I can always delete it.
I think people are taking crazy pills, they religiously follow this guy and his delusions about becoming a multiplanetary specie before the Sun becomes a red giant....5 billions years from now.
As they have such thoughts they have to walk through human feces and scenes from the Walking Dead...only with the homeless instead of zombies.
Stuff that would scare them to death if they saw it in a movie or compel them to pity if they happened in the background of a live news reportage from Ukraine.
Instead it's happening under their nose as they wonder if Mars is ambitious enough or we should aim directly for the Andromeda Galaxy.
> We are on the cusp of a completely new way to generate and consume content. Copyright laws will have to be rewritten. Once this pandora box is open it can't be closed.
The question is not if but why
We don't need more content, we need more curated and higher quality content.
Random by definition has a very low probability of producing quality.
Case in point: The walking dead.
It's already an infinite variation of the same topic but the good bits ended after season 2...
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>
Nailed it. This article is a textbook example of why STEM people shouldn't be so quick to dismiss things like political science.
What we're talking about here is governance -- laws, norms, and fairness. Nobody lives on an island. Even on land that's "yours", you're still reliant on things like roads, water pipes, and other shared public infrastructure. You don't like how someone's running things, vote them out or leave, but don't pretend you're better off doing everything yourself. "Self-sufficiency is the road to poverty" as a famous economist said.
Incidentally I've been watching the walking dead again (season 8) and a lot of this stuff is the subject of the show. It's definitely had some rough patches but at its core, it's a show about how to build communities and large-scale civilizations, and what effects various leadership styles have on each society's long-term prospects. Very relevant.
I had an interesting VR experience, I bought the Oculus during lockdown when I had some time off work. I played a lot of hours over a few days to complete the Walking Dead Game. What I felt was most curious, was afterwards I now have visual memories of being in the apocalyptic town fighting zombies. Almost like, a fake memory of it. I think because VR is total visual immersion, there could be some memory link unlike that which can be found from film or monitor based games.
Everyone thought it was cool how episodes of The Walking Dead kept getting longer. But then someone ran the numbers and it turned out the episodes were still the standard ~40 minutes, and every single new minute past that was ads. And not just ads, but lots of super short ads, so they're even more annoying.
https://old.reddit.com/r/thewalkingdead/comments/86o9du/i_timed_the_last_episode_to_see_why_it_seems_like/
AMC does it in the spinoffs too.
I have a problem getting to his point when the examples he shows at the start are so unlike what I see when I enter the same search phrases.
"COVID-19 trends in Palm Beach" didn't bring up any hotel listings. Instead I get statistics, cases, and a map of cases from the New York Times, and after that a list of ordinary links.
"the walking dead season 11" showed an ad from AMCPlus.com, which is fairly understandable since it's totally on point, followed by regular links, the first to wikipedia.
I know that what individuals see is customized to some extent, but I can't imagine what sort of search history he has that would get the results he shows.
If his examples are not typical, it seems possible his premise is flawed.
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!
The Walking Dead is going to finish up on AMC much later than usual and as a result, it has been very late for it to come on Netflix. Season 10 of The Walking Dead has not yet arrived in the US. When will it release on Netflix? Here is everything that you need so far.
People frequently show more affection in movies to animals than to humans. The Walking Dead spent years graphically and brutally killing humans both dead and undead and no one flinched. Then one episode the starving protagonists killed a pack of feral dogs for food and suddenly there were tears shed.
Dunno, I watched The Exorcist a couple of years ago and it's one of scariest horror films that I watched. Not even in the same league with modern stuff.
Not saying I'm not desensitized to fake on-screen violence (I eat comfortably watching The Walking Dead), I just think horror being scary has nothing to do with violence being scary.
There’s a running refinery in several of the films that is a stronghold for a clan usually. It’s better than the Walking Dead Tv show having cars run for years after industry shuts down , or they siphon gas from some rusted piece of junk.
The Walking Dead has a bicycle for I think two initial episodes but bicycles would run out of consumables (tires/inner tubes/chains/cables) though it might be better situation than automobiles running out of non spoiled gasoline in a year once industrialized manufacturing stops. The rubber in tires/tubes can rot/degrade with uv exposure and cables rust. Different use case from post apocalypse but I have to replace multiple chains/cables/tires per year on multiple bikes.
In the UK, Doctor Who is clearly an outlier. The other really long-running shows are soap operas like Eastenders or comedy panel shows.
But in the US, there seem to be an awful lot of outliers, and it's on the strength of those series that Netflix initially established their following: Friends, The Office, Park and Rec, Seinfeld, Community, The Walking Dead, The Blacklist, Gilmore Girls, Grey's Anatomy, West Wing, That 70's Show, Supernatural, Criminal Minds, and I could keep going, honestly, for quite a while.
So yes, there's an extent to which 5 or 8 seasons is less common, but the goal for US shows has been 100 episodes for decades now, which is usually 5 seasons of 20+ episodes each.
If Netflix is adopting a more UK-like approach, that might result in better TV eventually, but it would be nice for creators to know they have to tell their story in 16 episodes rather than 100.
This is one reason I really like the "miniseries" format. It's a broad enough label that it can include something a few 1-hr episodes long or 8 of them. I guess at the longer end, they're closer to a "season" of a typical show, but the idea is that it's a complete story arc with a defined beginning and end.
I love how modern formats allow for stories to be told where they otherwise wouldn't fit into a single film or work as a weekly recurring series. I've always felt that a movie is like a short story: you're dropped into the plot and the background is exposed through the course of action. Longer formats like the miniseries can tell a story more on the scale of a full novel.
When you get into stuff like "The Walking Dead" where it theoretically starts off like a novel but keeps renewing and keeps rehashing the same basic plot points for years, it's like one of those novel series where they just keep cranking out new sequels as long as people are buying them, quality be damned.
I’m getting my popcorn ready for this episode of “walking dead” unfold all over the internet news outlets.
> this narrative got appropriated and transplanted to America, in film, TV, and fiction. Where it hybridized with white settler fear of a slave uprising. The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising
I think it's a pretty fair to say the modern zombie story starts with Night of the Living Dead, and this viewpoint couldn't possibly be any further from how Romero handles themes of race, class, and authority.
I mean, maybe it's because I don't watch Walking Dead, but I've never seen a zombie film where I thought I was supposed to empathize with the protagonists. Except maybe Shaun of the Dead!
Complete overkill. YAGNI. A month or two of food and medicine is just about all you'll need. Dude is acting like he's going to be homeless, society will evaporate, and be scrounging for water from mud puddles like some episode of The Walking Dead. I live in Paradise and deal with fires, black bears, drug-addict trespassers, insurance companies and power outages. This story's level of insanity is a waste of money and unrealistic. I have a SHTF bag, but it's only for when I don't know where I'll end up.. and haven't needed it yet. And, a lot of that prepper stuff is junk: I tried a Survivor Filter Pro and it fouls the filter into uselessness with any brackishness or sediment; it's totally worthless.
And you can still go out if you:
- wear indirect vented goggles (eye protection)
- an N95 mask (disregard the CDC manipulative lies)
- use 70% hand sanitizer, 1% bleach, or 0.5% hydrogen peroxide per WHO for cleaning surfaces
- wash your hands thoroughly for 20+ seconds, and nails too
- decontaminate/remove yourself, your clothing and PPE outdoors before entering your or someone's home.. removing clothing straight into a washing machine without entering living areas is a good idea
Also, the latest is that SARS-CoV-2 can survive up to 9 days on fomites (objects), so surfaces will stay contaminated for sometime.
I did an exam in European and International Copyright Law in college even though I studied Computer Science. Based on my knowledge this whole story about forgetting the copyright logo and entering the publich domain sounds like a myth/fictional.
Copyright of movies covers the video frames but it does not cover the concept of the story. The only part that could be protected are maybe fictional names of characters, cities and maybe special breeds. But the movie does not even mention the word zombie. So anyone would have been able to use the word zombie freely. The general concept of someone dead coming back alive is not protected by copyright simply because general concepts are not protected.
Even if somehow the movie was called ZOMBIE and they copyrighted and patent it, others would have been able to do movies/comics/books WITHOUT using the word zombie.
In the Walking Dead, zombies are called walkers so they would have got around the zombie patent by calling zombies something else.
The Olympics won't be cancelled.
Why?
Because the percentage increase of foreigners coming into Tokyo as a result of the Olympics is negligible compared to the numbers going in and out on a daily basis.
I love a good end-of-the-world scenario as much as anyone. But, gimme a break... What rational benefit would there be in cancelling the Olympics? The only risk of disease arising from the Olympics is the spread of herpes, chlamydia, and ghonorhea in the Olympic village (a small price to pay to party with uber-fit gymnasts...)
We've heard these warnings so many times...
Ebola, Avian Flu, SARS, MERS, West Nile Virus, Mad Cow Disease, H1N1, Zika Virus, etc., etc....
Wake me when the dead start not staying dead... Now THAT would be a virus I could can get behind. Until then, I fully expect to watch the Olympics this summer (and maybe an episode or two of The Walking Dead), and read through some of these hysterical posts and chuckle.
The Walking Dead season 7: This is why the word 'zombie' is never used
It turns out horror maestro George A Romero doesn't exist in this show's universe
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/the-walking-dead-season-7-theres-a-reason-why-the-word-zombie-is-a-big-no-no-a7461246.html
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I've forgotten which movie now, but there's a big scene in a blockbuster where they destroy a building for real. The studio made a deal with the town to take a dilapidated building, destroy it, then build the town a new building to replace it.
When I used to watch the Walking Dead I kept thinking there was a missed opportunity to do something similar in Detroit with any post-apocalyptic show and some abandoned neighborhoods. Even razing the properties afterward and paying for disposal would be an improvement in safety.
The internet wins for "consume when you want" but TV is always going to win for "live" whenever a large audience is involved. Just from a sheer efficiency standpoint, the bandwidth involved for millions of TCP connections for a single broadcast is staggering.
That's why this model can work fine for niche live events that few people want but not so much for mass market live broadcasts. It's this reason that you've got to caveat "TV Shows" vs "Live TV" when you make that statement.
"Shows" can be easily cached on CDNs much closer to each consumer. "Live" can't.
If anything, I'd see the major broadcast networks and ESPN continuing to get stronger, while everything else on TV gets weaker.
The only TV shows that people have to watch "live" are shows with a community built around them, ready to react and discuss it as it's happening (Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, etc). This is where movie audiences are similar because that opening weekend crowd for an anticipated movie tends to share the experience.
I honestly wish they'd bring back midnight showings instead of 7pm Thursday showings, because that midnight crowd energy is impossible to replicate.
I think this goes to show how much of an impact HBO had on television.
There isn't an argument quite like this outside of maybe NBC's 90s sitcoms, arguing about Seinfeld/Friends/Frasier or AMC's late-aughts Mad Men/Breaking Bad/Walking Dead.
Of all the shows you mentioned the only ones I have watched is, OITB (left it at after watching S04 I think), Master of None (both the seasons), I realise that its a drama that leans toward being a rom-com but I do not watch rom-coms at all. Kudos to Mindhunter, indeed that was entertaining and right in my ballpark. Liked House of cards till the time Spacey was there, S06 disappointed me. Season 1 of Making a Murderer was outstanding, season 2 didn't catch my interest. Also the last comedy I watched end-to-end I think was Entourage (which was produced by HBO), The Office (US) and Parks And Recreation, not surprisingly Netflix doesn't stream any of these in my region, Prime Video does the last two and Hotstar streams Entourage.
These are good shows not great ones like The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, BB, Six Feet Under you know about the stuff that critics rave about etc. I don't care if Birdbox was watched by all of Netflix's subscribers, thats precisely the sort of thing that I don't watch the majority of the time, you watch that thing once and you forget that you ever watched it again. I'm now on probably my sixth or seventh rewatch of The Wire, that should tell you something about my viewing habits and why Netflix's content just doesn't work for me. I don't expect a network to consistenly churn out shows like that but at least some of the shows should be somewhere close to that level which HBO continues to do with The Deuce, Succession, True Detective(I know they fucked the dog on S02) etc.
Also you have the time to watch ALL of that, I don't. I work in tech too, I have an hour on weekdays and maybe 2-3 on weekends for leisure, so its only natural that I would be picky about what I watch, the absolute best, currently that would mean shows like The Americans, Escape from Dannemora and shows from the past like Halt and Catch Fire(from AMC), Six feet under, Deadwood which not surpisingly were also made by HBO. Netflix doesn't stream any of that.
I also don't understand how you think AMC won't exist, are they going to be insolvent ? Doesn't look like it, they have a cash-cow in The Walking Dead(I only watched till S06 then got bored) They got two of the best TV shows I liked BB and BCS, BCS is gonna kill it in the next season. They also produced The Terror, a brilliant mini-series which Netflix didn't stream as well and again Prime Video did. As a viewer I don't care about Netflix's subscriber numbers or HBO's lack thereof, I want to watch content I like which sadly Netflix doesn't produce on a consistent basis, this is entirely subjective and I realise that I might be one of the edge-cases in all the millenials when I say Netflix don't tickly my fancy.
I'm not biased towards HBO, hell HBO doesn't even stream in my country, I'm incredibly picky about what I watch since I'm short on time, Netflix churns out a LOT of shows, its only natural that some of them turn out to be brilliant and some of them indeed are, but the rest, like 90% of the shows are just average, they don't work for me, I simply do not have the time to watch them.
In that sense, Netflix is like the Y-Combinator of producing original content. You produce(invest in) hundreds of TV shows(startups) and hope one of them makes it big (becomes a unicorn) and the rest of them, well they would be probably cease to exist after some time.
I always felt like The Walking Dead was missing an opportunity to do some good.
Years ago I read about a movie production crew that got permission to demolish a rundown public building as part of filming in exchange for rebuilding it afterward.
For TWD you could use several of those abandoned Detroit neighborhoods for a sequence and then bulldoze the neighborhood to the foundations afterward, reducing the health and safety concerns.
Walking Dead is a TV show that makes zero sense whatsoever. I dropped watching it after 2.5 seasons, because after season 1 it lost any semblance of a plot, and became a TV-show-equivalent of the very zombies it portrays - mindlessly wandering around. I can't understand why it is so popular.
These are some games I played 10 years ago: Snake, Pacman, Space Invaders, Oregon Trail. These games weren't addictive because they were so repetitive and the difficulty level increased to the point where it was frustrating and impossible.
Oregon Trail and games like that had an end.
So non-addictive games are designed to end whether through increasing difficulty levels or story?
Three of my favorite games are Telltale Games The Walking Dead (PC release, mobile port), Last of Us, and The World Ends with You (Nintendo DS release, mobile port). I loved the story. They weren't addictive and they had an end. TWD had such a simple game mechanic (point and click choose your adventure) too, it was pure storytelling. If you watch Ready Player One the movie, it's a little bit of video game history. You can also research video game history and play those old games too.
The most recent game I played that's kind of like old game mechanics is Overcooked. I unlocked the NG+ for Overcooked 2 and I had to quit because it was too hard which is a good thing.
One thing that bugs me is that (guesstimate) 1/3 of Hollywood stars are Australian (or Kiwi), but they always (have to) do US accents in their movies. And about 90% of the time there's actually an Australian character in a US movie/series they get a US actor to play the Australian! And it sounds so very fake, though not to people in the US evidently. Both of these I find hard to watch.
It's no better with Brits. I never could watch House after loving Blackadder, and The Walking Dead is so weird after being a huge fan of This Life. (i.e. the lead character in both are English)
Visual Novel is an apt description, though I'll disagree with you on one thing: most Japanese visual novels back when I last checked them, which was in the 90s/early 00s, were terrible. And I mean, really, embarrassingly terrible, and not just for their random and bizarre sex scenes, but overall badly written and cliched. Some of it could be chalked up to poor English translations, but most of it was mind-numbing cliches and nonsensical situations you'd laugh at if found in a book or movie, and which you had to repetitively click through.
That said, yes, I think The Walking Dead Season could accurately be described as a Visual Novel with very little branching, more than a full-fledged point-and-click adventure. I think it succeeds at this; Lee's story is certainly more interesting than whatever happens with Rick & crew in the tremendously repetitive TV show. I can see how Telltale's formula gets repetitive for subsequent games, since it's essentially a one trick pony, but still... I was entertained for one season :)
I've been playing their game The Walking Dead Season 1 and yes, it's mostly the illusion of choice, not real choice. But it's also surprisingly convincing during your first play (characters remember choices you made; they are either friendly or hostile depending on how you treated them; some show up later and some don't; etc). It's only after you replay the game that you see underneath and realize it's all mostly cosmetic, and that you cannot make really meaningful choices.
Because asset polish doesn't matter nearly as much as gameplay: the high-res remake will never make as much as the original.
The most successful game of the year, Far Cry 5, has sold 1/20th as many copies as Minecraft has, a game that is ugly as sin and always has been, but it's fun enough that it doesn't matter.
There's no point in adapting a property if the adaptation won't grow the audience. The Walking Dead was a comic book superstar, selling upwards of 500,000 units per issue when it was picked up by AMC for the TV adaptation. The TV adaptation is now reaching 8 million viewers per episode, and that's considered low.
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.
Just realized that, my mistake. Every time I hear Georgia I immediately think about the country in the Caucasus. I am half asleep right now.
Georgia, USA, could be interesting too, although the only thing I know about it is they film "The Walking Dead" there.
Being good is evidently boring...
I added a few examples in another comment. Even Rambo sacrificed his own safety and freedom to help rescue POWs.
Modern day heroes are all a bunch of whining self-centered children. Just go watch any super hero movie today for a good example of that.
It's almost a badge of honor to be morally ambiguous. Compare a list of protaganists, how many are anti-heros? Do we even have any real good guys in movies and tv these days? Even Superman has been turned into a murderer for this generation.
A few examples from popular TV:
Walking Dead: everyone is a murderer. Murder is justified consistently.
Billions: It's hard to know who to root for, they are all rotten. The righteous people are the "bad guys"
Scrubs: All the characters are morally bankrupt (compared to 30 years before it's time)
Ironman: A selfish rich asshole.
Batman: (ok, he was always an anti-hero from day 1)
Deadpool: Do I need to explain this one?
Wicked: A play about how the evil witch is misunderstood.
The Shield, The Wire, modern Star Trek vs old Star Trek, the list is too long...
There has always been corruptions, lack of morals. That's not my issue, it's that today, there simply isn't even close to a minority of actual real main protagonists that are selfless.
I think people find good people trying to do what is right just boring these days.
/rant
And H1Z1 was a "rip-off" of DayZ. And DayZ is what made battle royal popular (I won't go as far as to say invented it, as I'm sure BR must have existed in other games before it). It's hard to understand why DayZ did not cease this market opportunity, but I guess they are too buzzy actually making a good simulator. Yes, simulator, DayZ is not a game, it's a zombie Apocalypse simulator. And that's what makes DayZ so unique. I can't wait until DayZ gets their first release (it has been in alpha for several years, and will soon hit beta) and it will have game-play like the walking dead tv series, with zombie hordes, state of the art gun fighting, weather, hiking, zombie - simulation, with decent graphics and gameplay. The early days of DayZ (Arma 2 mod) was the best game experience I've ever had in my life, and I've been a pretty hard core gamer.
To add to that, in some zombie stories, such as The Walking Dead, everyone turns into a zombie when they die, even if they haven't been bitten. I don't know if it's ever explained in the graphic novels, but in the TV show it's glossed over, with the character Rick Grimes saying something like "whatever it is, it's in all of us now". I forget if Romero's films share the same conceit. But in The Night of the Living Dead, the dead are actually coming to life, raising from graves.
GearVR and Rift owner here. Social VR, for example AltspaceVR, is also quite worthwhile with mobile VR like the GearVR. Yes, you cannot look around people and you have only one 'hand', but that's good enough. Another feature I regularly use is PhoneCast to use most Android 2D apps in VR. I remember catching up 4 seasons of The Walking Dead in double speed with BsPlayer every night. Of course BigScreen will also be a killer app when it's released for mobile to watch movies with others.
I would disagree about the cultural significance of TV shows and movies. They occupy very different places in culture.
TV shows aren't just long-form narratives; people develop relationships with the show and its characters similar to the relationships they develop with friends they see regularly and learn about over time. People's experiences with the show differ based on whether they started watching from when it first aired or binged it after the end of a season. Moreover, shows change, often as a result of the cultural response to the show or viewership (see, e.g., Walking Dead's latest season, L&O SVU, daytime soaps).
Movies are essentially one-time events and distinct unalterable shared experiences They don't change (directors' cuts notwithstanding). The cultural response to the movie may change over time, but the movie itself doesn't. (For example, Gone with the Wind is the same movie it's always been, but people now view its depiction of minority characters far less favorably.)
This article makes it seem like it's almost inevitable for video game movies to be bad, almost as if there's some objective formula which dooms video game movies to failure. For example, the author mentions something like: "stray too far from the original and you get weird movies that alienate fans, but stick too closely to the original and you get something boring and overly game-like." Seems like a false dichotomy to me.
There's definitely a way to create a highly-compelling side story that "fulfills" the promise of an original series without being overly constrained by it. For example, Tell Tale Studios is a game company that is quite famous for making good side stories that latch onto existing franchises, and their Walking Dead video game is one of the best video game storylines I've ever played through. It seems like it's quite possible to turn good movies and good tv shows into compelling video games; surely this is possible in reverse as well! It's also really easy for me to imagine an alternate universe where video game adaptations are like comic-book or novel adaptations, which are capable of performing quite well.
I do think that making good movies that are entertaining and have artistic merit is always hard, and since the problem of making good movies is already not easy, adding additional constraints from a video game premise probably makes it more difficult, especially since film types are probably more likely to be passionate lovers of comics and books than they are to be passionate gamers. There's probably also a problem with the prestige of video game titles that makes it difficult to find good writing talent.
> For Netflix, I have a subscription. But guess what I do when I want to watch the latest Walking Dead or Game of Thrones. I want it convenient, preferably legal, but most of all convenient.
What is inconvenient about subscribing to HBO Now? You have to do more work to find/download an episode of GoT compared to streaming via HBO Now. Or you could stream the episodes from Prime. Same with Walking Dead. There are rarely inconvenient streaming options.
>Even marquee cable TV shows like The Walking Dead are having trouble holding onto viewers.
You can't cite that, The Walking Dead has story and writing problems outside of general TV viewership declines.
I really hate advertising. There's a lot of investment in human psychology, and I sometimes find myself being seduced by a piece of advertising. They really know how to push my buttons.
It's insidious. Even news articles have paid content. Paid placement for TV and movies (Netflix is not immune to this). It's everywhere, and impossible to escape.
His voice reminds me of Geoffrey Palmer's, whose reading of The Man Who Was Thursday for the BBC is excellent.
My main problem with audiobooks are the narrators, especially in fiction; I give up on about 2/3 of the books for that reason. I have a similar problem with TV shows like The Walking Dead - the acting is just too mediocre. Maybe I'm a snob, but it literally yanks my suspension of disbelief away.
I don't think I ever listened to one read by Guidall, though; does anyone have a recommendation?
>and I'll admit to binge watching HoC, as shallow as it is
Compared to Walking Dead which you mention as a favorite?
I remember me and others, on HN years ago, complaining about how Netflix was investing too much money into TV and original TV while skimping on its streaming movie catalog (this was around the time its STARZ deal was ending). Turns out their strategy was exactly right. I like watching movies, but nothing gets my return visits like serial TV, such as "Breaking Bad" and "Walking Dead". Investing so much money into "House of Cards" seemed bizarre 5 years ago but now that Netflix has so much exclusive content, it's hard as a longtime subscriber to just quit it. even as someone who now subscribes to Amazon Prime and HBO. I actually like Amazon Prime's library, which can be augmented with content I buy from Amazon separately, enough to quit Netflix. But my parents really like the Netflix shows (and I'll admit to binge watching HoC, as shallow as it is), which is something Prime or HBO will never have.
edit: besides the Netflix-conceived shows, e.g. HoC and "Narcos", there are the Netflix-bought shows, such as Arrested Development and Black Mirror, and what seems like countless comedy specials, such as Louis CK 2017. Back when I thought HoC was a poor investment, I was thinking that one really great show a year wouldn't be enough to keep me subscribing year after year. But Netflix seems to be introducing exclusive content several times a month.
I really want to like Atlanta, but the whole city makes my skin crawl.
Whenever we go there, usually to take in an MLB game, I just want to turn around and leave immediately. There doesn't seem to be any rational reason for it. When the spouse drives out of town to go stalk Walking Dead filming locations, the overwhelming sense of dread eases up, and I just get bored looking at bits of rural Georgia that were lucky enough to appear on television for one scene.
Maybe I'm allergic to peachtree streets.
In contrast, NYC, Chicago, Boston, Phoenix, Nashville, San Diego, Denver, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, and most other US cities I have visited just don't have an aura to them that I can pick up. Baltimore felt like I just walked in on someone who had been crying and was trying to hide it. Washington, DC, felt like someone was following me the whole time, like being hunted. Cincinnati felt great just being around it; it made me want to consider moving there.
Atlanta is just the opposite of that, every time I go. Just being there stresses me out for no readily apparent reason.
On paper, it seems like it should be great. Georgia Tech is close, and the local economy is great. All kinds of television shows and movies have that juicy Georgia peach at the end of the credits now, instead of Vancouver. The weather is decent for 10 months out of the year. Lots of local agriculture. Lots of roads leading out of town, and a hub airport for a relatively decent airline. Diverse, cosmopolitan culture, as long as you stay in the city limits and away from the suburbs. About the only thing it lacks entirely is a seaport. I just can't stand actually being there.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. If I may, I think that you have taken U.S. sensational news stories and popular movies as your entire context of the U.S. Since nobody else is respecting your point of view, I'll share.
1. Smoking tobacco is seen as a mild taboo, but many people still do it. As long as the smoking is done outside and away from a main entrance, it's unlikely anyone will comment.
2. A large amount of people are addicted to prescription opiates, but if you go to New Mexico or Ohio, it's not going to look like a scene out of The Walking Dead. The total amount of addicted people is estimated to be 2 million [1]. Out of 300 million people, it means that this tragedy is hidden unless you personally know an affected person. By the way, many in California are affected by this issue.
3. Tobacco isn't considered a "gateway" to cannabis use by experts or credible laypeople. Tobacco users and Cannabis users have little relation or overlap.
4. Cannabis is usually introduced in the same manner as alcohol (at parties or small gatherings of friends), though alcohol is far more socially acceptable. Cannabis has never been primarily considered a "trippy" drug in the U.S. ---though there are many people who do use it that way--- it's more of a recreational substance. Cannabis use has declined among the under 18-year-olds over the past decade, but has increased among adults.
4. There are many methamphetamine and heroin addicts in absolute numbers, but again, they do not dominate any metropolitan area. Sure, it is easy to find addicts among homeless populations, but it isn't like Crash, Breaking Bad, or The Wire in terms of pervasiveness and intensity.
1. https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/overdose.html
> As for the world, there seems to be a lot of nonsense tech such as see-through cell-phones? No way to even hide what you are doing, even crucial characters and VIPs have see-through communication devices, whilst they steal/look at top secret information?
I'm sure that's just for TV viewers to be able to see their screens. It is better than projecting the screen over the face or reflecting it on the glasses of the actors like other TV shows do.
If you don't like it, that is OK, no one is forced to like anything. I don't like The Walking Dead, and it doesn't mean a lot of people is wrong, just that we have different tastes.
But to be fair the show is ages ahead of Star Trek TOS in terms of plausibility.
In fact, the lack of the fantastic technologies indistinguishable from magic that are present in Star Trek is very much part of the appeal. Is what makes the show more real. There's no faster than light space travel for a start. They have to use orbital mechanics to move around. They have to accelerate half of the way and deccelerate the other half. They have to dock very carefully instead of saying 'beam me down'. It is a very welcome change.
It's such a major and pervasive genre that many people now consume sci-fi media without even realizing and/or knowing it.
It's a pity that establishment literary circles still mostly ignore it outside of a few token examples. This drives educational circles and now most literary curricula (even K-12) leave any kind of serious analysis or discussion off the list.
Science Fiction requires some very different analysis tools than many other literary genres and as a result, readers (consumers) are so ill prepared that they often can't even recognize it when they're consuming a genre piece, or consuming something with science fiction elements, if it doesn't explicitly involve Star Wars like space opera cliches. But literary criticism, by largely ignoring the genre, is failing to develop those analysis tools.
There's plenty of people who'll say "I hate sci-fi" and then go on to binge watch several seasons across several shows that are all members of some sub-genre of sci-fi.
Note: IMHO I have a very expansive view of what Science Fiction is. I consider the genre to be basically any story where some non-existent "technology" (or science, or engineering or medicine, etc.) exists, and the story is set in motion around that technology. The technology can be as inconsequential as a grain of sand in the story, or a major plot driver. It can be so important to the story that the entire setting of the story becomes incomparable to anything that we can currently experience, or so mundane that the world of the story is exactly our world, but with this one twist. And I assume technology can be anything from physical stuff to cognitive concepts.
As an example of how expansive my view on this is, I would consider a show like NCIS to be sci-fi because many of the plots can only exist or move forward based on some impossible or non-existent forensic or cyber technology.
"Walking Dead", sure I consider that sci-fi because it relies on the assumption of some nonexistent disease to drive the entire show.
The "James Bond" series (and many spy movies and series) are basically sci-fi because the stories can only function in the presence of non-existing or impossible technology.
An amazing number of Horror, Spy, Police, Thriller and Action stories all fall into the same category.
If you disagree with me on this, that's fine. But I'll put this another way, "The Man from Earth" is a movie that essentially takes place in one room of a small house. There's no technology, gizmos, spaceships, aliens, or other things that can't exist in this world. It relies on a single premise, an improbably genetic condition, that without which the entire story can't exist. Every other single thing in the story is entirely plausible as a small-set drama and if you conclude that the main character is lying or crazy, then the story is still science fiction because it still causes the viewer to consider an improbable science. In fact, I think the genetic condition is only mentioned once in the entire movie.
So if NCIS can get away with 15-20 minutes of impossible forensics and hacking per episode and not be sci-fi, then "The Man from Earth", which dwells on the genetic twist for a few moments can't be either.
Actually, no, a huge number of people do not enjoy regular TV. The highest viewership series last year "The Big Bang Theory" had over 90% of the population uninterested in watching a free show.
http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/more-tv-news/the-20-highest-rated-shows-of-2016-the-walking-dead-and-the-big-bang-theory-win-the-year/
Its at the point where if you meet someone and you're a fan of a non-top tier TV show, unless you met in an echo chamber, the odds of someone being your astrological symbol or in some cases having the same birthday are higher than them being a fan of your pet show.
TV is no longer culturally relevant, not like it was decades ago. Nobody watches that stuff.
> However lately Netflix' content simply seems to lack substance to me.
I want to echo this as well. One thing about American TV content is that the story plot is very repetitive in nature. Netflix and other similar providers' original contents are very much either a superhero or a crime chaser plot. Furthermore I also dislike breaking content into seasons. It keeps audience around so more money but I am just very inpatient when it comes to TV content. In China / Hong Kong, most drama do not release in parts. So say there are 40 episodes it will have 40 episodes completed when the drama is aired. When you drag your drama plot beyond season 3 the story gets boring. Walking Dead, House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Blacklist, dragging on.
I want some more refreshing content. This is why I love cartoon contents like Bob's Burger or watching documentary. I get some breathing room.
I try not to let the anti-vaxxers, hippies, or the Hollywood stars brand whole areas, or my experience in San Francisco in 1988 with a broken down car and told to go find a tow truck.
"a lot of education but who have an active antipathy to it."
An yet, I live with people who cherish it right here in rural America. Parents sacrificed to get kids in college. Doctors are listened to (yep, get your shots).
Its ok, really. It is socially acceptable to degrade and demonize all us NFL & MMA watching morons. You can feel superior based on one story, and frankly, most in these parts don't go in for the trouble to correct you. Its not like TV treats people much better.
The funny part is the little digs. The NYT article[1] on TV shows by region claimed folks in rural American liked "Walking Dead" because it is "for people worried about immigration". I'm more thinking that its a fun show and frankly most people here can imagine there survival a lot more than those goofballs in the show.
Oh well. As the graphic floating around Twitter said "you spent 8 years weaponizing the federal government" then you get this.
I guess, I ask if someone had the same story about say, a racial group, would you be passing it along on a board like this as an example of why "uneducated X" would be true?
1) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/26/upshot/duck-dynasty-vs-modern-family-television-maps.html
As bad as bundling is, it also has historically subsidized smaller channels that sometimes come up with innovative programming that would otherwise never happen.
Everyone passed on Mad Men except this little movie-rerun channel called AMC. Would Walking Dead have happened without it?
"Anarchist" is antipodal to the "nationalist" part of "nationalist mercantilism", which is historically associated with "capitalism" in such a way that many people confuse the two.
This is exactly why some people prefer the term "propertarian anarchist" to "anarcho-capitalist", so as to avoid arguing over the meanings of words rather than the tenets of the school of thought.
An anarcho-capitalist cannot make and enforce any law establishing rights in property, but instead recognized that by societal convention, people can claim objects for their exclusive use, and defend such claims by voluntarily respecting the reasonable claims of all other participants in the society.
If you have faithfully watched the television series of The Walking Dead, "The Claimed Gang" that was featured in season 4, episode 11, were basically anarcho-capitalists. If you said "claimed", whatever it was became yours, and if you violated someone else's claim, you got a beatdown from the whole gang.
Rushed, cramped, and thin characters are far too common in modern movies. I think it is a sign of the times that people going to movies want more depth and 2 hours isn't enough to tell a deep story.
While it has its flaws, the modern mini series (Game of Thrones, Daredevil) tell much better stories that are more compelling and have depth. (except The Walking Dead, they have some issues)
I would rather see a 6 hour series on Netflix that tells the Rogue One story than a single 2 hour flick with characters that I have no interest in.
I need to work and sleep and spend time with friends. TV just isn't a priority because the vast majority of it is pure trash.
I can't even spend the attention required to watch TV most times. I find myself just leaving it on in the background and then realized that I've paused it because something was more interesting on my laptop. Sometimes it takes me hours just to get through one episode.
There is also piracy. I don't have cable but I still watched Walking Dead. Which I've also stopped watching. Live TV just seems so pointless. If a show is good I can just pick it up after like 3 seasons and binge it if I want.
Paying $80 a month for TV is just absurd. And paying for sports is even more ridiculous. I like the NBA, and occasionally the NFL during playoffs. But I'll never watch a game live which just spreads 35 minutes of content over 3 hours to maximize ad revenue.
TV had it's heyday, the idea that it isn't on a steady downward decline towards some new steady state is delusion. ESPN in its current form is done. The impact on athletes salaries should be interesting though.
> it is hilarious that she talks of "rich, deep experiences" but then holds up "Kim Kardashian: Hollywood" as an example in the very next sentence, which is literally a cash-grab celebrity reskin of an existing game.
The sentence you refer to is calling attention to people sneering at that game. So you sneering at it is a bit weird. You're just supporting her point. I've heard it's a solid game, as you say it was mildly successful even before it had a big media franchise attached. Do you sneer at every TV show or movie tie-in? The Walking Dead by Telltale for example?
If they looked at stats like "hours of YouTube watched by under 18s", they'd need a change of underwear.
Walking dead. Putting out comic books in film is just a symptom.
Totally agree. Have you ever seen the movie The Imitation Game? There's a great quote from Turing's character when he is talking about being picked on and beaten up by bullies at school - "Do you know why people like violence? It is because it feels good. Humans find violence deeply satisfying"
It's that simple, really. It is in our nature, just like sex. We like it. It feels good.
The only reason we try to eschew and condemn such violence in modern society is because it is in our best interests and more productive to society as a whole to not be like that. No other reason. If we all lived in fear and were huddled in our homes in small communities we wouldn't have even half the modern luxuries we do today. Plus, on the larger scale, if it's war you are talking about - well, they cost a lot of money/resources. So they are tough to maintain for the long haul without noticeable economic harm.
People like to say that love is stronger than anger and hate. I have always disagreed. Hate and anger run deeper than most imagine. And they motivate people like nothing else in this world, except perhaps fear.
The one and only reason people aren't butchering each other in the streets is because we have figured out a way that we can all survive. If that were to crumble, you can be damn sure society would look a lot closer to The Walking Dead or Children of Men than Star Trek.
The alternative is to mint an evergreen series like Law & Order. Someone finds a dead body in NYC; investigation, trial, and silly social commentary ensue. Then vary the parameters a bit and you get SVU, Criminal Intent, et al. Characters are interchangeable, guest spots abound, social commentary changes with the politics of the day.
Walking Dead -- eh, it's getting a little old. I thought they were going to explore some primitive economics, and maybe they will, but the cliffhanger gag last season reminded me too much of "Who Shot JR?" Not sure I care. And the spinoff went too heavy on the social commentary, couldn't even finish Season Two.
Mr. Robot is more promising, but I haven't seen one yet that comes close to the satisfaction I got from the clear arc of the story in Breaking Bad. Sons of Anarchy tried, but fell short somehow.
> You can show Braveheart or a video of a street mugging to a bunch of 8-10 year old kids at school but you can't show them a movie where (god forbid) a pair of tits appears on screen.
Braveheart is rated R.
We did get to see scenes from an R rated movie in grade 10, but it was the opening to saving private ryan while we were studying WW2. I'd argue that violence like that in context is more acceptable. 15 year olds are also much better prepared.
The thing that's really ridiculous is the swearing. The Walking Dead has gratuitous violence, but they can't say fuck because that would hurt advertising revenue. It's ridiculous.
I know a lot of people (myself included) aren't huge fans of that frenetic, jump-cut-heavy style of vlog/video that's so common on YouTube but I'm pretty sure The Show was one of the first to really popularize it.
Still, I also loved The Show. At the time, I was used to IRC and forums and the comment sections of goof sites like Fark but it still felt like something really cool and unique when Ze would put out calls for submissions or contributions that would then be featured in episodes.
I'd done much smaller collab projects with forum friends in the past but his personality and fairly large fan base made it seem a lot more fun and like being part of a bigger crowd.
edit: it also led me to find the "pilot" for a show that was never produced: The Remnants. I'd watch that over The Walking Dead any day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQFv0Le2DyI
A lot of talk about Eco, not much on the article! For my money, it's off the mark. The 'freedom' in open world games is mostly an illusion, and we seem to be getting away from it, as the technological demands increase. Generally the only freedom is the order in which you undertake the pre-scripted missions. Years ago in Morrowind, you could kill quest giving NPCs and wreck the story, but in Fallout 4 all essential characters are weirdly immortal.
Your 'choices' are overblown. For example, in Far Cry 4 you have the option to kill a character or not (on the orders of another). In your report, you refer to them as having been "taken care of". You can't even change the dialogue. Your reward is a different epilogue movie. It's all more choose your own adventure than choose your own War and Peace. You can see the game designers dilemma - why expend massive effort on branching paths when any given player will only choose one? Far Cry 4 also had an amusing bug - you could also choose to destroy a temple or not. However the bug meant the game would show you the non-destroyed model when past a certain range, suddenly popping to the correct model as you approached. The mask literally slipping!
Even non-open world games stuggle to provide meaningful agency. The much acclaimed Walking Dead allowed many choices, from which all resulting divergences were soon neatly resolved funneling the player to exactly one ending.
Honorable mentions : Fallout New Vegas, which offered so many options it almost collapsed under its own weight, and until Until Dawn, an interactive horror movie in which every single character can live or die.
I like looking at stuff like this, but it's a completely unrealistic view of humanity's future.
If we're really lucky, the cities of the future will look something like those in Blade Runner (minus the part about people living offworld) or Dredd, or even the Mad Max movies. But more likely, things are going to look more like 28 Days Later or The Walking Dead, or the scene of the future in The Terminator.
Eh. It was dead since they painted an Opera logo on a Webkit wrapper (a sad day indeed). This is just an episode of Walking dead.
If this is indeed forced by content creators, I think it is counter productive. They will just give more incentive to Netflix (and Amazon and others) to create they own content, as third part content lose them money.
Perssonal view: the "Original Netflix Content" sign already give me a more value perception. Between a recycled TV show and a new one by Netflix, I always chose the new on by Netflix. So far I watched all of: Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Making a Murderer, House of Cards, Narcos, Sense8, Bloodline, Orange is the new black, Master of None, Better Call Saul.
And I'll probably keep watching the next seasons of all of them.
Outside of Netflix, I only follow the very best ones (IMO): Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad (that's over) and Walking Dead.
What this means? I consume only the very best hits that these other content creators produce. For casual, day-to-day entertainment, that covers 90% of the time, I stay with Netflix.
My first reaction to his arrest was joy and then I saw comments about him getting "beat up in jail" to put it lightly.
People who say those kinds of things are no better than him. Possibly worse.
The solution to dealing with people like him is to be able to separate them from society or fix the system so it can no longer be exploited so "easily".
He may have hurt a lot of people but it's been through proxy as far as we know. Like Drone strikes, if you can't see the damage you're doing you can't feel guilty about it.
Like Morgan on the Walking Dead. I do believe Martin is a good guy on the wrong path.
It's easy to come together to have shared hatred for this guy and it's hard to realize
I can do better as a human being with empathy towards someone who is broken; sad and probably doesn't understand why people hate him.
He's just being "successful" as it was always defined to him.
Like the Boston Bomber. Getting "Revenge" does not stop the perpetual cycle violence and misbehavior.
The Wolf of Wall Street was a glorification of this type of behavior and a lot of people saw Jordan in that movie as a "Hero"
1 of those shows is still on TV. Sopranos ended all the way back in 2007.
Anyway, from a business standpoint only having 2 or 3 good shows mean people get out of the habit. Fox fed viewers from Simpsons into American Dad and Family guy, but when most channels are filled with junk people got out of the habit. When The walking Dead has a bad season there is nothing keeping people tuning into AMC.
Think filler B TV like Roseanne or Home Improvement the kind of show where the mass of humanity don't just turn them off even if nobody is lining up for a new episode.
PS: It's also all the same formulas and if you like it that's great for you. But, we are missing a lot of the off the wall TV like the twilight zone or MST3k.
It's just an announcement - it's way too early to tell how the series is going to turn out. That being said, I would be surprised if the reboot becomes a cultural landmark like TOS. I just hope it's at least good, compelling television. At best I hope it captures the genius of good Star Trek: exploring new ideas, concepts, and perspectives, with clever & humane writing, capable acting, and good special effects.
I hope it's not too heavy on the action/drama, like _The Walking Dead_ or _Game of Thrones_. These are both excellent series that are highly entertaining to watch. But they make me _feel_ first and _think_ second.
Good Star Trek episodes are like puzzles. You're thinking "what the heck is going on?", "what strange phenomena is this?", etc. The best ones draw you in and then delight you with the reveal. They almost have a Twilight Zone quality to them.
I've seen the first "season" of black mirror it was OK is just don't like that type of Scifi I like my Scifi more bigger than life, and while i don't mind some "futuristic earth" shows Black Mirror has the same issue I have with most UK shows and that they produce too little episodes to even fill an afternoon, but Black Mirror just took it to a whole new level with having like what 2-3 episodes?
The new season on Netflix will hopefully be at least 10 episode long so I might actually take another spin at it, waiting 10 years for another 3 episodes of Luther or Sherlock is bad enough I'm not going through this again.
With US TV shows I usually wait until at least the mid season or the 9 episode pickup because lately US TV shows especially from the bigger networks have less job security than the offspring of JRR Martin novels and the Walking Dead characters.
So far we had quite a "decent" year, 12 Monkeys has been renewed, Childhoods End and Westworld are coming, the CW actually managed to make comic book shows (never was a huge comic fan, infact i never had a chance to read a single book i think) cool, we are bloody getting The Man in the High Castle show on Amazon and Marvel's Netflix production is in full gear.
I, for one, am optimistic. Even though the JJ Abrams reboot movies sucked, he's not the only one who can do the work. There are hordes of people in Hollywood who grew up on Star Trek, love it properly, and want to bring back the spirit of exploration and optimism and the ensemble cast work that make the older series so compelling. I think the world needs a new Star Trek - one that isn't just shiny effects, but holds true to the sense of hope and courage that I loved and still love. And I know it can be done.
On the plus side, the quality of ensemble-cast science fiction tv writing has exploded over the past 15-20 years, starting with how Babylon 5 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer built season and multi-season story arcs that depended on character growth. I would love to see the sort of rich, passionate writing that made Firefly, Walking Dead, and other shows so effective applied to Star Trek!
And I'm a little biased toward the development of web-only series - some friends of mine are doing Cartoon Network's first web-only series, and I'm really hoping it succeeds spectacularly and points a new direction for CN. Fixed timeslots in general are a dated way of doing shows now. Timeshifting is the norm.
So yeah, hope for a bright future. And screw the Prime Directive.
By the time the video of the sporting event is transmitted through the air, satellite, or internet, there is already a time delay between when the viewer sees an event happen and when that event really happened. When you watch an NFL football game on cable or satellite, you are really watching something that happened dozens of seconds ago, if not a couple of minutes ago.
That is plenty of time to inject post-event meta data into a broadcast to enhance the viewing experience. There is no need to predict if a basketball shot is going to be a miss to the viewer at home. We can simply wait for the event to occur and then the broadcaster can inject the results between the time the event occurs and the when the viewer sees the event.
I guess not many people watch sports from a DVR, but imagine if you had an hour to two to computationally enhance the sport event's display.
Or maybe you could watch an episode of The Walking Dead and elect to see real time Twitter/Instagram/Facebook reactions alongside the broadcast or on your second screen.
> "Somebody told me that popcorn time is the Netflix killer and I think that isn't true. I think it's not a piracy problem, it's a service problem. You have to give the users what they want in a fair price."
This is a pretty common sentiment on HN and other places on the internet that's used to justify piracy but I don't think it really applies to most people who say it. The person in the video is from Buenos Aires and really can't get his hands on movies and TV shows short of going to the United States.
But if you're in the United States and want a TV show, between iTunes, Amazon instant, YouTube rentals, Google Play, Microsoft Store and your cable provider the movie is probably a $2-$3 HD rental. $5-$6 if its just released. If you have time to browse HN you're not poor enough to justify pirating over a $6 rental.
Of course the counterargument is "but the DRM formats don't work on my TV/car/fridge", but that doesn't work here because Popcorn Time is designed for desktop viewing and deletes the videos on reboot, not for transferring to other devices. And "the only movies with high pirate rates aren't easily available" doesn't work either because the most pirated shows are the ones most easily available. Game of Thrones is on HBO Go, Walking Dead is on amc.com, Kingsman: The Secret Service and Seventh Son is on every rental service listed above. [0]
[0] https://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-pirated-movies-of-the-week-050415/ http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/top-10-pirated-tv-shows-of-2014-game-of-thrones-walking-dead-lead-list-1201390863/
Hey cool thanks, that's great! I haven't seen many of those, but I liked Firefly, BSG, GoT, and VM S1-2 (haven't seen S3). I've seen Buffy S1 and the musical episode, I probably should revisit it.
My top recommendations would be Twin Peaks, My So-Called Life, Freaks and Geeks, Sports Night, and Arrested Development. I like a lot of shows that get cancelled "early".
The "myth arc" episodes of the X-Files are worth it, but don't try to sit through all 9 seasons. Recently, Better Call Saul is awesome for the emotional depth and film noir aspects, and the previous Breaking Bad to which it's a prequel is still a masterpiece even though I find the premise implausible. The Walking Dead is seriously addictive too.
Like a lot of people have said, modern shows are very much into the everyman male lead. Bryan Cranston's character in Malcolm in the Middle, Ed O'Neill's Al Bundy, Tim Taylor playing, once again, the affable rough-though-bumbling dad.
The thing is these are all prime-time sitcoms and comedies.
There's just as many popular shows where this isn't the case. Dramas rarely have this sort of soft, incorrigible-but-loveable archetype.
I'm not super-current on my media, but Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, Walking Dead, Mad Men... most everything on HBO, Showtime, AMC, and FX run with strong, deep, emotionally complex male characters who grow and discover themselves, alongside the female characters.
And the male characters in these dramas are, on the whole, much more identifiable and aspirational.
You're assuming individual or social utility-maximizing rational behavior if we do hit limits and begin deflating. I don't share that faith.
Look at what happens domestically when we have a year or two of recession and take the exponent of that. Now imagine a contracting economy for decades with the rate of contraction accelerating over time.
The "genetically rational" (not hedonic or utility maximizing) selfish-gene course of action in a shrinking pie world is to reproduce as much as you can and then kill as many other people as possible, preferably those from lineages further from yours (other ethnicities). This increases the odds of your offspring successfully reproducing by eliminating their competition. Our genes are ancient, and they know what to do when the famine comes. They don't "care" whether it sucks from the perspective of their sentient but disposable constructs/vehicles. Evolution is amoral, and nature doesn't care about you.
An alternate "genetically rational" strategy is to retreat to the margins and wait for the episode of "Walking Dead" to end, but there'd be competition for good but isolated places to live off the land. In this scenario you'd want to actually look poor, if not be poor, since that would make you less attractive to raiders.
Not exactly a future I want to see. I'd rather just be at ground zero when a nuke hits. Quick and painless.
> I can't help but be completely distracted by how obvious it is that the set is a set and the actors are just people pretending.
This really bugs the hell out of me, especially on 120Hz TVs. Granted, sports and newscasts look like you're sitting right there which is neat, but for fictional shows it's unnerving. My sister has one of those TVs, and we occasionally go over there to watch The Walking Dead with them. It's as if the video is being slightly fast-forwarded, paused, then fast-forwarded again, but the dialogue still sounds normal throughout. It really takes us out of the moment and looks more like a documentary of the making of the show, rather than the show itself.
I pay for Netflix, but watch every thing (including the Netflix productions) on Popcorn time.
If HBO doesn't provide their content, on-demand, on my country, it's not my problem.
Same goes to Walking Dead... Here in Brazil Netflix has it only till season 3... On popcorn time I can watch the last episode, with subtitles, only 2 or 3 days after it's aired.
I'm really willing to pay for content as far as it's available on my country!
I think you're missing a unit. You should be measuring eyeball-minutes. An episode of The Walking Dead might be 20M x 45min = 900 megaeyeball-minutes. Gangnam Style is 2B x 3min = 6000 megaeyeball-minutes. Disregarding target demographics for the moment, that says the advertising spend for a first run episode of Walking Dead should be about equal to 15% of the lifetime spend for Gangnam Style.
The interesting meta-point though is that an audience of 20 million viewers is a big hit [1] so a billion views is 20M people watching it 50 times or, 200M people watching it 5 times. And 2 billion views is double that.
Put in perspective that is probably in excess the number of times the most favored "I Love Lucy" show has been seen. Or put another way, you've got a music video with the same eyeball impact as the highest rated television show ever.
That says to me that either advertising on Youtube is a bargain or advertising on TV is way over priced :-)
[1] http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2014/02/10/the-walking-dead-mid-season-premiere-delivers-15-8-million-viewers/235855/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Lucy
This article could not have picked a weaker argument in The Walking Dead, where:
- one of your group members is a mother (Kathya) and an important part of the story although mostly in a 'family' context but also by her own merit as a veterinarian
- one of the main characters (Lily) is ex-Air Force and speaks for her big, tough father in all matters, and is the leader of your group
- one of the main characters (Christa) is significantly stronger and more capable than her spouse
- an entire episode of the first season of the game takes place in a farm run by a mother and her sons
- one of your group members is a small girl (Clementine) who is also the protagonist in the second season of the game
It's probably the least gender, race and age biased game featuring humans.
I would have cut my cable years ago if I could have gotten current episodes of True Blood and The Walking Dead through streaming services.
This is a step in the right direction. Comcast and Verizon must be quaking in their boots because as more networks decide to go the direct distribution route, the less necessary their TV distribution services will become.
You can buy episodes for AMC's shows on amazon and iTunes the day after they air?
http://www.amazon.com/Greetings-Set-Season-5/dp/B00NI1VFYI/ref=sr_1_1?s=instant-video&ie=UTF8&qid=1413399576&sr=1-1&keywords=walking+dead+season+6
Good way to watch the one or two shows you want from some of these networks. Although its not an all access plan to every show you can atleast watch the latest.
> Effort also introduces time lag. If the next episode of Walking Dead takes 24 hours longer to show up on TPB, I'll probably see a bump in legitimate streaming and rentals.
Popular TV shows are available on TPB within minutes, not hours or days.
Marginally more effort makes a huge difference. Linux on the desktop takes marginally more effort to use than Windows or Mac. What difference does that make in popularity?
Effort also introduces time lag. If the next episode of Walking Dead takes 24 hours longer to show up on TPB, I'll probably see a bump in legitimate streaming and rentals.
I'm not arguing that DRM works, especially in the CS sense that it really makes things "uncopyable." (That's impossible.) I'm attempting to explain why people keep doubling down on it and what behaviors drive that. If DRM leads to 5% more sales and costs less than what they get in revenue from 5% more sales, they'll use DRM.
These companies spend just as much time staring at their spreadsheets as they do in any other industry. If DRM does not correlate with increased sales, now the bean counters ask "why are we spending this money to license this DRM technology?" It becomes a red cell on the spreadsheet, not a black one.
It's also about changing customer habits. Napster, TPB, etc. mainstreamed industrial-scale piracy and taught users that this is easier and cheaper than buying content. The studios and record labels and such were definitely asleep at the switch for the rise of the Internet (understandable as they are not in tech), but now they've woken up and created channels that make it just as easy to buy. Now if they make it harder to pirate too...
TBH, I now realize that wasn't a very thoughtful comment on my part.
> While they are small teams (were they ever big?), with regard to "fighting the institution", frankly, that's not the impression they leave me.
I was thinking more in line of House M.D., where from what I recall everyone in the hospital except the protagonists were portrayed as mostly harmless morons.
After going through your list of criminal movies and all the series I've been watching recently and thinking on it for few minutes, I'm willing to partially retract my claim about how every series portrays organizations where protagonists work as broken.
> but The Walking Dead has been the most successful show, and it's pretty much the opposite of that description. It's constantly reinforcing how much the breakdown of The System sucks and gets people to kill each other.
But it also reinforces how small groups with lots of guns are the way to go; every time they tried to stick in bigger groups, it all quickly and tragically fell apart.. Maybe I'm reading a different message from this series than you (but TBH, I gave up after season 3; unfortunately, my favourite plot arc ended with the season 1, and after that, I just couldn't see the point of what they were all doing).
I'll also admit that the "libertarian paradise" was a potshot; it just popped to my mind that the kind of things my more "freedom-oriented" friends say wrt. to policy and gun control would fit perfectly to a zombie apocalypse. The most (self-labeled) libertarian friend of mine being a huge fan of Walking Dead didn't help to avoid forming this association.
Nowadays you have teams of two or three, which are at the same time up against the external threat and the institution within which they work. Lone heroes saving the day in spite of the incompetence (or corruption) of their colleagues.
While they are small teams (were they ever big?), with regard to "fighting the institution", frankly, that's not the impression they leave me.
They have their moments of rogue colleagues or corrupt departments, but for the most part, what I see is a small team backed up by a larger institution fighting Evil (criminals, terrorists, etc).
I'm talking about the mass market, mind you, not The Wire but NCIS, CSI, Law & Order, Hawai Five-o, Criminal Minds and all that crap.
And then there's this recent influx of zombie movies - the libertarian paradise, where no one tells you what to do, there is perfect free trade facilitated by the proliferation of firearms within general population, and where everything that moves in a group larger than 20 is a mindless mass trying to kill you.
Which movies? I had to admit I haven't watched recent zombie flicks, but The Walking Dead has been the most successful show, and it's pretty much the opposite of that description. It's constantly reinforcing how much the breakdown of The System sucks and gets people to kill each other.
if walking dead and zombie movies taught us anything, it's that things can get a whole lot more sub-optimal.
thanks for the clarification. you're right on that.
i've found that my social skills have dramatically improved from trying to learn them _conceptually_, rather than implicitly. I watched a lot of tv shows - walking dead, house of cards, game of thrones, breaking bad - and kept pausing the tv to discuss with my wife _why_ people were acting the ways they did.
doing this really helped me come to understand a lot of things, like the importance of staying calm if you want to be respected. apparently 'dispositional mindfulness' is mindfulness as a default state, as opposed to something practiced intentionally.
going about my day thinking about abstract things constantly seems like the opposite of dispositional mindfulness. i'll haveh to look further.
That graphic is also terribly wrong.
The Walking Dead has had 51 episodes. Each episode is about 43 minutes. That's just over 36 1/2 hours of content; not 3 days and 15 hours as the infographic suggests.
Rounding off to the hour when the information can be readily scraped from a number of websites would be a pretty big oversight if this was a service.
Eh, looks pretty good to me. Our wants are diametrically opposed: Voice search (do care -- Apple TV search is painful), tech specs (non line-of-sight remote -- Apple TV is line-of-sight), games (eh, might be a nice diversion for a few minutes after an episode of Walking Dead), and I don't have an HBO subscription.
As an anecdote I have resorted to pirating Rick and Morty. I love the show, it's amazing really. If you haven't go watch it now. You might think that I am selfish a-hole who wants to rob the creators of one of my favourite shows of their income, but that's not the case. I am simply not located in the right part of the world. Not being an American is a huge hassel when it comes to digital content consumption.
I am willing to pay, nay I would love to pay, for Rick and Morty, but from my research I have found no way, short of VPN + US credit card, to buy a season pass. So you have potential customers who have to resort to piracy because the industry has no interest in distributing to their region. Am I going to buy Rick and Morty when it eventually comes out in Sweden? Not very likely as I will already have watched all episodes.
The same holds true for The Walking Dead, thankfully HBO has started releasing episodes of Game of Thrones the same day in Sweden as in the US and I can and am paying for that.
Probably more accurate to say Binge Viewing kills discussion. And I think it may. There's less water cooler conversation than over the Walking Dead.
My take on binge viewing - I'd rather see a Greatest Hits to get current. I don't have 2 hours to sit through a movie, let alone 72 to get caught up on a series.
The Telltale Walking Dead game is actually based on the comic book universe, which is distinct from the TV show. Also, the game features a completely separate story, with only a few character references for fans to catch.
So no, you don't need to watch the show or read the comic to enjoy the game, but as with all license properties it never hurts.
I've heard about that, and I've played one Sam & Max game by Telltale :) .
I don't have and don't plan on owning any Apple devices - not useful and too expensive in my country, the local ecosystem uses Android, so I hope they release more games for Android :) I thought they hadn't released, any but apparently they just did !!! Should show them some support by buying it :)
www.slimgamer.com/16504/telltales-the-walking-dead-season-one-finally-comes-to-android/
should I watch the TV series before?
Thank you for pointing me to that game :)
I just played the first episode of The Walking Dead on my iPad. Please, give it a try... It's mind blowingly good.
Nate Silver wouldn't have a job without advertisement. Neither would Glenn Greenwald, Walter Cronchite, Dan Rather, Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, or Peter Jennings.
TV shows like Seinfeld, Friends, The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, and M.A.S.H. would not exist without ads.
Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Peyton Manning, Michael Phelps, Michael Jordan, Michael Tyson, Tiger Woods, and Larry Byrd would not have done the things they did without ads - no one would have paid them to.
Ads pay for people who are good at what they do to do what they're good at what they do as a means to pay for the other things they have to do. You couldn't possibly be more wrong about advertisements - without ads, there would be no US as you know it today.
While I agree with most of the points the author makes in this article, I disagree with the ultimate thesis.
Snapchat offers what? Engagement
So how do you monetize that? Get users to engage with brands
Allow me to elaborate. Twitter's Amplify partnership program is a brilliant example of the amount brands are willing to pay to engage with customers (both existing and potential). Twitter used to be in a unique position to offer that engagement too: with huge penetration, easy integration into existing media (putting a hashtag in the corner of a TV broadcast, for instance), and an incredibly low-friction engagement process. Twitter made it easy for a brand to create a sea of voices engaging with a brand. I believe Snapchat is now in a position to make a similar offer.
Before I go on, I'd like to pose a question: how many people read event-centric tweets after an event? Aside from journalists reporting on said event looking for memorable tweets, my guess is not many. Hell, most people barely pay attention to the stream during these events. At most, you have a tweet that's at the top of a feed for a few seconds before being quickly pushed down by a dozen more, never to be read again. I'm sure by now you're connecting the dots: Snapchat offers a similar service in that respect.
The thing is, there's a major core difference between these two. Twitter is a public forum, and Snapchat is strictly peer-to-peer communication. This gives Snapchat a unique offering, in that it allows brands to communicate one-on-one with customers.
Imagine, if you will, a broadcast of The Walking Dead (I use them as an example for two reasons: 1.) I'm a huge fan, and 2.) They're big on the second-screen experience so this seems plausible). As part of your second-screen experience, one might find a stream of picture responses to various moments in the episode. Major character dies, suddenly the stream is full of shocked faces (maybe some rage faces or big goofy grins, depending on who). Now imagine this stream is powered by Snapchat.
This is already possible with Twitter, to a degree, but with Snapchat there's less inhibition which will drive greater participation and greater engagement. Not only that, but Snapchat would also allow TWD to engage back with the user on a personal level- maybe respond with a snap that contains a marketing call-to-action ("Want more scares? Check out the exclusive behind-the-scenes footage online"), or just responds with a zombified version of the image you sent in (how cool would that be?).
I'm sure there are many more awesome use cases than what I just stated, but I think this example speaks to the fact that Snapchat can be a real force for engagement without requiring brands to spam the hell out of the platform's users. This is where Snapchat outperforms against any other social product when it comes to driving brand engagement: because the users are so fanatically engaging with the product already, brands don't need to spam. They can just interact with the users in a meaningful or entertaining way - and I don't mean this "Get a coupon that you have 10 seconds to screenshot" bullshit, or "Let brands send snapchats that last forever" or any shit like that. Just give the users a fun way to interact with your brand, and the loyalty (and purchases) will come.
So, here's what I would do, if I were to monetize Snapchat:
- $20/yr developer program
- Free API access for up to 2,000 snaps sent/received per month
- Pay-as-you-go model: $XX for every additional 10,000 additional snaps
- Hashtag support (maybe)
- Analytics
- Offer consulting at a premium to help brands effectively leverage Snapchat
Notice the generous pricing structure. I think one thing that Snapchat can cash in on is the uniqueness of its platform, and the eagerness of the hacker community at large to build on top of it. I want you to recall the modest success of App.net, which doesn't have nearly the engagement metrics or penetration that Snapchat currently enjoys. I for one have several small projects I'd like to build on the Snapchat platform, and would be more than happy to pay a modest premium for the opportunity. The pay-as-you-go structure keeps your hackers happy (I doubt anyone would pay $100+ for toy projects), and also maximizes revenue from larger brand campaigns.
In conclusion, I think the assertion that Snapchat "has no intrinsic value" is complete bollocks.
> While its an unscientific poll, I have found it hard to find anyone I know that watches television who doesn’t love at least one of their hits: Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, and Mad Men.
One of those shows has only a few episodes left, while another has one season remaining.
Also, AMC doesn't produce Mad Men or Breaking Bad.
> Would you criticize Breaking Bad because you don't see as much crack being made in more recent episodes?
That would be like criticizing The Walking Dead because you don't see as many vampires in recent episodes.
Would you criticize Breaking Bad because you don't see as much crack being made in more recent episodes? How fucking stupid.
It's not stupid at all. The meth on Breaking Bad is not the plot, the plot is cancer-stricken man is pulled into the seedy world of illegal drugs and how he participates. The plot of Walking Dead is survival in a zombie world. If you aren't going to focus on conflicts with zombies then they should've just set it in a post-apocalyptic world sans zombies.
> Walking dead seems to be tapering off fans, turning from less of a zombie show to more of a drama ( each episode is 95% talk, 5% zombies ).
I'm sorry to derail, but I am so sick of this being considered as a "problem" with the show. The show is about human beings facing their inevitable demise. Even the title "The Walking Dead" is a play on words, referring to the survivors, rather than the zombies themselves. The show, the novel are both dramas first, and zombie stories second, where the zombie story is simply a backdrop to the very human drama of coping with one's own death and the death of loved ones.
The show has gotten worse, but that's because the characters have gotten more bland and the scenarios have gotten more tepid. It has nothing to do with drama:zombie ratio. Would you criticize Breaking Bad because you don't see as much crack being made in more recent episodes? How fucking stupid.
If this is a major problem to you, then you don't get the show and probably shouldn't be watching it anyway. I'm sure Fox will cook up some nice, bland, predictable zombie-loaded crapfest for you in due time.
When you say Walking Dead has been getting "worse and worse" are you referring to the show itself or the ratings? While the show itself is debatable, the ratings are not suffering in the least.
‘Walking Dead’ Season 3 Mid-Season Finale Ratings Top 15 Million http://screenrant.com/the-walking-dead-season-3-ratings/
I really dont agree.
Breaking Bad and Mad Men are ending shortly.
Walking dead seems to be tapering off fans, turning from less of a zombie show to more of a drama ( each episode is 95% talk, 5% zombies ).
The fact is, both breaking bad and mad men would make the price of AMC unrealistically high. If Netflix did want to buy them, they should wait until the season after when both shows are no longer on and get it for a song.
A much more astute purchase would be HBO/Cinemax/Shotime
That's 33 cents for ALL of AMC, not just Breaking Bad. That's mad men, he'll on wheels, walking dead and the old movies. And they sell discs. And the sell in iTunes. And they get paid by Netflix, hulu, and amazon.
I hope it continues to work out, I tend to enjoy just about all of their original content and they seem to be hungry enough to not just do the lowest common denominator thing. Probably not as big as hbo but give them some time.
You pretty much wrote what I was going to say.
AMC hit it's Golden Age of TV programming with that trio, but clearly have shown that they have issues with the handling of heavy creative talent, what with the issues that Weiner and Gilligan have publicly had, and the volatility of the showrunner position on the Walking Dead. (which subsequently also resulted in one of the actors leaving the show). On top of that, they expanded the number of episodes of S4 while reducing the budget per episode. And of course, milked the coverage of these shows with vacuous Talking Bad/Talking Dead.
I wouldn't be surprised if talented writers avoided that network like the plague.
I watch TV shows by the season, in one sitting often times. So shelling out $70 for the box set of discs is terrible. Netflix is my kind of product, but I'm still waiting for the next season of Walking Dead. Can they just stop delaying it so long?
It seems like I keep saying this in this thread, and others, but Amazon already meets this demand. I feel I must keep repeating it because it seems so many don't realize this. I don't pay for cable TV but I watch the latest seasons of Breaking Bad and Walking Dead on Amazon. The only catch is I see them a day after broadcast.
$25 for each season? More like $13-$15 per season. And I can watch them again anytime I want. $10 a month for AMC? Screw that, I already get a better deal on their shows I want right now, TODAY.
EDIT: I just looked it up; I paid $13.99 for Season 5 of Breaking Bad on Amazon. Under the $10 a month for AMC idea, assuming I only wanted this one show, it would cost me about $50 based on aired episodes and expected air dates of the final episodes. I did watch the third season of Walking Dead through Amazon as well but it has $0 for my order on that for some reason, but it lists for $26.99 currently. Walking Dead also broadcasted over five months but did not overlap with Breaking Bad. For those two shows alone at $10 a month would have cost me around $100, I got them both for $40.98. Since I do not watch any other AMC shows, even though I could watch some of them on Netflix, I think I came out ahead.
I agree with you, unbundling is not the future the cable companies are fighting. They are fighting on-demand viewing. The only thing I need cable companies for is the bandwidth to watch what I want when I want. Their arguments to the contrary fall on deaf ears.
Are there problems with this? Sure, I can't watch some shows because they aren't available as season passes on Amazon so I may have to wait for them to appear later. If the show never appears as on-demand? Well, too bad for them because my money just went elsewhere. There are enough quality choices out there that I just don't care.
At this point, there's very little cable TV can do to convince me to return to paying subscription fees for a hundred channels I don't want. The only way I see it is if they somehow get Netflix and Amazon Instant to be made illegal.
Engage in the future, cut the cord.
Sports is just one part of overall package that explains why I no longer subscribe to satellite or cable: I don't feel I'm getting good value for my money. Summarizing what started out as a much longer paragraph, we were paying $80/month for a lot of crap, crap we would never care to watch. Buried in that $80/month somewhere was ESPN.
AMC, however, continues to get our money. _Breaking Bad_ and _Mad Men_ are two shows that I just pre-pay for the seasons as soon as iTunes makes them available. I don't even know how much a season costs because I don't care; take my money, damn it. And we get episodes the day after they air. (_Walking Dead_, OTOH...meh, two season of that was enough.) TNT and _Falling Skies_, same thing: take my money. _House of Cards_ and _Arrested Development_ were enough to get me to come back to Netflix. I've got money, and a fair amount of it; I'm willing to pay for good programming.
But what I won't do is pay a bunch of money for reality shows and ESPN. I don't want to hear sob stories about how it's just not financially feasible to do it any other way. Figure out a way, because I can live just fine with the TV I've got, or none at all. And if I'm just not the kind of TV customer anyone wants, I'm fine with that, too.
Anecdotal evidence on movies and games :). Mostly based on reviews.
StarCraft II was one of the most silliest examples of this. The characters are one-dimensional to the point of being laughable. This is a game which had almost unlimited budget, and they just fail horrible at having an original story. I dare people to watch the cinematics say that the male roles are typical of the human male population.
But the more telling part, is that I would have to dig into the indy scene if I even wanted a bit originality in the story. I can't find a single AAA game that have original and well fleshed out characters, and a interesting story. At best, one would have to look at the walking dead which copies that from the TV-show.
Movies... pre-2000, we had a bunch of james bond copies. After that, we got the expendable? The new die hard? Any of the teenage vampire movies?
The one with good story and good character looks to be mostly remakes of older movies or comic/book made-movie, or animations. Wreck-It Ralph is a clear example of good characters.
> time or the inconvenience
It took me less than two minutes to get the latest episode of the walking dead from a torrent site in 1080p quality about 20 minutes after it aired on cable tv tonight (commercial free).
I think your argument really highlights your advanced age and disconnect with modern technology.
The first episode of The Walking Dead comes to mind. I'd also volunteer Waterworld and The Day After Tomorrow, but those are a bit too obvious and not worth the money.
Walking Dead, was hands down the best series last year for me. It's a well put together and produced show. Has a lot of drama without being soap opra'ish. Even if the zombie apocalypse is not your thing, it's still a great show. My wife hates zombie movies and absolutely loves the series.
Last month I moved and didn't have an ISP at home for the first 3 weeks or so. I set up tethering on my phone and a 5GB data plan. Yesterday I got a notice that I was over my data limit. I haven't done a whole lot of web surfing in the new house, but I have listened to a ton of podcasts using the Podcast app which I have never done before.
So if I just blew through 5 GB of data in 2ish weeks and the only thing different was using the podcasts app...
(I did watch 3 episodes of walking dead on Netflix which obviously contributed to the data use, but a 45 minute episode can't be that big)
A few bugs:
1. Dexter hasn't aired on the west coast, but the next episode is listed as 7 days from now, when it's really a few hours from now. Same with The Walking Dead.
2. Doesn't work on my iPhone.
A few comments:
1. Don't make me click to see the next episode air date. If you want to keep the current interface, do it on mouseover. Better yet, just let users add shows and present a table with a list sorted by date.
2. It'd be nice to show the next air date of old show re-runs too.
I had a little issue. I chose The Walking Dead and new episode airs later today. It told me that the next new episode was in 7 days. So I had to go over to Wikipedia to make sure tonight's episode was a new one. It is.
I bought a season 1 of The Walking Dead on iTunes, and found it suboptimal. It kept automatically trying to download the normal version, HD version, and each "behind the scenes" episode for each episode. All I want is the HD version! This was annoying enough to me to go back to just pirating episodes for season 2. If this experience has changed I might reconsider.
I'm a fellow Austinite and will vouch for the Drafthouse as well.
The prices --while still obviously above raw cost-- are fair in comparison to the traditional competition. Four dollars for bottomless coke; six dollars for popcorn. They have a gigantic selection of brews and wines. There are various entrees available at the same price of a typical restaurant.
The pre-show entertainment isn't just a thinly veiled sequence of advertising. It can be hit or miss --apparently they're _all_ edited by two fellas in an office somewhere-- but it's nothing like the "LOOK AT THIS AWESOME PRODUCT!" strategy. Regal FirstLook, I'm looking at you and don't particularly care if the tablet survived a thousand foot drop from the sky or not.
Finally, they are able to cater to various crowds and match the atmosphere and the expected behaviour. Traditional movie-going? STFU and watch. "Quote-alongs" for the hits of the recent past? Feel free to revel in your shared heritage of Big Lebowski references, (polite and relevant) chatter welcome. Movie Marathons? Be prepared for Harry Potter supersaturation for the next 24 hours as you go from Sorcerer's Stone to Deathly Hallows. Don't have cable television but still want to enjoy The Walking Dead? There's a screening for that.
Oh, and regarding their no talking and texting rules. Think they don't take it seriously? Think again :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L3eeC2lJZs
That wasn't the case for AMC before "Mad Men". Now, in addition to "Mad Men", they have "The Walking Dead", "Breaking Bad" and "Hell on Wheels". Even more than that, they have my guarantee that I will at least try a few episodes of any AMC original show that comes out.
You're right that Netflix would have to build an audience, but if they are able to create exceptional quality shows, as HBO and AMC have done, then they can very print that certificate very quickly (within a couple of years).
They aired Walking Dead season 1 in the UK earlier this year, awesome stuff. It was the first time I turned my TV on for about 3 months & worth every minute :)
Very glad it is coming back for a second season.
> AMC is ending Breaking Bad next season because of Madmen sucking up the budget
Thankfully, that's not going to happen. AMC tried cutting BrBa back to only 6 episodes next season. But Sony owns the rights to the show, so they shopped it around. AMC caved. For all the press Mad Men gets, Breaking Bad has ~2x the viewers per episode, and Walking Dead (which had it's budget cut due to Mad Men's cost) gets about ~2.5x the viewers.
[Edit: Removed my snarky comment about AMC's management.]
The reason Valve doesn't lose angry and frustrated fans is because it's anger and frustration over something they love. It's the "damn it, why are there only six episodes of Walking Dead in the first season and then I have to wait another year?!" kind of anger and frustration, for the most part. That's the kind of reaction most companies would give anything for.