Stephen Fry described TV as the nation’s fireplace, with the implication that shared viewing of a common canon strengthens cultural connections with other people.
It’s like how millennials can drop a Simpsons quote into a conversation with their peers and everybody gets the reference.
Peak TV has annihilated this. Nobody watches the same stuff anymore.
Did you catch the latest season of Current Thing? No, because there’s no Current Thing any more, there’s a thousand of them.
And it's still one of the best pieces of television ever made. My own personal canon would be that, _Ozymandias_ (Breaking Bad), _The Pine Barrens_ (The Sopranos), and honorable mention to the finale of _Blackadder_. What's anyone else's nominations?
Are you saying that viewing number is dubious because the panel is small?
~2000 is a pretty decent sample size. The viewing numbers you should be skeptical about are the very small ones which will have huge error bars, not the huge ones.
Less pessimistically, we now have content for a broader diversity of tastes - greater than ever before. As a result, people can choose to watch shows socially with friends, as well as have content just for themselves. And consuming that content can lead to finding new social groups based on shared interests, if they do desire.
I find the diatribe of "things got better, we got worse" so... boring and antisocial? You never magically made friends, you have always had to make them. There are now tools specifically to help you do this, and your pool has become unrestricted to the geographical region of your job. It's easier than ever, it's more likely you're just overwhelmed by the change.
But even that's fine - I made a new friend today while out and about. Just from talkin' like "the good ole days".
What We Do In The Shadows is extremely queer and has managed to develop significant reach, and that makes me happy. I thought some of the jokey bi stuff in the first season would be throwaway like usual, but they keep dialing it up.
The writers are very well-versed in the vampire meta, and it shows.
Idk. On one hand all the main characters are gay or bi (I think Collin is?). On the other it’s almost entirely a non issue. The vampires have no concept of gay culture at all. As a straight guy with no particular connection to in group lgbt culture this seems preferable. It’s often culturally alienating. What we do in the shadows is comfortably normative
There are definitely still Current Thing's though - Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, Squid Games. They'll come and go. There's also the 'in-joke' kind of references from more niche shows that can form a stronger connection than the big thing of the day.
I thought about this recently. Ideas is what in theory kept American society going. For a while, as the society started to lose track of what it wants to be ( and people in charge not exactly keen on educated populace ), it was the idea of American destiny and uniqueness and freedom and so on.
Shared TV space replaced those 'shared values' state tried to indoctrinate people with 'shared current thing', which had to indoctrinate people to state propaganda AND sell stuff for companies.
Those shared values have to replaced with something.
I want to say something pithy like 'but now its memes or tiktok shorts', but I can't get sufficiently worked up.
No, it's just that one discusses these media in different venues than the public square. For example, if I watch something, I will inevitably find people talking about it on various fora, such as its subreddit. In that way, one is still able to latch onto the common canon. And this is even before saying anything about cultural phenomena like Game of Thrones.
Stuff that comes out weekly seems to do better on cultural impact. ~Everyone's seen the Invincible memes.[0][1] I see What We Do In The Shadows references all the time.[2] There are a few shows I've never watched, but know bits and pieces about through stuff like this.
Given that I subscribe to meme groups, participate in #meme slack groups - and am bombarded by memes incessantly in twitter - I was surprised to see that I didn't recognize any of your memes.
"Beef" was pretty great, I'd recommend that. I'm surprised to see no mention of "The Witcher", though, I figured that would've ranked relatively highly despite the many creative shortcomings of the show.
One interesting difference is that in the TV show Luffy has a friendly smile on most of the time. In the anime Luffy runs around with a wide eyed unblinking psychopathic stare.
It does not help that main character only grunts in the show instead of talking. The book version of Geralt is the most talkative swordsman ever, so you learn a lot from dialogs or his thoughts. When you replace dialogs by grunts, you loose a lot of information.
That's a big caveat. Haha. I made it through almost the entirety of the season before I realized there were dual timelines. Nothing made sense. Maybe that's on me.. but I feel like enough people had similar issues that it's more likely a major shortcoming of the show.
I think that’s supposed to be intentional though. It didn’t click with me either even though in retrospect characters in the future are reflecting on their pasts that were shown in the very same episode.
I thought it was a really good execution tbh. It’s rare to see fantasy play out the effect of different lifespans
I'm the same, something as simple as `$year` at the bottom of the screen when switching about would have helped me immensely. It was disorienting enough that it put me off watching any of the further seasons.
The Witcher was pretty bad in its last season. I know multiple people who just stopped to watch it, because the show was too annoying for millions of reasons. I mean, I myself could not handle last series. Not just because of "faithfulness to source" issues, but because pacing, insufferable dialogs, characters that done makes sense etc.
And the series before that would be fine if it was not called the Witcher, but as it was it made any reasonable progress impossible.
I don't watch any TV, with a few exception for prestige shows that everyone else is watching - and I recognized a lot on that list - Walking Dead, Suits, Grey's Anatony, Gilmore Girls, Breaking Bad (which I've watched), Friends, Lucifer, Big Bang Theory.
In the top 50, I've see Night Agent (give it a 7), Luther (6-7), Extraction 2 (6).
I've heard good things about Beef, and maybe Kaleidoscope. Kaleidoscope is novel because it's an 8 episode heist show that, in theory, can be watched in any order and be cogent. Arguably, this is one reason I have not watched it. Not a big fan of gimmicky things.
Of course there's also the bit of the "how can there be 18,000 shows and nothing to watch?"
I've heard of plenty of them, but only watched a few, and only watched maybe two of them more than once. But I watch weird back catalog documentaries and such that I wouldn't expect to be crowd pleasers.
Based on the synopsis, I expected to NOT like Breaking Bad, but Bryan Cranston's performance was superb. I will never be able to see another Los Pollos Hermanos with a straight face again.
