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
Night agent came out this year and is 10 episodes. I didn’t check but assuming it’s 1hr/ep that’s 80million viewers. Wow
Ps. Checking a popular torrent site and roughly adding up the download count for all the season rips and adding a representative number from some of the individual episodes. Then multiplying that by 10 because there are other public torrent sites and many private ones we get 60k x 10. Even if you do x 20 it’s roughly 1 million. Out out 80 million that’s just 1-2%
The Night Agent was not good enough that you would want to go through the effort to pirate it, but it was slightly good enough to watch if you had nothing else to do after a hard day of work. I had no idea it was that successful, now I feel sort of bad for contributing to it.
I guess the lesson to take away from all this is there are a lot of people who are tired after a long day at work and are willing to waste their time on something acceptable instead of trying to choose something better.
Just think of all the amazing content from decades past, even movies from not long ago in the 90s, that many gen z will never see and experience and enjoy in their whole lives because they can’t buy or rent or play dvds any more, don’t use torrents, and streaming providers have very little content from years or decades past. It a loss.
But then you still need to get the DVDs from somewhere and most people don't want to buy a movie just to watch it, and renting DVDs is a thing (mostly) of the past.
I think that’s highly regional, and probably limited lifespan. Enjoy it while it lasts. Here in Europe, I haven’t seen a DVD or a CD in a library in many years.
They might not know torrents per se, but I think most at least know that stremio and popcorn time exist - I have no sources, but I'd expect most torrents nowadays to be consumed that way.
It's a warm show about people who care about each other where the drama comes from social misunderstandings.
The initial pilot featured a more conniving Penny played by a different actress. The focus group feedback was "Someone keep that mean girl away from those sweet boys".
Think of it as a show for moms / grandmothers / aunts of nerdy men. They want to see them get up so some shenanigans but generally be OK.
It's also a low effort show to watch so you can throw it on in the background while you're doing other things.
Warm show? I admittedly haven’t watched many episodes, but they all seem somewhat casually cruel to one another, and not in a loving way you may tease a friend.
I always felt the stereotypes were truly making fun of geek/nerds, and somehow fooled folks into thinking they were in on the joke.
> they all seem somewhat casually cruel to one another
So you're saying it's the same as just about any other sitcom?
Besides joking at one another's expense, a super common trope in US sitcoms is the lie to avoid embarrassment which builds up tension throughout the show, inevitably leads to exposure/confrontation and then resolution (forgiveness) near the end.
So many situations would be resolved quickly if the characters just 'fessed up immediately instead of trying to deceive the others to save face.
The first and only episode I watched revolved around one of the male leads training the female lead like a dog, by giving her food treats when she completed tasks for him.
I don't know if that was representative but I decided it was not for me.
I don't know how to mesh that with Wil Wheaton speaking so fondly of his time on the show in his book. Even the updated one where he talks about his past views and behavior with exceptional self-awareness.
Dude. It blows my mind there are over 25 episodes per season of most of the older series. I know most of the series had rough starts, but they really get good in the later seasons. I tried to tell someone to just watch it, and tell them how in Season 3 or 4 it gets really good. That means, you just gotta watch 50-75 episodes to get to the good stuff. LOL. That doesn't seem to convince anybody.
I mean, personally I love the early episodes just as much. But trying to get other people into it hasn't been successful for me.
Also I love starting on a long binge. There are hundreds and hundreds of episodes to watch! Peak Star Trek for me is DS9 when they start to get heavy into the Dominion war. Sisko is such a badass. He's my favorite Captain.
Dude. You realize you can skip the earlier seasons, right? Like just jump to season 3 or 4. So don't watch the first three or four seasons of MAS*H. Just jump to the seasons when Sherman Potter is ther.e
What a rude reply. I was just sharing something I thought was funny, since most shows today only have like 8-10 episodes per season. To get through 2 seasons of TNG is like going through 10 seasons of a modern show.
To be fair, it's a definite truth that shows get more chance of funding based on what is popular and how it fits into that perceived potential popularity.
So TBBT is a part of the overall zeitgeist, an example of a show of its type that was very successful.
You bet if a sci-fi show was number 1, than other sci-fi shows would be being made and better funded.
Uk is going through a comedy golden age last decades. I attribute it to bbc doing an excellent job giving chances to younger comedians on gameshows like mock the week, qi, 9 out of 10 cats, im sorry i havent a clue etc... as well as the prominence of edinburgh fringe
I think this sort of talent development really is just about giving chances to new folks, its the risk averse large networks only re-hiring the same older folks that stifles an artistic sector, be it movies, shows, music, games, comedy etc
I don't see anything on Netflix that is trying to compete with TBBT, which is a CBS show firmly targeted at Middle America.
If anything, Netflix comedies are the opposite of TBBT, there's no audience laughter, it's all single-camera like Arrested Development, The Office and other 2000s-era neo-sitcoms.
The more people watch TBBT, the more Netflix is motivated to maintain the license to keep it in the library (and while I'm not positive about this, I thiiiiink the more they have to pay to maintain that license).
Money they take out of their budget to keep TBBT in their library is money they can no longer spend to keep shows that I, personally, care for alive.
It's the same thing as cable: by paying for a Netflix subscription, I'm partially paying for them to keep TBBT on their network, and I don't think it's a stretch to say if they didn't have TBBT they'd have a (or more than one) different show instead, that I might be more interested in.
TBBT isn't specifically the problem. But it's pretty emblematic of the lowest-common-denominator chaff that's currently clogging up streaming services. I don't even think it's a bad show, necessarily, in of that people do get joy from it. But I think broad-appeal, low risk, low effort content is horrendously overvalued in our society compared to more interesting, creative work, which is honestly not that hot of a take.
Tl;dr I want more people to like the sorts of things I like so that they get more financial support and become more prevalent compared to the sorts of things I care for less. This is not an unusual take.
> Money they take out of their budget to keep TBBT in their library is money they can no longer spend to keep shows that I, personally, care for alive.
On the same token, money spent keeping TBBT on the network reduces customer churn and increases earnings, which can be invested in other shows.
TBBT is the symptom, not the problem. Netflix would be delighted to not pay CBS a fortune every year. The problem is that Netflix doesn't have enough customers whose tastes skew towards your own.
In the spreadsheet the total of ALL the hours is 93,455,200,000 or ninety-three billion, four hundred fifty-five million, two hundred thousand hours.
And that's between January and June 2023.
If we say the typical working day is 8 hours and the week is 5 days and a typical full time worker works 42 weeks a year (factoring in holidays and sick leave), based on this report 55,628,095 or about 56 million years of human productivity spent staring at Netflix in the 1st half of 2023
Looking at it another way right now we have almost 8.1 billion people on the planet. The total hours reported in this spreadsheet averages to about 12 hours per person on the planet for the 1st 6 months of 2023.
Pretty mind boggling, especially when you consider this is only part of the story, compared to all the other entertainment media we spend time on (TikTok, Instagram etc.)
I really love the show, I think it's a combination of likable characters and feeling special when you understand a physics/chemistry/scifi etc reference. It makes you feel smart because you are in on the references that the smart people are making.
Tropes, Caricature, Mocking, Sterotypes... These things have been the tools of comedy for a LONG time. For good or bad they will remain that.
The problem is context, it's Lenny Bruce mocking the cop who is reading back his skit in court. It's Dave Chapel pointing out how people quoting him on twitter without the context miss the point...
These are made up people in a make believe world doing made up things. They aren't meant to be taken seriously on any level.
I'm not supporting the parent comment. But don't you think we as humans have a penchant for conflating the reel and the real and ending up reinforcing the stereotypes present in the world?
If anything, we need less stereotypes. A caricature is fine, But after a certain point it just feels tiresomely pigeonholing into an idea.
Love the sneaky word play! Does art imitate life or does life imitate art?
> ... reinforcing the stereotypes present in the world
The whole point of comedy is to take away the teeth behind these things. The act is meant to reshape culture and conversation. Stereotype, beauty, the perception of color, were very fungible and its just another tool!
In reference to the first video: did the definition of 'misogyny' change while I wasn't looking? These guys don't seem to exhibit 'dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women'. They simply want to have sex.
Also, one of the main features of the show seems to be to point out the fact that, with respect to women: That's Not How To Do It. So, to claim that the show's writers are "doing it wrong" seems to be missing the point. It'd be like criticizing the writers of All in the Family for imbuing Archie Bunker with working-class conservative values. The whole point of the show was to illustrate how wrong he was.
For the first two guys, the video's point is that their sexual harassment, spying, and dehumanizing comments towards women are played for laughs without it being obviously wrong. The humor is in them being bad at socializing; their behaviors aren't addressed, and are portrayed as pathetic, socially repellent, but ultimately harmless.
The comments Sheldon makes are misogynist in the literal sense of the definition you gave, too, self-evidently so, IMO. The first video starts listing examples at 10:45. Again, the humor is just in the juxtaposition of average people's attitudes with his open contempt for women, with his bigotry acknowledged but never really addressed.
If all entertainment must conform to an idealistic view of society then it's just going to be really boring isn't it? I think a lot of people are not going to watch TV shows if they only portray the world in this highly moralized way.
I probably wouldn't like the characters or watch the show if they didn't make the jokes or have the quirks and shortcomings that they do.
The point is whether the artistic output is prosocial or antisocial. Different aspects can be different levels of one or the other: art, commentary, critique, education are all important. Reproducing awful antisocial behaviors without the attendant critique on those behaviors leads people to normalize and ultimately adopt those behaviors. We are social animals and time and time again it's proven that it doesn't matter if we're "socializing" with real people or fictional characters, we want to be part of a perceived in-group and so will act in ways that make us think we'll be liked by those whose gaze matters to us. Sitcoms are especially capable of stirring up these feelings since there is immediate social feedback (laughtrack) to the behaviors seen on screen.
My wife will put Friends on as a background to the day. So it might not be engaged watchers just people who want the noise and like the familiarity of the characters talking in the same way that radio fills the audio space.
I never understood it either. My parents used to watch it together at top volume. My theory was that it was easy to watch, you knew exactly what was going on, it was familiar. When my mum died my dad would watch it alone at top volume, I guess it reminded him of her and a bit of comfort in a world that had suddenly gone unrecognisable, crazy and scary. I could never stand the grotesque yelling voices and hysterical laughter and I would ask him to mute it or switch it off when I came visiting with my son. I can't imagine I will ever watch an episode but I derive a weird sort of mild comfort knowing that it's there.
It had an interesting characters at first, but then it quickly devolved into relationship show with all the character adjustments necessary to make it happen.
I enjoyed it, but I enjoyed it the same way I enjoy Seinfeld. It is an equivalent of chips and icecream. Filling, but ultimately bad for you.
Putting Seinfeld and Big Bang in the same bucket hurts my soul. Not sure how either are bad for you though. People need a way to decompress and a 22min sitcom is a great way to transition from one mood to another.
I will admit it is not a perfect match, but both have a laugh track and both remain very popular. I think I may have been trying to get an agreement from several generations of sitcom enthusiasts.
How about Big Bang and Scrubs? Both are kinda silly and both kinda got bad the same way.
Seinfeld was recorded in front of a studio audience, so the laughs are real. The thing is though that they often did multiple takes of each scene, and the laughs are sometimes the ones from different takes.
Not if people stop watching. Remember that older network TV shows declined overtime. The first 2-4 seasons were really good. The next 2-4 seasons were good or OK. After that, quality tended to really decline.
Sometimes I sit and think about how one of the highest paying companies in the world sells unproductivity as a service. There's free options for entertainment like YouTube too.
There's nothing wrong with being unproductive. We should totally rest and enjoy life once we've covered our needs for the day. This thing about productivity being a goal of society is stupid. Who says being productive leads to happiness?
I actually like to be productive, and I suspect you do too. But if people don't, that's fine too. I do wonder if we might be addicted to productivity, though.
HN is a site where you hear people unironically talk about how they listen to audiobooks and podcasts at higher speed to optimize how many they can take in.
Thinking about what that implies about how these people engage with art is kind of wild. It's like speedwalking through an art gallery to see more paintings per hour. There's something about that optimization/productivity mindset that seems strangely pathological. Like insisting on eating exclusively vitamin gruel because it's optimized for nutrition per minutes.
I don't know where this compulsion starts, but it's a little disturbing.
> Like insisting on eating exclusively vitamin gruel because it's optimized for nutrition per minutes.
That is actually a thing and perhaps a growing industry called "meal replacements".
It's not surprising given that meals for many people are already just plastic wrapped matter heated in a microwave and slurped up from their laps on the couch.
Part of it is politicians who seem insistent on treating productivity as a primary goal. If we were struggling to produce enough food then, sure, productivity would be a big problem. But we produce an excess of food. So much so that obesity and diabetes are a problem now. This goes for everything: I can't think of a single thing in life where I think "if only we were more productive I'd be happier". At some point we really have to learn to just be happy.
The other part is the tendency of people to focus on simple metrics and neglect anything with nuance. Things like number of books you've read this year, how many people you manage, how much money you earn. All simple numbers, all essentially meaningless outside of a much broader context, but all pursued with laser focus for no particular reason.
At this point in my life I earn more money than ever, I have more stuff and, yes, I'm more productive. But am I happier now than when I got my first cheap car (that I could now buy every month without even sacrificing anything)? Am I happier than when I first had sex? Am I happier than that day I cooked a splendid boeuf bourguignon for my student house? Of course not.
The "meal replacement" industry is exactly what I am thinking about. I know some of them are marketed as essentially premade low-caloric meals, that theoretically make it easy to do calorie-counting. At least that has some kind of niche application that I get the use-case for.
But those other ones, are freaky - the ones that are designed to be allround [food] for humans, in the same way that a dog can eat exclusively a specific type of dogfood indefinitely. Why the need/desire to do this? It's like something out of classic dystopian sci-fi, only it's chosen voluntarily by people with access to real(ish) food, and they pay a premium for it.
I think you're correct about this effort to cram more 'stuff' into life instead of taking our time to engage with less in a deeper way, being counterproductive to the things that make us happy. Maybe some internalized mindset of productivity for its own sake, completely unmoored from the managerial context? Some kind of cargo-cult type performance to attract what - prosperity? Happiness?
I don't really have a good answer for why this happens, but it's certainly interesting.
I'm definitely a niche, but as someone who has never been a super big eater and has lost most of my sense of taste, this kind of product seems great.
That said, for me it has nothing to do with productivity. I just want a single meal I could repeatably consume to maintain a healthy diet. (Ideally, with as little effort as possible on my part because it all taste the same to me)
Well some might argue that every episode is the same formula. Watching season 2 or 10, you’re like watching the same thing over and over.
Not really thinking it’s a big problem personally, lots of shows follow very similar formula, but I did end up stopping to watch after a few seasons as I did get tired of it.
