When I look at the crap I watched as a kid in the 80s (which included a good amount of 70s reruns), basically all broadcast TV today is far superior. But the competition for broadcast TV isn't "no competition" now, it's the Internet, and computer games, and Netflix. The entertainment industry has been blown wide open by the Internet and computers, and so now they have to compete with thousands of alternatives instead of just having 3 channels to choose from. Naturally, quality goes up.
When I was a kid, the "rots your brain" videogame that my parents would only let me play at friends' houses was Super Mario Brothers. Now, my "rots your brain" pastime is Factorio, which is a game where people are literally designing chips in:
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/2vqzlx/8_bit_alu_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/4aijlw/here_is_my...
SpaceChem even more so.
As others have mentioned, Zachlikes are basically programming, and in particular the debugging / pipeline optimization parts can quickly drain my enthusiasm if I've been doing a lot of hard coding at work.
Actually, I can test this...I've got some old My Little Pony episodes lying around on a hard disk. They're 9 minutes apiece. IIRC they ran 2 to a timeslot, so that's 18 minutes of show per 30 minute timeslot, and 12 minutes of commercials.
When I was in High School, our English teacher actually wrote and produced a TV show and was telling us about her experience and some of the things she had to do to cut episodes in the right amount of time for commercials. At the time (mid 2000s), the average was 23 minutes of show per 30 minute episode.
Looking across my library at recent shows, it seems to average about 21 minutes nowadays.
I don't complain about the speeding too much as I watch most shows are 1.5x and cut out the commercials so a show with 18 minutes of content takes 12 minutes.
(I'm sorry.)
It doesn't work this way for content that tries to communicate a specific mood, but for slapstick humor chains like BBT, more jokes is just funnier than less jokes per minute.
Try searching for versions with laugh track removed to get a better sense of the writing per se without the extra emotional manipulation.
Compare with Silicon Valley, a comedy show which also mercilessly skewers nerds, but more for the sake of social commentary than just piling on insults, and which treats even the most caricatured characters with some dignity and humanity.
I think "dumb show" reflects more about the style of humor than the type of people who like it. Some people prefer clever, subtle humor. Some people want goofy and slapstick humor. Some people love awkward situational humor. There is no account for taste.
But yeah, it's an awful show.
I don't think that's quite what the parent was saying. It's not that BBT is a show for a dumb audience. Rather, BBT is a show about supposedly smart characters, with a writing staff that doesn't have anyone sufficiently-smart-enough on it to be able to accurately depict the thinking process of genuinely smart characters.
You can't, as someone with an average IQ, really write the internal monologue of someone with a much higher IQ. You can probably capture their personality, but you can't solve problems the way they solve problems (or write characters who do so) without, at least temporarily, actually being that smart.
This is an often-discussed aspect of writing military fiction: it's basically impossible to come up with the sort of strategic masterstrokes that a famous general would come up with, without yourself being a famous general. You can bring together ten lesser strategists and ask them to knock their heads together, and you still won't get a brilliancy† out.
† https://www.chess.com/article/view/how-to-play-a-brilliancy
Most people who write master strategists in fiction end up just doing one of a few main things:
• they crib all the "clever moves" from well-known historical battles. This limits you to just, essentially, writing history over again wearing a new coat.
• they get an actual master-ish strategist to consult. You see this in, for example, sports anime about chess or Go—the author usually relied on input from a high-level professional (but not master) player.
• they just make the characters' abilities entirely informed, rather than explicit. This is your Sherlock Holmes story: you can see what they came up with in the end, but you don't get any insight into how they went about putting it together. The author just decided what the solution was, worked backward to what sorts of clues would lead one to that solution, and then decided by fiat that the protagonist would notice those clues.
The whole "rational fiction" movement is basically about avoiding doing any of the above.
BBT as a minstrel show -- which is a way of mocking another group -- is an apt simile, regardless of whether blacks suffered worse fate or not.
Which is not even relevant anyway: what blacks suffered had little to do with minstrel shows, those were the least of their troubles. If parent had compared BBT to slavery, you'd have a point. But he made a much more precise argument.
Do we have to go through this every time BBT is mentioned on the internet. We all know the show sucks and why, and adding this descriptor only starts the same stupid fight that appears on every BBT thread and is never resolved and just makes everyone angry.
I still haven't forgiven Parker & Stone for telling people that voting didn't matter. If they've grown up, with some kind of mea culpa, I'll be happy to welcome them back to civil society.
Anyone have an anecdote of young BBT fans being drawn to physics or math?
Sure, it's a comedy, but it's not like there's a watchable Star Trek turning a new generation towards STEM. Mr. Robot, probably just breeding more anarchists.
But yes the live audience laughs moronically on cue and I totally agree with your assessment of the show.
I get my episodes of BBT from iTunes. You’re correct that BBT episodes are shorter than most other mainstream shows (at least in my own library). They are often only about 18-19m, other episodes reach 21-22m as well. I don’t see any below 18m in the past four seasons and stopped searching beyond that. Alternatively, most of the half-hour shows I watch are consistently about 20-21m, so BBT is definitely providing less content overall.
As for the assertion of 1m intros with BBT, that's 3x longer than reality. I scripted simple controls for controlling iTunes via my phone so that I wouldn’t need to reach for my kbd or trackpad. I set the FWD time to 30 seconds and the BACK time to 10 seconds. Jumping ahead by 30s is appropriate for most shows that I watch, whereas BBT requires me to also jump back by 10s (it has a 20s intro).
Few sitcoms still have 1m or longer intros. New Girl is about 5s, down from around 30s when it started. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia dropped from 1m to 30s. The Sarah Silverman Program dropped from 22s to 17s in 2010. I see the overall trend for typical broadcasts as gradually reducing intros (excluding shows on HBO, etc; those still have very long intros but also no commercials).
Supernatural or Lost are good examples of how an intro should be. Literally just the name of the show on the screen for a few seconds, no theme music that gets annoying halfway through the season, no montage of the characters tromping around a fountain, just skip to the show.
At any rate... the Netflix skipped intro is how it should be done. Thank god for Netflix.
That's been the trend for dramas basically ever since-- Lost was among the first to adopt the minimal intro that's popular now. Stargate even made a joke out of it in one of their later episodes.
IIRC the standard is:
22 minutes for 30 min shows
44 minutes for hour long shows
You can go to RARBG and check the MediaInfo for any show.
So you get 16 min of ads every hour. So a quarter of each hour is ads.
I stopped watching normal TV 2 years ago and before that used to record all my shows so I could fast forward through the adverts. Stuck at the in-laws for Christmas and I actually can't watch their TV due to the adverts now.
I’m now a functioning adult and find it hard to get into video games, not because I fear I’ll get addicted but I just don’t get the same dopamine hit from games like I used to. I drive on race tracks to get that hit now.
In February of this year Minecraft apparently had 55 million players (with 122 million copies sold).[1]
1: http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/02/27/minecraft-has-55-mill...
I have feeling the bottom of the barrel has gotten a lot worse than it used to be.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmH4bXt23LHAg-INoizVY...
Depends. Talk shows in the 70s (Dick Cavett and such) were far better than the BS today (from Fallon and Kimmel to Letterman). M.A.S.H would stand up there with anything today. And the original talent on something like the Ed Sullivan show or the Soul Train or Johny Cash show. Or the Groucho Marx game show I've been watching on YouTube (all the above were beyond my time, and I've only caught MASH on re-runs).
I have a feeling that MASH somehow breaks the normal chain of time and causality in that the only time anyone ever caught it was on re-runs. Same with "A Charlie Brown Christmas". These are shows that were born in the big bang and civilisations occasionally drift into their broadcast space for a few decades before moving on. We're still in the MASH nebula, and have been since 1972.
I haven't had a TV in 10 years and when I'm at someones house who does, the difference is immediately apparent, especially during the late night segments.
The average early AM commercial now (at least in my area) is literally so bad that it feels like advertisers just assume that their average viewer is mentally challenged or emotionally unstable in some way. It's almost like watching a SNL skit or a fake commercial within a really bad B-grade movie.
With YouTube we see people not relying on direct ad revenue, but rather embedding sponsors into their content. And doing things like recommending products and using Amazon referrals to generate revenue from their channels. I guess the problem with broadcast TV is that commercials still work just as well as they did, they just have a smaller audience.
Is Factorio popular among kids?
Also, changing would require learning something new. People genuinely find learning to have a level of discomfort so they avoid it.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/03/learning-hurts-your-...
That...doesn't jive with the limited exposure I've had to cable television. Hundreds of channels and very little good on, I suspect people waste a lot of time flipping through.
Having never owned a TV myself, I'm actually considering buying one now. The fact that shows are actually getting better, combined with how easy it is to wait for other people to be a filter, combined with no ads makes TV actually attractive to me for the first time since I was like 5.
But still zero reason to pay for cable.
Went out, bought a nice directional antenna, bought a converter box from a friend, turned it on.
5 minutes later I realized I had zero tolerance for ads shouting at me, boxed everything up, and eventually took the TV to recycling. (It also nearly put me in the hospital, big CRTs are big.)
My iPad and Netflix/iTunes are all I need. Someday maybe I'll get a 13" iPad Pro and stick it on a wall, but I doubt it.
its amazing
Trust me, having grown up in a broadcast and then cable TV household, there's a habituality to TV consumption that isn't there in streaming.
Though streaming has its own habituality in the form of bingeing.
One thing I’d kind of like on Netflix and their ilk would be a way to choose a series and say “play me a random episode“. Some shows work well that way. I don’t want to have to go choose through six seasons to find something that appeals to me, I’ll just take an episode. Surprise me.
Something more akin to changing channels like "random cartoon" or "random comedy" would remove one last obstacle in the way of converting cable subscribers.
If the platform were to offer a random choice, the fact that the resulting view was not organic would need to be tracked separately. Conversely, you'd want a better way of figuring out whether the viewer was satisfied with the content after all. These problems require nontrivial effort.
Right now, things are much easier. The viewer always makes a choice, ostensibly a conscious choice, and all views factor into aggregate numbers that correlate with show popularity.
The UI could even continue doing separate random programs, but allow the watcher to say "Keep Watching this", locking in their choice and making it a "discovered" show.
So just track it separately and don't interpret it the same way as deliberately chosen shows. I don't see the problem.
There'd be a "cable-style-menu" option to mimic the way cable / satellite menus have looked since the late 90's. Maybe 50 or so channels of similar programming running on a time schedule, where you have the option of catching the last 30 minutes of "Terminator 2 - Judgement Day" or watching from the beginning.
Its mindless, but I think that style of consumption is what a lot of people want. It to do the hard work for them.
You could do multiple channels, but I think if you really, really want to capture the "I'm watching this with the rest of the country" feeling, a single live channel would be the safest bet.
It also may have value strategically, because there are some shows that "work" more as a live show, and there are some TV series that have better cultural impact if they are released in a serialized way. For instance I suspect Game Of Thrones has been more successful at permeating culture by releasing one episode a week than it would have been had the whole season been dumped at once.
Financially though, it's not clear this would work for Netflix. Now, depending upon how they pay for a given piece of content, they're paying for a lot of programming being used as background noise. You'd have to get enough people buying Netflix subscriptions because of this added option to offset the higher costs.
I work in the streaming industry, and offering the same "background noise" quality is something that still eludes us. I personally believe that as soon as you introduce any sort of possibility of explicit input from the user (skip, pause), or even implicit (by the way, all of this is also available on demand in our catalogue) the experience is tainted. Subconsciously we know that we are needlessly watching something we should be tailoring ourselves.
The power of the linear channels is that they are so severely limited. Streaming services has long tauted that they are superior because they aren't. Tough problem.
Smarter people stop watching TV > TV adapts to the new demographics to fight over dwindling ratings > TV becomes dumber > Even more smarter people stop watching TV
With Netflix, you pay for an all you can eat sub without commercials. Newssites and newspapers should do the same. It allows for two viable ways to pay for content: either paying directly, or paying via advertisement/your time.
The old model of e.g. cable TV is akin to having one's cake and eat it too. Its outdated, and superseded. The only reason it still exists is because the legacy is being used due to habit ie. people who don't know yet about on-demand services like Netflix. Probably tons of babyboomers + elder. If we want to put the nails in the coffin, we gotta 1) unsub to cable TV as much as we can 2) not use it as much as we can 3) stimulate and help these lagging groups to get on with the program.
Product Placement is like a landmine, I'm watching the show when they spring an ad out of the blue and kill any semblance of suspension of disbelief.
There's a certain feeling of "Gotcha! I still got it. Can't full me, Diet Coke".
Also good shows and movies do not do this. Never once noticed product placement in The Wire or Breaking Bad, Pontiac Aztec notwithstanding.
Details: https://www.polygon.com/2015/3/13/8210581/monument-valley-ho...
i.e : Gypsy first episode was filled with Channel perfume branding. NO -f'ing- GO
I had the same reaction this Thanksgiving when I was at my Dad's. I don't think it actually has become dumber, we're just not used to it anymore. I felt like I was watching commercials with a bit of content sprinkled in. I cut the cord about six years ago.
It started with station logo water marks and now its amazing to see how much of the lower right hand corner of the screen is seen by networks as acceptable to use for advertising another show while the current show or sporting event is running.
When all you have is TV, though, you can acclimate yourself to all kinds of rubbish. I'm sure in the future when we have a superior protocol or way or doing something, we'll look back and wonder why we thought X was ever a good idea.
Also, kids are consuming a lot of highly effective YouTube ads.
You can also runs pixelserv that will return a 1 pixel image so you don't get any errors.
It does on FF for Android!
If you want a more "native" player there's always SkyTube and other similar apps for longform content.
There's a few apps for which I think native is important, but I'm generally happy with mobile websites. uBlock Origin really makes mobile web not suck.
But it turns out YouTube was the last source of dynamic (i.e., not image/text) ads in my life, and now when on the rare occasion that I accidentally open YouTube in my work Chrome profile, I'm surprised at how averse I've become to dealing with even the tiny load lag + few-second wait for a pre-roll. I've considered switching to Spotify, since Google Play Music seems to be one of those life-support products that PMs within Google make their promotions off of through useless UI churn instead of fixing longstanding issues, but at this point, YT Red is what stops me from doing so.
I can get straight unlimited 1GB connection Internet for $99 month. I pay another $45 for the cable. It's difficult to get BBC and BBC America without cable or satellite, and I watch both all the time.
It's scary and interesting.
I was shocked that network tv could produce something so smart, balanced, thoughtful, albeit 20 years ago.
Wait, I'm sure there have been more. Right?
Yeah, never mind.
https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/episode-101-teaser-a...
Note that I don't mind smart or funny commercials. I will actually seek out reruns of the old "Hi I'm a Mac/PC" and watch them with delight. (And I'm a PC user :o).
there are over 7,000,000,000 people in the world
100 channels is not even close to enough, especially when they're all funneled through the same 2 or 3 providers
The mother then informed that it's always been this way, so I looked up a few old ad compilations from the 90's and early 2000's. She was right.
I'm not sure about the television programming itself-- drama, "real-life" shows have always been a hit. I remember when I did watch television, I did so hoping to numb out whatever responsibility I had to do at the time with something non-thinking enough to be calming, but dramatic enough that it wouldn't bore me. The result is the crap they've been airing for years. And I realized again that advertising is all about subconscious influence. Doesn't matter how fucking stupid the commercials are, it matters that you've seen it. Television is mindless in the way that it lulls you-- you'll soon forget what happened, because nothing much happened, and you weren't really paying attention because the programs don't allow you to process everything consciously (in fact, that's because there's nothing to process-- afterall, all of it is laid out to you clear as day. This is what happens next, susie does this for this reason, the resolution you are about to see is expected under the paradigm we've constructed, etc). If you watch the same rehashed concepts everyday, the same commercials, it will stick in the subconscious, and some time later you'll be shopping in the supermarket and pick up a pack of Charmin toilet paper for no goddamn reason even though they market their flushable rainforest corpses with bears who complain that the paper is sticking to their assholes. You make that decision to buy in a split second because you hate grocery shopping and you don't have a lot of time to debate over prices because you still have a dozen other items to pick up. How do you choose? Those bears are cute, something tells me this toilet paper is extra soft and clearly that's something I should want out of a decent quality toilet paper... idk throw it in the cart.
1950s: 13% Pre-cable: 18% Pre-web: 22% Pre-Youtube: 24% Now: 30%
As alternative forms of media have become available, the value per viewer hour has decreased, so the total amount of time devoted to commercials has increased.
This is no different from YouTube or Facebook. Except those services follow your personally and make shadow profiles of your preferences and sell them to other companies. Is that really better?
If you mean the ads are better quality, then that’s even worse. Better ads mean you’re being told what to buy... more effectively.
I suppose it depends what you mean by "better quality".
I have seen ads which were effective in making me think something was a good product only to discover that it's not upon further research.
On the other hand, I have seen ads which were really good in the sense that they showed me something that I would not have otherwise found and that I genuinely like.
If it matters to anyone I work for Google (Cloud) so maybe I'm biased in my stance on ads. That being said, I am guilty of using ublock origin so I like to think I hate annoying ads as much as anyone else.
Except for product placement, and I suppose billboards, I just don’t see ads anymore. I don’t hear them in my music, they only exist as product placement in my television and movies, I don’t see them online. I’ll take that reduction any day, and just accept the total elimination is unlikely.
The last (and final) one I watched (just to see how bad it was) had a 30 second (I am not shitting you) beer commercial complete with the signature Michael Bay 360 degree shot.
And not to mention the Chinese - "we must call central government" - pandering.
https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/best-netflix-...