They just stick the contrived cliffhangers on the end of each "episode" instead.
As photography and CGI improved, writing went down the toilet. Mainly because it's not necessary to make money. Most viewers are happy enough for bad plots, so-so acting, dubious congruency and limited dialogs as long as it's visually entertaining.
As usual, the wider your audience, the duller your product has to become to accommodate everyone.
The worst is definitely dubbing. In France you can clearly see that around 2000, producers gave up any effort on looking for decent translator and voice actors. The voices are always the same from one movie to another, the lips don't match, the jokes are lost.
When I watch the 5th element or the naked gun however, I'm amazed at the fantastic work they did to translate the spirit of the lines so beautifully.
Still, sometimes on netflix you got some very nice surprises, provided you watch it in orginal version only. "The good place" and "Dirk gently" really made my day.
I finally found a switch to switch to the German soundtrack with English subtitles. I'm much happier with that.
I wonder why each scene is not just shot twice, once with the German dialog and once with English. It would work much better than dubbing.
Because this would require an exclusively bilingual cast, dialog that works equally well in both languages, and would drastically increase the production cost.
Not really. First off, most Germans seem to know English passably well. Even if one doesn't know English well, one can still memorize/recite dialog. There isn't that much dialog in a show. And lastly, one can always dub the ones who can't do it, as a last resort.
> dialog that works equally well in both languages,
A requirement anyway if it is being dubbed.
> and would drastically increase the production cost
Increase it, sure, not so sure about drastically. Why spend a lot of money on the production (as is obvious in Babylon Berlin) only to make it sound crappy to the biggest market (English speaking)? An English soundtrack makes it accessible to most of the world.
I also wonder why the original actors didn't do the dub voices.
"Everybody's heard those nightmare stories of somebody doing a take 20, 30, 40 times. Other than obvious errors like forgetting a line, often I can't see any difference between take one and take 20."
https://www.dga.org/Craft/DGAQ/All-Articles/0309-Sept-2003/C...
Exactly my point!
> the reward of a better shot greatly outweighs that cost
My point, too, the "better shot" being the improvement of the lips and voice matching the movement and action. Consider that the English language market is most of the world.
I've seen it done, don't recall which movie it was.
> make a film
I'd love to do that. Wanna finance me?