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One of my friends is a writer, and his take on the problem is that the seasoned writers Netflix used to have (a few years ago) are now all getting fairly "old". Aka around their 50's.

So, they were let go, and a new generation of young, unseasoned writers has been doing the writing.

But unlike previous generations though (heh), many of them are not even slightly interested in learning from the previous (seasoned) writers, whom they view as inferior for some reason.

Thus, the extremely low quality (idiot level) of writing in recent years.

No idea how accurate that is, but it seems like a reasonable take at first glance.

Mind you, I don't really watch US origin tv/movies any more myself due to their crappiness. :)

Certainly I would agree that letting go a lot of experience folks would have an effect on the product.

However, I think this comment could use some more justification:

> But unlike previous generations though (heh), many of them are not even slightly interested in learning from the previous (seasoned) writers, whom they view as inferior for some reason.

Claiming that a particular generation is really different from another in this sort of way is something I'd need to see a lot of evidence to be convinced of. Kids trying to do their own thing and middle aged folks lamenting "kids these days" is a tale as old as time.

Thus the "(heh)" in my post. I recognise the same thing, and found it ironic.

> Kids trying to do their own thing and middle aged folks lamenting "kids these days" is a tale as old as time.

Yeah, agreed. From my point of view, it's not totally the new writers fault.

It's the fault of the management chain that got rid of the old writers and also didn't tell the new ones "Look, just humour the old fogies for a while, you might learn something...".

Barely on-topic, but this is sort of the plot of Reboot, and I remember watching this show seeing the dynamic between the elder writer played by Paul Reiser) and the much younger writer played by Rachel Bloom.

The gist of the (relevant) bit of plot is that the younger writer wants to take an old classic series (ala Full House) but do a gritty reboot of it, but the studio brings in the original writers on to help, and there is unsurprisingly a culture clash.

I remember thinking (of the younger generation) how sad it was that they were so eager to dismiss all the experience of the elders, and how glad I was that this was just a TV show and probably not at all what was happening in the real world. I was safe in that ignorance right up until I read your comment.

This was a great show I can't say enough about. It really mad me laugh out loud far more than any other show in recent memory. (And in the end, if I recall, both groups of writers learned that the other was actually pretty decent at their jobs and had a lot of good ideas.) Unfortunately, it didn't do spectacularly in the ratings and was immediately canceled. I seriously hope someone else picks it up, but I don't know how likely that is.

I've never seen the show but it sounds good and reviews were decent. Given that it was killed off after one season, is it still worth the watch? Does it end well?

I think it's worth it, but I just like watching TV. It ends with a sort-of cliffhanger (a relationship cliffhanger), but it's not a surprising one.

> I was safe in that ignorance right up until I read your comment.

Oops, sorry. ;)

> No idea how accurate that is, but it seems like a reasonable take at first glance.

I mean that's what every generation of skilled workers has always said about the generation following them, so I'd take it with a grain of salt.

I wonder if some of that is TV writers growing up on ubiquitous TV writing, like how anime is increasingly made by people who just like anime and weren't as interested in a wide variety of media as the older generation.

Bringing up episodic television shows in the 90s brings up an interesting point. For 90s episodic television, script submissions were open to the public. Each show still had a team of staff writers like they do today, but the staff writers would mostly write the really important episodes (like finales and two-parters). The bulk of the episodes would be freelance scripts, with the staff writers editing for consistency and adding an extra scene or two to hint at continuing plot threads. In today's binge-able format, almost every episode is written by the staff writers. (They might still let someone with connections, like an actor on the show looking to make a career change, submit an episode.)

Sure, 90+% of submitted episode pitches were probably terrible, but that was fine because show runners could choose the best episodes from the slush heap. Now each series only orders roughly as many episode scripts as a season has episodes. If a writer has a 75-80% hit rate, the show can't discard the bad episodes.

> The bulk of the episodes would be freelance scripts, with the staff writers editing for consistency and adding an extra scene or two to hint at continuing plot threads

Can you name a few shows that were written that way? I'd never heard of this but I don't watch much TV from before the 2000's.

I worked with a copy writer that had written an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." By coincidence she had submitted an a script for an episode that coincided with a major plot point they were working to (a character leaving). I asked her about it, and it was really the only major writing credit she ever got.

I know that at least Star Trek: The Next Generation and the Golden Girls accepted freelance scripts. You can sometimes find the submission guidelines for Star Trek: The Next Generation on fan sites. You can also tell if this is the case for a show by looking at the writers. If there are lots of writers who only wrote one or two episodes, the show probably took submissions.

All the old books about television script writing I've read are about submitting in this way, but by the time I was actually considering it episodic television was rapidly dying out.

I know Star Trek: The Next Generation did this. They also did it with Deep Space 9. Not sure about Voyager.

I don't know what other shows might have done this.

I really felt this when I was watching Andor. It's about a bunch of nobodies in the Star Wars universe, no Jedi at all. But there were so many moments when things just made so much sense, that it actually took me out of the moment in surprise. There's so little good writing anymore that it's shocking when you see it.

>but the combination of all of them doing that turn one fairly decent (not perfect, but decent) streaming service into an array of streaming services each individually not worth the subscription.

And thus we're back at "cable rates" but pick your poison.

The response should be "cancel services when you don't need them" but it's tougher if you have a family with young kids who you let watch.

I really liked paying CBS/Paramount for a single month so my kids could binge Korra (sequel to Avatar: the Last Airbender) back when Netflix released A:tLA first. We literally watched nothing else on the service.

A friend of mine just does one service at a time, and it's low-key fairly brilliant. There's a bit of headache with installing / uninstalling apps on televisions and having to log into things once a month or quarter or however long it takes him, but the kernel of the idea is that there are generally only a few new, good shows worth watching for any given network, but all the good shows are roughly equally distributed between networks.

So instead of paying $10 a month to Disney for Mandalorian, Wandavision, Loki, an additional $10 for Peacock for Mrs. Davis, Bel Air, and Poker Face, plus however much else for HBOMax, Netflix, Hulu, etc., he could just pay one network $10 a month, binge the couple of good shows that they had, and then instead of waiting months for the next thing to come out, unsubscribe and switch to another network. Lather, rinse, repeat.

He isn't as current, and sometimes it's hard to chat about whatever the current new thing is, but society has effectively already given up on the concept of the whole nation tuning in to any one thing and it being the topic of watercooler conversations for a myriad of reasons.

Note: He has children, and I have no idea how he handles this other than to note that he also has a digital antenna, so some shows are "always available" (or at least as much as is allowed for)

This is why all the streaming services are constantly trying to hype up their one "must watch" show. If you aren't watching it now, you're left out of the conversation, and nobody will want to talk about it in three months.

Are they though? Netflix in particular is famously bad at actually promoting their hot new stuff. I suppose they may do it more on-platform and just assume it's enough, but it seems like (and this is just from my memory, which is maybe wrong) that the ads for streaming services generally fall into the "look at all this stuff we have and maybe I won't even tell you what show I'm giving you a clip of right now" kinds of commercials.

I practically never see an ad for a particular new show -- tho in addition to memory faults there is also of course selection bias here.

I suspect what Amazon did with wheel of time and rings of power to be a less brutal method: weekly episode release. Disney does this too.

If they have enough “must-watch” shows that are staggered then you lose out unless you’re paying constantly.

It’s what they want: gets them som earned media/socialmedia hype, and prevents the binge+drop discount watching approach.

I think the release cadence can be a double edged sword for viewer retention.

Certainly with Wheel of Time I felt that there was a few weak\boring episodes in a row and I hit the point where I dropped it, for me wasn't worth waiting a full week to see if quality of subsequent episodes improved.

If there had of been a buffer of episodes available I could probably power through the bad episodes until the show picked up again but with weekly release cadence it just caused me to give up on it.

I wonder whether some of the media streaming companies are going to try to use the sports streaming playbook, where you get penalized for canceling and then resubcribing within <12 months.

Those penalties could be "we just won't let you sign up" or "oh you don't get the promotional rate then, your rate for Netflix will be $44.95/mo for the next 11 months".

This is why I set up Jellyfin on my server.

I wanted a smattering from like 10 different services. No I'm not paying 120$ a month. So I pirated every last bit.

Turns out friends also wanted to watch them so I made my JF instance available via cloudflare. And now I get requests of shows, the arrs parses the request, downloads, and just shows up.

The services had their chance. They failed us. We came with alternatives. Until their offerings are better, we see no reason to change.

A lot of wisdom in that rant. I too have noticed the big gap is writers (who are going on strike it seems). I think we're all going to have to suffer through "stuff written by LLMs" for a while, but I really think that a studio that restructured their revenue sharing to focus more of the proceeds towards writers would find quite a bit of success in today's market.

> I too have noticed the big gap is writers

I started watching "The Night Agent" but the dialogue became too painful for me to carry on after about four or five episodes. That coupled with a script where two secret service agents bitch at each other like children eventually nailed the coffin.

Exactly! I had the same reaction. First episode, "Okay, an interesting (if well worn) setup, a lead character that is somewhat interesting, some dynamics." to second episode "Well that really didn't feel particularly entertaining", to the third episode, "not getting better, time to get off this train."

I just watched “Ghosted”. It was somewhat entertaining, but hardly stellar. This is the sort of movie that is being released these days, and we can easily take it or leave it.

Dexter Fletcher as director piqued my interest in Ghosted just a wee bit. I read The Rachel Papers as a youngster and quite enjoyed the film when it came out (in which he plays the main character in the book).

I'll probably watch it on holiday to hedge against the possibility of losing two hours of my life on a school night :)

I feel the same is also happening with Rabbit Hole, though I might persist with it. The Kiefer and Charles Dance in the same series, what's not to like?

The show got better by the end. The show itself-- not the dialogue.

On a similar note: for so much of Night Agent, it felt like they started with competent technical advisors that paid enough attention to detail to make terminals show TUIs/GUIs that actually relate to the current goal, but the writers came along and rewrote every technical explanation with "brb guys, gotta hack the mainframe" garbage.

The wine moms around me love the show though, so maybe it's just catering to the target demographic.

> Take any Writing 101 course, and if you want to write for Hollywood, completely throw it out the window because they do not care in the slightest about any of that.

I don't think it's that. Historically, you'd have a strong cast and crew on board for the first ~2-3 seasons.

Any show attracts its critical mass of viewers early on, so the first way to keep production of later seasons profitable is by eliminating expensive gimmicks (helicopters, SFX, on-location, etc.).

Firing the writers and replacing them with Writing 101 interns is usually the next step. It's not that nobody cares, but the replacement labor is new to the game; they're not writing award-winning scripts at that stage in their lives. It's a step above mining fanfiction.net for scripts.

Well said, writing makes the difference. Quite a few great movies have an extremely simple setting. Even if we establish that writers can't write anymore, let's turn to books not yet televised?

One phenomenon of shitty writing and dialogue is that increasingly I hate the main character. Smug, cringe, sassy, sarcastic, lecturing. I'm not rooting for them, I hope the bad guys win.

> I think the root problem is that no studio anywhere is large enough to put out enough high-quality content to keep the people engaged continuously. Not even Disney.

This. There simply isn't that much really great content.