Comment by alabastervlog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alabastervlog | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Eh... it's extremely flabby, like most of these franchise-tied TV series (all the Marvel ones have the same problem, both the Netflix and Disney ones, though the Netflix ones are far worse about it). Tons of scenes where I want to yell at the editor "fucking cut away! It's over!" and then it goes on another 20 seconds, shots where it clearly should have cut a couple seconds earlier, whole pieces of dialog that are painfully redundant, restating things or adding nothing to either plot or character, et c, and it adds up.

My best guess for why they do this is that it fills time with fewer set-ups and sets, saving production costs. I can't figure out another angle for how this could be saving money per minute of "content".

The new season makes that really clear, because each 3-episode "movie" is 130ish minutes long and clearly could have been one 90ish minute film without losing anything important at all, still with plenty of time for relaxed-pace character development and such.

> whole pieces of dialog that are painfully redundant, restating things or adding nothing to either plot or character

Modern TV is made to be consumed (I use that word intentionally, not watched) by people who aren't really paying attention to what's happening, so you need to restate any major plot point several times to make sure it sticks.

I do think the cost thing is a factor.

You've got 30 seconds you shot that, when the editor sits down to put it all together, definitely needs to be trimmed. But if you do that, it's 30 fewer seconds of "content". Your business measures output in terms of minutes of content, finished or watched. If you leave it in, the scene's worse, but how many viewers will stop watching because of it? Fewer than what it's worth to have that extra half-minute of "content". So it stays.

And operating this way, you can shoot 7 minutes of dialog that'd be trimmed to 4.5 minutes in a good edit (it's many individual shots, and most have at least a little on the beginning or end that need to go), instead trimming only what's absolutely necessary and get 5 or maybe 5.5 minutes out of it; do that over an entire 40 minute episode and you've saved yourself an entire longish scene that you'd have had to set up for otherwise, to fill the same time. Each set-up is expensive, so that's also saving you money despite being the same amount of "content".

Are streaming services really measuring value in terms of minutes watched? I would have thought they’d have better methods of tracking which shows generate subscriptions and retention.

Cost-per-minute and total minutes delivered being key metrics for their production folks would have a similar effect, and is kinda the same thing (how many minutes of viewing will be experienced by someone who watches the show you made for us?) if they don't also have effective controls in place to keep the editing tight—and, from what they put out, I think they do not.

Its all talk and very little action. The Mandalorian was better in this regard.

Mandalorian benefitted a lot from being far more episodic, though of course it also had some longer plot lines. Most shows that try to make their main thing the prestige TV “big damn plot” just aren’t very good at it. Episodic’s easier to get right, or at least to do OK.

It’s also a better star wars, in that it’s playing in the same space as the originals, and not a lot of things do that very well, so it’s nice to see anything doing it decently well. Andor’s competition is basically all of political action-thrillers, and that’s a crowded space in which it doesn’t really stand out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com