Netflix Wants Movies to Restate the Plot Three or Four Times in the Dialogue | Hacker News Reader

Netflix Wants Movies to Restate the Plot Three or Four Times in the Dialogue

variety.com

68 pointshaunter36 comments

Mozart wrote for audiences who were only half paying attention. If that is all he had done -- and it was all that most of his peers did -- he would be forgotten. But at the same time he also wrote for audiences who were paying the closest possible attention. He is remembered for doing both. It is quite a trick, as you will see if you try it. Netflix do not even see the need for it, and therefore, their "works" will be forgotten.

It already is. Every time they drop a new show, it's a hot topic for a week, maybe two, then it immediately falls out of the gestalt. No one brings up anything they've done in the future ever again. You barely ever hear anyone mention things like bird box.

oh I love the old shows that were written with two-level humor.

think foghorn leghorn with funny physical humor for the kids and subversive humor for the parents.

Sort of related -- I have friends who are immigrants to the US. They have a hard time with subtle types of humor, but some extra physical humor can sometimes let them have a good time anyway.

And parents of the time also got that Foghorn Leghorn was a parody of Senator Claghorn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senator_Claghorn

Edit: Apparently, Foghorn goes even further back and is a parody of the sheriff from Blue Monday Jamboree as the first Foghorn episode predates Claghorn: https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/the-origin-of-foghorn-...

Not quite as highbrow, but Pixar stuff, particularly the earlier movies, manage to have jokes that work for kids and their parents. It was much appreciated.

The first few seasons of SpongeBob SquarePants are also masterfully crafted in this way

Yes! I can still go back and re-watch SpongeBob episodes despite the being 30, and I still laugh. Just at different things now :')

Bluey is pretty good in in that aspect too.

Many of the original Loony Toons and Warner Brothers cartoons fall into this category.

The reason they were produced from the 1930s to 50s was to be run in movie theaters before the main picture. Since they would run before different kinds of movies they had to entertain both kids and adults. Some of the humor in those cartoons clearly went way over the kinds heads.

It was only later that they were bundled as TV shows for children.

This is a great point that's applicable to legal writing. Thank you for sharing it!

Any chance you have a source where I could learn more about this aspect of Mozart's work?

Good question. The literature does not tend to be very informative on this point. It is a difficult topic to discuss because you can either handwave and presume agreement, or else go very deep. It has a lot to do with the amount and kind of repetition, and that is where the analogy between music and prose gets wobbly. The nearest thing we had to a Mozart in living memory was Stephen Sondheim. Something like "Comedy Tonight" would have been very familiar to Mozart, in purpose if not in all the details of execution.

In terms of technical writing for multiple audiences, it comes immediately to vocabulary, and there, again, the analogy fails, because it is much harder to get away with using unfamiliar words. For your purposes, Churchill might be a more direct model than Mozart. Look particularly at how he deploys words of one syllable, two syllables, etc. to shape phrases and produce climactic rhythms. Occupational dialect, full of terms-of-art, is obviously an obstacle to this kind of thing.

Some related discussions:

Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42529756

The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44567683

Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062198

Yeah I'm really watching less and less. I already closed all my streaming accounts after the fragmentation but a friend gave me access to his massive Plex library with all the latest stuff.

However I find I just don't care anymore. It's such terrible crap. And all the same tired old tropes. The snarky detective breaking all the rules. The muscly ex-soldier that bashes heads in. The superspies with offices that look like nightclubs. And spinoff after spinoff which are even more dumb and one-dimensional than the original.

Once in a while there's a pearl but they're few and far between. Most of it is fast food entertainment and utterly hollow.

Turkish TV series have been operating on this exact "second screen" logic for decades. They are massive global exports specifically because their 140-minute episodes rely heavily on meaningful stares, flashbacks, and circular dialogue.

They are designed for people ironing or cooking; you can leave the room for twenty minutes and miss absolutely nothing.

Personally, I can't bear them, the constant spoon-feeding is torture if you are actually paying attention, but Netflix is effectively just adopting this proven, low-attention retention strategy.

> They are designed for people ironing or cooking; you can leave the room for twenty minutes and miss absolutely nothing.

Damn, this explains Brazilian and Indian soap operas so well too!

And also American (USA). Remenber Dallas ? Dinasty ? Andor ?

"Can we get a big one in the first five minutes?"

That's in screenwriter circles called the hook, not the plot. You don't reiterate the whole plot for the innate viewers, you just deepen the hook, usually by giving wrong hooks, which are then replaced by better hooks.

It's not that Netflix invented TV scripting. Even with festival movies you turn it off within the first 5 minutes if you have to judge 200 to 2000 admissions in a month. Same with distributors. They certainly don't watch the whole movie if it starts bad. It usually doesn't get better in the third act.

Some TV is already like this. I recall critics of Teletubbies complaining about the repeated statements and actions (Tinky-Winky says "Again! Again!"). Then I spent time in Asia and all their popular entertainment (eg Running Man) continually repeats the last 10 seconds of each action. It's crazy making to me, but it evidently is what the viewers like.

The teletubbies is a bad example here, it's designed for babies where repetition is good for learning and development.

Some Asian content can be like this, sure, but I suspect that's stylistic rather than for the reasons Netflix are doing it.

Interesting, so Netflix is literally and not figuratively infantilizing its users.

The "user" is only half of a human anyway, 50% is the max consciousness people spend on whatever Netflix they have running as background noise. That's the target audience Netflix is optimizing for: half-humans. Saves them lots of bandwidth, expenses for quality, and yes, it needs a solid amount of exposition[0] to work.

[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Exposition

> Then I spent time in Asia

The worst show I've seen for this was american - mythbusters.

”He is buying a gift for his aunt”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2gB03p44_4

They're taking the hobbits to Isengard.

I am daft: why do people past a certain age continue to watch movies and tv shows so religiously. What’s the never ending allure? It’s very formulaic as per the articles. Once in awhile I can sort of understand but beyond that, is it escapism? Addiction?

This will kill Netflix in the end.

You mean the company that is going to spend 100+ billion to buy a legacy hollywood studio, Warner Brothers (sadly)?

I recently heard some workmates discussing some new TV show - one told the other that they definitely can't double-screen for this show - it needs full attention.

i believe that would qualify as "hanging a lantern"

http://bekindrewrite.com/2011/02/04/what-does-hang-a-lantern...

when done artfully it works well, rather than insulting intelligences, or seeming intentionally dumbed down.

Reminds me of the gift shop sketch from Mitchell & Webb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MFtl2XXnUc

It’s so painful that I can’t even watch.

There will never be another The Wire.

When HBO took chances, was cool, and my grandparents stole it via the terrestrial distribution signal.

Netflix will probably absorb them and make them even worse than they are now.

The HN headline misses the point that Netflix told Matt Damon this.

I'd guess more people will watch Matt Damon's new movie on Netflix than watched Adolescence before it won the awards

People want to see (are more likely to watch) super and action hero movies with big stars in - but there's been so many of these with fairly similar plotlines that outside the attention grabbing action and fight scenes the quiet/story development scenes become like ad breaks and people start looking at their phones.

If Matt Damon made different movies for Netflix (like adolescence!), he'd get less views but be given more freedom.

> shows like “Adolescence” are “the exception,” Affleck said he felt the show “demonstrates you don’t have to do” the Netflix tricks to please audiences.

I hate this lazy, boring form of non-art.

If people can't pay attention, fuck them.

I am of two minds here. I can understand how the filmmakers can feel insulted by this demand but I am also one of those viewers that watches movies with one eye on my phone so spoon feeding the audience benefits people like me. I only pay full attention to one or two shows (usually those that I watch with my spouse) and every other show can only get my divided attention. My product manager sense says that you should give people what they want even if my artistic sense is indignant.

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