this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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An insightful thought from a TV critic I read years ago just as streaming was taking off :
There’s no such thing as the best TV show anymore, because there’s so much that’s generally good enough to be a candidate that no one person has watched it all and spent the time to assess it properly.
More broadly, this had happened to western culture with the internet. Previously, with only three tv channels and two major papers, we were all literally on the same page.
I’d go further and say there’s a vertical dimension too in terms of complexity. Society and its various aspects such as technology are now complex enough in total they I don’t think anyone can ever say they understand what’s going on.
One of the worst catalysts of this is when channels started dropping entire seasons of shows at once online to appease le epic binge watching culture. But when everyone watches something new like that at once, there's no time to actually appreciate anything or discuss the story or build anticipation, it just gets burned through and forgotten within 2 weeks.
It does still allow for catch-up at the end of the run though. I prefer to binge watch, but now I wait a few months for it all to be released and then watch it. Which still doesn't allow for week to week discussion, but fits my watching patterns better.
Don't know about you but I have no interest in discussing TV shows with anyone. They're for my personal enjoyment.
And I absolutely loathe being left on a cliffhanger every week and then having to remember to go back and check every Tuesday or whatever. Most often what happens is that I forget about or lose interest in the show entirely.
Yea for sure.
I think that whole thing of dropping whole seasons and how it’s kinda faded somewhat is an interesting case study of this particular internet culture moment.
Where we think we want more and faster but have lost sight that that’s just a dumb dopamine mentality left unbalanced and unmitigated and that we actually prefer more traditional forms of various things.
At the same time look at novels, when one comes out it doesn't get released one 10 pages chapter at a time...
Sometimes they do. Dickens and Tolstoy wrote and published serially. So do an awful lot of fanfic writers in the present day.
And then there was the weekly Dracula thing popular on Tumblr a few years ago where they take a non serialized novel (as far as I know) and split it up based on the dates of the correspondence within, going a level further than serialization and delivering the story "real time" as the letters and newspapers were sent/published in the story.
Serial writing used to be a big thing, and even today there's a reason for the popularity of fanfics and webnovels. Hell, remember Homestuck?
True. But then reading is probably a more self-limiting format than film/tv. At least for most people.
I use the phrase “societal decoheshion” to describe that. We (whoever that may be) just aren’t all that unified enough in our culture or information sources anymore.
Even just since Reddit became dead to us, my wife (who I met through Reddit) and I went to different platforms, and find ourselves often catching each other up on what our respective corners of the internet are doing.
I think culture just doesn't respect traditional boundaries anymore. There's still unity, but it might be with some anonymous individuals from across the globe.
There are tons of young millionaire youtubers who I've never heard of. It's pretty cool actually that there are so many niches to fill.
And plenty of poor low-subscriber channels that are actually really good and could blow up at some point.
I’ve certainly watched some people from before they were big and from memory their content was more or less just as good in the “early” days. Which all up makes for a pile of stuff!
Probably doing stupid things like posting with useful titles and thumbnails without agape mouths...
That seems to be the only kind of trash content that Google is interested in pushing these days.
I can't remember what channel, but somebody did an experiment with not doing the ridiculous thumbnails and got way fewer views. Which sort of gets at the point of this article: the are huge swaths of people that are clicking on them and that sounds super foreign to a lot of us.
It was Veritaseum. I don't argue that they're not effective. I argue that Google has full control of them and Google could easily derate those types of videos to make a better experience for their users. But they do the opposite.
By what mechanism? Manual curation? Do you have any idea how much content is on that platform?
By the same mechanism they use for everything: the algorithm
waves hands magic
Wat.
Youtube "pushes" whatever gets more views and longer watch time.
If trashy crap is being suggested, that means other people are watching it in increased numbers.
No YouTube pushes what people will click on. They don't care about the quality of the content, whether the people who watch it actually enjoy it (dislike = "engagement"), or what kind of content people are actually subscribed to because the ads come first.
That's pretty much what I said.
No it's not what you said. You specifically mentioned "longer watch time" where clickbait titles and thumbnails result in the opposite, but also plenty of ad views.
Google pushes what you click. Stop watching this kind of content and it'll probably stop being recommended to you
Not true. I don't watch it.
And even if I did, it doesn't mean that I liked it. None of these tech companies' algorithms seem to account for that little fact, even when I directly express otherwise.
they are not optimizing for your enjoyment, they''re optimizing for your engagement. they don't give a fuck if you hate what you're watching as long as you watch it for longer.
Yes that's my point.
Don't know about you but I don't spend my free time torturing myself.
Well I practically never see these kinds of thumbnails, it's absolutely influenced by your behaviour whatever it may be.
I do, I learned everything on Facebook. AMA
There IS a best TV show and it’s Six Feet Under and it’s perfect and the ending makes me cri every time and I will FIGHT ANYONE WHO DISAGREES
But srsly it’s a 10/10
My wife and I just finished the finale tonight, and it was a great ending. Very little ambiguity, real closure, and an emotionally appropriate song.
But, I think it is far from "the best TV show". It may have been "the best" for a TV drama when it came out because it was groundbreaking, but the acting and writing at times could be pretty bad (so many dropped plots with no follow-up or consequences). It also went on for far too long, which was a consequence of having to create 12 episodes per season, each the same length.
It's worth watching, but I'd give it a 7.8/10.
That’s entirely fair. I watched it for the first time a decade (decades?) after it some out and it really struck a chord with me.
Then I began to date someone who is a funeral director and they didn’t know of its existence. I introduced them to it after having it be the first show I actually cried at and we both cried. So I have an emotional bias.
I still 10/10 it (and I’m harsh on movies and shows) because of my subjective experience.
Quick edit: I would love to know what show you would rate better. Not in an antagonistic sense, I am fully open to other opinions and I know mine is not THE CORRECT one. It’s just the show that hit me the hardest and that was before I was married to (or knew) my funeral director/mortician. Five years before.
Other edit : the worst dropped plot in the best show was The Sopranos rape plot. They just kinda.. didn’t do anything with it.
Also following because I like good recommendations. I don't know if I have one that I would necessarily rate 10/10 as the best show ever, but the first show that honestly had me cry/feel real feelings was Scrubs. And while it's up there, I still don't think I'd give it 10/10 myself.
Edit: I can't believe I forgot Baskets. That show is a masterpiece.
There are a few shows I'd rate higher: Breaking Bad (although it had it's share of 'throw away' episodes), Reservation Dogs, Battlestar Galactica (so many throw away episodes), The Newsroom, and Deadwood. I think Deadwood would be my highest ranking, especially for writing and acting.
Obviously I'm sure plenty of examples can be given for why Six Feet Under is better than each of the shows I've listed, but that's the beauty of subjective lists!
Breaking Bad was fucking stellar but there’s a couple shows I’d put higher—definitely The Sopranos, even though it took me maaaany years to get around to watching it! I followed breaking bad as it came out and loved it but I’ve yet to find a show that is as interesting as/hits me as hard as SixFunder.
I tried to watch deadwood and BSG and just couldn’t get into them. Maybe I give Deadwood another go!