91–100 of 112 posts
Slight tangent: Does anyone find it weird that no matter what you watch, HBO puts a 30 second preview for something else before your show. Fix that - and a skip intro button. Otherwise, keep it as is.
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That's not a great metric. Here's a much better one: Metacritic will give you an aggregate score for every TV show made during a year, and also does a year-end Pazz-and-Jopp-style roundup of critic top 10 lists; here's 2018's: https://www.metacritic.com/feature/critics-pick-the-top-10-b... (You can edit the URL to go back to 2015). The actual critic roundups tell as much a story of FX's dominance of prestige TV as HB…
> and also does a year-end Pazz-and-Jopp-style roundup of critic top 10 lists; here's 2018's: A ranking based on how many paid-for critics are talking about a TV show? Huh? That's like saying "this startup is better than another because they've gotten more press on TechCrunch/Wired/WSJ/etc". IMDB is imperfect, but it's a better proxy for what consumers enjoy.
If you're looking for what consumers enjoy, look at the ratings, where HBO also does not fare especially well.
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Westworld's ratings are far south of even True Blood's. It's a good show. But it's not in many people's top tier.
Eh what? Westworld is rated 86% on Rotten Tomatoes and 8.8/10 on IMDB. True Blood is rated 69% and 7.9/10 on the same platforms, respectively. Which ratings are you looking at? EDIT: I also checked Metacritic. True Blood is rated 68 on average across seven seasons, meanwhile Westworld is rated 75 on average across two seasons. If you take the Metacritic rating peak of Westworld (Season 1) and the Metacritic rating pe…
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Because it's not that good. It was good for its time, but TV today is different and better than TV was in 1999. People were still watching laugh-track sitcoms when Oz was in its prime.
>People were still watching laugh-track sitcoms when Oz was in its prime. Like... Big Bang, the number one network sitcom which averages 18.5 million viewers?
Laugh tracks are strongly maligned yet people still love the shows that use them.
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>People were still watching laugh-track sitcoms when Oz was in its prime. Like... Big Bang, the number one network sitcom which averages 18.5 million viewers?
Hell, people are still rewatching Seinfeld. I was driving around LA a month ago and saw a billboard promoting Seinfeld reruns. Laugh tracks are strongly maligned yet people still love the shows that use them.
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> More importantly than what Netflix itself creates is the fact that everyone else is creating great TV, and Netflix can just license it. The whole reason Netflix started creating its own original content was because they can't license good stuff from elsewhere anymore. It's too expensive. That play worked reasonably well when everyone else thought of streaming as a tiny niche market, since that meant they were willi…
Netflix and Amazon Prime represent most of the best TV drama series of the last 10 years, and what isn't on those services is available a la carte from Apple and Amazon. I know the article sets up the conflict this way, but the point really isn't that Netflix is an unstoppable juggernaut, so much as that what Netflix represents is. Maybe Amazon will figure things out and it'll come to dominate TV, or maybe Netflix wi…
I guess this comes down to personal preference, so it's possible to argue that, but I would absolutely disagree. A look at the list of Emmy Award winners for Best Original Drama (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primetime_Emmy_Award_for_Outst...) surfaces many titles that show that cable and broadcast networks haven't been sitting still this decade: Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Dexter, Downton Abbey, True Detective, Boardwalk Empire, Homeland, The Americans, The Good Wife, Mr. Robot, Better Call Saul, This Is Us, etc.
You can argue that the list of Emmy winners has been slanted until very recently by bias against streaming providers. And I wouldn't disagree with that! But my point in citing Emmy winners isn't to say that those awards are an infallible guide to what's good and what isn't; it's just to say that there's been plenty of good programming coming out of cable networks over the last 10 years.
> Maybe Amazon will figure things out and it'll come to dominate TV, or maybe Netflix will
Netflix has already given up on the idea of dominating TV. Their shift to original programming means they're not trying to be your one source for everything anymore, they just want to be a source with enough good programming to convince people they're worth subscribing to. Which, as a business model, is kind of like... HBO.
Netflix's Ted Sarandos has even said this explicitly: "The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us." (https://www.gq.com/story/netflix-founder-reed-hastings-house...)
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We're in a golden age of television in part because everyone is producing high-quality shows. For every Deadwood, there's a Justified; True Detective, a Mindhunter. HBO has never been the best place for comedy series and, good as Crashing was, it remains an also-ran there as well. HBO's quality has been pretty far off its peak for awhile. GoT is a tentpole show with a rabid audience but it's not especially good (it's…
This post is completely subjective. It seems obvious that numerous people disagree on your assessment of quality. GoT "not especially good"? HBo doesn't have good comedy? Ever seen an episode of Curb? You then go on to base your conclusion on your subjective view of the quality of their shows. If anything, I'm inclined to believe the opposite of what you say given how many people would disagree with the basis of your…
HBO Now's web player (on my Macbook Pro, anyway) would not play in HD on an external monitor no matter what I did. HDPC is working. Every other service (including Netflix) worked fine. Only HBO reverted to SD video as soon as I moved my browser window to my 4K display, no matter what browser I used. I'm sure the problem is Silverlight. But it's ridiculous that they still use that piece of garbage.
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Netflix and Amazon Prime represent most of the best TV drama series of the last 10 years, and what isn't on those services is available a la carte from Apple and Amazon. I know the article sets up the conflict this way, but the point really isn't that Netflix is an unstoppable juggernaut, so much as that what Netflix represents is. Maybe Amazon will figure things out and it'll come to dominate TV, or maybe Netflix wi…
> Netflix and Amazon Prime represent most of the best TV drama series of the last 10 years I guess this comes down to personal preference, so it's possible to argue that, but I would absolutely disagree. A look at the list of Emmy Award winners for Best Original Drama ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primetime_Emmy_Award_for_Outst... ) surfaces many titles that show that cable and broadcast networks haven't been sitti…
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Netflix and Amazon Prime represent most of the best TV drama series of the last 10 years, and what isn't on those services is available a la carte from Apple and Amazon. I know the article sets up the conflict this way, but the point really isn't that Netflix is an unstoppable juggernaut, so much as that what Netflix represents is. Maybe Amazon will figure things out and it'll come to dominate TV, or maybe Netflix wi…
> GoT is going away. GoT has, at the last count I saw, four successor series under development at HBO (down from a peak of five, and likely but not certain to get down to only the best actually getting full-scale production), with one already, unless I missed a schedule change, already filming, with the showrunners of GoT and GRRM all involved in all four. > Content of the same quality is much more available now than…