Enjoy the Best, Not the Latest, Media

What is defined as "best" is a constantly moving target because audiences are getting more and more sophisticated. Every time the industry breaks new ground with new media or a new concept, the audience learns from the experience and the movie industry can only regurgitate that concept so many times before the concept becomes redundant.

You think something like game of thrones could have been made two decades ago? What drives the sophistication of TV shows up to the point where they kill off the main character in the first season just to keep you interested? Doing outlandish stuff like this was never needed to keep audience engagement in the past... In fact movies made nowadays are waaaay to intense for audiences back in the 60s.

This isn't something I'm just making up. Movie execs are very very aware of this issue, they know that the bar needs to be constantly raised to engage viewers and ironically by every time you raise the bar you train the audience to be even more more sophisticated and you gotta raise the bar again.

I'm only a matter of time before audiences are so sophisticated that they begin realizing this fact as well.

Right now, in general, the audience isn't intelligent enough to recognize this positive feedback loop. To the audience this phenomenon mostly appears as "all modern movies are stupid except for the classics."

What's going on is that the "classic" you love so much was the bar raiser and all the other movies that came after it are filler in attempt to capitalize on the concept and raise the bar further. The cycle continues until one random movie actually successfully changes the game.

How many marvel movies need to come out before the whole franchise becomes boring? I'm enjoying the franchise right now but I know that eventually it won't be as good as the classic original movies that started it all.

Long gone now but the trio of Howard Cosells, Don Meredith and Frank Gifford enamored me similarly as a young boy, and for similar reasons to the point of today I still find sports commentary far more enthralling than the game itself.

My favorite duo today, while a biased favorite as a local are Len Casper and Jim DeShaies who are the home announcers of the Chicago Cubs. They bring a spirit and joviality influenced by deep reverence for the game of baseball that I don’t think can be touched by any other broadcasting duo in the league (this is relegated to television broadcast announcers, there are too many to name in radio I think).

Every time a Cubs hitter knocks one out onto Waveland, and Len lets out an “oh BABY that ball is GONE” I like to imagine the late legendary Haray Caray is looking down on the booth smiling upon this generation of Cubs color commentator.

Netflix and all others track every minute of the shows they release. They track where people drop off, what they spend watching, for how long, what scenes they repeat. They probably track which scenes and stills are capped and shared on social media.

This alters the content, especially in something like a TV show which has time to be created in a reactive way.

The hallmark of a 2020 streaming show is a scene with 2-4 spicy, post-able bits of dialogue with a glaringly obvious connection to the political, social, or cultural malaise of This Month. TV shows are increasingly becoming just a chain of those.

This was always the case (studios have always had a profit motive) but with the internet it's turned up to 11. Like everything else in our culture, I guess.

There was a day before Star Trek:TNG came out, and then the next day it premiered. By the author's own reasoning he or she wouldn't have watched "the best tv show ever made" until after the invention of IMDB and its listing there.

I personally enjoy watching new content because it's a bit like real-time anthropology. The media we create and consume says something about the society that forms the context around its creation and consumption.

I suppose not everybody feels this way, and that's fine. I don't really have any desire to tell people what or what not to watch or listen to. This blog post being so sure of its content is a bit... odd.

For example, using the term "best album" over "the album I enjoyed the most" kind of indicates a surety that feels somewhat like they're talking down to you. I guess my question here is "Why?"