It’s too easy to dunk on modern TV. There’s so much slop coming down the pipeline that many people—myself included—aren’t even willing to dig around in the muck to see if anything is still salvageable. To make matters worse, anime has become popular in the USA, so we’ve opened the sluice gates even wider to accommodate the ever-growing garbage bandwidth. A big problem with all these new shows is they’re all short format to accommodate “decreasing attention span” in my generation. Despite this, everything on is insanely boring. How is that possible? These shows are all so dense and expensive that they’re basically movies. Are audiences so lazy and stupid that they can’t make it through 8 episodes?
I say: make them longer.
Most people have a lot more free time than they’re willing to admit. A lot more. You can’t tell me that you don’t have time to watch Star Trek when you have 2000 hours in Counter Strike. Or when you binge a Netflix MiniseriesTM all in one afternoon. Show some respect for the medium. Personally, I won’t watch something less than ~20 episodes unless it comes highly recommended from a good friend. Reject the quarterly mindset. I also love when someone at work recommends a TV show so I know to never, ever, ever, ever watch it.
So what’s even the point of TV shows? I think it’s emphasizing characterization over plot. I’m not talking about character development here; that is a meme. What are your characters actually like though? What do I think they’re going to do next? Maybe they make a surprising decision that recontextualizes my perception of them. You do not get this in these quarterly tiktok shows. Instead, you get one A plot that runs for the entire show. It’s no wonder they can’t generate any interest. I could watch 2 episodes of The X Files and get a better sense of resolution than that. I do not care about the plot. I don’t want to hear about the plot. I want it to be boring. I want to follow the seemingly mundane life of characters so that I care when the red lights come on. I would be more shocked and engaged if Capt. Picard replicated Oolong Tea that whatever 9th character has betrayed the Mandalorian, because I’ve seen Picard order Earl Grey 50 times before that. In Kamen Rider OOOs they make underwear and babydoll jokes every episode (that’s right, I really just wanted to bring up Kamen Rider again), and by episode 40 its actually funny because of the commitment to the bit. Its not funny when the obviously evil authority figure gets owned epic-style in [insert any scifi show from the past 15 years here] during the season finale (the 8th episode)(character was introduced in the last 30 seconds of the 6th episode).
In conclusion, I would rather watch all of Chicago Fire than Stranger Things, assuming there is no option for suicide.
[edit: I realize I’m comparing coughing baby to hydrogen bomb in this post; that’s not really the point. Old thing good new thing bad is not really meant to be part of this argument, though obviously episodic TV has been replaced by serialized TV in the modern day.]