I still can’t stop but think how stretched out the Hobbit films were, for an otherwise short book. That’s a sin that stains forever with me. The Lord of the Rings films, do have their own flaws, but they’re fairly contained and can be debated as to whether they were good or not. I have so much trouble excusing anything with the Hobbit though.
And I hope we never, ever see anyone tackle The Silmarillion. Simply because, there will be so much improvised fluff in that would-be film, that it’d make the Hobbit films blush.
Creating consent for the Gaza genocide
(Love the meme)
The worst part was if I wore any of my many Flash or Green Lantern shirts people would assume it was a Big Bang reference. I had to explain, that no, I was just a nerd.
They just released yet another spinoff last month
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Fails_to_Save_the_Universe
I watched a review of all the BBT series and their spin-offs recently, and they had pretty positive feelings about that. It sounds pretty fun, and how bad can it be if Brian Posehn is in it?
I was wondering that myself. I hate big bang theory with such a seething passion that I’m not sure I can give this a chance 😩
another one? young sheldon wasnt enough.
My first girlfriend loved that shit. It didnt make it past a few months, because she constantly braught me in comparison to one character due to me having autism. Go figure
For me, the Mass Effect 3 ending at launch. It’s still aggressively mediocre after several patches and DLCs, but the original at launch was genuinely insulting. I have only been invested in a piece of media like that a few times in my life—the shittiness of that ending really ruined me for a few days. It was an entire decade before I could muster up the desire to replay the trilogy. I’ll still be mad about it when I’m on my deathbed.
Game of Thrones ending was less disappointing for me.
Firefly being canceled
“Second screen content”
Firefly getting cancelled.
The Expanse getting cancelled.
I was upset about the expanse too. Talked to a coworker for a while about it and he said go read the books, just start at book 7 you really won’t be missing much. So I did and immediately knew the 30 year time jump wouldn’t have worked on screen. We still might get more a few years down the line when the actors age up. Also I’m glad I got into the books it was the spark that got me into audiobooks. Started listening to the expanse authors new series and I think that’s getting picked up by Amazon as well.
I actually did start reading the books and then decided to stop and just watch the show, but then I forgot the books existed, so that’s fun I can go and read them now
all the good scifis getting cancelled because it wasnt “drama” enough.
I’m not a dumb man but I never could figure out the expanse, I’d always get lost of what was going on
I had a hard time with season 1 because it kept jumping between so many different things. I gave up on it then tried again after a couple years after hearing. It got sooo good and then got even better. Then I read the books. In the show they needed to introduce a character earlier in the story whereas in the books it’s not until book 2. So that contributed to some of that disjointedness.
A lot of the original episodes of Pokemon were never dubbed in Danish. I will never forget. Never forgive.
This is the level of petty im here for.
Star wars. I just have such a love/frustration relationship with it. This includes stuff produced by George Lucas btw.
I feel like it tries to appease all crowds. The family friendly crowd, the autistic nerdy crowd, the politics obsessed crowd and so on.
Andor for example is peak star wars, because it’s made specifically for one audience. No one’s taking their 6yo to watch this.
The problem is when a kids’ show has the prerequisite plot for a show with a totally different audience.
Take the clone wars for example. It started as nothing more than a kids’ show. Then, it ended dark. Same with rebels. Look at episode 3. Amazing amazing plot with the transformation of the Republic into the empire. And then you have jar jar binks.
Let’s not even begin to talk about Disney.
Star wars just has so much potential due to its huge world and the Jedi/sith stuff. But it’s just so frustrating to see how such art can be wounded by the will to earn money.
I know this isn’t “the most unforgivable sin” or whatever, but I suppose it’s definitely up there. It’s the sin of painting an angry face emoji on top of a beautiful and detailed painting of an unimaginabley cruel monster, just so that more toys can be sold.
I guess a decade of slop media where nothing is sacred and everything must be exploited has hardened my heart from caring about anything anymore. A younger me cared about why the Star Wars sequels are bad or that they cancelled Firefly too quickly or that Community fired Dan Harmon. But all these properties are just tools of corpo oppression at this point. Art doesn’t have the same impact if they are just trying to squeeze every last dollar out of them.
I firmly believe that there are real artists trying to say things and tell cool stories in these companies, and real shit does somehow sneak out on occasion (see Andor, perfectly imperfect jewel), but the utter financialization and commoditization of media means there’s so many filters a work has to push through before it’s allowed to survive. Like mass marketability etc — stuff that non artists make up to justify their salary.
PS not hating on non-artists (kind of don’t believe the category exists, but as a role) it’s just that when the share of people expecting to get paid from a work is mostly admin, marketing, logistics, rather than the people actually making the thing, incentives and culture get warped.
Yeah tbh there’s actually been a bit of a revival in the movie space ever since the Marvel universe had its final moment. Everything Everywhere All At Once is actually legitimately one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. One Battle After Another, Eddington, even smaller movies like Mickey 17. So clearly creativity isn’t dead.
I never watched Andor, not because I don’t think it’s probably good, but because it probably didn’t need the Star Wars license to be good. I’ve heard there anti capitalist themes in there and I just have a hard time seeing anti capitalist themes in mass market media as being genuine. It’s like buying a Che Guevara shirt from Urban Outfitters.
It definitely transcends its IP, which is why I feel it snuck through. If it wasn’t actually rock solid on top of being obviously subversive it would never have seen the light of day. It’s basically a manual on the dos and don’ts of rebelling.
I loved the early internet, where people were doing art for arts sake and funslop for funslops sake.
Then there was a tiny tiny period where people started making money doing it, and I was young and naive enough to truly believe we could have a kind of content-utopia where creative types would flourish etc etc.
The trend-chasing algorithm-humping stifling any chance of financial success for creativity and inventiveness was pretty inevitable in hindsight, but still.
The feelings gone and we’ll never get it back.
I loved the early internet, where people were doing art for arts sake and funslop for funslops sake.
I affectionately call this the “Peak Newgrounds Era.”
Aside: Kudos that the place is still up and people are still embodying that spirit.
Have you heard of dropout.tv?
It’s College Humor reborn under Sam Reich (the former Secretary of a Labor’s son) and it’s incredibly unique. They have a bunch of shows (go watch some Game Changer clips on YouTube) that are all hosted by and starring comedians and they profit share with all their talent, and their ToS service says you can share your account with anyone, etc.
They are very much the new media that is springing up while the old giants collapse.
If you’re at all interested in genuinely creative content, do yourself a favor and check them out.
thier the OG youtubers that adapted to the times, most other ytubers fade into irrelevance after a while, often times with the worst possible pivot like being maga, or zionist.
Media or entertainment? Kinda different animals.
Pretty much any book-to-movie adaptation. 90% are awful. It’s a rare case when they’re better or equal adaptations.
General media? The spinelessness of our news organizations across the board. A free press doesn’t exist, they bend a knee to their corporate billionaire overlords. They don’t tell the whole truth, they hold back, they don’t call a spade a spade. They should be part of the apparatus protecting the common person from the bullshit the rich and government try to sweep under the rug. At best, they’re complicit in their silence, at worst they’re active participants aiding the rich.
What I was going to say.
The “reputable” sources of information we were told to trust in school for our typical papers rate a solid F tier, with Wikipedia often providing both higher quality, accurate, and nuanced information despite being a tertiery source.
I can’t name a single major news outlet in the USA worth watching or reading aside from maybe PBS.
Cable “news”. It is entirely responsible for the current state of things.
Propaganda, you mean. I don’t think news actually exists anymore on US propaganda networks
Hence “news” in quotes.
Almost everything JJ Abrams has touched.
I would agree but with the caveat- everything jj Abrams has touched that he didn’t make originally
His original works are fine. Super 8 is up there with some of the better modern scifi movies, his work on lost is legendary. But then you have both star trek and star wars… what a failure to both.
Aw. I actually liked his Star Treks…pretty much in the same way I like remixes or covers of my favorite songs, anyway.
Edit: I enjoyed them for being popcorn flicks and don’t think they overwrite the source material. Just a different take.
Abrams made two amusing Star Trek fanfics.
I liked Lost for the most part, but he is way too fond of throwing out too many unresolved mystery boxes.
Fringe was pretty good
You leave Felicity out of this!
nutrek is based in his style of directing, made the shows kinda garbagy, only the animated shows are better.
Battlestar Galactica, and any other time the writers are just writing down the rabbit hole without having any clue what story they’re going to tell. The writers of Battlestar introduced one mystery after another and worked to sell the audience on the belief that they were going somewhere good with all this. They had jack shit and I’m not getting that time back.
Some other offenders:
Star Wars sequels: how the fuck did that get greenlit for like a billion dollars without any living soul knowing what the plot was gonna be
Mulholland Drive: fuck you David Lynch, explain this shit or GTFO. If I want dream logic I’ll go to sleep
Lost: J J Abrams you spoiled little rich kid fuckass
Times that didn’t happen:
Andor: just an adamantine brick shithouse of storytelling
starbucks arc was pretty obviously, directionless by the 3rd season.
OMG, Lost! That show sucked and yet so many people I knew loved it. I wondered if it was sunk cost cause the first two seasons were captivating. The rest of the series just dragged on.
i think it was the music by bear mcreary and his brother, wife. ron moores obsession with no lasers, no high tech , unexplained tech of the cylons, like thier ressurection , ftl travel. Also having the NVIXM chick, cally in the show, everyone knews he was a cringe actor/characther even before all the news came out about her.
Lost and Battlestar Galactica aired approximately in parallel. Being a sci-fi fan, I watched BSG, of course, but many friends watched Lost. It definitely had more mainstream appeal and a higher profile. But from the sounds of things, it really lived up to its name! I’ve always been glad I got into BSG, even if it also went off course for a while.
IIRC BSG got screwed in part by the Hollywood writers’ strike. Did that impact Lost as well?
Star Wars sequels: how the fuck did that get greenlit…
I’m certain it went exactly like this
Anything star trek after ST:Enterprise
The movies were all dumbed down pew pew flare flare versions of previous star trek movies, the series were horrendously dumb and badly written, in a show that is about the stories, ethics, morale, etc.
It was awful and the only shining light was the series “The Orville” by Seth McFarlane who is a huge star trek fan and it shows.
Lower Decks was brilliant tho
People really need to start getting more brave with fresh new IPs. As much as I’d love to see old favourites rebooted/renewed you can tell when there’s too many cooks in the kitchen and they ruin a good thing that’s already reached a conclusion; good or not.
I like foundation, it gaves star trek vibes some episodes, more star wars lately
The foundation series is tough. It is simultaneously one of the absolutely least faithful and most disrespectful adaptations of science fiction literature of all time, and a really good show. I wish I could watch it without the lens of the books buuuut I can’t.
I haven’t read the books, but have heard recommendations for the show. I tried to watch it, but had to turn it off after the first three episodes. The visuals were great, but I found the writing and dialogue to be really bad. So many heavy handed references to that girl being smart. Counting prime numbers for fun while swimming or something up to an impossible number, etc. There were other things but that’s what I remember for some reason.
Usually when I notice something like that it persists, so I stopped watching. Did the dialogue bother you and did it get better, or is this just a subjective a taste thing?
It seemed like fairly standard tv stuff to me. Personally, if I’m watching a show that is grounded in the mundane eg the first season of true detective or breaking bad, i expect the dialogue to be very good and for the plot to be subtle and engaging in a complex way, but if I’m watching a SF show like a grandiose space opera then I have very different expectations. I am okay with some goofy dialogue, a lot of monologuing, more simple plot structure (since the setting is often complex in SF shows so it’s often more of showing a familiar dynamic in a wildly unfamiliar context like star trek is all about), etc. All this ranting to say that since it’s a galactic scale space opera i want crazy visuals, cool SF concepts, and an imagining of human mores and taboos set in a far flung future, I am willing to tolerate a lot more floppy plot and character interaction. My problem with this show in particular is just that it is a teeeeeeerrrible “adaptation” of someone else’s work, but if they had just taken inspiration from Asimov and not used all the nouns and settings like they’re trying to cajole the plot into show form, I would have been pretty happy with it. There’s not a lot of original SF on TV and they clearly had enough ideas where they could have just walked their own path.
Do you like watching galactic empires progress/fall over time with timeskips and solid cgi? The show picks up as it goes because the characters don’t know anything yet. The theme changes as empire falls and the clones get further from the original. The 2nd foundation is a pretty nice aditition too. Demerezel being the last ancient robot forced to serve emprie but also kill them and replace them if they don’t act like empire is pretty fun. A lot of stiff isn’t revealed early on tho.
And the cgi is so solid, could never be less than a 6/10 for me because of that.
It has all the good things for a space opera show, it’s really refreshing outside of the Asimov context. I will quibble about the adaptation aspect but I definitely recommend the show to anyone looking for a good watch
The series changes heavily once the foundation is set in motion, which is about episode 4ish? If Hari Seldon is still alive, you haven’t gotten to the good part of the show yet (sorry for the spoiler but hes about to die soon based off what you’re saying) The girl is not just smart, shes a mutant (they are like in the year 12,000, she isnt the first mutant) psychic who can see her own future. She is good at math so she is at haris level when it comes to psycohistory, which is telling the future using advanced math/ai or whatever the fk from the future.
Harry has a plan which involves dying to become a martyr which eventually should lead to the coming dark age he predicted only lasting 100 years instead of forever. Almost immediately sht fucks up and they deviate from the predicted timeline with it branching in another direction.
The writing gets good or at least very enterting and fast paced after hari seldon dies which is season 1 episode 2s ending I think.
It gets better over time, season 2 episode 4ish is where I got more into it. It’s like a 7/10 season 1, 8/10 by the end of season 2, end of season 3 was a solid 8.5/10 for me, i like the direction it went. Season 1 is more regular scifi, 2 is more magical, and 3 is just star wars jedi sht. The series is like for all mankind with timeskips ocasionally. If you like empire, you get a different batch of the day, dawn, and dusk every season, which is probably my favorite part. (same actors playing different roles)
I mostly like that by season 3 you are 300+ years in the future from season 1 with some characters still around because of cryosleep, cloning, robots, etc… I like seeing the world progress/fall over time.
Do you think people would have enjoyed the TV show as much though with all the cast changes that would have been required?
I haven’t read the books, but my understanding is that was why, so they could have recurring characters and some continuity.
Edit: and once you do that… well all sorts of shit changes.
I think they just shouldn’t have made it in fhe first place as it clearly wouldn’t work as a show. Instead they just made everything up and used all the nouns. There are clearly some stories that can be adapted and some that cant and I hate the trend of just adapting things with big names attached to them to make money. Dune made for cool movies, Rendevous With Rama is begging to be adapted to the screen and I can’t wait for it. Asimov is dialogue driven and concept heavy and just shouldn’t be adapted.
(edit: stop adapting everything and just make up new stuff i.e. give me raised by wolves back you fucks!)
I like raised by wolves, but I prefer demerezel from foundation to the android there. More empathy for her.
She is for sure a great character! Lee pace is amazing, and I always love seeinf Jared Harris in anything (Fringe is my favorite show). Like I said, it’s a GREAT show, just a bad adaptation.
Thats definitely a fair take.
The ending of Dexter (the original.)
