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The list fails because it doesn’t have The Tick.
Which version?
Is there a bad version?
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The list fails because it doesn’t have The Tick.
Which version?
Is there a bad version?
I think the animated series is probably the best. The Amazon live action series was quite enjoyable.
The original live action series was pretty rough. It had its moments but you could tell they didn’t have the budget to do anything really superpowered and the writing wasn’t that great.
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The cast for the BBC’s new version of Gladiators has been revealed.
Seem to athletes from a good range of disciplines: powerlifting, rugby, swimming, gymnastics etc. And they’re hewing closer to the original’s style for costumes rather than the weird ones Sky had. The individual logos are a nice touch (and presumably more practical than the lovely airbrushed designs on the 90s Gladiators’ costumes, which made them almost unwashable, apparently).
Unfortunately, it’s being hosted by Bradley Walsh and his son, of all people, so I’m much less interested in watching it.
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New Boots Reilly show
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They mentioned a sitcom I had never heard of and have forgotten what it was already!
Abbott Elementary?
They mentioned that one, along with Ghosts US and Young Sheldon, but the main show they talked about was Fire Country, which isn’t a comedy, but is apparently one of the biggest shows on US TV.
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Good article on the state of the streaming TV economy: https://www.vulture.com/2023/06/streaming-industry-netflix-max-disney-hulu-apple-tv-prime-video-peacock-paramount.html
The high-stakes Writers Guild of America strike has focused attention on Hollywood’s labor unrest, but the really systemic issue is streaming’s busted math. There may be no problem more foundational than the way the system monetizes its biggest hits: It doesn’t.
Just ask Shawn Ryan. In April, the veteran TV producer’s latest show, the spy thriller The Night Agent, became the fifth-most-watched English-language original series in Netflix’s history, generating 627 million viewing hours in its first four weeks. As it climbed to the heights of such platform-defining smashes as Stranger Things and Bridgerton, Ryan wondered how The Night Agent’s success might be reflected in his compensation.
“I had done the calculations. Half a billion hours is the equivalent of over 61 million people watching all ten episodes in 18 days. Those shows that air after the Super Bowl — it’s like having five or ten of them. So I asked my lawyer, ‘What does that mean?’” recalls Ryan. As it turns out, not much. “In my case, it means that I got paid what I got paid. I’ll get a little bonus when season two gets picked up and a nominal royalty fee for each additional episode that gets made. But if you think I’m going out and buying a private jet, you’re way, way off.”
Ryan says he’ll probably make less money from The Night Agent than he did from The Shield, the cop drama he created in 2002, even though the latter ran on the then-nascent cable channel FX and never delivered Super Bowl numbers. “The promise was that if you made the company billions, you were going to get a lot of millions,” he says. “That promise has gone away.”
Nobody is crying for Ryan, of course, and he wouldn’t want them to. (“I’m not complaining!” he says. “I’m not unaware of my position relative to most people financially.”)
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“The entire industry,” says the director Steven Soderbergh, who has been navigating structural changes in Hollywood since 1989’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, “has moved from a world of Newtonian economics into a world of quantum economics, where two things that seem to be in opposition can be true at the same time: You can have a massive hit on your platform, but it’s not actually doing anything to increase your platform’s revenue. It’s absolutely conceivable that the streaming subscription model is the crypto of the entertainment business.”
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The economics of streaming have been screwed for a long time now. And it’s not just the reliance on unsustainable growth that always gets brought up in these conversations – they’re massively overspending on content in general, and most of the time gaining minimal incremental advantage from what they’re producing.
And to boot, they’ve screwed the economics of theatrical movies at the same time by training everyone to wait for streaming, and to pay what they used to pay for a single cinema ticket to now get a month’s worth of unlimited content for the entire family.
In that climate, I’m not surprised that the creative are being screwed over too. The whole system is broken and it’s all going to come crashing down soon.
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They mentioned a sitcom I had never heard of and have forgotten what it was already!
Abbott Elementary?
They mentioned that one, along with Ghosts US and Young Sheldon, but the main show they talked about was Fire Country, which isn’t a comedy, but is apparently one of the biggest shows on US TV.
Yeah I had heard of Abbott Elementary as it’s won a few awards. Young Sheldon is the one I heard and immediately forgot about.
The Fire Country one was notable too, never read of heard a single word about it before then and they said it was something like the second most popular show in the country,
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Good Omens season 2 trailer:
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Yeah I think we are facing a lot of challenges in our systems thanks to technology advances. Each seems to inevitably drive down the value of the average person’s efforts.
Streaming has stopped rewarding success with back end royalties, AI is eliminating jobs, Spotify pays pennies for thousands of plays, Amazon has closed down many department stores and job growth is all in the gig economy.
Fair enough this is outside the scope of TV news but I think we need to readjust how things work. In comics I love getting access to almost all of Marvel’s entire catalogue for roughly $6 a month but how does that work as a model on its own? Why produce so many comics when they all bring in the same $6?
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Stills from the animated B5 movie:
It’s not necessarily the art style I would have gone for, but it’s not terrible. It looks like it’s CG so hopefully the movement will be fluid
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New Boots Reilly show
Well that looks fucking awesome.
I was a bit disappointed by Sorry to Bother You as I think Boots Riley is stronger where his ideas are concerned than where the actual writing and directing are, but hopefully he’ll have developed somewhat and the TV format should also help, I think. And I mean, a kafkaesque approach to superhero storytelling and BLM issues… it’s a great concept.
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This isn’t really TV News but it ties back into what we’ve been saying about streaming and the current content glut. SNL a few months ago:
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Yeah, the snippets of the new actors for Delenn, G’Kar, Zathras and Franklin are great.
(also, here’s a link to the trailer)
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Some of this streaming deletion stuff is a bit unexplained right now. So HBO/Warner and Disney have deleted shows as a tax write-off, they claim them as lost assets with a $ value.
The latest to disappear from Max is the revived Space Ghost series but apparently it can still be accessed by a few other sources like an Adult Swim website. In that case it is not a write-off, it still exists to generate revenue (even it is 20 cents a year in ad rates). Maybe they haven’t noticed.
The whole thing really needs the US government to change this loophole, it is encouraging companies to make shows extinct in any format, on the one hand claiming they are worthless to viewers but allocating them write-off values of over a billion (in the case of Disney). This is not really helping anyone (other than shareholders of course). I never got to see it but I am advised the Willow show was okay if not great, now it no longer exists in any legal format, nobody who worked on it will get any royalty payment ever again as it is more profitable for Disney to mark it as a $5m lost asset than exist online as a middling property that will make them a few hundred grand a year.
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It took me a second to realise you meant Space Ghost Coast to Coast there, given the show finished in like 2008.
I assume that some of the weird incongruities are down to licensing, like Final Space has been deleted from streaming in the US but is still available on Netflix in other territories.
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It is Coast to Coast. The example I heard was still accessible in the US (although I can’t test it from here).
Regardless the system seems to have developed a mechanism where deleting content is more valuable than retaining it. This is the opposite really of how the industry has worked for decades since shows were sometimes deleted to re-use physical tape. There was a great article a year or two back where an indie film director made a British/Greek comedy film that wasn’t a success and outlined every penny of the budget but he would eventually hit profit as it consistently made about $25,000 a year on various TV repeats or other platforms, he’d have some sort of pension boost off it.
This tax write-off scenario now means it is likely better for the studio to delete it from existence and take a one-off $250,000 boost from a niche show. Which is good for them, bad for him and bad for anyone who might have enjoyed it, flops aren’t necessarily bad products, The Princess Bride and Shawshank Redemption played to very low audiences and discovered later and lauded as classics.
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Oh, I see. The same crappy reasons that saw WB axe Batgirl and other material can apply to TV and streaming, cue Disney’s mass content cull.
Damn, that is both narrow and stupid even by corporate US standards.
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A topic related to this is the decline of physical media, which I think has been a real loss but which a lot of people seemed indifferent about as we moved into this new golden age of streaming.
It was always going to be the case that relinquishing all control over the availability of material to the streaming services was a bad idea. As soon as DVD/Blu-Ray releases stopped being standard, it removed the only legal way to retain copies of these TV shows and movies indefinitely if the streaming services decide to pull them like this.
There’s an element of cultural vandalism about it all. (Yeah, maybe that’s a bit too strong a phrase for the loss of something mediocre like the Willow TV show, but the principle is the same.)
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Which is why I like what Paramount is doing – in effect, the old strategy with a new paint job. Streaming premiere then disc release a few months on.
Also, on his Twitter, in response to people asking how they can support B5 The Way Home, JMS’ answer was: “Buy it.”
There’s nothing wrong with streaming, but it can’t be the sole option.
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On that note, as someone who is planning to buy the new B5 movie to support it and has out bought physical media in many years, are any of the modern options DVDs? like is the “4K” a DVD or some new disk format that came around while I wasn’t paying attention?
(It is of course fine if none of them are DVDs, I’ll buy a disk and pirate a version I can watch)
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B5 The Way Home is getting digital, UHD and BR releases.
UHD is 4k super Blu Ray, you need a player and 4k capable TV. If you own a PS5 you’re covered for the player part.
Strange as it sounds the B5 disc collection remains DVD. Issuing a high definition BR set should be a no brainer but it has yet to happen.
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buying a disk and then piracy seems to be the way to go then.
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A PS3, PS4 or Xbox One will play a Blu Ray (if you have any of those lying around).
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UHD is 4k super Blu Ray, you need a player and 4k capable TV. If you own a PS5 you’re covered for the player part.
XBox Series X is also a 4K player, that’s what I use.
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Some of this streaming deletion stuff is a bit unexplained right now. So HBO/Warner and Disney have deleted shows as a tax write-off, they claim them as lost assets with a $ value.
The latest to disappear from Max is the revived Space Ghost series but apparently it can still be accessed by a few other sources like an Adult Swim website. In that case it is not a write-off, it still exists to generate revenue (even it is 20 cents a year in ad rates). Maybe they haven’t noticed.
The whole thing really needs the US government to change this loophole, it is encouraging companies to make shows extinct in any format, on the one hand claiming they are worthless to viewers but allocating them write-off values of over a billion (in the case of Disney). This is not really helping anyone (other than shareholders of course). I never got to see it but I am advised the Willow show was okay if not great, now it no longer exists in any legal format, nobody who worked on it will get any royalty payment ever again as it is more profitable for Disney to mark it as a $5m lost asset than exist online as a middling property that will make them a few hundred grand a year.
And it honestly damages the value of the streaming services. They have the potential to be fantastic repositories of entertainment but my removing content or not even making it available, it lessens its desirability. The streaming wars are going to get tighter in the coming years and prices will definitely keep going up. With that, people are going to expect more, not less. Why should I sign up for a service if I can’t get a complete library? This is going to hurt them in the future.
WBD has access to HBO’s complete library that goes back to the 1970s with their first comedy specials. The also have access the WB and MGM libraries of movies, TV shows, and cartoons. They could theoretically destroy Netflix overnight. They could charge $50 a month and gain subscribers just to explore that history.
And that may be streaming’s next evolutionary step: tiered content availability. I think Netflix or some service has tried that. It would be one way to offset their licensing costs.
Overall, this is part of the growing pains of streaming. It will be interesting to see where it all goes.
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And it honestly damages the value of the streaming services. They have the potential to be fantastic repositories of entertainment but my removing content or not even making it available, it lessens its desirability.
The problem is the model supports short-termism all the way along. The BBC, without profits announcements to the stock markets, are quietly (sometimes it is hard to find) putting up obscure 60s and 70s documentary material that’s a fascinating time capsule.
Somehow the system that has been concocted says Disney’s flop shows are worth $1.5bn in tax write offs. It makes no sense to me how we’ve reached a situation where we’re arguing they both have and don’t have huge commercial value. If nobody wants to watch Willow then fair enough but by logic its write-off value should also be next to worthless.
This really can only be improved at the US legislature somewhere. Like what we saw in 2008 it’s a financial con job.
A friend argued with me this has always been the case as US TV wrote off pilots against tax but I think this is very different. Pilots are like R&D for a company, content that is never aired (except the odd leak). It’s a fair argument that was also a loophole but still one that makes more sense. The models are so skewed to corporate profit, Ed Solomon has his ongoing joke that Men In Black, despite sequels, has never on his statements ever made any money, so he gets no royalties for writing it.
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he problem is the model supports short-termism all the way along.
Very much this, it allows the company to show growth on the next quarterly report and that’s all shareholders care about.
The models are so skewed to corporate profit, Ed Solomon has his ongoing joke that Men In Black, despite sequels, has never on his statements ever made any money, so he gets no royalties for writing it.
JMS says something similar about Babylon 5, that he’s never seen royalties from the show as an executive producer because failed project were constantly assigned to it. Part of why there were so many problems with trying to make a theatrical movie was because he’d be guaranteed a cut there.
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The writer of the first live action Transformers movie said something similar recently. That it’s nice Hasbro keep making these movies for the love of it given they don’t make any profit.
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At least the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy is finished, so they can’t outpace the ending and fuck it up that way.
There’s a hundred other ways they can fuck it up of course.
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At least the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy is finished, so they can’t outpace the ending and fuck it up that way.
There’s a hundred other ways they can fuck it up of course.
Netflix’s go-to fuck-it-up move is to simply cancel it after one season.
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The writer of the first live action Transformers movie said something similar recently. That it’s nice Hasbro keep making these movies for the love of it given they don’t make any profit.
It’s mad when budgets are published and box office takings are public. The accountancy gymnastics are incredible though. Solomon points to a recent year where Men In Black was reported as losing an extra $6m. How can you lose millions on a product that was completed 25 years ago?
If you claimed anything similar on your tax returns a massive red flag would be raised at the inland revenue.
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DC Superhero Girls, which my daughter loved age 6-8, is now also gone as a write off. I don’t think people are quite realising these things are not a a temporary removal from a streaming service. To get a tax write-off on an asset they have to cease to exist in any commercial setting. Willow and whatever are never coming back, in any format, the only way to ever see that content ever again is via piracy.
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This tax write-off scheme really needs to be legislated against. It’s cultural vandalism.
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This tax write-off scheme really needs to be legislated against. It’s cultural vandalism.
Eh, they can take back the Flash movie.
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Paramount plus will be showing the Quantum Leap reboot in the UK (finally!) on 13th July.
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Paramount plus will be showing the Quantum Leap reboot in the UK (finally!) on 13th July.
Watch now before they delete it and write it off for tax.
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I’ve just noticed that TCM has disappeared. I vaguely recall hearing Ryan Reynolds talking about it potentially closing on Twitter. For some reason, I assumed that only meant the US one. But no, the UK one has gone.
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I’ve just noticed that TCM has disappeared. I vaguely recall hearing Ryan Reynolds talking about it potentially closing on Twitter. For some reason, I assumed that only meant the US one. But no, the UK one has gone.
Still on in the US.
Zaslav dropped it from about 90 employees to about 20. He is a piece of shit.
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Babylon 5 is getting a blu-ray release in December, pre-orders are live now
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I wish, it will become available but not right now – at least for Amazon and HMV.
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B5 BR set now available for preorder at HMV.
£69.99 is better than I was expecting.
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Yeah that’ll be me done with Disney+ then. They don’t have the back catalogue or a decent and steady stream of new content to justify going over a tenner a month.
Much as I think their big franchise stuff is mostly pretty mediocre these days, they have quite a few good shows on the Hulu side that make it still worth having at that price – current shows like Only Murders In The Building and The Bear are pretty good. Plus there’s a lot of historical stuff that we watch a lot in our house like Simpsons, Malcolm In The Middle, Family Guy, Futurama… Plus all the old classic movies that are on there. It’s a decent offering still.
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Honestly, Disney should have never started their own streaming service. Disney, like a lot of streamers, are finding out what Netflix knew for years:
It costs a lot of money and you constantly have to have new content to keep people coming back. Streaming services are beasts that must constantly be fed and that’s expensive.
If had piggybacked on Hulu (a bit of the reverse of what they have done globally with Star), it may have been a better process. They still would have had to come up with original content but the pressure may not have been as great. Disney has to make a decision soon on Hulu on whether they but out Comcast’s stake or sell it off.
Really though, Disney could have made a fortune licensing their libraries out to Netflix and other streamers and occasionally produced new series for them. It dramatically reduces their overhead and increases their profits.
I still think we will see some services disappear in the next few years, through acquisiton or shutdown. Small niche services will probably survive as they aren’t having to generate new content, just license material that aligns with their service. I can see a scenario where one of the big streamers starts acquiring contenet the niche ones go for and it impacts them.
It will be interesting to see what happens.
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Honestly, Disney should have never started their own streaming service. Disney, like a lot of streamers, are finding out what Netflix knew for years:
It costs a lot of money and you constantly have to have new content to keep people coming back. Streaming services are beasts that must constantly be fed and that’s expensive.
The thing is, Disney+ already owns a wide variety of successful existing properties and franchises, compared to Netflix and AppleTV and other services. If they focused on tapping those properties for quality products people would be happy to pay good money to subscribe to the streaming service that exclusively provides MCU and Star Wars and Disney theatrical movies and original TV programs. With proper hype, viewers would be happy to pay for the monthly service even during months with no new content, knowing that the next show is going to be great! A mega-successful Disney+ service should have been a no-brainer, but the execs took success for granted rather than strive to provide quality product.
I’m continuing with Disney for the time being since I’m enjoying the stuff on Hulu. I recently dropped Netflix and switched over to AppleTV which seems to be trying harder to provide diverse quality product. And if and when they begin to disappoint, there’s BritBox waiting on the sidelines. You want my monthly fee, you better keep me interested.
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Hopefully get to watching B5: The Road Home in the next few days.
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Fucking awesome!
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Not for me. Cera again, Scott is not a nerd, he’s a super cool guy who is lazy as fuck.
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The Peripheral Canceled at Amazon Despite Season 2 Renewal – Variety
The news comes despite the fact that Amazon renewed the show for a second season back in February. The series, based on the William Gibson novel of the same name, debuted on Amazon on Oct. 21, 2022.
It starred Chloë Grace Moretz and hailed from executive producers Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan under their rich overall deal with Amazon. According to an individual with knowledge of the situation, the decision to not move forward with the second season was heavily influenced by the ongoing writers and actors strikes. In essence, even if the show was to go back into production soon, Season 2 would not be available until close to if not into 2025.
More in link…
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Idiots. These execs are failing to develop any kind of property by axing everything.
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They should get Dan Stevens
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So no Chris Pratt? Damn.
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To be fair, Dan Stevens is always the correct answer for just about all casting decisions.
…except Wonder Woman.
I’m willing to let him try.
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For anyone who remembers Takeshi’s Castle/MXC, it turns out there was a revival earlier this year. And it’s all on Prime! Somehow the algorithm didn’t pick up on my love of weird bullshit, especially Japanese weird bullshit. There was a preview episode on Japanese TV that’s been uploaded to YouTube with subtitles so you can get a taste of it. I’ve watched 2 episodes so far and it’s still fun
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Did you watch it actually on Prime? I just looked and it says available in September, which has me suspecting it’s only going to allow access here to the new British dub they’re doing with Romesh Ranganathan and (I think) Tom Allen.
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Yeah, it’s on Prime here subtitled in Japanese.
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It’s available on Prime US.
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I’m on episode 4 now, and they made all the games harder! This is sadistic. And fun. Also when you have full episodes that aren’t edited and are actually translated you understand why people show up over and over even while losing games in the export versions – turns out they give some people a fighting spirit award that lets them go through if they impress or amuse the hosts, and some of the games are actually a second chance – people who are eliminated and want to try again get to do these and if they pass they’re back in.
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Did you watch it actually on Prime? I just looked and it says available in September, which has me suspecting it’s only going to allow access here to the new British dub they’re doing with Romesh Ranganathan and (I think) Tom Allen.
The dubbed version is on Prime for me now as well, it’s Tom Davis and Romesh Ranganathan
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Based on the comic book of the same name, which I remember being disappointed by outside of the nice art. It’s been almost a decade though, so I don’t remember it well.
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Amazon Prime UK has nabbed the John Wick prequel The Continental! Starts 22 September.
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