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Storytelling has gotten so damn efficient due to screen media. A well-scripted modern TV show moves along incredibly briskly. It’s like Lean Storytelling. Shortest path through the beats of the hero’s journeys. It’s barely even writing. It’s amygdala assembly programming.
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Nothing forces efficiency more than knowing every minute of screen time is costing 10s to 100s of thousands. No time to dawdle. Can lead to mechanical effects sometimes, but damn the machine works. Slick is the word. It’s not always good storytelling but it’s slick.
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Wonder if there’s a way to measure this. The Expanse, Stranger Things, Cobra Kai have struck ne as especially brutally efficient.
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It’s like tourists on a package bus tour in Europe. “If it’s Tuesday it must be Brussels” type pacing.
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It’s the sign of a mannerist late stage or something. Like we’re on the cusp of a leap out of this local minimum with a young new kind of storytelling that can afford to be sloppy and loose because it makes big gains on an unexpected vector.
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Examples: Cobra Kai, The Expanse…. Not a single missed beat or sloppy discursive scene. No spezzatura. No weird narrative conceits overindulged.
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The interaction between sequenced media and hypertext media through monitored behavior and algorithm is the vortex of efficient mentalizing. That's the conversion of humans into bots. That's 'peak tv'.
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I think of it as Highly Leveraged Storytelling: these techniques let you squeezing more content out of a finite amount of that spark of life in the character or world that people look for in stories. Star Wars is the most over-leveraged IP in the world, for example.
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