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I have no desire to watch the Pennyworth show. Batman’s butler is a level of infill I can’t bring myself to care about 🤔 Maybe there are limits to extended universes.
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There’s a ton of new tv but it feels like we’re in endless reboots, extensions, interpolations etc so I suspect the real bottleneck is the cost of learning to care about entirely new characters and worlds. But sometimes the benefit of a known character/world is too low.
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But otoh our expectations of the payoff of entirely new worlds is set sky high by extended universes. There’s almost no chance that a random new space opera will pay off as big in sheer low-effort watchable hours as Star Wars. The Expanse S1 felt like more of a slog than it was.
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The Mandalorian is an example of a near-perfect franchise extension. A sufficiently high-potential/low-cost premise in an underdeveloped part of a big and familiar world.
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Station 11 was an example of completely new material hacking attention somehow. I wonder what’s the secret to that. It was not even archetypally familiar (which explains derivative satires like The Boys).
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Another new world that hacked attention well was Snowpiercer, though the tv show appears to have squandered the optionality.
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This stuff fascinates me. TV remains a really undertheorized part of civilization for something which takes up arguably the most human waking attention overall, among all coherent activities. It’s the read-only 2d pre-metaverse.
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Under-theorized is the wrong word. Under-integrated into species identity. It belongs up there with science, religion, sports, music, politics… Homo televisionus
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Replying to @abestanway
Theorized is perhaps the wrong word for what I’m getting at. I mean something like it’s not part of the species self-image the way things like religion and politics and science are. Under-integrated into species identity.
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If aliens visit, the fact that we spend so much time lost in narrative alt-realities will be very salient. Galaxyquest kinda nailed what I’m getting at here.
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I mean big mainstream middlebrow-normie stuff. Like there are no World is Flat or Sapiens level big fat pop books on tv. Things like critical theory are more like inbred subcultural theorizing fandoms imo. They’re satisfying for those who join the subcultures.
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Replying to
Theorized is perhaps the wrong word for what I’m getting at. I mean something like it’s not part of the species self-image the way things like religion and politics and science are. Under-integrated into species identity.
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