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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Like, we know Alfred’s going to top out at Butler++, whatever his youthful adventures.
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We adopt new shows when we hit diminishing returns with old ones
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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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Might as well give Wallace a re-read: jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf. “Society of the Spectacle” laid it all out in the 60s though…
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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.

