this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2025
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If it's bad, you didn't waste time on it.
If it's good, it'll get canceled before finishing.
If it's good and finished, it'll still be good and finished when you binge it all later.
Though IMHO, the problem is the same (capitalism...) problem affecting film and gaming: people have forgotten how to spread their bets out over a wide mid-market for modest returns overall. Instead, everyone is a gambler now and only invests huge money into safe projects they expect a monster return on.
You look at older shows and they weren't all great, but they'd make 40 episodes a season for under a million. Often, they weren't even all that good, but you'd get a few episodes a season that were solid and eventually, usually after 2 seasons, the cast and crew has learned enough about the characters and the making of the show to be good at it. Shows and creators today have no runway. You don't get 80 episodes to figure it out and start making regularly good content. You get like 1 episode to become a mega success, or you get canceled.
If you want to make games you either become an indie and work with a dozen people or less, or join one of the like 5 megastudios that make all the big games on a team of thousands. The 50 to 100 person mid budget studio barely exists today in any industry. It's killing content, killing variety, and it's going to kill the mediums because the next generation of creators doesn't have a place to learn and practice their craft.
It's this whole culture where being "mid" is somehow horrifying. Either everything you do has to be a world record and the best most amazing thing ever, or you might as well not bother. Everything's been "optimised" to death.
I mean, that's because we have more options for entertainment than ever before. If something is mid, why should I watch it over the 10,000+ 10/10s that I haven't experienced yet, or even worse, why should I watch it over rewatching one of the 100s of 10/10s I already know and love? There's only so many hours in the day that you have to watch something, why would you willingly spend time on mid content?
We have more options, most of which is just "optimized" bullshit that appeals to the biggest possible audience and takes absolutely no chances with anything, and you've been conditioned to only want that instead of something that might sometimes not give you the best possible dopamine hit
I was focused on the production side, which I do think is primary in this issue, but i agree that there's a cultural issue on the consumer side as well.
I think it's an artifact of our accelerated society. When I was a kid, most of the adults I knew worked fairly regular hours at one job, came home, and watched a tremendous amount of cable TV. Movies were a special occasion at the theater, or there was some home theater. And video games were still new.
Now, most of the adults i know either work 2 jobs or work 1 job that stresses them out badly enough to be two. It also feels like maintaining life is just harder. Things should be faster but there's so many scams and middlemen now that you spend a lot of time researching and navigating situations to avoid trouble.
They stream media and play video games, and they have so much choice but so little time that it feels like you need to maximize the fun time.
But I think all that is still downstream from the capitalist mode of overproduction.
Oh yeah absolutely, this is all basically just a metastasis at this point