of course the TLOU show is "good." Just like the mcu is full of "joke-core" sentences, prestige tv is full of "good-core" filmmaking... in the modern media landscape, "good-core" is more important than "good." Every prestige tv show thats clawing for relevance will do like a tracking shot episode (i hear The Bear is actually good, but the point stands) or a fucking The Red Balloon riff or something. Its not hard to do. It's NOT hard to do
doing a "weird episode" of a regular tv show used to be just cause they had a good idea. The community parallel universes ep, If, Then, Else from Person of Interest, The Chinese Restaurant, Fly, the "Episode 19" tradition in Fringe (weird examples, but its just off the top of my head). Now its calculated. A cynical read on modern Prestige TV would be that it's about straining all of the workmanlike iteration out of "base" tv and making an entire show of "outstanding episodes"- you can see this with the Netflix model of tv shows not having discrete episodes anymore. it's 13 hours of one continuous dramatic arc. The whole idea is applying refined media/Film aesthetics to the puerile TV medium- its a spectacle of Signifiers.
MCU shows will have a pointless tracking shot action sequence for no reason other than to get people to pog for it. its not really about fitting the thrust of a good adaptation or refining the tonal landscape of the work, its about adding another checkmark to the "this is is Important art you can put on your wall" box. Aesthetic version of adding in a Bechdel Test-passing scene in a show that's broadly disinterested in women.
One of my friends compared TLOU HBO to that waluigi analysis. It is a Waluigi tv show. An imitation of a prestige game imitating prestige tv. A copy of a copy. in a sense its the ultimate prestige show cause its PURE pretension- a crab thats all shell.
i miss 3/4 of the refs in this post but yeah, yeah, this is it, see - TV used to be okay with being okay.
i love star trek the next generation and i love it because I think its method of delivering Serious Social Commentary or of adding Dramatic Characterization was goofy and fell apart on scrutiny, because there were never any serious consequences, the federation was basically the same from ep to ep and bounced back from every awful thing that happened. that's GOOD. it's GOOD that every single episode reset the world at the end. that's what most of life is!
most of reality is not gut-wrenching traumatizing experiences that permanently change you. most days you just wake up and have a fucking burrito and go to work and star trek was capable of being that. there's an ep that's just "let's follow data for a whole day and see what hijinks he gets up to. no A plot."
then every single FUCKING time i look at any info about post-2009 Star Trek i learn about ANOTHER named, often beloved character from earlier franchises that they killed off brutally just to make another gut-wrenching, jarring Serious Cinematic Moment, because hey, you can't make Prestige with redshirts, right? the whole point of modern star trek is to make people go through stages of grief because characters that have been part of their cultural canon for their entire life are now Officially Dead, and that means they have to keep mining deeper and deeper for someone NEW that you recognize and can feel sorrow over losing forever. have they killed ro laren yet? fuck all television and fuck all movies made after 2005 modern media is sewage
star trek the next generation has the same emotional weight as a normal conversation. like you're arguing with a roommate about doing the dishes, and when you've pretty much resolved it you drop some nugget of wisdom you genuinely came up with, like "if we could divide every day into equal amounts of generic time and spread them evenly amongst everyone, then none of us would ever have to do an unfair amount of anything, but that's not the universe we live in," and you both feel like that really cleared things up for you, but even if what you just said was really dope you're both standing in a $850/mo. apartment with taupe accent walls in a california suburb and it just doesn't matter that much
