lilac

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professional games industry web engineer and games hater

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Sullivan
@Sullivan

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

Sullivan
@Sullivan

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.

Image reading: "Waluigi is the ultimate example of the individual shaped by the signifier. Waluigi is a man seen only in mirror images; lost in a hall of mirrors he is a reflection of a reflection of a reflection. You start with Mario – the wholesome all Italian plumbing superman, you reflect him to create Luigi – the same thing but slightly less. You invert Mario to create Wario – Mario turned septic and libertarian – then you reflect the inversion in the reflection: you create a being who can only exist in reference to others. Waluigi is the true nowhere man, without the other characters he reflects, inverts and parodies he has no reason to exist. Waluigi’s identity only comes from what and who he isn’t – without a wider frame of reference he is nothing. He is not his own man. In a world where our identities are shaped by our warped relationships to brands and commerce we are all Waluigi."

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mcc
@mcc

Every time I see a no-cuts longtake in media now I just think, why did they do this?. If they aren't actually making some sort of artistic statement or achieving some kind of tonal effect by doing it all as one cut, it winds up really distracting me. A long no-cuts take could mean any number of different things or serve any number of different purposes! Just… make me feel like you had one in mind and weren't just doing it to be Impressive!

There's an episode of Mr. Robot (I really like Mr. Robot) which is completely wordless for almost its entire runtime. In an incredibly fun gimmick, the last words spoken before the 40-minute silent block are "It's cool dude, we don't have to talk" and then the first words spoken afterward are "We need to talk". That's really funny! It's so clever it doesn't need any justification besides the cleverness! But that's not the interesting thing about the episode, the interesting thing about the episode is I didn't notice there were no words in it until someone pointed it out. The only thing I noticed at the time was that the episode was incredibly tense. That is the true power of Film Techniques

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Sullivan
@Sullivan

this reminds me of the bit from this Every Frame a Painting on "the spielberg oner" https://youtu.be/8q4X2vDRfRk?t=387 about Steve's habit of just CUTTING in the middle of a successful Long Shot (huge swag move. equivalent to the master swordsmen who walk around wearing a blindfold just to challenge themselves). Beyond being cool, it speaks to a sense of artistic awareness. He's not just doing it for the sake of doing it. The flow and tone of the work is paramount- it's not about showing off, it's about the sense you're trying to evoke. So why not cut if it works better? Technique, aesthetics, gimmicks- they are tools! It's the difference between a figure skater building a beautiful, considered routine versus some min-maxing fucker realizing you can get an easy 9.9 by going onto the ice and doing 13 pretty solid triple lutzes in a row.

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Sullivan
@Sullivan

Had more thoughts on this and I didn't wanna split it into a reblog so theyre going here:

(Gross sentence incoming) TV used to be a Live Service medium. They'd tool with the characters and setups from season to season, trying to get the brisket cooked just right. New Girl does some ungodly mad science to Winston...hes a cop by the end of the show...what the fuck were they thinking?? But thats TELEVISION. Thats the process.

The 90's star trek shows typically took three seasons to start getting reliably good...and hell it didn't even really WORK on Voyager. The bread doesn't always rise. Can you imagine a modern star trek show surviving after 75 shitty episodes in a row(dont say picard and discovery dont say picard and discovery) ?? Hell no. But by the end they were some of the most influential and amazing tv shows of all time!! DEFINED tv.

a good classic tv show is a nursery for good ideas. Im watching Billions and it has excellent instincts from season to season- its booking its 5 star character actors better, its moving weak characters out and putting in good ones, its leading up to crazy moments better. "Pure TV". Is it prestige? God no. Black Sails, one of my favorite tv shows of all time, is expert at this as well. Each season they took inventory and put the last one to shame. Eventually they get so good at it that they hide a micro-season iteration in the final 3 episodes of the show. A feat only Avatar the Last Airbender and a few other titans have been able to accomplish.

But that era is GONE!!!! We get monotone-tv now. If the show is not mind-bustingly perfect, innovative, and gimmicky right away, it dies. Only apex predator once in a generation masterpieces like Succession can withstand that heat. We are losing our "mids-that-age-into-Loud"...WHICH IS WHAT TV USED TO BE ALL ABOUT!!

We are getting a lot of fake tv shows. Cuckoo TV. Brood Parasite TV. Its not going to iterate. Its gonna be the same fucking thing every season. Every season of Westworld is the SAME SEASON OF TV!!!

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Sullivan
@Sullivan

Also i love LOST. Lost is not to blame for this at all. Watch those last three seasons again. TV. Rocky bits, but iteration, moving characters around. Some bad booking, some called shots that dont go into the stands, sure. But its tv

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