Topic: The TV Show Thread

Yellowjackets took a complete nose dive this season. So that sucks. Quite possibly one of my all time favorite shows and they just tanked it with some of the sloppiest, laziest writing in all of streaming. I'm half wondering if the drop in quality was strike related because jfc it's like night and day from one season to the next. Oh well.

@nessisonett @PegasusActual93 kinda envy you peeps in the UK because they've turned the American HBO streaming platform into the hub for trash television and I just don't understand why. Unsubbing as soon as I can. What an embarrassment of a service. I'll just pirate because there's no way I'm paying for the heaps of garbage that make up the new Max.

@zupertramp
I'm actually American not British and I really couldn't care less about any of the changes they made to the platform. Everything I was watching and plan to watch are all still there and I'm not being charged anything extra so why should I care?

@PegasusActual93 but it does impact what programming they carry. It's why they stopped carrying Westworld and a few others I can't think of at the moment. Because it's not really HBO anymore. It's a streaming service that carries some of the programming traditionally shown on HBO but is mostly meant as a variety pack of all the properties they own.

I mean it's cool that all the stuff you watch remains unchanged but I really doubt that'll last.

But my bad on assuming you're British. Bygones.

Edit: Minx and Legendary were the other shows axed despite being renewed for more seasons because Warner is drowning in debt and can pull a show at a moment's notice to avoid paying residuals.

I'm just saying... prestige TV, it turns out, is expensive. 8 different versions of The Property Brothers and my 1000lb (fill in the blank) on the other hand... not so much. Max portends the beginning of the end. Mark my words.

@zupertramp
HBO Max was never just HBO (hence the name) It was always everything under Warners umbrella including Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, TCM, DC, TNT, TBS, Boomerang, etc. None of which has changed (though I do find the hub system of the past was a little easier to navigate). People tend to forget you can't just do prestige show after prestige show, and only rely on that as your business model. It's simply too expensive. You need cheaper programming as well to offset costs. I am no fan of removing shows but the fact of the matter is many of their shows they took off literally nobody was watching. Westworld lost over 80 percent of it's viewership since season 1, and who has even heard of Minx? I can watch my movies and gritty dramas and my wife can watch true crime, and the app doesn't run like s--t. Win-win.

@PegasusActual93 true it was never just HBO but it had everything from HBO. And yes no one has heard of Minx, so how expensive could it have been really? But the problem is it was renewed and removed from the service anyway. And like yes, Westworld's viewership dropped... so remove the show entirely? I'm one of the people who stopped watching but had hoped to go back. Now I can't despite paying for the service. Just feel like residuals are part of the deal personally. Like from one day to the next who is actually sitting around watching Sopranos in 2023? Probably not that many. So could it be removed to save money? It's not impossible.

If you don't share my concerns though that's cool. I just am beginning to trust, less and less, paying any streaming service a recurring fee if they can just yank whatever they want to save money.

And I'm just not a fan of all the garbage that greets me on the home screen now. But I guess that's just a me thing.

Edit: oh and they kinda already got ahead of this and introduced the price hike earlier this year. all part of this merger.

This is not entirely true. Max is now the merged version of HBO Max and Discovery +, where a lot of the purge from the former was to make way for the latter, so @zupertramp has a point when he feels the service has been devalued.
(to make matters extra confusing, the geniuses at WB Discovery decided last minute that Discovery+ was to live on as a separate service in addition to merging all or most of their reality/unscripted [email protected] into Max... go figure. It's anyone's guess how long that will last, though.)

@FuriousMachine Partially true, but the real reason they purged content was to save money. Removing the content means they don't have to pay royalties and such for having the content on the service anymore. It's all about saving money for Discovery since taking over WB.

@nessisonett Decidedly heavyweight stuff, raw and ugly. They ended it perfectly. Going to miss the show but I’m more appreciative of it ending on a strong note.

Finished watching the last season of The 100. This is the first time ever I've been absolutely p***ed off by a TV show.

So I followed the show until season 4 as it was coming out. Then I took a long break from it and resumed watching it last month from season 5. That season was an absolute disaster, it was so bad. Season 6 was much better and more interesting. The plot of season 7 was all over the place and it could've been much better. I still liked the season more than the fifth one overall, but it was still not that great.

The problem with these last seasons is that the show writers went all out on making the main characters unlikable as hell, especially the primary protagonist. I absolutely hated her until the end. She's selfish, deranged, violent and hypocritical. Human lives don't matter to her at all, yet we're supposed to like her? Absolutely insane.

What I really liked about season 7 is how it touched upon how humans are constantly drawn to conflicts and that we will never change. But there are people who believe we can break free from that by transcending. It's an interesting, albeit supernatural, solution. The important part though is that the characters are aware of this never-ending downward spiral and want to break free from it as well. There has always been violence and bloodshed in every season and they've realised that they keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

The primary protagonist doesn't realise this though. She remains unchanged until the very end, still believing that what she's done has been right. This is what absolutely p***es me off. I don't think I've ever hated a character more than her. And the thing is that I didn't mind her at all until season 5. That's when she became absolutely unlikable. It's so hard to give a crap about these characters when they're awful people.

Another thing that was infuriating about the show is how illogical most plot points were. It genuinely didn't make any sense why the characters chose to do most of the things they did.

So yeah, my experience with The 100 ended on a sour note. I'm glad that I finally watched through the entire show even though the last couple of seasons were not as good as the first four. They should've at least ended the show on season 6, but at least they didn't drag it out for another season after the seventh one.

Perry Mason being cancelled is insane. HBO continuing their absolute race to the bottom.

bing watching some episodes of Gilmore Girls Season 1.

forgot how bad Paris and Tristen were as jerks to Rory in the first season

@nessisonett
Kind of dramatic. I liked Perry Mason and wish it got a season 3 but the fact of the matter is nobody was watching it. You are the only one i have encountered in the wild that I could even discuss it with. It lost more than 70 percent of its viewership from season 1. If an expensive show is not being watched you can't justify it. Need I remind you just last week HBO had the one-two punch of Succession and Barry having great finales on the same night.

@PegasusActual93 Zaslav will kill the network in the near future. If everything was driven by profit and viewing figures then the only shows on would be reality TV. He’s already pushing out creativity in favour of that garbage and the removal of the HBO name from that app is the first step to getting completely rid of prestige TV as it’s too expensive for the returns. Writers are on strike because their medium is being squeezed by profit margins when the industry has never, and will never, be profitable. It’s inherently a waste of money in the same sense that the Mona Lisa is. Good TV should be funded due to the sole factor that the world is a better place with more quality media made with heart and soul.

@nessisonett
The tv industry was at one point profitable. Because of a thing called syndication. Thats it. And you can't do that anymore now that cable is all but dead. The world was never an imaginary fairy tale land where anybody and everybody had full freedom and infinite cash reserves to do anything they want regardless how much or little their works were getting. It was always driven by money. Like Zaslav or not (I don't care for him) the whole company they had going there before him was a massive sinking ship and thats just a pure fact. You cant make 100 shows that cost millions per episode when most of them are only yielding not even half a million viewers per episode. Something has to give. Perry Mason was averaging maybe 400,000 per episode and it costs some dough to make a show that recreates a time period that authentically. Shows being cancelled for lack of viewership is nothing new. In fact shows in the past got cancelled that had vastly superior ratings (dont believe me go look up the viewership figures for famous cancelled shows like Firefly or Freaks and Geeks or even other cancelled HBO shows like Carnivale or Rome).

Not sure if anyone else has noticed this but the new Max app doesn’t seem to work as well as the HBO Max app did, from a technical standpoint. The new app had much worse lag and buffering, with frequent blurriness while the stream catches up. I never noticed any blur or lag on the old app, nor on Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, or my Cable TV streaming app. (Running all apps through the native Samsung smart suite). My fiber internet connection should be sufficient for on-demand 4K streaming.

I don’t mind the design of the Max app, and it carried over all my preferences, watchlist, watch history, etc. It just doesn’t stream in seamless 4K like before. Hopefully it will be addressed in an update. Because it makes me want to avoid the service all together. I have plenty of other options to watch.

@Th3solution
I have had the exact opposite situation happen. The HBO Max app while not the worst had it's issues especially back in 2021. When it switched over to Max It has ran so much better for me. No lag that I have noticed when playing something, or when browsing. Plus when I download movies or episodes onto other devices I no longer have downloads just randomly disappear for no explainable reason. Not sure what is causing the issues you are having but hope it gets sorted out, I am streaming directly from my PS5 if that makes any difference.

@PegasusActual93 Interesting. Then I suppose it likely has to do with the Samsung app then. 🤔
I never use my PS5 for TV/movie watching, but I do use my phone and tablet sometimes, so I’ll experiment with those.

@Th3solution also on a Samsung TV and have noticed lagging during playback that didn't previously happen. Could just be a Samsung app issue but that's a pretty big demo so probably worth addressing.

That said I haven't been a fan of HBOs app from the beginning. It's better than it used to be but only barely. It's just not very user friendly imo. Like stuff that disappears from my "to watch" after watching and other stuff that doesn't. Or I constantly get content in my continue watching that I've finished. And the minimal subtitle options. Little quality of life stuff. And now it's far more cluttered with other needless programming but no need to beat that horse.

Overall I'll be happy to leave it behind when my year is up.

@Th3solution I had the same experience with the PS5 app. It was particularly egregious when I watched The Last of Us on release day (don't know if the timing was relevant). It would start with extremely poor quality and intermittent audio throughout the opening credits and sometimes into the episode itself before "settiling" on a stable stream. A couple of times it persisted so long that I had to switch to Chromecast, which didn't have the same issue.

Same with Tokyo Vice, but not as bad.

A couple of months ago, while visiting my aging mother, we watched The Last of Us via her Samsung TV app and that was all smooth all the way.

Haven't really watched anything on Max since I got a Samsung myself recently, but I expect that to be fine

Only time I remember having similar issues in the past was back in the GoT days when attempting to watch early on release day was often pointless.