Bingewatch

I find myself bingewatching whole seasons of shows that are in reality pretty stupid.

Most of them are awful. The Man in the High Tower,
a series that gets good reviews on Prime, from a
Philip K Dick book, is unwatchable for me. Bad
acting, bad writing, but the CGI is good. That's
all people need these days, the acting and
writing are meaningless to them.

Quote: Pacomartin

I find myself bingewatching whole seasons of shows that are in reality pretty stupid.

Looking for something to binge watch
Decided on Boardwalk Empire
I've always liked Steve Buscemi in a variety roles
Just watched 1st episode, pretty good. Got 5 whole seasons to binge on :-)

I found this fascinating about Steve Buscemi

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/buscemi.asp

The day after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Steve Buscemi, who worked as a firefighter from 1980-1984, showed up at his old fire station, Engine Company No. 55 in the Little Italy section of New York.
For the next week he worked 12-hour shifts, digging through the rubble trying to find the bodies of missing firefighters, all the while refusing to do interviews or have his picture taken.
“It was a privilege to be able to do it,” the 45-year-old actor said. “It was great to connect with the firehouse I used to work with and with some of the guys I worked alongside. And it was enormously helpful for me because while I was working, I didn’t really think about it as much, feel it as much.
“It wasn’t until I stopped that I really felt the full impact of what had happened. It would have been much harder for me to get through it if I hadn’t been able to do that.”

I just finished season one of The Wire and thought it was decent. Going to try and watch all of season two this weekend,

Quote: DRich

I just finished season one of The Wire and thought it was decent. Going to try and watch all of season two this weekend,

I loved the wire
Great characters
Omar rocks. My favorite character.
Bunk, Stringer, Proposition Joe, ect, all great characters

Here's almost 3 hours of just Omar

Binging on Fortitude
Looked interesting.
Small town way way north by glaciers.
Up to episode 5, pretty good as I am trying to figure out WTF is going on
Watching now. Should be working but my computer connectivity to work network is down

Quote: DRich

I just finished season one of The Wire and thought it was decent. Going to try and watch all of season two this weekend,

Season 2 is an ugly duckling, I liked it best, many fans hated it.

Best mob nickname: White Mike.

With Bingeing now commonplace, has TV become more episodic (meaning are more TV shows incorporating story arcs and/or maintaining more continuity between episodes)?

Quote: Nareed

With Bingeing now commonplace, has TV become more episodic (meaning are more TV shows incorporating story arcs and/or maintaining more continuity between episodes)?

Well I think that is certainly true of the TV that is released on streaming services. You may not binge watch, but you would tend to watch the episodes in order.

Short form comedy like Grace and Frankie where episodes are roughly half an hour probably expect to be sold back to broadcast in severely censored form.

But even basic cable like this 8 episode series, "The Sinner", wouldn't make a lot of sense unless you watched all the episodes in order. I am sure they are thinking of its eventual run on Netflix.


Hulu is experimenting with a system where you purchase Live TV and you get a video library to accompany it for the price ($40 plus $4 surcharge if you don't want commercials on the video library).

The big improvement is the ease with which you can put the streaming service "on hold" for any reason, and not have to pay for it. You can put Netflix on hold for four weeks, and watch only Amazon Prime, or you can put the live TV on hold and just watch video libraries. Of course, you can put everything on hold while you are out of town, or just want a break from watching TV or if money is tight.

The question is, what will happen to the industry? HBO with up to 2 million streaming subscribers and 130 miliion worldwide subscribers can afford to pay stars half a million per episode, and pay for high quality talent. Netflix charges less money per subscriber than HBO and is still transitioning from buying material to making their own.

But advertisers are still paying $50 a month per television household in the USA. That;s a lot of money to replace with streaming services that are increasingly commercial free.

Quote: Pacomartin

Well I think that is certainly true of the TV that is released on streaming services. You may not binge watch, but you would tend to watch the episodes in order.

That may or may not matter.

If you recall series like Time Tunnel, Star Trek (all of them minus perhaps DS9), etc. the order of eps in which you watched didn't matter at all. On the other extreme there was Babylon 5, where only watching in order made sense. If you watched a third season ep and then a second season one, you'd be hopelessly confused.

One thing I've long notice dis that half-hour sitcoms tended to have more continuity than one-hour dramas, largely because the former included children in the cast. This is not a universal rule. Setting aside The Simpsons, which operates on entirely different rules, comedies like "Friends" and "Cheers" used children as plot devices only.