I was having a conversation last night that wasn't exactly optimistic. It was one that detailed the struggle to find 'good' media these days. One that explored the fact that for a while, there hasn't been much to watch. Where television shows have declined massively in quality, and the world of feature length films is difficult to navigate. Hollywood has recently managed to learn that films don't need massive budgets nor do they need to be massive franchises, but the downside with decreased budgets is that their marketing has been nonexistent. Good things are releasing, they're just very difficult to find and hear about when nobody is talking about them. The same regarding television series, though on that front the budgets have ballooned, though quality massively declining. This has pushed a lot of people towards foreign creations, take the realm of Korean dramas as a great example; why browse endlessly through a sea of streaming services to only end up watching The Office when you could just watch a more creative concept hailing from distant lands?
I think many of us would struggle to find an ongoing television series that really manages to capture our attention. We haven't had a 'Breaking Bad' type of series appear in a long, long time. So, with so many streaming services around, what are we all even watching? I had these questions return to me as I was watching Shogun again, as I had returned to it having not finished the show due to life getting in the way. I fell in love with this show for its strong attention to detail, the unique visuals of its filmmaking and the story that is relatively simple: a foreigner finds himself captured in Japan and has to adapt to the ways of life there while dealing with the struggles of its tough and complex political climate. While Shogun is what I would consider a more serious story, streaming services themselves alike have been trying to find that sweet spot between fiction (due to budget) and serious setting. It's partially why so many shows released these days tend to look so bland, void of colour and atmosphere, with stories that are mostly stuck within the present rather than diving into different worlds and themes.
Returning to Shogun now that it is 'done', it made me realise that even streaming services are struggling with the Hollywood idea: how do they make more money? Shogun was quite a hit for its themes and technical aspects and it became highly evident that they just weren't prepared for that sort of response. They genuinely had no idea how big of a hit they actually had. And the outcome of this was the desperate bid to shit out an announcement of a second season as soon as the show ended, as people began to question whether there could be more of this world to come. And surprise -- a surprise even to the studio -- there is a second season to come! While I love a good mini series which comes and goes and doesn't find the need to exist beyond its main narrative, I think we're in this weird era of television where studios have no idea what people want despite people endlessly binging and referencing the very things that they want. Such huge disconnect!
It comes to no surprise that the world remains in the past these days. Where nostalgia bait remains at the forefront of all entertainment media, cycling back and forth between yester-year and searching deep into the graves in search of anything with a hint of soul. What happened to our comedies? Our detective whodunnits? Our science-fiction drama space explorations that had so much cheese to them that they formed decade-long fanbases and fueled the Internet with enough cringe to last a lifetime? What happened to the inspiration we once pulled from the worlds of books? Did film studios forget they likely have libraries riddled with creative potential sitting at their disposal? Perhaps an executive or two having lost their library cards within the pools of investor cash flowing into the streaming world at the turn of the previous decade.