CarmB

ITGUYINSD said:

jeff fields said:

entropys said:

Yeah right at the start I knew they would actually end up with the clip. And sure enough.

anyway, this second series is turning into a bit of a sad soap.

the thing I have liked about streaming is you get decent story arcs over a season. Truly great stories with a beginning middle and end.

But the trouble is some shows get so popular the producers can’t help themselves and rush about trying to come up with ideas for another season.  Thing is, a weak subsequent season(s) cheapens what came before.  It’s called jumping the shark.

I hear they are making a second season of The Queen’s Gambit. What a complete and utter travesty.

This, of course, is not at all true with Ted Lasso, none of it, as anyone with even a passing familiarity with the show knows. The story arcs for all the characters were plotted out for three seasons before they ever started making the show. There was no "rushing about", and there's nothing weak about this season, either.

The last two episodes were a bit odd.  Almost like they ran out of story and needed to fill a couple episodes.  

Odd is not necessarily a bad thing. If you stick with a particular formula to please fans you wind up stagnating rather quickly. Do that and the whining about a show becoming too predictable kicks in. The show was more consistently appealing in Season One, certainly, but remains worth checking out. I do think, though, that taking the series beyond Season 3 would be a mistake.

No need to overthink this. Bottom line is, does the service at a given price point offer enough to justify the cost. It’s either yes or no. If yes, then I sign up and if no then not. I would imagine that quite a few consumers will not limit themselves to a single streaming service. I do think there will reach a point where most of us will not be signed up for all of them on account of the cost will be excessive and if the amount of content is such that the time to watch it all falls short, well why spend money on something you’re not going to use. 

In other words, the services are not exactly in competition with each other and yet, to an extent, they are. By that I mean, it’s not a case of having to choose just one. If you are buying a smart phone, you are likely buying just one. But if you subscribe to a streaming service, you don’t necessarily limit yourself to just one. That said, for most of us there is a limit and if the price per service increases significantly, that limit will become more of a factor. I’m unhappy with the direction that Netflix has gone, especially that it charges a premium for delivering 4K and HDR. Fortunately, all the other services have not gone there. As well, from a launch in Canada at $7.99 a month to now charging $18.99 a month for the top tier is flat out greed. No wonder subscription numbers are trending in the wrong direction. 

For Apple to succeed, it needs the model to prevail accommodating consumers who sign up to multiple streaming services. It’s not us or them. It’s add us to the mix. For that, you don’t need the most content just enough appealing content to justify the price to enough subscribers to have a viable service. We’re not in a scenario where phone specs are compared to decide which phone to buy. Most consumers are not going to add up the titles with one service and compare that number to another, choosing the one with the most. A consumer will consider what is on offer and decide if for the price it’s worth adding to the mix. Each service will stand or fall on its own merits. Of course, if the cost per service skyrockets industry wide, it changes the narrative. As a consumer, my hope is that this will not happen. Personally, since you don’t have to carry most of the services year-round, I will not, if the cost gets out of hand. I’ve already gone there with Netflix which means the amount of money these services can collectively extract from us is not limitless. 

At the end of the day this production will be judged as any production is, on its merits or lack thereof. 

When a filmmaker conjures up something, regardless of the source material, it’s that filmmaker’s work that matters not the source. It would be absurd for one to worry so much about being true to the source if doing so compromised the quality of the resulting film, series, whatever. 

So it’s going to be down to Foundation the TV production being judged as a viewing experience. My guess is that most of the audience will not and probably never will read Asimov’s original compositions and it is essential that the Foundation TV production be made with that in mind. If its compelling television great, if not, so be it. Apple TV+ is not going to be ruined if the project fails but would certainly get a boost from having Foundation hit the mark. In other words, this production is pretty much like any other production, the difference being that this is such a famous franchise that there will be plenty of attention on it when it launches. 

The assumption that whatever drops by to say hello is responsible for developing the technology needed to get here is like most assumptions, lacking in imagination. While it is true that it takes a highly evolved technology to traverse what we consider to be vast distances, it might not require that much grey matter to operate said technology. A society could develop robotics and artificial intelligence to a modest degree more advanced to what we already have which could then evolve itself into the required technology to make travel to other solar systems viable. You could have a bunch of fools not much more evolved than we are with access to sophisticated tech, clearly a bad combination for any species unfortunate enough to encounter them. You could have varied species in an alien setting at different levels of development. In that scenario, a more advanced society might have developed the necessary tech and a more barbaric bunch - in other words more like us - could have somehow gotten their hands on the necessary tech and stopped by to check us out. Heck, they could be on the lam and are just flailing about getting into trouble. Those of us in this society have access to technology that we would be individually hard-pressed to reproduce were the society and infrastructure to suddenly collapse. Who among us would be able to cobble together even something as basic as a toaster and yet we can do all sorts of spectacular stuff like surf online. 

Look, it’s no more valid to whine about yet another alien invasion project than it would be to whine about any number of stories that cover scenarios that have been done before. Pretty much everything has more or less been done before this many decades into film and TV creation.  It’s not about the basic premise so much as it’s about execution. Of course, you can’t validly criticize the execution of a creative project if one hasn’t been shown the end result. Still, if the goal is to find fault, better to get one’s shots in before the fact since there is a risk that the movie or series will be done so well that taking shots will be harder later on. 

The series in question might well be poorly done and short on originality or it might be awesome. When it comes out we can find out what has been wrought. Hope it’s good. I will say that so far Apple has produced a decent percentage of solid content. That said, everything Apple green lights isn’t going to work out and anyone foolish enough to expect it to deserves to experience the inevitable disappointment when it doesn’t. There are times when I imagine some with such a highly critical approach to just about everything that it must be virtually impossible to ever enjoy anything. Kind of a miserable way to go through life. 

KBuffett said:

Xed said:

jcc said:

Not sure why Apple doesn’t just buy it. They need the assets.

elijahg said:

AppleTV+ would be so much more attractive if it had something like MGM's back catalog.

cg27 said:

The Kubrick films alone would be worth it.

I understand the desire to want Apple to simply buy up every old catalog so they have a plethora of content to offer, but that's a short-term solution and would muddy the waters of what they've been trying to accomplish. Frankly, the only way they cold've come out on top is if they had bought Disney because it's old catalogs that people love it's Disney + Pixar + Marvel + Star Wars + Nat Geo that will make them the dominate force for old catalogs sprinkled with new content in terms of revenue.

In 5 years I expect the Apple TV+ will grown to the point that no one else is able to compete with the amount of original, quality content. Instead of saying "I hear that The Handmaid's Tale is a great series but it's weird that it's made by Hulu" you'll be saying "of course [new series on Apple TV+] is well reviewed, it's on Apple TV+." On Apple TV+ it's already the norm*, but an excellent series or movie on other services is an exception because you have to include all the other content they've bought to pad their library.

I expect that they'll be getting the top writers, producers, and actors to be on Apple TV+ because that's where the highest likelihood of Oscars and Emmys will be.

* https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/04/13/apple-tv-has-the-highest-rated-content-of-all-streaming-platforms

Netflix and Amazon have more original content than Apple, and are adding to it at a faster rate than Apple. Also, I think they’ve lost their way (again) with this Prince Harry and Me-gain content.

Apple charges a lot less per month than either Netflix or Amazon. Here in Canada, Amazon is a great deal for what you get but Netflix is the only streaming service that forces you to pay a big premium to get the latest formats like Dolby Vision, 4K, etc. Quite simply, I want Apple to keep it simple. Charge for the original content, charge fairly, and it’s all good.