Oh, believe me, that is something that has been on my mind recently…
In Star Trek, humanity evolved to become better because it had to learn the hard lessons of the past.
Sadly, in reality and today, I’m not so sure those “hard lessons” would lead to any betterment of humanity. World War III could end, and it would be like that alternative episode of enterprise, where is Zephryn Cochrane shot the Vulcan visitors in the face with a shot shotgun.
Feel similar for Star Wars. I gave the sequels a few shots but ultimately don't really care about them. However, the transition era between the Republic and the Galactic Empire echoes what is happening in the US this second.
I was (re)watching Clone Wars around the start of the year while making plans with my partner to leave our friends and flee the country. The way the Jedi Council treated Ahsoka towards the end while ushering in an era of fascism hit especially hard this time around.
They did her so wrong and then tried to say it was her final test. Such a cop out! Surely with all your sense of the Force you should have known she was innocent. But they didn't see a Sith Lord right under their noses, either...
Except they have so many screwups with writing it's not even funny. Like the captain freaking praying in s02e01... Yeaahhh, Starfleet is definitely known for their faith in god and not humanity...
There are plenty of religious people in ST. The point is humanity, and especially Starfleet, are secular and logical almost to a fault. It'd be a cold day in hell when a captain goes, "Oh jeeze, oh no, I don't know what I'm doing! Please Sky Daddy, help mee~"
There's even a freaking episode in TOS where Kirk directly denounces Gods as a whole, even while he's literally staring at someone with god-like powers. It's even a repeating theme in other ways through the series.
It is wholly anachronistic to have a captain defer to religious faith. They explicitly say humanity has moved past the need in all of the first five series.
Maybe Archer has some kind of religious faith-based statement I'm forgetting, but he's set in early Trek times, and it does not remove the fact that EVERY OTHER series before ST was sold explicitly states humans do not believe in gods for worship. Picard even basically tells Q to fuck off and Q literally has powers beyond what "God" is ever described as having.
There’s even a freaking episode in TOS where Kirk directly denounces Gods as a whole, even while he’s literally staring at someone with god-like powers.
You mean the bit in who mourns for adonais where he says "we have no need for gods we find the one sufficient"? Really? Might wanna rethink that as an example. Especially since canonically there's a freakin' chapel on the enterprise AND religious officers kneeling to pray. Even in DS9 Kasidy says her mother would want her to be married by a minister.
And Pike does not defer to religious faith, he faces a crisis outside of his control and outside of his role as an officer and throws a quick prayer. Oh no. The horror.
Religion has lost its stranglehold of control, but personal faith most certainly endures through all trek. You might wanna check some of your biases 'cos its making you logic fault.
You're really reaching at straws when you equivocate a captain admitting humans have believed in one god vs a captain making a religious appeal to God.
Starfleet doesn't condemn religion, but again, that DOES NOT mean they endorse it. You religious buffoons always utterly fail to understand what kind of humanity is portrayed.
For a moment I was looking at the ear and wondering what kind of mutated creature that was. You cannot convince me that on first glance, if you miss the actual eyes, that the ears don't look somewhat like an eye.
Do you really want the public to be aware of how shitty the reality is?
I mean here in Germany e.g the reality is that our justice system is overloaded and many criminals can get away because the courts have more cases than they can handle.
I prefer that the wide public doesn’t know that we could already live in anarchy to some degree…
That's fine for drama and written TV. But nah, reality TV ruined the world.
The Real World and Cribs on MTV led to Big Brother and Survivor - which as well as popularizing the format and leading to endless trash, led to The Apprentice, which revived Donald Trump's image and brand and convinced millions of really dumb people that he'd make a good president.
In the good parallel timelines, the execs that suggested reality TV were laughed at and it never came up again. MTV still plays great music videos all day, the History channel actually talks about history, and barely anyone outside of the US knows the name 'Kardashian' or 'Donald Trump'.
The problem is that reality TV is inevitable. People, generally speaking, like to know what other people are doing. Or like to see other people react to things.
The first "reality TV" program was Candid Camera, which technically got its start as "Candid Microphone", all in the late 1940s. Of course things evolved from there into our current "reality TV" situation.
The real problem is that the line between "entertainment" and "reality" has gotten blurrier and blurrier. When we watch Godzilla we know that's just entertainment, we know a giant lizard creature isn't walking down the street.
It's also funny that you mention MTV because realistically MTV should have died out years ago. In the same way that video killed the radio star, the Internet killed the video star. Why would I turn on the TV and hope the video I wanted to watch was on, when I could just go on the Internet and see it now. Of course MTV the television station wants to keep making money, so they pivoted hard into reality TV.
Jurassic Park is one of my most favourite movies ever. Although they come not even close to the first one, I still rewatch 2 and 3 from time to time.
But Jurassic World is a disaster for me. The second one was already so bad that it caused losing my whole interest for the World franchise.
I still cannot believe how much they butchered this franchise and the initial vision for the book and the movie.
I genuinely think that some people hit a certain age and then simply lose the will to explore new things. The amount of absolute garbage reboots and sequels that my parents watch just because they liked the original thing is far too many. But it's certainly not just them. I know people younger than me that will just always listen to new albums of artists they used to enjoy even if it's hot garbage and talk about it like it's pretty good. I'm certainly not an authority on what people can enjoy, but I can absolutely be disappointed in people that reach this point where familiar=good.
I always have to pop up in these threads because I'm out there, and I'm not alone. I've been watching The Simpsons, more or less, non-stop since it first started airing.
When I was younger it played twice a day during the week with a new episode every Sunday. So when it comes to the earlier seasons, the ten or so seasons often viewed as the golden era, I've seen those dozens of times.
In the 2000s watching TV at a regularly scheduled time wasn't as much of a priority and the availability of videos on the Internet began to increase, so I usually watched The Simpsons that way. When the film came out in 2007 I was there opening day.
As streaming services became popular in the 2010s I started to watch The Simpsons there instead. Although these streaming services rarely had a backlog, just the current season, but I had them all collected over the years.
In the late 2010s my roommates and I decided to watch every episode of The Simpsons but not in release order. We would just pick a random season and episode and watch a few episodes a week over the course of two years.
Now in the 2020s we sometimes get together to watch, sometimes watch solo. I'm personally much more strict about watching every week, they usually watch in short bursts and I don't mind rewatching recent episodes.
But... Is it good? Yeah mostly. Not every episode is great.
The episode that aired this past Sunday isn't anything special, a few funny moments but Albert Brooks who voiced Hank Scorpio and Russ Cargill (from the movie) voiced a new character and that was fun.
The Treehouse of Horror from two Sunday's ago was much better, so if you want a recent episode then watch that.
No it isn't ever going to be as great as the golden age of The Simpsons, but it's still fun to watch and I still laugh, so that's a win to me.
My kids are mainlining it most days (when they're allowed TV). They're pre-teens and they love it. I don't mind so much, basically because nostalgia - and at least it's not Teen Titans Go, which was so fast it gave me a headache
What long running franchise should be taking out of the hands of idiots and given to people who are actually talented and creative?
The one exception is the MCU, that is definitely one that needs a break. I feel I've been watching the same movie over and over since the second Avengers.
The worlds of Star Trek and Star Wars are so vast that there are tons of stories that could be told. It just needs to be in the hands of someone that is actually good at their job and not a profit crazy committee.
Disney had an entire cannonical set of excellent stories to work with, but said 'fuck it we'll just do whatever crappy nostalgia bait JJ Abrams wants'... and we got a complete shit show.
Andor actaully reminded me of a lot of the 'legacy' cannon stuff, which is why it was so popular/great. Dark Empire, Thrawn, Jedi Academy... just had so much better story going on.
Star Trek seems pretty good in this regard. Discovery went ary but it was fun while it was good. Strange New Worlds is fantastic, Lower Decks takes a very different view of the universe for fun, and Picard was a decent enough story with some good stakes.
The movies suck ass though, particularly Abrams.
Star Wars on the other hand could just go away and I would not care. I saw New Hope in 77 and loved it. Looking back; not a great movie. And it was downhill from there.
Which is it shouldn't have been. There have been better books than anything produced by Lucas or Disney.
I enjoyed andor. The first 1.5 seasons were pretty solid. Then they started "discovering" characters who were in Rouge One and doingbtheir usual BS where we are all supposed to faint because someone we know shows up...
It's gone from losing my interest 20 years ago to flat out unwatchable. I saw an episode from the most recent season and it was neither funny nor interesting to watch. It's sad that one of the funniest shows ever has been past its prime for so long it's now an animated corpse of what it once was.
funny thing is Im pretty sure the last one I watched was worth watching but I no longer watch over the air real time and it was not streaming in an easy enough to do fashion so just sorta fell out of watching it.
I remember when skate 3 was released. It was the biggest sports game of the year. It outsold even FIFA. BUUUUUUUT, fifa fans are so deranged that they spend like 2 Billions in micro transactions that EA obviously spend all their efforts into making more FIFA and no more skate. Except now Skate. Obviously, and we all know how shit this turned out.
As an extremely die-hard Futurama fan I'm starting to feel the same way, especially since disney owns it now. The only thing they'll do with it going forward is see just how much they can wring from it, in the same fashion they're killing star wars, marvel, and every other IP they bought to pump out never-ending crap. I'd be fine if this was the end, even with a tear in my eye.
Fucking Grey's Anatomy. Idk if it really counts as a franchise though but it's on season 22 and hasn't been good in years. It needs to end. I keep waiting for an asteroid to hit the hospital because that's pretty much the only disaster that hasn't hit that hospital yet.
those are franchises older than tv, not only streaming, so i doubt it'll stop, The Walking Dead on the other hand... also they're rebooting Breaking Bad, soooo there's that
I'm not opposed to the idea as a BB fan, I just suspect the producers will do something stupid like cast that twerp from Dune as Jessie Pinkman. Also, no fucking way anyone can portray Walter White better than Bryan Cranston
I love Star Trek dearly, I just don't think we're ever going to get a show that hits like TNG/VOY/DS9 (and even ENT/TOS) again - largely due to capitalism and the dramatic shortening of TV seasons. SNW is watchable and has some good bits in it, but it is forced to operate at a mile-a-minute pace, and either forced or poorly chosen by the showrunners to be Action Action Action about 90% of the time. I just need some breathing room!
That being said, Lower Decks and Prodigy both hit on a lot of what I love about Trek. Their cancellations (and the new ownership of Paramount, and Section 31, and SNW only getting 6 episodes for their last season) do not bring me any hope for the future.
SNW does have some great moments. I loved the "documentary" episode most specifically, because it was a neat spin on things that let them experiment a lot with the cinematography and documentary-style shots.
As the documentary was the real 'focus' of the episode, the plot of transporting the enslaved alien creature/ship was allowed to be a self-contained story like old-school trek used to be, and I really appreciated the reflection on the morality of what they do as a crew, and as Starfleet.
There was a lot of TNG's DNA in there, and I liked that.
Yeah, there is a lot to like in it, I probably wasn't as kind in my original message as I should've been. I do love that they went more episodic with it, that's for sure! And they have had a few episodes that were pretty lighthearted and funny, which is greatly appreciated. It straddles the line of A/B tier for me.
I'm glad that Strange New Worlds exists, but it's totally fair to criticise.
I feel a lot kinder towards the writers and showrunners when I consider that we simply don't live in the 90s anymore, and that the realities of media consumption have changed in a way that forces different priorities.
Back in the era of TNG, Friends, and the X-Files, it was totally reasonable for a show to air 26 episodes over 26 weeks. Seasons would run so long that writers were putting out bottle episodes just to stretch the budget. Yet it was profitable because people would keep watching - after all, there were only a few channels competing for the same limited airtime.
Nowadays we're utterly drowning in media. The amount of content is almost infinite, and viewers are seemingly fickle, and quickly bored.
Being successful now isn't about having a great long-running show, it's about making a massive impact as fast as possible, and hanging on to that top-banner spot on Netflix or whatever platform for just a scant few weeks before people get distracted by the next thing. Only those first weeks matter.
And so, seasons get compressed and the budget gets concentrated, until shows are six episodes all coming at you full force like an airhorn blast of non-stop action and effects. They don't want longevity, they want hype.
We can blame the industry, or we can blame society, or we can blame people's viewing habits. Probably it's a bit of all three. But it certainly explains a few things.
It's almost a similar story to how the "Triple-A" gaming industry ruined games by optimising for the wrong metric, all while costing a fortune to do it.
Fortunately for gaming we have a thriving indie dev scene now, which is where the true joy, art and creativity can be found.
Perhaps TV is simply waiting for its own indie revolution.
I just don't think we're ever going to get a show that hits like TNG/VOY/DS9 (and even ENT/TOS) again
Given how much bad pressure and online criticism TNG, Voy and especially DS9 got, I'm surprised they even tried Ent. SNW was a great show, but don't forget just how much fans and execs hated every single new series that came out. Your treasured classics were dragged through the muck regularly.
That's fair, yeah! As much as I try to not let criticism impact my enjoyment of things, I'm sure it unconsciously has done so. I still don't expect to be looking back and saying "Discovery was actually fantastic" in 20 years, but I'll keep an open mind to it.
Imagine that. Two or three seasons for a tv show always srem like the sweet spot. Same with movies. Terminator, great. Terminator 2, even better. Terminator 3 to wherever we are now, what the fuck even is this?
I think a lot of people watch long lasting tv shows out of habit, not because they are good or holding up. Bob's burger is the only exception i can think off, and maybe some other niche shows, if they are good they are good and if they have more to say, go ahead.
One of my favourite shows used to be community. I have the fondest memories watching it for the first time. Now every time i rewatch it i got reminded that only the first two seasons are really good, and then it just falls apart.
It's not a golden rule. A show can be bigger if the creator has a large enough vision for it, from the start. The problem is that it's not how the business works - if you try to make a long show you'll end up with a cancelled show instead.
No way, so many examples of great shows over 3 seasons long. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, The Sopranos, The Wire, The Simpsons was amazing for a long time, 30 Rock, Parks and Rec, Battlestar Galactica, The Shield... I could go on.
I still get frustrated when we get a big games conference to show off a bunch of trailers, and a streamer watching one will start rattling off “Oh. Soldier of Fortune remake? Bloodborne 2? God of War?” up to the title card. Then, when it’s some fresh new IP, not a sequel, everyone has a reaction of “Oh. Dunno what that is.”
Gamers are very much complicit in the terrible state of game remakes/sequels.
You know what's crazy? The show has existed for my entire life (I'm 36), but I've only seen like 5 episodes ever. And the movie.
When I was around 6 or 7ish, i was just getting into stuff like that and had seen the show a couple times. Then my grandma saw some thing on the news or at church or something and ranted about the show so much, about how vulgar and terrible it was. So my mom decided I shouldn't be allowed to watch it. I was an obedient child, so I didn't watch it. Then my older friend introduced me to South Park a year or two later, and mom hadn't said anything about that show... I never really got interested in The Simpson again after that.
I did enjoy Saw X but the end was a little wacky (consequence of being a prequel?) and I don't know how they're gonna bounce back from that. And now the next movie is stuck in production limbo.
Ultimately killing John Kramer so early in the franchise was (IMO) a big mistake.
Having a movie with him as the lead was so refreshing, but goddamn you mfs should have never killed him in the first place! Let alone have waited so long to try to rectify your mistake!!
Five Nights at Freddy's has only been running for 11 years and is a corpse of its former self that seems to have been ironically put into a machine to make more money.
The weird Sci-Fi turn they took on Sister Location was easily the worst thing they did to this franchise and has derailed all future entries, change my mind.
I actually disagree. I think the sci-fi elements, and especially Remnant, are awesome (and had been pseudo-foreshadowed since the first game). I think the problem is that the series didn't end after FFPS and UCN, with maybe Help Wanted being allowed if it actually had a conclusive ending. Afton went from a serial killer to a serial killer with mysterious sci-fi motivations to a ridiculous slasher villain returning from literally everything.
I saw a commercial for the newest Pokemon game and up until it said it was exclusively for Switch 2, I hella thought it was some F2P mobile garbage. When your ads don't even make the newest game look good, it's definitely time to stop.
I tried it after seeing the pirate flag thing being used in Nepal Gen Z Protests and I thought it must be a cool story if its so popular, so I tried watching it... and I got bored so quickly. I mean, it just feels very weird to me, doesn't "click" for me, oh well, I guess my brain is just different.
Tbf, Avatar: The Last Airbender was also made for kids, but I quite enjoyed it as a young adult (even though it does have "cringy" moments). I guess One Piece just doesn't have a "deep" overarching story like a world war, propaganda (talking about the fire nation), and genocide.
I assure you, One Piece is very much not child friendly later on. The first like 700 episodes build up to a specific story arc (Wano). The current (anime) arc has a major back story of a characters life which includes him begging to be allowed to die as a child.
If you're actually interested you can just try the Netflix show. It's a watered down version but it's decent enough to give an idea of what makes it have so many fans. The Anime is just weekly television that's been running for decades - it was never meant to be binge watched.
I started One Piece about 3 years ago and have read all the manga and just recently caught up on the anime.
Some of the things I really enjoy about it:
The story progression ramps up nicely. Nobody is that OP from the get-go, and the stakes and power levels have increased steadily as the story goes on. There is definitely plot armor, but it's not like every bad guy is on the same level as the previous one.
There is great representation. There are people of different races. There are gay-coded, trans, and gender fluid characters, there are young and old people. And none of them are really played for laughs for those traits. All character types have heros, villians, comic relief, and serious characters. And none of the characters with real screen/page time are flat and one dimensional. This along with the power scaling, really makes the adventure feel important and like a fleshed out and lived in world that you are part of. I can only imagine this is even moreso true for people that have been fans since the late 90s.
At almost 1200 chapters, I feel like I understand this fictional world and how it works. There are macguffins and such, but nothing that feels out of place. Characters still behave how you would expect them to behave and the creator doesn't just pull stuff out of nowhere. There is still great continuity with the earliest things that happened in the story. There are many familiar characters, but more still come and go, but not before becoming necessary parts of the full tale. It's not like Star Wars where it feels there's about 2 dozen characters with names in the whole universe.
And the last thing I'll say is in spite of all this, it still does stuff just for laughs regularly. It knows it's a story primarily for young boys, and despite being one of the best loved anime/manga ever, it doesn't take itself all that seriously. It's a damn fun time to read and watch almost every bit of it with few exceptions. The stuff coming out now is as good or better as it's ever been.
Like anything else, it won't be for ever single person out there, so if you don't like it, you don't like it. I saw a few random episodes on Toonami in the 90s and was WTF is this random stuff then. It is a weird thing to dive into the middle of, and a lot of it is outright silly. But I had people at work keep telling me I'd like it, I finally gave in, and I was hooked from the first chapter.
Half of the plot points from all the movies have been enacted, attempted or discussed in the first year of Trump's presidency by his cabinet, handlers, backers or string-pullers or funders. Fictional supervillains as entertainment are a distraction, dangerously so when the real thing is happening as we speak.
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler
they passed the halfway point of the Grand Line.
:::
The power creep just got way too out of control for my liking, and while I know that the power creep always existed, I feel like the adventures before showed how you can tell a good story without just brute force. Plus, even with their superhuman abilities, their struggles still felt relatable. And with what happened before and right after the aforementioned turning point, it felt like that would be left in the dust.
That's just a barrier of entry though. I've never seen anyone read the whole thing and then come out thinking it was just a waste of time. You either enjoy it or give up.
One Piece is kinda different from other long shows because it's not being stretched artificially, but in a more natural way. Like, comparing it to Dragon Ball, it's not a case of "and now we need to find the 7 dragon balls again" but a case of "turns out that finding 7 specific items that may be hidden anywhere in the world is actually fucking hard". In that analogy, the story is at the "we just found out who has the seventh" stage. So now all that's missing is getting that last one, making the wish and seeing the outcome of it.
The first segment of the series was quite linear, but after some point each country they visit has its own story, almost like an Isekai. Some of those stories are incredible, some are extremely boring and others are just fine. Then once Naruto and Bleach ended, OP kinda shifted into trying to absorb the fans of those two series and it became a lot less interesting to people who enjoyed only OP out of the big trio.
Well, it isn't one. There's a great overarching story and recurring characters and all sorts of stuff that makes it not quite qualify as an Isekai, but yeah in general every new country has their own stuff going on in addition to the main story and it takes the main focus. Usually the most hyped chapters are the ones in-between arcs because it's when there are updates on what other characters have been doing while the main cast was absorbed into a separate story.
And then even inside those separate stories there's some times an additional level of separate story through some long flashback that last up to dozens of chapters.
It's like the author wants to move on to create new stuff but can't so he just adapts OP to fit whatever new story he wants to make. But I guess I'm just giving you even more reasons to stay away from it and I haven't even mentioned any of its flaws.
Half-truth take. It's not stretched artificially in the fashion you describe. It is still rife with artifical stretching. Rife with filler. An absolutely obnoxious amount of screaming. Several minutes in each episode wasted explaining what happened last time. And so on. It is garbage that needs to end, but for those who absolutely want to dive into it, I'd at least recommend canning the anime shit and just read the superior manga.
I remember watching Detective Conan in the Mandarin dub as a kid. Don't remember much of it now. I looked it up recently, and apparantly it has been running since the 1990s? Still ongoing... yea I don't trust anything that runs for that long, probably quality of the story went downhill if I had to guess. I have no idea how it's even possible to run a concept for 2 decades+ without it eventually getting repetative and boring. I was curious about what the ending would be, but it never ends.
I've been watching the Fast and Furious movies since the first one. And I actually look forward to how ridiculous each one gets and how it's going to top the previous one. I know it's been time for it to end for awhile, but I will actually be kinda bummed when it does.
You never know when a gem like Prey, but you gotta deal with hot garbage in the meantime. Wanted to love Romulus, watched it, no idea what it was about, don't remember a single thing, don't even have a scene in my head.
Literally all long running franchises. There is a clear downward trajectory over the lifetime of franchises. It doesn’t have to start immediately, but goddamn if it’s not true for everything. Go out on top. Don’t go out floundering about the lower-middle (at best).
It doesn’t need to end. It just needs new blood. For the last 20 years it’s been exclusively run by a group of people who all used to hang out in the same pub in the 90s.
Let’s have a year or two of someone young and talented shadowing RTD to learn all the ins and outs of producing such a difficult show, and then let them loose.
It needs new blood but keep RTD far away from it. He is garbage at both story and character. I think he is responsible for more that 2/3 of all the fart jokes in Doctor Who.
I think it needs to go back to serials. Give stories enough time to setup problems and them actually solve them. The Doctor just magics hits way out of problems these days.
RTD will need to be involved for at least a little bit.
The problem, as stands, and the reason why RTD is back at all, is it’s an incredibly difficult show to make. Same budget as something like Midsommar Murders, but you’ve got to go somewhere completely different every story, with new sets, locations, and cast. And you’ve got plenty of bespoke objects & scenery to create, and VFX.
So the person running the show has to be a really good showrunner. And there’s not that many people in the UK with that much experience. And fewer who’d want to take on a huge franchise rather than do their own thing.
That’s why you’d almost certainly need someone to shadow RTD for a year or two before they could take over. Even if they’ve been a showrunner before, they’d need experience running Doctor Who.
I'd rather see them bring back Alpha Centauri level costumes and effects than have RTD anywhere near the show. Get someone who knows how to write a good show.
Lower budgets and no fancy effects can force the writers to have to write an engaging story. I don't want any new Who creatives still involved. I think other than a handful episodes of Eccleston and Capaldi I don't ever want to rewatch any new Who.
Honestly you have to go all the way back to pre JNT before you get stories I enjoy watching.
Of course the issue here is what people do or do not consider “good” varies from person to person.
The most likely candidates are Pete McTigh and Kate Herron. McTigh is the most probable, given that he’s showrunner of the upcoming Sea Devils miniseries and has had his name linked longer than anybody else.
Both of those names would be new blood (even though they have both worked on the show). Unless Moffat or Chibnall are going to come back again (and they’re not), then the only Fitzroy Tavern regular left who’s qualified is Mark Gatiss, and he said long ago that while he’d have been interested in the 00s he’s very much not interested any more.
That’s the closest we’re going to come to a new take, realistically. One thing’s for certain - nobody is going to take it back to any pre-JNT era.
My most radical opinion is that every story ever created should be made to end. And continuing any story past a well-made ending is a crime against storytelling.
We should have a law where sequelising a story that already reached a satisfying end incurs fines that quickly escalate into insane amounts of money. Redirect that dosh into funding actual original art.
IDK if it's still popular anymore or just tax write off slop, but definitely Scooby Doo.
I would have absolutely been in the minority back when it came out, but as someone who grew up watching it through reruns on Boomerang, I personally like some of HB's other attempts that didn't stick better.
As the lyrics to Running Under Water by Pain goes:
Me and my friends get no respect.
What does Scooby do that we neglect?
Currently the SC franchise is pretty much a walking corpse with the extremely formulaic plot of "the gang loves xyz and are going to see them/experience event" with little to zero prior showing that they care. Perfect example is literally the KISS crossover movie that came out maybe less than a decade ago. A basically dead band that's been out of the spotlight for a long time and a franchise that went creatively bankrupt decades ago are a perfect match for each other... Except they had to suddenly transform the gang into KISS fans for anything to make any sense.
Edit:
I think it's actually called Running Under Water and not Jabberjaw...
I think flipping the question creates more hot takes. Except for the series with self-contained increments, most "popular" long-running franchises just need to stop. Not necessarily close the franchise completely, but just let one thread end and create a new one.
Call of Duty
Battlefield
Modern Warfare
Uncharted
Assasin's Creed
Dark Souls
Tombraider
Final Fantasy
Tales Of
Zelda
Street Fighter
Mortal Kombat
God of War
Deus Ex (pretty much dead already thanks to Square Enix doing a shit job)
If nothing else, I like how directly The Matrix Resurrection lampshaded this. Thomas Anderson’s game company is forced into making a sequel to their Matrix trilogy by Warner Bros itself, and provides infinitely conflicting corporate views on being completely original and yet repeating the source material.
They couldn’t escape the sequel trap, but they could at least draw attention to it.
They're just terrible satire. Even when they have a clear target for their satire instead of making fun of everyone in the episode, they get the freaking message wrong a lot of the time.
Like the wall-mart episode. What's the big baddy? Is it the economies of scale, and that allowing massive companies that get every benefit from that scaling compete directly with mom and pop shops? No, it's the customers who like convenience and low prices!
They're just ... shit at their job most of the time. The first couple seasons are waaaay better because they're just stupid juvenile stories having fun for the most part. The more political they attempt to get, the worse their satire gets, and I'm someone who generally agrees with what they're attempting to make fun of. (with many glaring exceptions, like directly calling the act of cleaning up the environment and using green energy "gay", making fun of trans people, etc)
They're seriously just... bad satire that ultimately only succeeds in normalizing being rude to each other.
star wars, for sure. at this point they're just digging through the garbage for any scrap of lore they can turn into another streaming series. it's less 'new content' and more 'extended universe, but legally distinct.'
For shame for you to say that Star Trek has run on too long.
We need messages about cooperating to create a classless, moneyless society of benevolent people now more than ever.
A what?!?!?
Hell, even Star Trek’s hope for the future would do all of us a bit of good right now.
Just remember in ST humanity went through WWIII, a nuclear war before all the nice stuff.
Oh, believe me, that is something that has been on my mind recently…
In Star Trek, humanity evolved to become better because it had to learn the hard lessons of the past.
Sadly, in reality and today, I’m not so sure those “hard lessons” would lead to any betterment of humanity. World War III could end, and it would be like that alternative episode of enterprise, where is Zephryn Cochrane shot the Vulcan visitors in the face with a shot shotgun.
I’m terrified that we live in the mirror universe
A surprising amount of people spring beards, nowadays. So there might be something in your observation.
And apparently India los so the eugenics wars because we have like a billion people and more a single Indian in star fleet in the first 50 years
Feel similar for Star Wars. I gave the sequels a few shots but ultimately don't really care about them. However, the transition era between the Republic and the Galactic Empire echoes what is happening in the US this second.
I was (re)watching Clone Wars around the start of the year while making plans with my partner to leave our friends and flee the country. The way the Jedi Council treated Ahsoka towards the end while ushering in an era of fascism hit especially hard this time around.
They did her so wrong and then tried to say it was her final test. Such a cop out! Surely with all your sense of the Force you should have known she was innocent. But they didn't see a Sith Lord right under their noses, either...
That the Jedi Council is incredibly hubristic and far less aligned with the light side than they think is a major theme of the prequel era.
Please tell that to CBS. (or who ever the hell runs these hellscape conglomerates these days and owns ST)
Paramount these days innit?
SNW is, like, almost there...
Except they have so many screwups with writing it's not even funny. Like the captain freaking praying in s02e01... Yeaahhh, Starfleet is definitely known for their faith in god and not humanity...
Yeah nah. A future that accepts all doesn't mean "atheists only"
There are plenty of religious people in ST. The point is humanity, and especially Starfleet, are secular and logical almost to a fault. It'd be a cold day in hell when a captain goes, "Oh jeeze, oh no, I don't know what I'm doing! Please Sky Daddy, help mee~"
There's even a freaking episode in TOS where Kirk directly denounces Gods as a whole, even while he's literally staring at someone with god-like powers. It's even a repeating theme in other ways through the series.
It is wholly anachronistic to have a captain defer to religious faith. They explicitly say humanity has moved past the need in all of the first five series.
Maybe Archer has some kind of religious faith-based statement I'm forgetting, but he's set in early Trek times, and it does not remove the fact that EVERY OTHER series before ST was sold explicitly states humans do not believe in gods for worship. Picard even basically tells Q to fuck off and Q literally has powers beyond what "God" is ever described as having.
You mean the bit in who mourns for adonais where he says "we have no need for gods we find the one sufficient"? Really? Might wanna rethink that as an example. Especially since canonically there's a freakin' chapel on the enterprise AND religious officers kneeling to pray. Even in DS9 Kasidy says her mother would want her to be married by a minister.
And Pike does not defer to religious faith, he faces a crisis outside of his control and outside of his role as an officer and throws a quick prayer. Oh no. The horror.
Religion has lost its stranglehold of control, but personal faith most certainly endures through all trek. You might wanna check some of your biases 'cos its making you logic fault.
You're really reaching at straws when you equivocate a captain admitting humans have believed in one god vs a captain making a religious appeal to God.
Starfleet doesn't condemn religion, but again, that DOES NOT mean they endorse it. You religious buffoons always utterly fail to understand what kind of humanity is portrayed.
Maybe, but I feel like the lore has become too large for the property and a reboot would be beneficial for the series.
How many reboots do you need?
Just one made by someone who understands the franchise.
And as far as I recall, there is only one reboot in Star Trek history, it just shouldn't have been made by JJ Abrams.
For a moment I was looking at the ear and wondering what kind of mutated creature that was. You cannot convince me that on first glance, if you miss the actual eyes, that the ears don't look somewhat like an eye.
CSI (and other shows that distort the public’s understanding of the criminal justice system—see the CSI effect).
Copaganda in general can just go away.
Good news: CSI: Vegas got cancelled last year.
Do you really want the public to be aware of how shitty the reality is?
I mean here in Germany e.g the reality is that our justice system is overloaded and many criminals can get away because the courts have more cases than they can handle.
I prefer that the wide public doesn’t know that we could already live in anarchy to some degree…
That's fine for drama and written TV. But nah, reality TV ruined the world.
The Real World and Cribs on MTV led to Big Brother and Survivor - which as well as popularizing the format and leading to endless trash, led to The Apprentice, which revived Donald Trump's image and brand and convinced millions of really dumb people that he'd make a good president.
In the good parallel timelines, the execs that suggested reality TV were laughed at and it never came up again. MTV still plays great music videos all day, the History channel actually talks about history, and barely anyone outside of the US knows the name 'Kardashian' or 'Donald Trump'.
The problem is that reality TV is inevitable. People, generally speaking, like to know what other people are doing. Or like to see other people react to things.
The first "reality TV" program was Candid Camera, which technically got its start as "Candid Microphone", all in the late 1940s. Of course things evolved from there into our current "reality TV" situation.
The real problem is that the line between "entertainment" and "reality" has gotten blurrier and blurrier. When we watch Godzilla we know that's just entertainment, we know a giant lizard creature isn't walking down the street.
It's also funny that you mention MTV because realistically MTV should have died out years ago. In the same way that video killed the radio star, the Internet killed the video star. Why would I turn on the TV and hope the video I wanted to watch was on, when I could just go on the Internet and see it now. Of course MTV the television station wants to keep making money, so they pivoted hard into reality TV.
Wait, what?
You need to learn from the IWC. No one hates wresting more than wrestling fans
Abrahamic religions 👍 we get it you've daddy issues don't take it so serious
How about all religions?
The pasta people too? They're pleasant
The Noodley One is always there for you!
rAman.
read this in castlevania dracula voice
Imagine.
any other religions for self entitled people?
At least we stuck to one solid trilogy and then stopped. Well, aside from the fanfic.
You mean the Bible is really a trilogy and the book of Mormon is return of the jedi? I'm interested.
Jurassic Park, the last like 5 have been the same rehashed ideas along with “big dinosaur how we kill it?”
I can't agree more with this. Wtf are they thinking.
They are thinking that they have made billions of dollars, so why stop now?
Jurassic Park is one of my most favourite movies ever. Although they come not even close to the first one, I still rewatch 2 and 3 from time to time. But Jurassic World is a disaster for me. The second one was already so bad that it caused losing my whole interest for the World franchise.
I still cannot believe how much they butchered this franchise and the initial vision for the book and the movie.
Jurassic World 1 is my guilty pleasure.
I would like to know the demographics of the people who still watch the Simpsons. They are out there. There are many of them.
I genuinely think that some people hit a certain age and then simply lose the will to explore new things. The amount of absolute garbage reboots and sequels that my parents watch just because they liked the original thing is far too many. But it's certainly not just them. I know people younger than me that will just always listen to new albums of artists they used to enjoy even if it's hot garbage and talk about it like it's pretty good. I'm certainly not an authority on what people can enjoy, but I can absolutely be disappointed in people that reach this point where familiar=good.
Nostalgia is a powerful 'drug'.
Haven’t watched it many years, went and found one of the tree house of horrors the other day because someone recommended it. It was alright
And there was one with a bear
I always have to pop up in these threads because I'm out there, and I'm not alone. I've been watching The Simpsons, more or less, non-stop since it first started airing.
When I was younger it played twice a day during the week with a new episode every Sunday. So when it comes to the earlier seasons, the ten or so seasons often viewed as the golden era, I've seen those dozens of times.
In the 2000s watching TV at a regularly scheduled time wasn't as much of a priority and the availability of videos on the Internet began to increase, so I usually watched The Simpsons that way. When the film came out in 2007 I was there opening day.
As streaming services became popular in the 2010s I started to watch The Simpsons there instead. Although these streaming services rarely had a backlog, just the current season, but I had them all collected over the years.
In the late 2010s my roommates and I decided to watch every episode of The Simpsons but not in release order. We would just pick a random season and episode and watch a few episodes a week over the course of two years.
Now in the 2020s we sometimes get together to watch, sometimes watch solo. I'm personally much more strict about watching every week, they usually watch in short bursts and I don't mind rewatching recent episodes.
But... Is it good? Yeah mostly. Not every episode is great.
The episode that aired this past Sunday isn't anything special, a few funny moments but Albert Brooks who voiced Hank Scorpio and Russ Cargill (from the movie) voiced a new character and that was fun.
The Treehouse of Horror from two Sunday's ago was much better, so if you want a recent episode then watch that.
No it isn't ever going to be as great as the golden age of The Simpsons, but it's still fun to watch and I still laugh, so that's a win to me.
I loved the simpsons but have not seen an episode in maybe a decade or more.
My kids are mainlining it most days (when they're allowed TV). They're pre-teens and they love it. I don't mind so much, basically because nostalgia - and at least it's not Teen Titans Go, which was so fast it gave me a headache
MCU has really run its course. They’ve jumped the shark
How about a bit different perspective?
What long running franchise should be taking out of the hands of idiots and given to people who are actually talented and creative?
The one exception is the MCU, that is definitely one that needs a break. I feel I've been watching the same movie over and over since the second Avengers.
The worlds of Star Trek and Star Wars are so vast that there are tons of stories that could be told. It just needs to be in the hands of someone that is actually good at their job and not a profit crazy committee.
Disney had an entire cannonical set of excellent stories to work with, but said 'fuck it we'll just do whatever crappy nostalgia bait JJ Abrams wants'... and we got a complete shit show.
Andor actaully reminded me of a lot of the 'legacy' cannon stuff, which is why it was so popular/great. Dark Empire, Thrawn, Jedi Academy... just had so much better story going on.
Which is a strange decision because Disney is at it's best when picking good existing stories and doing a quality adaptation.
Star Trek seems pretty good in this regard. Discovery went ary but it was fun while it was good. Strange New Worlds is fantastic, Lower Decks takes a very different view of the universe for fun, and Picard was a decent enough story with some good stakes.
The movies suck ass though, particularly Abrams.
Star Wars on the other hand could just go away and I would not care. I saw New Hope in 77 and loved it. Looking back; not a great movie. And it was downhill from there.
Which is it shouldn't have been. There have been better books than anything produced by Lucas or Disney.
I enjoyed andor. The first 1.5 seasons were pretty solid. Then they started "discovering" characters who were in Rouge One and doingbtheir usual BS where we are all supposed to faint because someone we know shows up...
The Simpsons. Used to be sensational but isn't anymore.
It's gone from losing my interest 20 years ago to flat out unwatchable. I saw an episode from the most recent season and it was neither funny nor interesting to watch. It's sad that one of the funniest shows ever has been past its prime for so long it's now an animated corpse of what it once was.
Omg I read “sensational” as a bad thing is it one of those words now
Only on a sensationalist kind of way.
funny thing is Im pretty sure the last one I watched was worth watching but I no longer watch over the air real time and it was not streaming in an easy enough to do fashion so just sorta fell out of watching it.
Trump / MAGA
Every. Single. Fucking. EA Sports franchise
They ought to be arrested for it, but players are somehow still buying it.
I remember when skate 3 was released. It was the biggest sports game of the year. It outsold even FIFA. BUUUUUUUT, fifa fans are so deranged that they spend like 2 Billions in micro transactions that EA obviously spend all their efforts into making more FIFA and no more skate. Except now Skate. Obviously, and we all know how shit this turned out.
Futurama. I think it's the best 30 minute show of all time but it's time for it to go. It's OK. Good things are allowed to end.
As an extremely die-hard Futurama fan I'm starting to feel the same way, especially since disney owns it now. The only thing they'll do with it going forward is see just how much they can wring from it, in the same fashion they're killing star wars, marvel, and every other IP they bought to pump out never-ending crap. I'd be fine if this was the end, even with a tear in my eye.
TIL Futurama was renewed. I'm so out of the loop these days it blows my mind.
Fucking Grey's Anatomy. Idk if it really counts as a franchise though but it's on season 22 and hasn't been good in years. It needs to end. I keep waiting for an asteroid to hit the hospital because that's pretty much the only disaster that hasn't hit that hospital yet.
Grey's Anatomy has had a couple of spinoffs (Private Practice, Station 19) so I'd say it counts as a franchise.
More of a soap, isn't it?
Rupert Murdoch.
those are franchises older than tv, not only streaming, so i doubt it'll stop, The Walking Dead on the other hand... also they're rebooting Breaking Bad, soooo there's that
Source on breaking bad?
I'm not opposed to the idea as a BB fan, I just suspect the producers will do something stupid like cast that twerp from Dune as Jessie Pinkman. Also, no fucking way anyone can portray Walter White better than Bryan Cranston
sorry, it's Prison Break getting a reboot, I was mistaken
I love Star Trek dearly, I just don't think we're ever going to get a show that hits like TNG/VOY/DS9 (and even ENT/TOS) again - largely due to capitalism and the dramatic shortening of TV seasons. SNW is watchable and has some good bits in it, but it is forced to operate at a mile-a-minute pace, and either forced or poorly chosen by the showrunners to be Action Action Action about 90% of the time. I just need some breathing room!
That being said, Lower Decks and Prodigy both hit on a lot of what I love about Trek. Their cancellations (and the new ownership of Paramount, and Section 31, and SNW only getting 6 episodes for their last season) do not bring me any hope for the future.
SNW does have some great moments. I loved the "documentary" episode most specifically, because it was a neat spin on things that let them experiment a lot with the cinematography and documentary-style shots.
As the documentary was the real 'focus' of the episode, the plot of transporting the enslaved alien creature/ship was allowed to be a self-contained story like old-school trek used to be, and I really appreciated the reflection on the morality of what they do as a crew, and as Starfleet.
There was a lot of TNG's DNA in there, and I liked that.
Yeah, there is a lot to like in it, I probably wasn't as kind in my original message as I should've been. I do love that they went more episodic with it, that's for sure! And they have had a few episodes that were pretty lighthearted and funny, which is greatly appreciated. It straddles the line of A/B tier for me.
I'm glad that Strange New Worlds exists, but it's totally fair to criticise.
I feel a lot kinder towards the writers and showrunners when I consider that we simply don't live in the 90s anymore, and that the realities of media consumption have changed in a way that forces different priorities.
Back in the era of TNG, Friends, and the X-Files, it was totally reasonable for a show to air 26 episodes over 26 weeks. Seasons would run so long that writers were putting out bottle episodes just to stretch the budget. Yet it was profitable because people would keep watching - after all, there were only a few channels competing for the same limited airtime.
Nowadays we're utterly drowning in media. The amount of content is almost infinite, and viewers are seemingly fickle, and quickly bored.
Being successful now isn't about having a great long-running show, it's about making a massive impact as fast as possible, and hanging on to that top-banner spot on Netflix or whatever platform for just a scant few weeks before people get distracted by the next thing. Only those first weeks matter.
And so, seasons get compressed and the budget gets concentrated, until shows are six episodes all coming at you full force like an airhorn blast of non-stop action and effects. They don't want longevity, they want hype.
We can blame the industry, or we can blame society, or we can blame people's viewing habits. Probably it's a bit of all three. But it certainly explains a few things.
It's almost a similar story to how the "Triple-A" gaming industry ruined games by optimising for the wrong metric, all while costing a fortune to do it.
Fortunately for gaming we have a thriving indie dev scene now, which is where the true joy, art and creativity can be found.
Perhaps TV is simply waiting for its own indie revolution.
Given how much bad pressure and online criticism TNG, Voy and especially DS9 got, I'm surprised they even tried Ent. SNW was a great show, but don't forget just how much fans and execs hated every single new series that came out. Your treasured classics were dragged through the muck regularly.
That's fair, yeah! As much as I try to not let criticism impact my enjoyment of things, I'm sure it unconsciously has done so. I still don't expect to be looking back and saying "Discovery was actually fantastic" in 20 years, but I'll keep an open mind to it.
All of them. How about some new shit for once?
Imagine that. Two or three seasons for a tv show always srem like the sweet spot. Same with movies. Terminator, great. Terminator 2, even better. Terminator 3 to wherever we are now, what the fuck even is this?
I think a lot of people watch long lasting tv shows out of habit, not because they are good or holding up. Bob's burger is the only exception i can think off, and maybe some other niche shows, if they are good they are good and if they have more to say, go ahead.
One of my favourite shows used to be community. I have the fondest memories watching it for the first time. Now every time i rewatch it i got reminded that only the first two seasons are really good, and then it just falls apart.
What? No. Absolutely not. Fuck, imagine if TNG had only run 2 seasons. Any more terrible ideas?
It's not a golden rule. A show can be bigger if the creator has a large enough vision for it, from the start. The problem is that it's not how the business works - if you try to make a long show you'll end up with a cancelled show instead.
No way, so many examples of great shows over 3 seasons long. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, The Sopranos, The Wire, The Simpsons was amazing for a long time, 30 Rock, Parks and Rec, Battlestar Galactica, The Shield... I could go on.
I still get frustrated when we get a big games conference to show off a bunch of trailers, and a streamer watching one will start rattling off “Oh. Soldier of Fortune remake? Bloodborne 2? God of War?” up to the title card. Then, when it’s some fresh new IP, not a sequel, everyone has a reaction of “Oh. Dunno what that is.”
Gamers are very much complicit in the terrible state of game remakes/sequels.
Fast and furious.
Simpsons
You know what's crazy? The show has existed for my entire life (I'm 36), but I've only seen like 5 episodes ever. And the movie.
When I was around 6 or 7ish, i was just getting into stuff like that and had seen the show a couple times. Then my grandma saw some thing on the news or at church or something and ranted about the show so much, about how vulgar and terrible it was. So my mom decided I shouldn't be allowed to watch it. I was an obedient child, so I didn't watch it. Then my older friend introduced me to South Park a year or two later, and mom hadn't said anything about that show... I never really got interested in The Simpson again after that.
McDonalds.
Mcdonalds food taste so bad nowadays.
Saw
Unfortunately, the movie that tried to end it, Saw 3D, sucked.
I did enjoy Saw X but the end was a little wacky (consequence of being a prequel?) and I don't know how they're gonna bounce back from that. And now the next movie is stuck in production limbo.
Ultimately killing John Kramer so early in the franchise was (IMO) a big mistake.
Having a movie with him as the lead was so refreshing, but goddamn you mfs should have never killed him in the first place! Let alone have waited so long to try to rectify your mistake!!
Five Nights at Freddy's has only been running for 11 years and is a corpse of its former self that seems to have been ironically put into a machine to make more money.
The weird Sci-Fi turn they took on Sister Location was easily the worst thing they did to this franchise and has derailed all future entries, change my mind.
I actually disagree. I think the sci-fi elements, and especially Remnant, are awesome (and had been pseudo-foreshadowed since the first game). I think the problem is that the series didn't end after FFPS and UCN, with maybe Help Wanted being allowed if it actually had a conclusive ending. Afton went from a serial killer to a serial killer with mysterious sci-fi motivations to a ridiculous slasher villain returning from literally everything.
Call of Duty and Pokémon.
I saw a commercial for the newest Pokemon game and up until it said it was exclusively for Switch 2, I hella thought it was some F2P mobile garbage. When your ads don't even make the newest game look good, it's definitely time to stop.
One Piece. Never watched it because having to watch a thousand episodes just to catch up is simply not possible for me.
I tried it after seeing the pirate flag thing being used in Nepal Gen Z Protests and I thought it must be a cool story if its so popular, so I tried watching it... and I got bored so quickly. I mean, it just feels very weird to me, doesn't "click" for me, oh well, I guess my brain is just different.
Or ypu know you aren’t the actual target audience for One Piece which is children.
Tbf, Avatar: The Last Airbender was also made for kids, but I quite enjoyed it as a young adult (even though it does have "cringy" moments). I guess One Piece just doesn't have a "deep" overarching story like a world war, propaganda (talking about the fire nation), and genocide.
One Piece actually does have those things.
But I'm still not gonna sit through 1000 episodes for it.
TLA is aimed at an older kid than One Piece seems to be.
I assure you, One Piece is very much not child friendly later on. The first like 700 episodes build up to a specific story arc (Wano). The current (anime) arc has a major back story of a characters life which includes him begging to be allowed to die as a child.
That and the anime pacing is terrible.
If you're actually interested you can just try the Netflix show. It's a watered down version but it's decent enough to give an idea of what makes it have so many fans. The Anime is just weekly television that's been running for decades - it was never meant to be binge watched.
I started One Piece about 3 years ago and have read all the manga and just recently caught up on the anime.
Some of the things I really enjoy about it:
The story progression ramps up nicely. Nobody is that OP from the get-go, and the stakes and power levels have increased steadily as the story goes on. There is definitely plot armor, but it's not like every bad guy is on the same level as the previous one.
There is great representation. There are people of different races. There are gay-coded, trans, and gender fluid characters, there are young and old people. And none of them are really played for laughs for those traits. All character types have heros, villians, comic relief, and serious characters. And none of the characters with real screen/page time are flat and one dimensional. This along with the power scaling, really makes the adventure feel important and like a fleshed out and lived in world that you are part of. I can only imagine this is even moreso true for people that have been fans since the late 90s.
At almost 1200 chapters, I feel like I understand this fictional world and how it works. There are macguffins and such, but nothing that feels out of place. Characters still behave how you would expect them to behave and the creator doesn't just pull stuff out of nowhere. There is still great continuity with the earliest things that happened in the story. There are many familiar characters, but more still come and go, but not before becoming necessary parts of the full tale. It's not like Star Wars where it feels there's about 2 dozen characters with names in the whole universe.
And the last thing I'll say is in spite of all this, it still does stuff just for laughs regularly. It knows it's a story primarily for young boys, and despite being one of the best loved anime/manga ever, it doesn't take itself all that seriously. It's a damn fun time to read and watch almost every bit of it with few exceptions. The stuff coming out now is as good or better as it's ever been.
Like anything else, it won't be for ever single person out there, so if you don't like it, you don't like it. I saw a few random episodes on Toonami in the 90s and was WTF is this random stuff then. It is a weird thing to dive into the middle of, and a lot of it is outright silly. But I had people at work keep telling me I'd like it, I finally gave in, and I was hooked from the first chapter.
Bond.
Half of the plot points from all the movies have been enacted, attempted or discussed in the first year of Trump's presidency by his cabinet, handlers, backers or string-pullers or funders. Fictional supervillains as entertainment are a distraction, dangerously so when the real thing is happening as we speak.
Tomb raider.
Or, wait, capitalism. Damn that's not a franchise, too bad.
One Piece. I was interested in it (the manga), but it's way too long.
Honestly, I stopped reading after
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler they passed the halfway point of the Grand Line. :::
The power creep just got way too out of control for my liking, and while I know that the power creep always existed, I feel like the adventures before showed how you can tell a good story without just brute force. Plus, even with their superhuman abilities, their struggles still felt relatable. And with what happened before and right after the aforementioned turning point, it felt like that would be left in the dust.
That's just a barrier of entry though. I've never seen anyone read the whole thing and then come out thinking it was just a waste of time. You either enjoy it or give up.
One Piece is kinda different from other long shows because it's not being stretched artificially, but in a more natural way. Like, comparing it to Dragon Ball, it's not a case of "and now we need to find the 7 dragon balls again" but a case of "turns out that finding 7 specific items that may be hidden anywhere in the world is actually fucking hard". In that analogy, the story is at the "we just found out who has the seventh" stage. So now all that's missing is getting that last one, making the wish and seeing the outcome of it.
The first segment of the series was quite linear, but after some point each country they visit has its own story, almost like an Isekai. Some of those stories are incredible, some are extremely boring and others are just fine. Then once Naruto and Bleach ended, OP kinda shifted into trying to absorb the fans of those two series and it became a lot less interesting to people who enjoyed only OP out of the big trio.
You could not have found a better phrase to make me hate One Piece more. I was ambivalent before, but I loathe isekai in all its forms.
Well, it isn't one. There's a great overarching story and recurring characters and all sorts of stuff that makes it not quite qualify as an Isekai, but yeah in general every new country has their own stuff going on in addition to the main story and it takes the main focus. Usually the most hyped chapters are the ones in-between arcs because it's when there are updates on what other characters have been doing while the main cast was absorbed into a separate story.
And then even inside those separate stories there's some times an additional level of separate story through some long flashback that last up to dozens of chapters.
It's like the author wants to move on to create new stuff but can't so he just adapts OP to fit whatever new story he wants to make. But I guess I'm just giving you even more reasons to stay away from it and I haven't even mentioned any of its flaws.
Half-truth take. It's not stretched artificially in the fashion you describe. It is still rife with artifical stretching. Rife with filler. An absolutely obnoxious amount of screaming. Several minutes in each episode wasted explaining what happened last time. And so on. It is garbage that needs to end, but for those who absolutely want to dive into it, I'd at least recommend canning the anime shit and just read the superior manga.
Oh I was only talking about the Manga.
SpongeBob, Simpsons, Family, American Dad
I genuinely thought all of these stopped what the fuck
I remember watching Detective Conan in the Mandarin dub as a kid. Don't remember much of it now. I looked it up recently, and apparantly it has been running since the 1990s? Still ongoing... yea I don't trust anything that runs for that long, probably quality of the story went downhill if I had to guess. I have no idea how it's even possible to run a concept for 2 decades+ without it eventually getting repetative and boring. I was curious about what the ending would be, but it never ends.
Don't wanna watch something that goes on forever.
It will actually be a sad day when Fast and Furious eventually ends. No more Family jokes. No more wacky titles.
I've been watching the Fast and Furious movies since the first one. And I actually look forward to how ridiculous each one gets and how it's going to top the previous one. I know it's been time for it to end for awhile, but I will actually be kinda bummed when it does.
Can’t wait for “Fast & The Furious versus Frankenstein”
Fast infinity: fastest family 4: shaw's laundry, Hobbe's social contract - Istanbul Traffic Jam
Isekai title
In addition to the three you outlined,
As a moderator of [email protected], I disagree with the first two. As a fan of both, I FULLY disagree.
You never know when a gem like Prey, but you gotta deal with hot garbage in the meantime. Wanted to love Romulus, watched it, no idea what it was about, don't remember a single thing, don't even have a scene in my head.
Yeah, Prey was fantastic, and by itself justifies all the other sequels.
I'm up for a few more mixes of those. Peter Pan vs Aliens and Robin Hood and the Terminator haven't been fully explored yet.
lol, I mean they did make Winnie the Pooh into a horror movie.
What about Alien vs Predator Vs Terminator?
Why stop there? Why not Alien vs Predator Vs Terminator Vs Peter Pan Vs Robin Hood?
I don't know what DCeU is.
DC Extended Universe. So the DC films from Man Of Steel to Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom.
The irony in it being mentioned as something that needs to end is that it did end 2 years ago.
The most recent Superman film was a reboot of the franchise.
I’m pretty sure that was a comic, and would have been a film if not for a rights issue
Pokemon
You take the good name of Star Trek out of your mouth.
Star Trek needs to be taken away from Paramount while it still has a good name.
Literally all long running franchises. There is a clear downward trajectory over the lifetime of franchises. It doesn’t have to start immediately, but goddamn if it’s not true for everything. Go out on top. Don’t go out floundering about the lower-middle (at best).
Doctor Who.
It doesn’t need to end. It just needs new blood. For the last 20 years it’s been exclusively run by a group of people who all used to hang out in the same pub in the 90s.
Let’s have a year or two of someone young and talented shadowing RTD to learn all the ins and outs of producing such a difficult show, and then let them loose.
It needs new blood but keep RTD far away from it. He is garbage at both story and character. I think he is responsible for more that 2/3 of all the fart jokes in Doctor Who.
I think it needs to go back to serials. Give stories enough time to setup problems and them actually solve them. The Doctor just magics hits way out of problems these days.
RTD will need to be involved for at least a little bit.
The problem, as stands, and the reason why RTD is back at all, is it’s an incredibly difficult show to make. Same budget as something like Midsommar Murders, but you’ve got to go somewhere completely different every story, with new sets, locations, and cast. And you’ve got plenty of bespoke objects & scenery to create, and VFX.
So the person running the show has to be a really good showrunner. And there’s not that many people in the UK with that much experience. And fewer who’d want to take on a huge franchise rather than do their own thing.
That’s why you’d almost certainly need someone to shadow RTD for a year or two before they could take over. Even if they’ve been a showrunner before, they’d need experience running Doctor Who.
I'd rather see them bring back Alpha Centauri level costumes and effects than have RTD anywhere near the show. Get someone who knows how to write a good show.
Lower budgets and no fancy effects can force the writers to have to write an engaging story. I don't want any new Who creatives still involved. I think other than a handful episodes of Eccleston and Capaldi I don't ever want to rewatch any new Who.
Honestly you have to go all the way back to pre JNT before you get stories I enjoy watching.
Of course the issue here is what people do or do not consider “good” varies from person to person.
The most likely candidates are Pete McTigh and Kate Herron. McTigh is the most probable, given that he’s showrunner of the upcoming Sea Devils miniseries and has had his name linked longer than anybody else.
Both of those names would be new blood (even though they have both worked on the show). Unless Moffat or Chibnall are going to come back again (and they’re not), then the only Fitzroy Tavern regular left who’s qualified is Mark Gatiss, and he said long ago that while he’d have been interested in the 00s he’s very much not interested any more.
That’s the closest we’re going to come to a new take, realistically. One thing’s for certain - nobody is going to take it back to any pre-JNT era.
All of them.
My most radical opinion is that every story ever created should be made to end. And continuing any story past a well-made ending is a crime against storytelling.
We should have a law where sequelising a story that already reached a satisfying end incurs fines that quickly escalate into insane amounts of money. Redirect that dosh into funding actual original art.
IDK if it's still popular anymore or just tax write off slop, but definitely Scooby Doo.
I would have absolutely been in the minority back when it came out, but as someone who grew up watching it through reruns on Boomerang, I personally like some of HB's other attempts that didn't stick better.
As the lyrics to Running Under Water by Pain goes:
Currently the SC franchise is pretty much a walking corpse with the extremely formulaic plot of "the gang loves xyz and are going to see them/experience event" with little to zero prior showing that they care. Perfect example is literally the KISS crossover movie that came out maybe less than a decade ago. A basically dead band that's been out of the spotlight for a long time and a franchise that went creatively bankrupt decades ago are a perfect match for each other... Except they had to suddenly transform the gang into KISS fans for anything to make any sense.
Edit:
I think it's actually called Running Under Water and not Jabberjaw...
Spiderman.
James Bond
I think flipping the question creates more hot takes. Except for the series with self-contained increments, most "popular" long-running franchises just need to stop. Not necessarily close the franchise completely, but just let one thread end and create a new one.
Videogame Time
Call of Duty
Battlefield
Modern Warfare
Uncharted
Assasin's Creed
Dark Souls
Tombraider
Final Fantasy
Tales Of
Zelda
Street Fighter
Mortal Kombat
God of War
Deus Ex (pretty much dead already thanks to Square Enix doing a shit job)
Very hot take indeed lol but Dark Souls has already ended.
Ah, my bad. Guess they'll just churn out Elden slop for awhile.
If nothing else, I like how directly The Matrix Resurrection lampshaded this. Thomas Anderson’s game company is forced into making a sequel to their Matrix trilogy by Warner Bros itself, and provides infinitely conflicting corporate views on being completely original and yet repeating the source material.
They couldn’t escape the sequel trap, but they could at least draw attention to it.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say South Park.
They're just terrible satire. Even when they have a clear target for their satire instead of making fun of everyone in the episode, they get the freaking message wrong a lot of the time.
Like the wall-mart episode. What's the big baddy? Is it the economies of scale, and that allowing massive companies that get every benefit from that scaling compete directly with mom and pop shops? No, it's the customers who like convenience and low prices!
They're just ... shit at their job most of the time. The first couple seasons are waaaay better because they're just stupid juvenile stories having fun for the most part. The more political they attempt to get, the worse their satire gets, and I'm someone who generally agrees with what they're attempting to make fun of. (with many glaring exceptions, like directly calling the act of cleaning up the environment and using green energy "gay", making fun of trans people, etc)
They're seriously just... bad satire that ultimately only succeeds in normalizing being rude to each other.
star wars, for sure. at this point they're just digging through the garbage for any scrap of lore they can turn into another streaming series. it's less 'new content' and more 'extended universe, but legally distinct.'