I saw an article the other day talking about how poorly most shows from the past 5-10 years are performing compared to older shows. The top streamed shows are largely from the late 90s to early 2010s.
It truly feels like we’re in a quality rut right now.
I’m currently rewatching season 3 of futurama, season 6 of Stargate sg1, season 4 of star trek tng, and I’m thinking of adding Quantum Leap and Battlestar Galactica into the mix.
I’m on a nostaglia binge lately, currently on Season ten of Stargate SG1, season 2 of the original Quantum Leap, Season 3 of Stargate Atlantis, Season 5 of Jeremy Bretts Sherlock Holmes.
That’s like when someone was talking to me about how much they loved MacGyver, only to find out that someone made a reboot. And apparently it’s not great, but I haven’t seen it so I have no idea. I also have no desire to see it because you don’t improve upon perfection.
Also it’s great watching O’Neill (two Ls) put a teenage Teal’c in his place with a little humility in one episode. Some small paypack for future boxing workouts on base I guess. It’s always weird hearing Christopher judge speak normally instead of his Teal’c speech pattern.
Stargate is hands-down my favorite show of all time… It ties with firefly, but firefly usually takes top spot because it’s short and sweet.
Seasons 1-3 are a little rough as with many shows that started out with serialization and all that, but seasons 3.5-6 are great, and seasons 6-10 are some of the best television I’ve ever seen.
They either learned from star trek, or just figured it out themselves that diplomatic and non action episodes can be just as riveting as action-packed explosion fests. Measure of a Man is first to come to mind for star trek. I’ll never skip that episode no matter how bored my wife gets.
The meme potential is endless. And there are so many inside jokes and references use in daily life that nobody else gets.
REALLY!? I mean, I know it’s great but also, every time I re-watch it (I think I’ve done that maybe 2-3 times already) I end up regretting it - and the last time iirc I just abandoned my plan halfway through season 1. I forget now exactly why but I recall that it gets extremely “preachy” near the end - like okay okay in that universe there is no god (except Daniel, obvi:-P), I get it, sheesh, now please move on from that with an actual story to tell. It feels like they were struggling to find a point to continue to base the story on any longer? Atlantis I vaguely recall being better with the whole nanites storyline. And yes, ST-TNG’s Measure of a Man is peak sci-fi - this is the stuff we crave, not “me punch bad-guy b/c… well… reasons I guess”.
These are all very vague recollections so I am not “advocating” for these positions. Actually, the reason I am saying this is b/c I’m starting to actively look for an excuse to re-watch Stargate again - can you give me a reason to btw? I mean for a person that has already watched it so who knows about the memes and such, but to re-watch it yet again (again)?
I’ll try to put it to some more words: maybe SG-1 hits some great high points, but as you mentioned it also has some extremely sludge-fest moments as well? And even as I say this, I realize that I just can’t stomach re-watching it all - but is there a resource that puts together only like the good episodes?
Firefly is no comparison imho - every single episode is hand-crafted gold from the master. Most everything by Joss Whedon is - his horror movie, Doll House, everything. Which reminds me I think haven’t caught up with his moderately newer stuff so that’s maybe what I should do.
And to give some context, since Babylon Five has entered the chat, that show is somehow both great and also boring at the same time. It’s great for someone who has never watched it, and maybe once more to re-watch after a few decades have gone by, but as I currently am struggling through the last season, I do see how very different it is from other TV shows, both then at the time and now. Which makes it both great - for someone who has never watched it or needs a reminder - but also not great, for someone just looking to re-watch riveting TV shows, at the same time.
I hope my reminiscings here are more interesting than annoying:-).
Honestly I don’t watch seasons 1-3 often. I usually start at the end of season 3 or even up to halfway through season 4.
There are a few continuing stories from earlier seasons, especially the introduction of a few friendly species, but I feel like the recaps will give you enough to go on, and if you’re really curious you can read a plot synopsis.
I’m not aware of any sort of unofficial list of must-watch episodes and probably-skips, but a good place to start is the season 3 finale, and go from there.
Replicators (the earlier blockier version of those nanites) infect an Asgard ship (the small Grey aliens) and they come to earth for help. “you came to us because you weren’t dumb enough?” is a paraphrased line.
If you don’t care about spoilers I could go into a little more detail since it’s not quite a multi-part episode, but it does go directly from one to the next in short order.
The first three episodes of s4 are good, IMO. Episode 4 not so much but it does get referenced a lot in later episodes. When my wife and I watched, I gave her a summary of that episode, but she has a shorter attention span. It’s a dialogue-heavy episode that kick starts a vendetta for one character. Good if you like drama.
Thank you for the tips, and the validation that it is not just me but the first few seasons really are a sludge, I’ll stop trying to guilt myself there I suppose:-).
I do remember an episode cliffhanger (or similar) perhaps at the end of a season about the spaceship that crashed and had the little bots on them. After that iirc it got good, but then after several seasons I lost interest again, but for different reasons it seemed (I just don’t recall why exactly, except the preachy thought). All that higher plane of existence I suppose is neat to think about except they treated it like plot magic and never really truly talked about it - probably it was that way on purpose in order to preserve mystery but then it was weird how Daniel came back and overall it came off as laziness even if that was not the actual reason.
More modern shows like The 100 have much better pacing and storylines, even if less of the magic and exploration. I also really enjoyed Farscape as well, which is quite an odd show but somehow works. Babylon Five is almost the opposite, being an odd show that isn’t really done as well, but has REALLY good settings as far as actual story. It’s definitely a grand space opera, just an odd delivery that feels a little as if the actors are doing improv rather than a professional TV program.
The ascension thing comes back and gets more explained, Daniel dies multiple times (3 maybe?) but the last time is part of a multi-episode arc that shows what his ascension experience is like (this time anyway) and it’s more or less understood that he can’t die again and expect to come back, and he might not even be able to ascend again period (though I don’t believe either are expressly stated, just my take)
Farscape is a great show, and some of the characters even have regular roles in late seasons of sg1.
I’m kinda pumped for season 9 of futurama though. Reboot fatigue is definitely a thing but I don’t mind it when futurama does it. It just won’t stay dead!
I think it’s the overstaturation and the nature of streaming. People used to watch scheduled shows and talk about them the next day. That’s not a thing anymore. Not to mention, entertainment is much more polarizing now that everyone has their own online echo-chamber.
I think it’s far more about nostalgia. Of course the same people who have watched the office 100 times over are going to watch it 100 times again. They aren’t looking to be entertained, they’re looking to veg out and not think (which I suppose to some is entertainment). NFL
Plus I can’t even think of a popular show in the past 10 years that had a meaningful conclusion. I don’t really watch a lot of TV so this could easily just be that I’m out of the loop, but it seems like a lot of endings are bad.
People used to listen to entire albums over and over again, each time getting new perspective on the music. And people re-read their favorite novels over and over again.
I think that’s what we’re doing with TV. We know what joke is coming, so we can watch other things in the background that we didn’t catch the first time.
At least that’s what I’ll tell myself on my fifth rewatch of SG1.
I can see the logic in that. Nothing wrong with rewatching something with new perspective you had compared to the first go around. I just know people who have watched the Office an obscene amount of times, and personally I just can’t do it. I thought the Office was really funny, but not watch it every day for 10 years funny. That’s just me, though - obviously different strokes for different folks.
Also, damn I haven’t seen SG1 since I was a wee lad. So many good SciFi shows back then, I think I might have to rewatch it myself.
Yeah, I’m wrapping up my annual-ish rewatch of South Park and definitely enjoying all the little background things I never picked up on previously, and also the random plot points that have new meaning based on events that occurred after they originally aired.
Plus I can’t even think of a popular show in the past 10 years that had a meaningful conclusion. I don’t really watch a lot of TV so this could easily just be that I’m out of the loop, but it seems like a lot of endings are bad.
Justified ended in 2015, Better Call Saul wrapped up in 2022. I think those two qualify as solid conclusions. It speaks to your point that I could only readily come up with two examples.
I mean, that’s the problem you get when so much is readily archived. If whatever’s currently coming out sucks, there’s so much history to pull the greatest hits from that you can just…stop watching new content. For years. Possibly ever.
I have noticed shows and movies lately have been very choppy, almost like they’re trying to chain together a bunch of tiktoks and calling it a movie. The dialogue has also gotten pretty terrible, like AI is writing it. It doesn’t sound human.
It might just be because the public is now spread over so many services…
Are those morons trying to compare the numbers from years ago when you had like one or two nation wide channels with the modern landscape? And the one episode was announced like a week ahead and everybody would be tuning in to watch it at the same time. Now you stream an entire show at will.
It’s moronic to want to use the same metric as a measure of success when clearly the entire landscape has changed.
With streaming you can watch what you want and not the “ehh, there’s nothing else on” shows. Studios are still making those low effort, watch because you have to if you want to watch anything at all shows, and maybe it’s a feeling of not being in a target audience but they are mostly that these days. Maybe even more so than before, because the studios now don’t have a reasonable expectation that people are just gonna watch it because it is on.
They have a pseudo incentive to produce a higher amount of cheap lazy garbage to flood the market with something, anything, that might grab attention and become a hit, whereupon they might invest more into it. They’ve really been lowering the bar, over and over, and as the bar lowers more and more people aren’t stupid enough to follow along and just watch whatever. Why watch modern garbage when there are yesteryear classics that were made with passion, at least enough to veneer over the ever-present profit incentive.
Probably will be for at least another year or two. The creatives need time to cook and they took a huge unplanned hiatus last summer protecting their jobs
Not aided by an aversion to commitment. Netflix especially loves to cancel shows after one or two seasons… despite a decade of The Office being their bread and butter. They should be promising creators a budget directly correlated with some desirable metric. Your thing is what five million subscribers are obviously sticking around for? Here’s half the budget of last year, when it was ten. You can decide whether that’s enough to do another season. Oh it was? And it worked? And now it’s twenty million? Great, here’s a shitload of money, keep going.
For some reason Netflix seems to be more interested in new subscribers than keeping their current subscribers. Probably because a lot of users just keep the account once they get it, even if they don’t use it all that much.
I saw an article the other day talking about how poorly most shows from the past 5-10 years are performing compared to older shows. The top streamed shows are largely from the late 90s to early 2010s.
It truly feels like we’re in a quality rut right now.
I’m currently rewatching season 3 of futurama, season 6 of Stargate sg1, season 4 of star trek tng, and I’m thinking of adding Quantum Leap and Battlestar Galactica into the mix.
Most of my shows are definitely 90s-2010ish
Obligatory Babylon 5 comment.
I’m on a nostaglia binge lately, currently on Season ten of Stargate SG1, season 2 of the original Quantum Leap, Season 3 of Stargate Atlantis, Season 5 of Jeremy Bretts Sherlock Holmes.
The modern ones just doesn’t hit.
There’s a non-original quantum leap? Pass.
That’s like when someone was talking to me about how much they loved MacGyver, only to find out that someone made a reboot. And apparently it’s not great, but I haven’t seen it so I have no idea. I also have no desire to see it because you don’t improve upon perfection.
Also it’s great watching O’Neill (two Ls) put a teenage Teal’c in his place with a little humility in one episode. Some small paypack for future boxing workouts on base I guess. It’s always weird hearing Christopher judge speak normally instead of his Teal’c speech pattern.
I haven’t seen Stargate or Quantum Leap, but I’ve seen the others so many times. Futurama, especially, is one show that I’m always in the mood for.
I would love to see what a memelord like yourself could do with the fertile ground that is SG1 memes.
We’d love to have you over at chevron7
It’s one of those shows that has been on my list for so long. My wife loves it too. I’ve been meaning to give it a go.
Quantum Leap is just beautiful, and Stargate is fun
Stargate is hands-down my favorite show of all time… It ties with firefly, but firefly usually takes top spot because it’s short and sweet.
Seasons 1-3 are a little rough as with many shows that started out with serialization and all that, but seasons 3.5-6 are great, and seasons 6-10 are some of the best television I’ve ever seen.
They either learned from star trek, or just figured it out themselves that diplomatic and non action episodes can be just as riveting as action-packed explosion fests. Measure of a Man is first to come to mind for star trek. I’ll never skip that episode no matter how bored my wife gets.
The meme potential is endless. And there are so many inside jokes and references use in daily life that nobody else gets.
Ok, I really need to make time for this show…
REALLY!? I mean, I know it’s great but also, every time I re-watch it (I think I’ve done that maybe 2-3 times already) I end up regretting it - and the last time iirc I just abandoned my plan halfway through season 1. I forget now exactly why but I recall that it gets extremely “preachy” near the end - like okay okay in that universe there is no god (except Daniel, obvi:-P), I get it, sheesh, now please move on from that with an actual story to tell. It feels like they were struggling to find a point to continue to base the story on any longer? Atlantis I vaguely recall being better with the whole nanites storyline. And yes, ST-TNG’s Measure of a Man is peak sci-fi - this is the stuff we crave, not “me punch bad-guy b/c… well… reasons I guess”.
These are all very vague recollections so I am not “advocating” for these positions. Actually, the reason I am saying this is b/c I’m starting to actively look for an excuse to re-watch Stargate again - can you give me a reason to btw? I mean for a person that has already watched it so who knows about the memes and such, but to re-watch it yet again (again)?
I’ll try to put it to some more words: maybe SG-1 hits some great high points, but as you mentioned it also has some extremely sludge-fest moments as well? And even as I say this, I realize that I just can’t stomach re-watching it all - but is there a resource that puts together only like the good episodes?
Firefly is no comparison imho - every single episode is hand-crafted gold from the master. Most everything by Joss Whedon is - his horror movie, Doll House, everything. Which reminds me I think haven’t caught up with his moderately newer stuff so that’s maybe what I should do.
And to give some context, since Babylon Five has entered the chat, that show is somehow both great and also boring at the same time. It’s great for someone who has never watched it, and maybe once more to re-watch after a few decades have gone by, but as I currently am struggling through the last season, I do see how very different it is from other TV shows, both then at the time and now. Which makes it both great - for someone who has never watched it or needs a reminder - but also not great, for someone just looking to re-watch riveting TV shows, at the same time.
I hope my reminiscings here are more interesting than annoying:-).
Honestly I don’t watch seasons 1-3 often. I usually start at the end of season 3 or even up to halfway through season 4.
There are a few continuing stories from earlier seasons, especially the introduction of a few friendly species, but I feel like the recaps will give you enough to go on, and if you’re really curious you can read a plot synopsis.
I’m not aware of any sort of unofficial list of must-watch episodes and probably-skips, but a good place to start is the season 3 finale, and go from there.
Replicators (the earlier blockier version of those nanites) infect an Asgard ship (the small Grey aliens) and they come to earth for help. “you came to us because you weren’t dumb enough?” is a paraphrased line.
If you don’t care about spoilers I could go into a little more detail since it’s not quite a multi-part episode, but it does go directly from one to the next in short order.
The first three episodes of s4 are good, IMO. Episode 4 not so much but it does get referenced a lot in later episodes. When my wife and I watched, I gave her a summary of that episode, but she has a shorter attention span. It’s a dialogue-heavy episode that kick starts a vendetta for one character. Good if you like drama.
Thank you for the tips, and the validation that it is not just me but the first few seasons really are a sludge, I’ll stop trying to guilt myself there I suppose:-).
I do remember an episode cliffhanger (or similar) perhaps at the end of a season about the spaceship that crashed and had the little bots on them. After that iirc it got good, but then after several seasons I lost interest again, but for different reasons it seemed (I just don’t recall why exactly, except the preachy thought). All that higher plane of existence I suppose is neat to think about except they treated it like plot magic and never really truly talked about it - probably it was that way on purpose in order to preserve mystery but then it was weird how Daniel came back and overall it came off as laziness even if that was not the actual reason.
More modern shows like The 100 have much better pacing and storylines, even if less of the magic and exploration. I also really enjoyed Farscape as well, which is quite an odd show but somehow works. Babylon Five is almost the opposite, being an odd show that isn’t really done as well, but has REALLY good settings as far as actual story. It’s definitely a grand space opera, just an odd delivery that feels a little as if the actors are doing improv rather than a professional TV program.
The ascension thing comes back and gets more explained, Daniel dies multiple times (3 maybe?) but the last time is part of a multi-episode arc that shows what his ascension experience is like (this time anyway) and it’s more or less understood that he can’t die again and expect to come back, and he might not even be able to ascend again period (though I don’t believe either are expressly stated, just my take)
Farscape is a great show, and some of the characters even have regular roles in late seasons of sg1.
Did you ever watch any of the ones past Atlantis - like Universe I guess - and if so were they any good at all?
I’m kinda pumped for season 9 of futurama though. Reboot fatigue is definitely a thing but I don’t mind it when futurama does it. It just won’t stay dead!
I don’t really watch a lot of TV, but that certainly sounds like what stays on my TV pretty much all the time to keep the house from being too quiet.
I think it’s the overstaturation and the nature of streaming. People used to watch scheduled shows and talk about them the next day. That’s not a thing anymore. Not to mention, entertainment is much more polarizing now that everyone has their own online echo-chamber.
I think it’s far more about nostalgia. Of course the same people who have watched the office 100 times over are going to watch it 100 times again. They aren’t looking to be entertained, they’re looking to veg out and not think (which I suppose to some is entertainment). NFL
Plus I can’t even think of a popular show in the past 10 years that had a meaningful conclusion. I don’t really watch a lot of TV so this could easily just be that I’m out of the loop, but it seems like a lot of endings are bad.
People used to listen to entire albums over and over again, each time getting new perspective on the music. And people re-read their favorite novels over and over again.
I think that’s what we’re doing with TV. We know what joke is coming, so we can watch other things in the background that we didn’t catch the first time.
At least that’s what I’ll tell myself on my fifth rewatch of SG1.
I can see the logic in that. Nothing wrong with rewatching something with new perspective you had compared to the first go around. I just know people who have watched the Office an obscene amount of times, and personally I just can’t do it. I thought the Office was really funny, but not watch it every day for 10 years funny. That’s just me, though - obviously different strokes for different folks.
Also, damn I haven’t seen SG1 since I was a wee lad. So many good SciFi shows back then, I think I might have to rewatch it myself.
Yeah, I’m wrapping up my annual-ish rewatch of South Park and definitely enjoying all the little background things I never picked up on previously, and also the random plot points that have new meaning based on events that occurred after they originally aired.
Justified ended in 2015, Better Call Saul wrapped up in 2022. I think those two qualify as solid conclusions. It speaks to your point that I could only readily come up with two examples.
I mean, that’s the problem you get when so much is readily archived. If whatever’s currently coming out sucks, there’s so much history to pull the greatest hits from that you can just…stop watching new content. For years. Possibly ever.
I have noticed shows and movies lately have been very choppy, almost like they’re trying to chain together a bunch of tiktoks and calling it a movie. The dialogue has also gotten pretty terrible, like AI is writing it. It doesn’t sound human.
It might just be because the public is now spread over so many services…
Are those morons trying to compare the numbers from years ago when you had like one or two nation wide channels with the modern landscape? And the one episode was announced like a week ahead and everybody would be tuning in to watch it at the same time. Now you stream an entire show at will.
It’s moronic to want to use the same metric as a measure of success when clearly the entire landscape has changed.
With streaming you can watch what you want and not the “ehh, there’s nothing else on” shows. Studios are still making those low effort, watch because you have to if you want to watch anything at all shows, and maybe it’s a feeling of not being in a target audience but they are mostly that these days. Maybe even more so than before, because the studios now don’t have a reasonable expectation that people are just gonna watch it because it is on.
They have a pseudo incentive to produce a higher amount of cheap lazy garbage to flood the market with something, anything, that might grab attention and become a hit, whereupon they might invest more into it. They’ve really been lowering the bar, over and over, and as the bar lowers more and more people aren’t stupid enough to follow along and just watch whatever. Why watch modern garbage when there are yesteryear classics that were made with passion, at least enough to veneer over the ever-present profit incentive.
Probably will be for at least another year or two. The creatives need time to cook and they took a huge unplanned hiatus last summer protecting their jobs
Not aided by an aversion to commitment. Netflix especially loves to cancel shows after one or two seasons… despite a decade of The Office being their bread and butter. They should be promising creators a budget directly correlated with some desirable metric. Your thing is what five million subscribers are obviously sticking around for? Here’s half the budget of last year, when it was ten. You can decide whether that’s enough to do another season. Oh it was? And it worked? And now it’s twenty million? Great, here’s a shitload of money, keep going.
For some reason Netflix seems to be more interested in new subscribers than keeping their current subscribers. Probably because a lot of users just keep the account once they get it, even if they don’t use it all that much.