#Captain Midnight

[chernobog13]

Captain Midnight #56 (October, 1947).

[vidreview]

VIDREV: "Short Seasons Are Killing TV" by Captain Midnight.

[originally posted august 29th 2024]

Captain Midnight is one of those creators i don't really follow because the vast majority of their work (mostly Big Corporate IP analysis) doesn't interest me, but every once in a while they'll come out with something that's EXTREMELY relevant to my interests. this one caught my eye because i've been on that "the streaming model is really bad for television" grind since 2018, and i'm always curious to see how mainstream perspectives on this stuff are evolving.

i'll just say at the start that this is a pretty good video. most everything i've watched by Captain Midnight has felt at the very least on the right track, if not always entirely on point, and the lack of cutesy overly familiar Content Creator-isms are a godsend from this type of channel. it makes for a bit of an odd duck for a full VIDREV, because i'm not here to discuss the shortcomings of what was said, but rather to take a closer look at what wasn't said.

in short, this is a video about how the now-standard 8 to 10 episode TV season in a post-streaming world has strangled much of what makes the medium unique, and he points to how many of the top-rated streaming shows are older titles with a hundred or more episodes as evidence (though he leaves out that streaming rights to shows like The Office have been the subject of contentious bidding wars in the past, a fact that would only strengthen his argument). he hits a lot of my personal favorite talking points: streaming tv is worse at good individual episodes, the idea of "filler" doesn't really make sense when applied to american television, the serial episodic structure lets you get to know characters better over time. near the end he pulls out the Netflix Marvel shows Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, each of which had a 14 episode first season that felt somehow overlong, despite their characters being literally tailor-made to support serialized week-to-week stories. these, he says, were an important early example of how the prestige streaming model encourages movie-like storytelling instead of TV-like storytelling. these are a good points, many of which i've made myself across my recent informal series of video essays about modern television writing practices.

but on the other side of all that analysis, Midnight's conclusion leaves something to be desired. here's the closing paragraph that jumped out at me, with my own added emphasis: "I love serialization on TV and I always have, I just think it can often be used better within the scaffolding of episodic stories. and for a while there it felt like TV was getting better and better at melding the two together into something truly interesting and special. but somewhere along the way that progress got lost, and many in the industry ended up thinking that serialization and short seasons were the shortcut to quality." take a good, long look at those bolded statements, and consider how important they are to Midnight's argument. after 17 minutes of wide-ranging and generally pretty good analysis of specific shows and recent trends, these three generalizations quietly paper over a gargantuan blind spot in order to get the script over the finish line.

first, "for a while there." for a while there refers to the internecine years between the dawn of the Netflix streaming era in 2011 and the eventual Wall Street-ification of all the media companies by 2018-19, when there was a big shift away from purely serialized television towards the more expensive "prestige" model we're so accustomed to now. what were the causes of this shift? what was actually going on "for a while there"? well, the 2007 writer's strike increased the writer's royalty take from home video sales, and gave them more bargaining power with networks. for this and a million other reasons, a lot of post-2007 shows saw a diminished episode-per-season count from 23 to 16-18. this was a huge boon to writers who now had more time to work on fewer episodes, meaning the quality of each individual episode shot through the roof. it helped that everyone coming into showrunning capacity at this period had years of experience working in the sitcom/cop-drama mines, developing a hunger for a show that could tell a continuous narrative within an episodic framework. with this new higher-quality television spreading away from cable-only networks into broadcast, suddenly everyone was talking about "the golden age of tv" and hyping up the medium as a place for nuanced, artful storytelling. Netflix saw where the wind was blowing and invested heavily into this trend, selling the idea that on streaming, there's no need for a set episode-per-season count for every show, no need for every episode to come in at a set length, no need to avoid more controversial adult topics for advertisers. of course, they very quickly reneged on that promise and have since become everything they promised not to be, but whatever. as Netflix succeeded, other networks decided they wanted to eat the streamer's lunch and develop their own services, making big deals with established names that made for great marketing. this meant a wave of well-publicized high-profile investment that pulled triple duty with audiences hungry for more mature media, creators hungry to make more mature media, and investors with dollar signs in their eyes. perhaps you can guess whose interests are the ones that actually matter in this equation.

but then after all that investment and quality increase, Midnight says, "somewhere along the way" the trend shifted, and "many in the industry" adopted the streaming model as the artistic ideal. now, hold on, wait. who in the industry? do you mean writers? directors? producers? executives? these roles each have wildly different relationships to the medium and to the stores of capital which allow it to be produced, and putting them all in a single consensus-bucket together as if they're all the same thing is wildly misjudged. you know what happened "somewhere along the way"? studios and streamers (and their increasingly powerful Wall Street backers) realized that favoring streaming over home video meant they didn't have to pay those costly royalties that were so painstakingly won in the 07 strike. you may recall that apocalyptically low streaming royalties were a major point of contention in the 2023 writer's strike. (the irony of Netflix starting as a DVD rental service is lost on no one.) like every service that emerges out of big tech, streaming was tailor made to break unions and steal profits without looking like that's what they were doing. they sold a big loud exciting bill of goods, got everyone to invest before regulators could catch up, made themselves an essential part of the creative economy, stole absolutely everything that wasn't bolted down while no one was looking, and left all their traditional unionized competitors scrambling to make up the shortfall. if this sounds familiar, that's because it is THE business model of the post-08-recession world. you might call it platform decay, or if you're Cory Doctorow you might call it "enshittification," but i'm gonna cut out the middle man and call it what it is: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. it's the enclosure of the commons in microcosm, the natural process of enclosure and monopolization inherent to an open market. as is always the case with their loud proclamations of innovation, tech has invented nothing new here. it's pretty much just What Capitalism Does.

we do not need bloggers to reinvent Marxism from first principles to understand what's happening. Marx already did that for us.

another key factor for understanding what happened "along the way" comes with the development of Mini-Rooms. instead of creating a crew of staff writers experienced at multiple levels of production who work for months together to write the scripts for a single season of television, streamers like Netflix would assemble small rooms of relatively inexperienced writers paid slightly above intern rates under the guidance of maybe one experienced showrunner that were only given a few weeks to pump out scripts to please investors. this has led to shows that often feel samey, rushed, and terminally inconsistent. now, instead of writers having more time to work on fewer episodes for the same (or greater) pay, they have less time to work on fewer episodes for worse pay and virtually zero royalties. this coincides of course with cost-cutting measures across the board in streaming, with producers desperate to decrease time on set wherever possible and eating the cost of breaking union regulations because Economies Of Scale Are Fucking Absurd, meaning everyone on a production has less time to do their work, which inevitably means that their work is worse. and with TV seasons being so drastically shortened, and the gaps between seasons so drastically widened (not to mention the expectation that few if any shows will make it past season 2 (because union contracts get a pay bump at season 3)), there are fewer opportunities for young filmworkers to gain experience, build connections with fellow filmworkers, and hone their talent pool over a period of years. a show isn't just its writers, directors, and stars after all, it's an entire business operation employing hundreds if not thousands of people. for a filmworker in the 90s or before, getting a gig on a popular show could be life-changing because it was one of the rare Hollywood situations that was relatively dependable for a long stretch of time. those kinds of jobs are increasingly rare, and the alternatives are starting to look more and more like undignified freelance work than a real sustainable career.

all of these factors and so many more have had the downstream effect of making the entire industry less stable, burning out promising young talent instead of developing it, discouraging others from trying to break into the industry in the first place, and lowering the baseline quality of popular media so the viewing public sees it as less valuable. perhaps you can fill in the blanks on the ensuing race to the bottom.

this is not the result of a creative consensus. this is not something that "many in the industry" just sort of randomly changed their minds about "somewhere along the way." this is an economic trend driven by economic forces far beyond the purview of any single working person's decisions. maybe you can find interviews that suggest otherwise, maybe there were lots of writers excitedly extolling the virtues of streaming media over traditional forms-- but those people are no less vulnerable to marketing hype than you are, and why should they have been more educated about the economic realities of streaming than we were? we are, all of us, simply reacting to systems in motion, trying our best to make sense of them, searching for the silver lining that keeps us from going insane at the instability of it all. this is why it's so important to have a materialist framework for your analysis-- without that anchor you're just judging by vibes, trying to divine an explanation from consumer trends and missing the forest for the trees. look not to the words of any given writer or actor or producer, but instead to the money, to the actual flow of material power. look at the victories of organized labor, and the resultant retaliations by organized capital. Midnight's thumbnail loudly states that "WE BROKE TV," but "we" didn't do a damn thing. our consumption habits didn't do this, the creative preferences of writers or directors or showrunners didn't do this-- it was rich people with lots of money who saw an opportunity to make even more money and took it, damn the consequences.

here's my problem with consumer-side criticism. it tends to see a hard dividing line between those who make media and those who consume it, and thus generalizes all of the makers into a single heterogeneous mass that can only be understood in the vaguest possible abstract. without a materialist economic framework for understanding the flow of power in these systems, consumer-side criticism can only go so far before it crashes headlong into a big scary Marx-shaped wall. there's a door to the other side only a few feet away of course, but it's rare for a critic in this mode to walk through it because I guess they see the business side of things as irrelevant or overly complicated. like, we're here to talk about the contents of media in a very layman's death-of-the-author sort of way, to judge trends on their own merits and not rely on outside sources to skew our perspective. this is fine when the scope of your analysis is relatively small, but as soon as you start asking questions like "why isn't [thing] as good as it used to be" your consumer-end framework fails you utterly. i'm not saying Captain Midnight is a uniquely craven paragon of this particular misstep by the way, in fact on the whole i'd say he's better about this than many. this is an extremely widespread problem for a generation of critics brought up after The End Of History, when trickle-down free-market hokum was adopted as Natural Law, leaving them only the empty feelgood individualist babble of neoliberalism to interpret the world. but it's not an insurmountable problem! i've yet to meet a commie my age that didn't start in that bubble and have to work their way out of it. i certainly made my share of embarrassing neoliberal apologia before finding the immortal science! it is the process of a lifetime to unthink these blind spots, and i point them out in all kindness in the hopes that others might avoid such mistakes in future.

and frankly, everyone is asking these "why is [thing] bad now" questions because it's begun to affect every facet of our lives. it's not just movies and television shows, it's basic web services, it's the USPS, it's the healthcare system, it's jobs and housing and education, it's everything. what is it, precisely, that you want to fix? you want to see better movies and tv shows? how do you propose to make that a reality, beyond "i hope that creators/audiences adjust their habits accordingly"? to my mind, this notable tension is a perfect opportunity to point people in the direction of an actual systemic cause, and thus an actual systemic solution. do not stop your analysis at "shorter seasons are bad and i hope they stop doing that" when you could help your audience think about these things in terms of class, labor, and solidarity, by giving them an illustrative example they might apply to their own working life. there is no fix to this macroeconomic trend in reform, no union so strong it can put a lance through the heart of capital's lust for profit. maybe bringing all this up in a video would feel too political for a lot of creators in this space, but the politics are gonna do what they're gonna do regardless and it's gonna be your problem (and your audience's problem!) sooner than later. i'm not saying every video essay should be a dedicated Marxist polemic, that would get old real fast, just that the current liberal individualist framework lets the real perpetrators off the hook and limits our ability to imagine better futures. if you want to feel like your fluffy unimportant media analysis is "justified" at a time of war, genocide, and crushing economic disparity, you might start by using them to normalize a more collective, materially-grounded way of thinking about the world. it's the little things that add up most in the long run, and you'd be surprised how easy it is to make "too political" into "too important to ignore" with a little strategic frog-boiling.

that's my opinion, anyway. this is still a pretty good video essay and i think you should go watch it. i'd also recommend Midnight's review of the Borderlands movie and the interminable nostalgia of modern Marvel movies for a bit of good fun.

[final note: at the start of the video, Midnight mentions that Adam Conover also released a video about the harms of streaming television at the same time, but that it goes in a very different direction. i'm gonna give it a watch and see how it stacks up by comparison. i expect that it will have a more materialist framework (since Conover actually works in the industry) and correctly identify where the problems lay. i also expect that he'll fall flat when it comes time to talk about solutions, because like Cory Doctorow he's invested in the anti-monopoly line, which fundamentally believes that if you just break up the monopolies then capitalism will be fine actually. i guess now i'll put that theory to the test, and if i find anything interesting i may end up writing about it.]

[tomoleary]

Greg Hildebrandt “Captain Midnight” Drawing Original Art (undated) Source

[browsethestacks]

America's Greatest Comics (1943)

Art by C.C. Beck

[kekwcomics]

CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT #55 (Fawcett, 1947)

Art: Charlie Tomsey, possibly?

Crikey! Is he... executing that alien? Jeez, down with the Interplanetary Prison-Industrial Complex!

[holy-shit-comics]

[gebo4482]

Captain Midnight

[luxerit]

So the second act of tfs is called "Captain Midnight" apparently

Could this be a reference to this broadcast interruption?

Maybe this will be relevant in s5

[stone-cold-groove]

Your official 1955-1956 Captain Midnight Secret Squadron membership card.

[raurquiz]

#remembering #richardwebb #actor #Finney #startrek #courtmartial #captainmidnight #outofthepast #sullivanstravel #Gunsmoke #HillbillysinaHauntedHouse #DanielBoone #Lassie #TheSmithFamily #TheSixMillionDollarMan #TimeTravelers #MuleFeathers #startrek58 @TrekCore

[chernobog13]

Captain Midnight's gonna sock ya right in da mush!

[shadowwingtronix]

Today's Comic> Heroes Unleashed #2

BW's Today's Comic> Heroes Unleashed #2

They gave Wonder Woman a sword and shield, and now all the superheroes want them. Heroes Unleashed #2 PD Comics (the date is missing from my digital copy, the downside of using layers in a PDF file, perhaps) Captain Midnight: “The War To End All Wars” part 2 WRITER: Bryan Augustyn ARTIST: Jay Piscopo Commander X: “Allies” WRITER/ARTIST: Jay Piscopo Sword Of The Blue Scarab WRITER/ARTIST: Jay…

[tomoleary]

Dan Barry “Captain Midnight” (1947)

[arsnof]

Happy Pride!

[chronivore]

Doctor Mid-Nite and Captain Midnight

[holy-shit-comics]