#current state of the industry and I can't make money with crafts until i have money to start

[coffeeworldsasaki]

So turns out that I can't start any crochet small business because I live in hell and it takes too much money to be allowed to sell and even if my father did offer to try somehow to make it happen I just prefer to wait until I move from this shit place

[peppertaemint]

Hello pptm! Would you talk a bit more about the current state of tv series? You mentioned briefly about an oversaturated market and how The Golden Age is now gone, but what were some of they key problems that lead to it in your opinion?

Would you consider Succession as part of the series that knew the importance of character development? Could we consider it like the final good show in this dire landscape of tv and streaming?

Lastly, what do you think will come next? There's a shift in the movie business in Hollywood if we look at the past year, but I don't know if we should be overly optimistic. Will we take a step back from prestige tv for a while until a new wave will bring something new?

Hello Madam M! Thanks for sending such a thoughtful Ask.

I think that over-saturation was part of the problem. What I mean by that is everyone and anyone trying to cash in on the money to be made through so-called prestige TV, and how the late stages of prestige dovetailed with the rise of streaming platforms.

Not every network went after prestige, but they've all gone after streaming, which has led to these conglomerates of streaming. Platform-wise, this is a huge turn off for "discerning" audiences. People watch HBO because they know what they're going to get. Now, if you sign into Max, you're confronted with the dregs of TV and can't make heads or tails of any of it.

This has been the case for Netflix for years now. They've dumped huge money into developing series but half the time when they cancel a show, that's the first a lot of people have even heard of it.

The other side of this is that platforms have dumped money into these series no one can find (lol), but say you do find it -- it looks and feels prestige but it ends there because the writing isn't solid. My understanding is that the writers' room tradition, which has a big practical training side to it, has been decimated by new ways of working these streaming platforms have brought. Usually, you start as an assistant in the room to learn the ropes. As the series goes on, assistants move up to writing scripts.

If these rooms aren't being put together anymore (which I read is the case more often than before), new writers aren't going through the learning stages.

The other factor is how quickly funding is pulled on these shows. If rooms are put together, there's no time for the craft to be taught or for the head writer to master it.

Do I think Succession got the writing right? Absolutely. When Ii wrote that BTS/Succession crossover for you (remember our bet... actually I can't remember what we were betting on 💀), trying to nail the dialogue and characters was incredibly difficult. It's like when you're spec script writing, you have to show you can follow the format but also write the characters so they are in-character but also not caricatures of their most obvious traits. The last part is what happened with the writing on Friends, for example. Most of the characters became the lowest common denominator of their most notable traits. Obviously, sitcom is a different format, but the point still stands because this is what happened to Greg in the last season of Succession. His character became a stock gimmick and stopped progressing.

I think things come in ebbs and flows, so the industry will self-correct. People keep joking that by amalgamating, platforms are reinventing cable TV. Lol. What needs to happen is for there to be less projects and more time, effort and oversight (The Idol FFS... where the fuck were HBO on that?) on the projects that are greenlit.

Well, there's my two cents. My flight was delayed so this turned into an entire essay.