I feel the same way. There are a few funny shows, like Succession, but most other series, even if they have an interesting start, decline very fast. Visually they're all OK to very good. But the writing is boring, often appalling.

Yeah the writing is horrible on the vast majority of these new shows/movies, they've been able to cover it up with amazing production values and paying for high quality acting but once you are no longer dazzled by that the story just leaves you with nothing compelling.

Part of it is they are just producing so much content that the marginal quality of each script that now gets made is lower, but I do think script writing is an art that has been reduced to a series of tricks and cliches and storytelling has massively suffered.

There are a lot of people who look at a streaming channel’s lineup and say ‘huh; they have one or two good shows but the rest is just awful’

Trouble is, they all are pointing to a different couple of shows.

I mean, you’re aware that ‘Succession is the only good show’ is not an objectively true statement, right? That other people might disagree with you about that?

So I don’t know what your prescription here is. Do you want to just be able to subscribe to SuccessionTV?

I don't even like Succession so much, just didn't want to pick a fight with its many fans :) Actually it's an objetive fact that you can't say too loud that you don't like it, or else... anyway, I'd rather not talk too much about shows that I liked, disliked or started liking, later got disenchanted. It'd be distracting for the discussion.

Since you asked: what I would like is just to buy Succession. Do you know what happens when you want to watch something that's not on any platform? There is this cambrian thing called Blu-ray or you go straight to precambrian with DVD.

But if I'm not mistaken, there's no way to "buy" a digital copy of a movie or a series. Or even "rent" it. I don't really think I'd watch Succession a second time.

Mostly everybody prefers torrents, if they're available, that not always happens, specially in other languages. If not, you need a Blu-ray reader and paying not so nice prices from Amazon. Add some reaping software if you don't quite believe that optical disks last a hundred years.

If you come to think it, platforms really aren't. They're subscriptions to catalogs. Also moving catalogs. I've paused a season for some days, then found out that it had become pay-per-view at Amazon.

I suspect that the real power of "platforms" is copy protection... again. Studios wouldn't allow non-DRM shops, so they insist in DRM in the browser and thus they've given all the power to the gatekeepers.

This mirrors what I am seeing as well. Lazy writing that produces a reaction of “why did they even bother making this movie?” despite the good actors and videography. Is it because good writers are difficult to find or, as with the actors, are the writers being constrained as well either by the streaming business model or poor taste in story selection by the streaming execs? The emergence of generative AI might make this even worse, as it’s only a matter of time till these are used to churn out scripts; although some of these scripts are so bad, maybe it has already started?

Anyway, I find myself terminating movies earlier and more readily than in the past due to the higher frequency of disappointing dialogue and story lines along with the fear of wasting my time. My response is cancelling streaming subscriptions for a year or so and then resubscribing for a few months in hopes that a few decent new pieces of content were created.

I have the opposite view, netflix and other streaming services have lots of good material while TV and movies before streaming rarely produced material I really wanted to watch.

I'm with you on TV (though I think that's kinda a coincidence, and I certainly don't associate Netflix in particular with good TV, though they do have the rare hit) but there are so many outstanding 20th century films that I don't expect to get through more than half of them before I die.

At the same time, now we have a firehose of content that may, depending on which friend you ask, be amazing!

I don't have time for all this content and I if I trust my friends as filters, there's till too much.

Maybe your just are getting old, and have different taste than what the movie/tv studios cater for today. If you were a kid during the 80ies, today kids are going to be looking at the content from that time with the same view as you were looking at stuff from the 40ies-60ies.

Just because a movie looks better doesn’t mean it is a better movie. There has been trash made during all eras, but today is about volume, not quality, so finding the gems is much harder and frustrating.

Do we really need to have another movie about super heroes or another movie about rescuing some retiring tough guy’s kid from a bad guy? Or another movie that spends the first half rotating between character building scenes filled with silly, rote dialogue and no story line? Or another movie that takes an old, tired story and simply replaces the characters with a new set of characters intended to signal the importance of a particular demographic group? Or another Jurassic Park, Hangover, Rocky, Transformer, Terminator, Star Wars clone? Yawn.

> Maybe [you] just are getting old, and have different taste than what the movie/tv studios cater for today.

But why don’t they cater to older folks? Typically, the further one progresses in one’s career, the more money one makes, and the more disposable income one has. I know that I now regularly spend sums now that I would have considered unbelievably profligate in my youth. Why don’t advertisers and producers target me, instead of some kid who still thinks $1,000 is a lot of money?

This is just a guess but I'm sure somebody has analyzed this novel model you propose where they charge more for the streaming service but target it at older, richer viewers and decided it doesn't pencil out:

How many people are really tons richer as they get older? Not especially many, this is an upper middle class phenomenon.

Given this small audience, are those people willing to pay 20x more per month for a streaming service to make up for that? Probably not.

If they get young people hooked on this cheap content now, they can keep charging them for it for their whole lives. How many times have you bought /The Goonies/ or /Die Hard/? The copyright holders of /Euphoria/ hope to be doing the same thing in 40 years.

It's similar to consumer packaged goods (deodorant, laundry soap, etc.) where the lifetime value of a customer is loads better if you get them into your brand when they are young. Convincing a 65 year old to change brands of shaving cream is both expensive (they have high standards and preferences from decades of shaving) and has low return (they won't be buying shaving cream for much longer). Convincing a 15 year old to buy your brand of shaving cream is relatively easy (they don't have any habits around which brand to buy, and also not much experience/preference) and they will be buying it for decades to come, so it will be a big return if it works.

Speak for yourself. I was a kid in the 80s and would rather watch things produced in the 40s-60s than the mindless shit that pervades most streaming services today.

You get the benefit of hindsight, too. Picking some reasonable top 25 films from any previous decade to watch, starting with perhaps the 1930s, will tend to yield pretty damn good results.

Of course, it's also the case that an absolute shitload of good-to-great films do come out every year. Very few (but some!) of them get huge budgets and a big marketing push, but there are lots of them. Average quality may be low, but the volume's so high that there's still more good stuff coming out than I, personally, can keep up with.

> an absolute shitload of good-to-great films do come out every year.

Pick any of the last 5 years.

If there are shitloads, then you should easily be able to name 5 great films from that year.

What are they?

Note; I can easily do this for any year from let’s say 1990 to 1995, but personally I can’t for recent times. Am I just missing the quality? Maybe. Excited to see what you come up with.

Just a quick glance at Letterboxd....

Banshees of Inisherin

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Both Knives Out movies

Parasite

Nope (probably just in the "good" grouping, not great)

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That's, uh... just from the "popular this week" screen. And only the ones I've seen, so I know they're good. But I'm pretty sure all those are last five years, or close to it.

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Digging back to 2018 and later (we can say 2018 counts since 2023 just started, right?):

Annihilation

Sorry to Bother You

High Life

Midsommar

Uncut Gems (god it's so good)

Jojo Rabbit

The Lighthouse

The Green Knight

CODA

Spontaneous ([EDIT] It seems very dumb but wow is it a gut punch, when you start to think about what you're watching and make some connections to real life)

Red Rocket (small-scale brilliance)

RRR

Watcher

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I just realized I misread you as asking for 5 good ones from just one of the last 5 years, not 5 total from the last 5 years, but I think that gets the point across? Despite my leaving off a whole bunch that may be more taste-specific, not having watched even 1/3 of the films from that span I have good reason to believe are good, not exhaustively mining that timespan (I bet I could double the size of that list without changing how I was selecting them), and also omitting a bunch of more-popular movies that I think were at least decent.

[EDIT] Hell some years you could get to 2-3 good ones just by looking at what A24 produced that year, nothing else.

I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your list, even though some of those are mediocre at best, but yeah I did mean per year, and limited to Hollywood (Parasite for instance not counting). And no, ok, I will also straight up disagree with the second Knives out Movie which I thought was absolute trash. A perfect example of poor storytelling and the form over substance of modern cinema.

But just taking say 1992 you have Last of the Mohicans, The Unforgiven, My Cousin Vinny, Malcolm X, Bad Lieutenant, Scent of a Woman, Reservoir Dogs, Dracula, Chaplin.

And then a bunch of fun schlomp like Arizona Dream, Basic Instinct, Sister Act, Army of Darkness, Home Alone 2, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Mighty Ducks, Wayne’s World.

These are all undoubtedly great movies.

And then another huge bunch of watchable stuff easily comparable to some of your mentions like Watcher or High Life.

And 1992 is not an outlier.

In 1993 you have Jurrasic Park, Groundhog Day, Whats Eating Gilbert Grape, Scindlers List, Meanace 2 Society, Alive, Dazed and Confused, Falling Down, In The Name of The Father, True Romance, Demolition Man, Carlitos Way, The Secret Garden, Philadelphia, A Perfect Workd, Cool Runnings, Short Cuts.

In 1991 Silence of The Lambs, Ternimator 2, JFK, Point Break, Thelma and Louise, Boyz in the Hood, The Doors, My Own Private Idaho, Barton Fink, The Fisher King, Naked Lunch.

In 1990 Goodfellas, Hunt for Red October, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands, Home Alone, Godfather 3, Dances with Wolves, Tremors, Back to the Future 3, Awakenings, The Witches, Wild at Heart, Jacobs Ladder, Nikita, Slacker, Millers Crossing.

And the quality difference is massive too, not just somewhat better. Like just Millers Crossing is miles better than anything that has been made in the last 5 years, and I’m picking at random.

In 1994 Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Lion King, Speed, Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber, Stargate, Natural Born Killers, The Crow, Clercs, Maverick, Ed Wood, In the Mouth of Madness, Interview With The Vampire.

I could go on.

And this is not even talking about how the 80s is a better decade for cinema, or how the 70s is the peak of the power of the author with far more experimental, artistic, and substantial productions.

Has quality declined? Yes. Massively. Humongously. Stupendously.

2022 - Kimi, After Yang, Crimes of the Future, White Noise, Official Competition, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Tar, Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon

2021 - Nightmare Alley, The Card Counter, Zola, The French Dispatch, Come True, Don't Look Up, I Care A Lot,

2020 - I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Mank, The Sound of Metal, Possessor, His House

2019 - Climax, Uncut Gems, Parasite, Vivarium, First Cow

2018 - The Clovehitch Killer, Prospect, Mute, Anon, Mandy, The House That Jack Built, Cam, Sorry to Bother You

2018 had a glut of Netflix sci-fi B-movies that I think are very solidly good if not so great. I think they're underrated so I included them. I might have also messed up on the years.

These are all films I've seen. There are many others that I suspect are even better that I haven't seen.

The top 5 scripted TV shows in 1992 were Roseanne, Home Improvement, Murphy Brown, Murder She Wrote, and Coach. The only show in top 30 that I would say was any good is Seinfeld.

Today, broadcast TV seems to be mostly procedurals and cable TV is mostly reality. If you like sitcoms, there has definitely been a dropoff since those have lost popularity.

Streaming is where can find the good TV shows. Remember, 1992 is before HBO started making good dramas and those were pretty rare before then. The big advantage of streaming is the variety, there are a bunch of mediocre shows in genres that barely existed before.

I just finished watching Derry Girls on Netflix, a comedy set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. I would rather watch the 18 episodes of that than any amount of 90s sitcoms.

I meant cinema.

I don’t watch TV, save for a few (less than 20) shows I don’t think anything truly brilliant has ever been made as a series, ever.

That said, I would agree that shows made between 2005 and today are generally better than shows between 1980 and 2015.

Though better is relative; shows with very few exceptions are junk.

I'd trade all the Friends and Seinfeld in the world for more stuff like Breaking Bad, the first 4 seasons of Game of Thrones, etc. I have no interest in generic settings with laugh track based cheesy one liners, and that was the bulk of early 90s television.

Do you really think that TV series from 1992 was higher quality than the series that are produced now?

No. I was talking about movies. I agree that series are better, but with few exceptions I don’t think series are truly good.