Guest Post by The Zman
When I had a TV subscription, my viewing habits were fairly simple. In the evening, I would put on the television and try to find a sporting event. If nothing of interest was on, then I would flip around the channels until I found something, but more often than not, I’d settle for a re-run of some show like Seinfeld. I never had the patience for channel surfing, so much of it went unnoticed and unwatched. Most of the time, the television was just background noise while I did something else like screw around on-line.
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When you cut the cord, television watching becomes something different than the ever present background noise. If you want to watch something, you have to think about what you want to watch. Then you have to figure out the source. I’m an Amazon Prime customer so I have their library of movies and TV shows. I also have access to the dark underworld of pirate sources. The Kodi app for the Amazon Fire gives me access to television channels from all over the world. I’m spoiled for choice.
Anyway, since I have never been much of a TV watcher, I ask people for recommendations and then find a source for them. Someone I know has been binge watching a program called The Walking Dead. He told me it was OK. I had some vague recollections about it from a few years ago. A bunch of people started writing about the best tactics for dealing with a zombie attacks. There was probably a National Review article on the conservative case for surrendering to the rage zombies.
I downloaded the first season and I can see why people like it. You can’t think about the zombies as they make no sense. The claim is a virus turns the dead into walking attack corpses, but that’s silly. The human body starts to decay at death, so in a few weeks, the zombies would have fallen to pieces. A supernatural explanation, like the war skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts gets around that problem, but I’m not the target audience for this stuff. Maybe the writers don’t want to spend time on the science of zombies.
The funny thing about that though is the novel that kicked off the whole end times plague genre had a simple solution that would probably make the story better. I Am Legend used a disease that turned people into something like vampires. They were still alive, but they just liked killing people and eating them. The cause of the vampire-ness was a blood disease. There was also an evolutionary angle as not all of the infected became murderous ghouls. Some retained their humanity and their faculties.
Doing some research on-line, I learned that the show is very popular and has a devoted following, even after seven seasons. I’m only through one season, but I can see why people like it. Most of our video entertainments are just poorly disguised lectures about how white people suck and men are terrible. This show is just a good drama for adults to enjoy with their kids. The men are men and the women are women. More important, the writers seem to respect the male and female characters by writing them properly.
For some reason, the show reminded me of the series Justified that was popular half a dozen years ago. That was another show that was just good old fashioned drama aimed at adults looking to be entertained. The fact that Hollywood is able to make these sorts of programs means they make the PC crap on purpose. It’s not that they are just a bunch of moonbats making what they like. It’s that they really want to make lectures so they do it as often as they can. These normal programs are happy accidents that pay the bills.
That last part is probably a huge driver for Hollywood. One of the things you learn when you go off the grid for your TV is that there is a lot of crap produced every year. I have an app that let’s me scan through all movies released by year. I bet most people have not heard of 90% of them. Anyone heard of Lazer Team, released last year? How about Doris, staring Sally Field, who I was sure was dead. How is that people allegedly good at making movies cannot see that these are terrible movie ideas? How do they get made?
The most likely answer is the business works on the theory that if they can get financing for a project, they make it, even if it is hilariously stupid. It’s like the venture capital business. The winners pay for the many losers. As a result, even dumb ideas like a King Arthur movie with black guys as the knights gets made. Of course, the fanatics who want to make lectures are driven to get the financing so they can deliver their lecture. That’s why so much of what is made looks like a deliberate insult to the intended audience.
That’s the other strange thing about all the terrible shows is that Hollywood has a massive amount of data on audiences. They use this to market test all sorts of things about movie and TV projects. Big budget movies are now written by committees, that include marketing people and data analysts. It seems like the obvious step is to use the data to determine what is worth financing. There can be no model that says a movie like Catfight has a chance to earn enough to pay for the camera rentals.
Maybe that’s what’s over the next hill as people cut the cord and the business model begins to unravel. The music business had to adapt when digital technology broke up their oligopoly. Maybe a similar thing will happen with video. We’ll get fewer shows, but they will be driven by market research, rather than the whims of studios. Or, maybe they just pay everyone less and keep pumping out crap movies like the Brothers Grimsby. As long as there are suckers with money, Hollywood will be happy to take their money.
One final thought on this topic. For those thinking of going off the grid for television, be prepared for your viewing habits to radically change. I found I watch less sportsball than when I had a sub. Even the limited effort to find a sports stream is enough to have me looking for other things to do in the evening. On the other hand, you will binge watch a series, which means spending a rainy weekend on the couch watching a full season of a TV show. You watch less, but more, if that makes sense.
Yeah I agree. If I could get my wife to give up the snews I would drop tv like the plague. There is literally nothing to watch on the shit box. Now that I get all of my movies and tv for free (well the cost of the internet connection) I have found that the vast majority of movies produced are very unwatchable. I pity the poor slobs that have to watch so they can write a glowing review of the shit that is presented as entertainment. Out of the 60+ movies produced every year only a handful, perhaps less than ten, can even be watched for free. The actors can’t act. The writers, if they use them, can’t write. The directors can’t direct.
Try binging Game of Thrones and Westworld, although the latter kinda dropped off towards the end of the first season.
Oh yeah, testify. Amazon, kodi, crackle , tubit, popcornflix. Great! Cut that cord. But you better at least have an idea of what you want to watch, or you wont find anything TO watch. I love it. And I will binge a series. Rainy days buddy. Funny that the author basically ‘discovers’ the plot of “the producers”. Get the financing, and make a bomb on purpose. You will discover some countries besides US make stellar movies. Even russia. I speak a few languages and find myself not even realizing its not in english until my wife says something. What are you watching? And then I realize its french or german. Hardest to understand are the british films. Thats an accent. Troma films make awesome horror films btw. In english. Check out “night of the chicken dead” . First ever musical horror comedy.
I stopped watching TV years ago. Too much propaganda.
Second that – I haven’t totally quit, but only find a couple of shows even watchable. “Lucifer” gets my attention, the writing seems solid to me and the characters are engaging. “Agents of Shield” is almost too fantastical, but it’s not sold as SJW so I can live with it. After that, the pickings get few and far between – I used to watch “Gotham” and “The Flash” but they got too soap-opera-ey for me eventually.
I get tired of being lectured when I’m trying to escape a whole society who think they can lecture me, endlessly, for my own “benefit”. May they all get a parasitic infestation!
“When I had a TV subscription, my viewing habits were fairly simple. In the evening, I would put on the television and try to find a sporting event. If nothing of interest was on, then I would flip around the channels until I found something, but more often than not, I’d settle for a re-run of some show like Seinfeld. I never had the patience for channel surfing, so much of it went unnoticed and unwatched. Most of the time, the television was just background noise while I did something else like screw around on-line.”
This is me exactly. I don’t watch much TV. Culturally speaking, I live under a rock.
“In the 1980s, Goldman wrote a series of memoirs about his professional life on Broadway and in Hollywood. In the first of these, Adventures in the Screen Trade, he famously summed up the entertainment industry in the opening sentence of the book, “Nobody knows anything.”[20][21][22] (The title is a pun on the title Adventures In The Skin Trade, a collection of stories by Dylan Thomas.) Reviewing the book, writer Art Kleiner wrote, “This is one of the three most engrossing ‘creative confessional’ books I’ve ever read… One third of the book talks about the roles of Hollywood film-making: how a film is affected by the star, the producer, the writer, and the other players. The next third tells the story of each film in Goldman’s life; the final third takes you step-by-step through the making of Butch Cassidy, including a presentation of the full screenplay. This is a book of gossip with heart, gossip specifically chosen to enlighten you (and, it’s pretty clear, to help Goldman himself work out his feelings about this business).”[23]”
Nobody knows anything = trial & error. Goldman writes about shopping Butch & Sundance all over. Took forever to find a buyer. Even then, it was a long fight to preserve the story: the formatted PTB insisted B&S had to stand & fight, a la standard John Wayne westerns, not flee the super-posse, run off to Bolivia.
When something does hit, that’s when zombiefication often comes in. The Fast & Furious franchise continues on, for example, has made billions. Equally, & reiterative, when something does hit, the people involved saying they had no idea it would – like Breaking Bad – is cliche.
Who do you guys use for internet?
I’m getting ready to cut cable,landline,and my internet that I get thru the cable company but I do still want internet access thru a different company.
I use ISDN through the phone company. Something similar may be available in your area. When I was in Butte for a while there was a service for Internet via microwave dish! And I think Hughes still does satellite internet; YMMV.
The appeal of The Walking Dead is the character development and their interactions with each other in a group survival situation and how they come up with ways to defeat or diminish their enemies. We all know the zombie angle is ridiculous.
As to TV, my cable contract comes up for renewal every 2 years, and last time they tried to drop my “loyalty discount”–after staying with them for 15 years! I had to negotiate with a supervisor in their billing department to get the rate back down. Well, it’s up for renewal again and charges for all 3 tiers (internet, TV, and phone) all increased, and my bundle savings dropped from $40/month to $20/month. So I’m considering pulling the plug on the TV package and just watching stuff on the internet (like good HD documentaries on YouTube) via my smartTV (no camera).
I too enjoyed “Justified”. But then I also liked “Fringe”, “Grimm” (which just ended), “Jericho”, and “The Americans”.
The Achilles heal I see with cord cutting (I am a AVID cord cutter myself) is the internet connection. Most of the country only has two local choices for Internet services, and they are usually the ones offering the TV packages. The TV packages subsidize the internet packages, so at some point the monopolies are going to begin running at a loss because so many people cut the cord, and that is when we are going to have problems. If they begin metering internet, then all of us cord cutters are going to be in big financial issues.
The real problem is the monopoly nature of these providers. There should be actual price competition, not just this bundle or else BS. Hopefully, there will be some progress in local wireless internet services or high capacity fiber to the home. At least then you don’t have the monopoly ownership of the line itself, which is a real problem when you think about the modern home and its dependence on internet connectivity.
My eldest insisted on getting Google Fiber so she could play games faster. That of course leaves Google perfect access to everything she does online, the better to sell her information to advertisers. Fiber from the telephone company would speed up things, but with the same problem.
SOME ISP is going to conduct your searches, comments, clicks, etc. to the wider Internet. I doubt any of them passes up the chance to use your information for their benefit. The only way around that I can see is to hack a local business’ wireless, or if you’re lucky a McDonald’s or Starbucks is in your neighborhood, and you can blend into an unattributable crowd that way. Life in the NSA sucks in numerous ways.