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Geek Punditry #113: The Medium is Killing the Message

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When you teach the same subject for long enough, there are certain topics and certain lessons you start to look forward to. One of my favorite things to cover with my 12th grade English students, for example, is Hamlet, and I particularly look forward to the famous “To be or not to be” scene. I always start by telling the kids that this is the big one, the grande supreme enchilada, the most famous speech that Willie Shakes ever wrote which, by proxy, also makes it one of the most famous speeches ever written in the entire history of the English language. Then I look at the kid who has already volunteered to read the speech out loud and say, “No pressure.”

Here’s a level three nerd joke. Ahem: “Took him 900 years to get this part right.”

After we read and discuss the speech together, I show them clips of several different film versions of Hamlet. We talk about how different actors play the role, how the different settings change their interpretation of the scene, and fun English class stuff like that. The most entertaining version – to me, at least – is when we watch Ethan Hawke’s depiction of the scene from 2000. In this version, director Michael Almereyda has changed the setting to the modern day (or at least, what was modern in 2000) and has Hamlet deliver this speech wandering the Action Movies section of a Blockbuster Video store. But I’m showing this to contemporary high school students. Even the oldest of them wasn’t born until 2007, and the vast majority of them have no idea what they’re looking at. Popular guesses include a gas station, a convenience store, and a bookstore. The ones that DO recognize Blockbuster Video, I assume, do so because they’ve seen Captain Marvel.

The weird thing is, after updating the setting, they kept the headgear 100 percent historically accurate.

It’s funny to me, to see the cultural disconnect between the film and the modern audience. No doubt Almereyda intended to make the movie contemporary, but in choosing that particular setting, this film feels even more dated than a traditional version of Hamlet set in the 7th century. And the percentage of my students who know where Hawke is before I explain it gets smaller with each passing year. These are kids who have never – and WILL never – browse the video section of a store.

And as entertaining as the lesson usually is, the fact that this is an artifact of times gone by makes me a little sadder each year.

I grew up in the 80s. I was in high school and college in the 90s. The peak of Video Store Culture is intertwined with the most important developmental years of my life. I remember as a kid, my parents taking us down to the video store and letting us roam the aisles looking for movies to watch. My younger brother and sister would gravitate towards the kids’ movies, and while they would pour over the shelves trying to make their own decisions, I found myself drifting to sections of the store I knew my parents would NEVER allow us to rent from, especially the horror section. Ghoulish monsters, blood dripping down faces, whatever the hell was going on with the box art for The Stuff…I was mesmerized. 

9-year-old me would have TRADED my brother to find out what was going on here.

VHS box art of the 1980s was a unique art form that has no peer in the history of pop culture, save perhaps for paperback book covers of the same era. Great box art could make even the lamest, cheesiest low-budget schlockfest seem tempting. But my folks weren’t the sort who would allow a 9-year-old kid to rent something like Creepshow no matter HOW enticing the box art was. So those movies found a home in my psyche only in poster form, which is how they remained until I was old enough to rent them and watch them myself. At which point – let’s be honest – I discovered that a great many of those movies were better as box art than they ever were as films. But that was okay.  

As I got older and went to video stores myself, I would gravitate to all kinds of movies, devouring things that I’d been curious about for years but had never been able to indulge in before. Not just horror, but classic sci-fi, old comedies, or indie darlings I’d heard good things about like Magnolia. It didn’t hurt that around the time I graduated college, my best friend Jason became the manager – and eventually owner – of the video store I most often patronized, so I got to sample an awful lot of movies for free. And as culture shifted from VHS to DVD, I went from being simply a viewer to a collector. I would go to Best Buy, Circuit City, Borders, or Barnes and Noble and spend hours walking through the shelves, examining the DVD cases, trying to find old favorites to add to my shelf or new movies I’d never heard of that were worth a watch. I could do this alone, but it was more fun to do it with Jason or our other friends. Either way, though, there was a tangibility to holding those cases in my hands, reading the description on the back, studying the list of special features to see if there was a good making-of featurette or commentary track that would be worth listening to or – of course – admiring the cover art.

This is a pleasure that has largely been lost to us. Netflix slaughtered the video store in its sleep, and of those retail stores I mentioned the only one that both still exists and has a physical media section at all is Barnes and Noble, and it’s nowhere near what it used to be. And while I know that we always lose certain cultural elements as time passes and culture evolves, this is one of those changes that has hurt not only the people who make these movies, but the consumers who watch them as well. 

It’s the streaming era I’m talking about, of course. That’s what killed the video store, that’s what has DVD and Blu-Ray sales on life support. (Thank God for horror movie fans, one of the last stalwart groups to demand physical media for their preferred art form. They’re the ones keeping the whole thing alive right now.) Sure, the convenience of streaming can’t be beat. I don’t need to go down to the video store anymore. I don’t need to HOPE that the movie I want to watch will be available. I don’t have to take the risk that I’ll get a disc with a scratch that has rendered it unplayable, and never again will I need to double-check that I’ve rewound a tape before I return it.

Was there anything worse than opening the DVD case at home and seeing THIS?

But this same convenience has made the entire movie-watching experience feel more disposable, like it doesn’t matter anymore. If I went down to Jason’s video store hoping to rent Scream 2 only to find that it had already been rented, that’s when I would look for something different and discover movies that I may otherwise have never watched, like Amelie. With streaming, you just have to hope that the movie you want is on a service you subscribe to, and if it is, there’s no need to roam.

But even if the movie you want ISN’T on your service, or even if you don’t know what you want to watch, the browsing experience isn’t the same. In a store, looking at a movie case, you had the opportunity to pick it up, read the back, gaze at that beautiful, beautiful cover art. Today, every movie is reduced not to art, but to a thumbnail. Most of the time it’s a still shot from the movie, probably a close-up of the biggest star in the film, with the title superimposed on top of it. It’s bland, lifeless. Just as the greatest box art could make me watch the worst movies, so can a cookie-cutter thumbnail cause me to scroll right past one of the best movies of the year, and I’ll never know. 

We’ve lost the community aspect as well. For people like me, TALKING about the movie after I’ve watched it is just as vital a part of the experience as actually watching it. Discussing what we liked, what we didn’t like, what did we think the sequel would be like, should there even be a sequel at all? At the video store, you can chat with other customers. “What are you getting? Oh, I’ve seen that one, that’s great. Say, I really liked From Dusk ‘Till Dawn but I’m not sure what to watch next. Any suggestions?” Sure, the streaming services TRY to do this, but I would take the suggestion of a random film geek in a video store over the Netflix algorithm every second of my life, and it wouldn’t even be a struggle.

Netflix has “We think you’ll love these.” Your local video store had “Vinnie’s picks.” Nobody ever saw Vinnie. No one knew who he was. But Vinnie introduced you to Boondock Saints and you LOVED him for it.

And with this, the respect given to a movie by the audience is being cut down. I know a lot of people who’ll stop a movie if they aren’t engaged in the first five minutes. And sure, that’s your prerogative, but there’s something to be said for a slow burn. Some movies need to be given time to get into the story, and sometimes that’s what makes it effective. In the video rental days, once we made it home with a movie we WATCHED the damn thing, no matter how bad the first five minutes were, because that was our only option. And I think we were better for it. I don’t want to tell you that you should sit around watching something you don’t like, but the disposability of entertainment has caused us to forget how to give a story a fair chance. I can spend twice as long scrolling through the options on Hulu than I ever did looking at the DVDs at Borders, but I’ll end up far less satisfied.

Then there’s the way movies are presented today. TVs have, for the most part, gotten substantially larger than they were when I was a kid. You would think that would make the viewing experience better, but somehow the opposite has happened. My students, my nieces and nephews, are more likely to watch a movie on their Chomebook, their tablet, or – worst of all – their PHONE. Not to say I’m not guilty of this at times – when my sports fanatic son is bound and determined to watch a lacrosse match between two colleges I’ve never heard of with an announcer who has all the life and energy of the sloth from Zootopia, minus the personality, I’m certainly not above pulling up an episode of Star Trek on my laptop. But it’s not my preferred method of watching anything, and the idea of watching an entire motion picture on a phone screen is giving me a migraine. But to kids today it’s common. I’ve had students tell me they’ve watched entire movies chopped up into two-minute segments and posted (in portrait mode for the love of God) to TikTok, a practice which I’m pretty sure is directly responsible for the sharp rise in instances of bird flu in the United States.

I took this picture myself just to illustrate my point and it STILL makes me want to punch me in the face.

The only thing that mitigates the sting for me is that I know I’m not alone. I have many friends – both in real life and on social media – who join me in bemoaning the decline of video store culture, and while there may not be enough of us to bring that culture BACK, it helps to know that other people feel the same way as you do. Coincidentally, on the same day this week my students were confused by the Blockbuster store in Hamlet, I listened to an episode of the Movie Crypt podcast in which filmmaker Alex Ross Perry discussed his new documentary Videoheaven, a “video essay” (in his own words) about the rise, influence, and fall of the video store told through clips of movies and TV shows featuring video stores. The movie is almost three hours long, he says, and frankly, it sounds amazing. I am very excited about this film and very anxious to get a chance to watch it.

I’ve never met Mr. Ross Perry, but just based on this poster, I suspect he’d be my kinda people.

Ironically, I’ll probably have to wait until it comes to streaming.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. Yes, he’s old. You wanna make somethin’ of it?

Geek Punditry #106: Spoiler Alert

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This time it’s Squid Game’s fault. The most popular Netflix series on the planet dropped a second season a few weeks ago, right in the middle of the break between semesters for most schools, so approximately seventeen bajillion people binged the entire thing before they went back. Of all the human beings on the planet Earth, according to my meticulous records accrued by reading social media posts, the only one who has not watched the entirety of Squid Game season two is some schlub named Blake M. Petit in Louisiana. In my defense, I’ve got other things occupying my attention. In December, I mostly watch Christmas movies until the 26th, at which point I try to spend the next week catching up on movies I missed that year. Then on Jan. 1, I began my Year of Superman project, so while I certainly WANT to watch Squid Game, I simply haven’t gotten around to it yet. 

Spoiler: The real Squid Game is the friends we made along the way. Who then get shot in the head.

This does not stop my students, of course, and when we returned from the Christmas break on Monday, I found myself several times having to stop them from babbling everything that happened in the show that I haven’t watched yet. I ask you to remember, now, that this is season two. This is a season that dropped mere days ago, not months or years, but several of them walked into the room wanting to tell me all about it, despite my admonitions NOT to do so. And I think it’s time, once again, to talk about spoilers.

I’ve seen the studies that say that some people PREFER to be spoiled – that knowing beforehand what happens in a story reduces their anxiety and allows them to enjoy the story better. Speaking as somebody who lives with anxiety as a constant companion that I wish I could jettison out of my brain and into outer space, I can only call this theory utter balderdash. It makes no sense to me AT ALL. I cannot, for the life of me, fathom how it feels BETTER to know that Rosebud was his mother’s maiden name, that Jack Dawson makes it onto the door, or that Captain America dies from using the Infinity Gauntlet before you actually see it. I get far more anxiety from being AFRAID of getting spoiled than I EVER have from wondering what will happen in the story next.

However, I’m also mature enough to accept that no two brains work the same way, and that while the messed-up hunk of meat in MY skull is absolutely spoiler-adverse, that doesn’t mean that people who prefer spoilers aren’t real. I get that. I don’t UNDERSTAND it, but I GET it. However, the fact that people watch and enjoy things differently from one another makes for an even BETTER reason to avoid spoilers, not a WORSE one. You see, if a person WANTS spoilers for virtually anything – a movie, a book, a TV show – they are readily available. They can be found in just seconds on Google, or if you want to get absolutely insane fake spoilers like I wrote in the preceding paragraph, you can get them on ChatGPT. Those who want to be spoiled can easily alleviate their anxiety. But for those of us who DON’T want spoilers, someone throwing them around casually is a severe blow to our enjoyment of whatever story you guys are out to ruin for us.

“But you know, Blake,” some of you say, “If the spoiler ruins the story, then it wasn’t really a good story in the first place.” I have heard this from many people, many times. I have also heard people say that thin crust pizza is better than thick crust. All of these people are – and here I’m going to use a somewhat complicated literary term, so I apologize in advance if you don’t quite get where I’m coming from – full of horseshit. 

Writers construct stories in a certain way. They create characters, select conflict, craft a setting, all to generate a certain effect in the reader or viewer. All of these things are tools in a vast and complicated toolbox, and one of those tools is the power of the reveal. Take something like The Sixth Sense, for example. I’m going to spoil it now, and I’m warning you in advance because that’s the decent thing to do, but I also know that it’s a relatively old and very well-known movie, so I’m not TOO worried about ruining it for anybody. Still, if you don’t know what happens, here’s your last chance to bow out.

“And they keep calling Chicago Style ‘casserole’.”
“What, do they think that’s an insult or something?”
“I guess.”

In this movie, a psychologist played by Bruce Willis attempts to help a boy played by Haley Joel Osment who believes he can see ghosts. Most of the movie focuses on Willis’s character as he tries to steer Osment through this bizarre ability of his and lead him to making peace with his strange power in the moments before the final revelation at the end – that Willis himself is a ghost, although he didn’t know it. 

It was a great moment, a fantastic surprise that not only made the movie exciting, but made viewers want to go back and watch it again to look for the many clues they missed the first time around. There’s a scene, for instance, where Willis is at dinner with his wife, talking to her as she grows frustrated and walks out on him. On first viewing, it seems as though she’s angry at him and is refusing to have a conversation, but watching it later it becomes clear that she can’t see or hear him, and what the audience thought was anger over his frequent absences is actually grief over his death. Once you realize that, you realize that NOBODY other than Osment’s character ever directly talks to or interacts with Willis in the entire film, a realization that is far more meaningful and rewarding the second time you watch it…IF you didn’t get it the first time.

Although writer/director M. Night Shyamalan has become something of a punchline in later years for an overreliance on twist endings like this one, this is the movie that made his career, and it was a hit for a reason. But if you go into the movie knowing that Willis is a ghost, you lose that shock at the end and, instead, spend the movie picking apart the little clues that are only intended to be significant in retrospect. 

What’s really weird is that Moonlighting had the same twist, but nobody ever caught on.

Or, to put it more simply, if a writer chooses to use a reveal in a story, they are doing so for a purpose. If that reveal is spoiled, you are both robbing the writer of the right to tell the story as they intend AND robbing the audience of the ability to enjoy the story as the writer wanted them to. Saying that if a spoiler ruins a story then it wasn’t a good story is like saying that if you make a pizza without sauce and it doesn’t taste right that means it wasn’t a good pizza. Maybe not, but if COULD have been if you hadn’t LEFT OUT A VITAL INGREDIENT.

What I’m getting down to is that avoiding spoilers should be a simple matter of common courtesy. If you want to get spoiled, you can. Fine. Go nuts. As I always say, it’s your life and you have the right to enjoy things the way you want, and my feelings about it should have no dominion over your own. However, when you throw around spoilers on social media or in a crowded room, you’re taking that same right away from other people. Not being able to go to the movies very often – especially to see R-rated movies – I knew I would be spoiled on Deadpool and Wolverine long before I actually got to watch it, and I was right. That movie is built on several surprise moments, with cameo appearances by actors and characters who haven’t been seen in Marvel movies in years, or in at least one case, ever. But I didn’t get to see the movie until four months after it hit theaters, and every cameo in the film had been spoiled for me before I got to see it. At this point I don’t even get angry anymore, just frustrated. I still enjoyed the movie, don’t get me wrong. I just know I would have enjoyed it MORE if I DIDN’T know that Lea Thompson was going to show up to reprise her role as Beverly from Howard the Duck.

“Well that’s on you, Blake,” someone says. “You should avoid those parts of social media.” By the way, if anybody ever figures out who this person is who keeps shouting out from the back of the room to interrupt my columns, let me know. He’s a jerk. The thing is, people drop these spoilers EVERYWHERE. It’s not like I’m part of a Deadpool Group on Facebook where I expect to get barraged by this stuff. It shows up in random posts on all social media. And even if I unplugged from social media entirely, that wouldn’t save me from things like the kid who walked into my classroom the day before the second Doctor Strange movie was released and – loudly – announced who one of the unrevealed characters was. 

To his credit, when he saw how angry I was, that kid at least had the decency to apologize. 

People shouldn’t have to spend their entire lives like Keanu Reeves in bullet time, twisting and contorting in midair to avoid having things ruined for them. Common courtesy should dictate that spoilers be restricted to a time and place where they are expected and welcome. 

Pictured: Logging on to Facebook the week any given Marvel movie is released.

All that said, there IS a statute of limitations here. People use common experiences – such as stories – as a shared reference point just as a basic element of communication. We aren’t quite as bad as the aliens on that one episode of Star Trek that communicated 100 percent via metaphor (the “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” episode – even if you don’t watch Trek, I guarantee you’ve heard the reference online), but we DO use our common experiences, including story, to relate to one another. Eventually, any story that is sufficiently popular enters the sphere of public knowledge, and it’s no longer reasonable to expect to remain spoiler-free. Another example from school – a few days ago my English class was discussing the way artificial intelligence is depicted in the media, and the movie The Matrix came up. I started to hem and haw a little bit, trying to talk about the movie without giving away anything important, until one of my students said, “Mr. Petit, that movie is 25 years old.” I thanked her for making me feel like Methuselah, but her point was well-made, and after that I stopped worrying about ruining the movie and just talked about it. The conversation went much better after that. 

But again, this is a movie that was released a quarter of a century ago. (If I have to feel like an old man when I think about The Matrix, so does everybody else.) I would never have done this with a movie that came out last year, let alone last month. And even if the movie WAS old, I wouldn’t do it if somebody had asked me not to.

What I’m calling for, my friends, is simple courtesy. If you don’t mind spoilers, fine. That’s your prerogative. But that doesn’t give you the right to ruin things for people who DO. Think before you spoiler. And the newer a movie or TV show is, think even harder. 

And here’s hoping I get around to season two of Squid Game before one of these kids ruins season three for me.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. In case you didn’t catch the joke, all of the spoilers he dropped in this column (except for the Sixth Sense example) were fake. Lea Thompson wasn’t in Deadpool and Wolverine. It was Lady Gaga.

Three Wishes: The Toys That Made Us

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A few days ago, a long national nightmare ended when Nacelle announced two new seasons of their hit documentary series, The Toys That Made Us. I became a huge fan of this series right away, and it’s been a long five years since we got any new episodes, so I’m absolutely ecstatic. To commemorate the news, I thought I would re-present to you a piece I wrote between seasons two and three for a sadly-defunct pop culture forum, a “Three Wishes” column where I suggested potential topics for future episodes. I’m happy to say that one of my three suggestions was included in season three, and the other two are going to be in the new episodes that were just announced, albeit in slightly different forms than what I suggested. It’s incredible that my ability to predict the future is incredibly accurate, provided that I only use it in ways that have absolutely no potential for monetary advancement on my part. Anyway, here’s what I wrote way back in 2018.

The best reason to subscribe to Netflix these days isn’t Orange is the New Black or Arrested Development. Heck, it’s not even Bright. The shining jewel in the streaming service’s crown is The Toys That Made Us, a documentary series that looks into the history and impact of some of the most popular toy lines of all time. With a lighthearted tone, the series dives into things that the viewer grew up with, chock full of interviews with the people who conceived the toys, creators who made the TV and comic book tie-ins, and supercollectors. Plus, you get all the classic toy commercials you grew up with.

The eight episodes, to date, have explored the worlds of Star Wars, Barbie, He-Man, G.I. Joe, Star Trek, TransFormers, LEGO, and Hello Kitty. That’s a ton of toyetic goodness. But if you’re like any other human being, you probably read that list and immediately asked, “Hey, what about…” and then filled in whatever your own favorite toy line is. That’s natural, there are hundreds of toy lines that have achieved enough success to have their fans, and while not all of them may have an incredible story to go with them, there are bound to be enough to fuel several more seasons of this show. Considering how popular and relatively cheap the show is to produce, Netflix would be bonkers not to ask for more. In Three Wishes, we take a look at something in pop culture and express three hopes for the future, whether those wishes are almost inevitable or pie-in-the-sky dreams. Today, we’re going to talk about three toy lines the producers should consider for their next round of episodes.

1. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The first choice here is pretty much a no-brainer. When you look at the independent comic book bubble of the 80s, it would be virtually impossible to argue that there was a bigger success than Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. From their humble beginnings as a parody of Frank Miller’s Daredevil, the Turtles exploded into a global phenomenon. Their comics, through countless relaunches and spin-offs, have been featured at no less than five publishers They’ve starred in five television series and six theatrical films, and most significantly, they have dominated toy shelves for years. 

Playmates Toys has held the Turtles license since 1988, producing thousands of action figures and playsets. In addition to the countless iterations of the Turtles themselves, there have been figures of their allies and foes, movie- and TV-specific versions, the turtles in costumes such as (not officially) the Universal Monsters and (officially) the cast of Star Trek, and pretty much any other piece of merchandising you can name. With a documentary, the challenge is to find what’s compelling in real life and push it to the forefront. Although I don’t know anything about the Playmates company or how they have worked with Eastman and Laird or the Turtles’ current owner, Nickelodeon, the sheer volume and popularity of this franchise seems like it would be a ripe property to focus on for 45 minutes. 

2. Toy Biz/Marvel Toys: On the other hand, here’s a property where there is undoubtedly enough drama to make for a compelling TV episode. It may be hard to believe today, but there was a time in the 90s where the future of Marvel Comics was in serious doubt. Bad business decisions and bad acquisitions sent the biggest comic book publisher in the industry spiraling into bankruptcy, and things looked bleak at the house that Spider-Man built.

One of the things that helped pull Marvel Comics through was an unexpected merger of sorts with Toy Biz, a Canadian-based company that had the license to make Marvel toys at the time. The story of the twisting, winding relationship between the companies has been written about extensively, but that doesn’t mean there’s not more gold to mine. I’d love to hear the story told by the players in the game, as we learn the truth about how, without this little toy company, Marvel Entertainment may not have lasted long enough to make your kids cry all the way home from Infinity War.

3: McDonald’s Happy Meal Toys: In my house, we have a term for people who didn’t love McDonald’s Happy Meal toys: filthy liars. Because no matter what kind of Keto-adherent, La Croix-chugging diet you may be on today, when you were a kid there was nothing better than a cheeseburger, fries, and a new toy. Since 1979, McDonald’s has released thousands of toys, from licensed Disney characters to Chicken McNuggets in Halloween costumes to the legendary McDonald’s Changeables (toys that transformed from McDonald’s food into robots. That I never completed this series is my one regret in life.)

Not only can’t the Happy Meal toy be beaten in sheer variety, but it’s also ubiquitous as anything you can imagine, touching virtually every child in North America for the last four decades. What’s more, some of them are insanely collectible. Give me a tour of some guy’s crazy attic Happy Meal museum and, I promise, I’m watching to the end. Let’s see if anybody feels that strongly about the Burger King Kids’ Club. (Answer: no.)

Blake M. Petit, whose college roommate once said he could never date a woman who didn’t “get” Grimlock, has been pontificating about pop culture online for over a decade. You can follow him at BlakeMPetit.com and, if you’re feeling generous, check out his books on Amazon.

Geek Punditry #57: Guilty Reality

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I’ve never really been a fan of the term “guilty pleasure.” It seems inherently reductive to me. It’s announcing to the world that you’re ashamed of something you like, but I don’t think anyone should have to feel that way. If you’re a grown-up who’s into Squishmallows, so what? Get yourself a Squishmallow. Tell your friends so they’ll load you down with them on your birthday. Why would that be anything to be embarrassed about? Adult Fans of Lego? We’re a thriving community. And if anybody tries to tell me that Bluey is “just a kid’s show,” I will personally offer to help them look for the soul they have obviously misplaced.

Don’t call yourself a dad if you can get through this episode without a lump in your throat.

That said, I do UNDERSTAND the idea of a guilty pleasure. There are some things that you enjoy that, for one reason or another, you feel like maybe you shouldn’t. It’s not a matter of shame for me, though, it’s more a question of why does this one thing, this piece of pop culture that includes so many elements that I usually find reprehensible, for some reason not only hold my attention, but leaves me thirsting for more? It’s not a guilty pleasure for me, it’s a confusing one. And here, of course, I am referring to the Peacock “reality” competition series, The Traitors. 

It’s kinda like Knives Out, only the characters aren’t as likable.

I’m not a huge fan of reality competition to begin with. I watched the first few seasons of Survivor back in the day, the show that popularized (if not outright invented) this hybrid game show and docudrama, in which people in competition with each other are also forced to live together. The thing that makes this type of show stand out is that we aren’t solely watching the competition, but also the lives of these people in-between the events. The thing that made the format revolutionary, though, is also the thing that turned me off. Those day-to-day moments became much darker. The contestants started to turn into vile, backstabbing jerks to each other, and it became increasingly difficult to pull for anybody. It wasn’t long before the majority of shows in this category were wiped clean from my viewing slate. Most of the reality competitions I watch these days are the ones that focus solely on the “competition” part, like The Great British Baking Show, Masterchef, LEGO Masters, or Crime Scene Kitchen. Without the manufactured drama between games to make people hate each other, these shows are much more pleasant to watch. In fact, there are plenty of times on British Baking Show where one contestant will drop what they’re doing to help out one of their OPPONENTS in a moment of need, an act of kindness and goodwill that on a show like Big Brother would result in somebody’s spleen being removed and served to the group for dinner with a light balsamic glaze. 

“It was kind of you to help Jeannie with her tartlet, but I’m afraid we WILL have to feed you to the leopard now.”

But back to The Traitors. Based (as so many of these things are) on a British series of the same name, when I heard about the first season a year ago I thought it would be worth a watch. The concept reminded me a little of one of the few reality competitions that I DID enjoy, The Mole. In that show, contestants worked together on a series of missions, with each success adding to the prize pot that would be awarded to the final victor at the end. One of them, however, was a “Mole” working for the producers and actively attempting to sabotage the others. This was a fun show in that the viewer got to play along, analyzing the clues and observing the behavior of the competitors in an attempt to figure out who the Mole was. Netflix brought that show back in 2022 for a reboot which worked well, although a promised second season has not yet materialized.

The Traitors is similar. Again, the competitors are working together to win challenges, and again, the prize money for each challenge goes into a pot to be awarded to the winners at the end. But there are several major differences. First of all, rather than a single Mole, a small group of the competitors are secretly chosen in the first episode to be the Traitors. And their task is NOT to sabotage the missions – in fact, it is in their best interest to see the missions succeed, because at the end of the game the prize will be split among the winners. If the non-traitors, or “Faithful,” manage to eliminate all of the Traitors by the end of the game, they win and those that lasted to the end share the pot. However, if even ONE Traitor remains at the end, then the Faithful get nothing and the money is divided among the remaining Traitors. Like most shows, each night the Faithful vote someone out, hoping like hell that they get one of the Traitors and not one of their own. But afterwards, the Traitors are allowed to choose a Faithful to “murder” and eliminate from the game.

Unlike The Mole, the audience is aware of who the Traitors are from the very beginning. We watch as they are chosen and we watch as they plan and scheme against the Faithful. We also watch the Faithful’s attempts to weed them out, which feel increasingly bizarre and nonsensical to those of us on the outside who already know the solution to the puzzle and can’t figure out how they could be so egregiously wrong. 

The big thing about The Traitors, though, is that when I tuned in to season one last year, about half of the contestants turned out to be veterans from various other reality competition series like Big Brother. They hadn’t played THIS game before, but they played similar ones, and they think they’re savvy enough to carry through to the end. Not being a fan of those shows, the personalities were blanks to me, but they were frequently shown acting as though they were experts or major stars. I was even more alarmed in season two when it turned out virtually EVERY competitor was a reality show vet, including some dude who unironically calls himself “Johnny Bananas.” These were people who had actually turned appearing on these shows into a career. Would I be able to handle this level of ego on my television?

This is what it looks like to be famous for being famous.

To my shock and confusion, the answer seems to be yes.

The show is incredibly backstabby, and the competitors take it super personally. I get that there’s a lot of money on the line, but to hear them talk about the Traitors as if they were Nazi war criminals instead of people trying to win a game show seems a bit much. Are they lying? Sure – but in the context of the game I don’t really see that as any more unethical than bluffing at poker. Are they kicking out innocent people? Absolutely – because they have to do that in order to win the game. It’s in the DNA of the thing. And yet the Faithful seem to talk as though they were literal thieves and murderers. I want to go up to some of these competitors and ask them what they think THEY would be doing had they been chosen to be Traitors, and wait to hear them try to do ethical backflips to try to avoid conceding that they would behave precisely the same way. In both seasons so far (season two is only six episodes in, as I write this), I have found myself surprisingly rooting for the Traitors to win, because the level of rage and invective that comes from the Faithful actually makes the Traitors seem like far more agreeable people. Also because the Faithful are unbearably stupid.

I need to correct that. It’s not really fair to call them unbearably stupid. It’s the way these shows are made. The producers prod the contestants to say certain things and act certain ways, and then they take their performances and edit them down, taking whatever reality exists on the set and shaving it away to sculpt them into characters: this is the arrogant guy, this is the ditzy girl, this is the narcissist, this is the bitch. Actually, on The Traitors, they seem to sculpt multiple bitches. But the point is, I am aware that the figures I see on the screen are not the people that they really are, but rather who the producers of the show want me to THINK they are. So the accurate thing to say is that the producers want me to THINK the Faithful are unbearably stupid.

“Okay, Kate, tell us again how smart you are. But…maybe don’t try to spell it this time.”

I know it’s easy for me, from my perch on the couch knowing exactly who the “bad guys” are, to laugh at the wrong avenues the Faithful follow to try to capture them, but even without that filter, I just don’t see how a lot of their tactics make sense. In the first episode, the Traitors are selected duck-duck-goose style, blindfolded, as the host of the show walks around the room and taps the chosen on the shoulder. As soon as the blindfolds come off, before even the Traitors have a chance to find out who the other Traitors are, the accusations begin. “This guy breathed funny.” “I’m getting Traitor vibes from her.” “I’ve been suspicious of him since DAY ONE.” Dude, it’s Day Two. Stop acting like that’s impressive. 

Another contestant gets confused by one of the Traitor’s “victims” and, unable to figure out why they killed that person, declares that the Traitors must be really stupid. This person who has utterly failed to track down a single one of the Traitors and has voted out several innocent people in the effort, helping their cause all along, is calling THEM stupid. I wanted to throw something at the TV.

One contestant is determined that “The Traitor HAS to be an Alpha Male.” Why? Because other Alpha Males are among his “victims.” This is ludicrous for various reasons. First of all, the Faithful are aware that there are, in fact, multiple Traitors. Second, the whole “Alpha Male” concept in and of itself is a myth. Even the biologists who first coined the term among wolves later dismissed it, saying they had misinterpreted the data, but the idea lingers. I’ve always thought that anyone who refers to himself as an “Alpha Male” as some sort of badge of honor is someone not worth paying attention to, but I suppose I need to extend that policy to include anyone who uses the term “Alpha Male” in an attempt to identify a fake murder suspect on reality television.

So I watch each episode, worried that the Faithful will get dumber and dumber and hoping that the Traitors – who damn it all, I actually like – can pull it off. I watch as the strategies learned from being on Survivor and Big Brother and The Challenge and The Bachelor inevitably fail, I watch as assorted Real Housewives decide which clique they’re going to be in, I watch as the only people with common sense are targeted by the rest of the Faithful and voted off the show, and I ask myself why the hell I keep watching this?

Gotta be because Alan Cumming is the host.

I’m not saying that this guy not coming back is the REASON X-Men 3 sucked, but it sure didn’t help.

As another great fictional detective, Benoit Blanc, once observed, “It makes no damn sense. Compels me, though.”

There’s nothing else I can say to explain why I keep watching The Traitors.

Or why I can’t wait for season three.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, now complete on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He’s about to start Tweeting at Netflix to find out when the hell The Mole is coming back.

Geek Punditry #39: In a Streaming World, Does Size Matter?

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Two years ago, in a move that made pundits across the world scratch their heads and say, “Well how the hell did that happen?”, Netflix purchased the Roald Dahl Story Company. This trust, of course, is responsible for the works of the creator of such things as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and that one short story about the snake. At the time, Netflix announced that this acquisition would lead to the development of their own shared universe, copying the Marvel Method just like everybody else has been trying to do for the last decade. So far, though, we haven’t seen a ton of stuff that feels like it’s part of that world. We’ve gotten a film version of the theatrical Matilda: The Musical, and later this year they’re going to release Wonka, an origin story for a character that Tim Burton definitively proved in his film version has absolutely no need for an origin story, but not much else.

Pictured: Much Else.

Earlier this week, though, Netflix surprised us all by dropping The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, a film based on one of Dahl’s short stories. The movie is directed by Wes Anderson (who also directed the Dahl adaptation The Fantastic Mr. Fox back in 2009) and stars Benedict Cumberbatch as a compulsive gambler who finds a secret to a mysterious power that could potentially make him the wealthiest man in the world. Despite a premise that could easily go very, very dark, the film (and the story it is based on) is remarkably sweet and optimistic, lacking the cynicism that so often creeps in when modern filmmakers attempt to adapt a classic piece of literature that didn’t have a lot of cynicism in the first place. It’s very much a Wes Anderson film, carrying on an odd obsession with films mimicking stage plays that we also saw in his recent feature Asteroid City. The sets of the film are flown in and out in full view of the cameras, the majority of dialogue is spoken directly to the viewer as if the actors were narrating a play, and even visual effects are done in a dime-and-nickel fashion, such as making a character “levitate” by having the actor sit on a box painted to match the set behind him. It’s weird and bizarre and utterly delightful.

It’s also only 39 minutes long.

Although originally presumed to be a feature film when announced, Anderson quickly corrected people, saying that it’s actually the first of four shorts he is making adapting various Dahl stories for Netflix. True, 39 minutes is longer than most of us think of as a “short” film (the classic Looney Tunes shorts were usually in the seven-minute range, and even the Three Stooges rarely broke 20), but it’s certainly not long enough to qualify as a feature film, which has to hit at least 80 minutes to be worthy of consideration. We’ve all seen poorly-made films that pad out their running time to hit that mark, in some extreme cases even running the credits at an excruciatingly slow pace just to cross that 80-minute finish line. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences officially defines a short film as running no longer than 40 minutes, including credits, so Anderson got in just under the wire if he’s looking for Oscar consideration, which I’m sure Netflix would LOVE. 

“That’s 43 minutes, Wes. Ya gotta chop four more if you’re gonna party with this guy.”

The odd thing is, as recently as 10 years ago, a film of this nature would have struggled to find a home. Since the end of the era of true theatrical shorts (an era I long for, an era I would dearly love to see return), a lot of theaters never would have run one as long as Henry Sugar. The only way such a film would get any theatrical showing would be in a showcase of short films, which wouldn’t be in wide release, or as part of an anthology of shorts, which historically have not performed all that well. As far as a TV release, it could possibly be aired as a “special,” but would certainly be cut up to add commercial breaks, and possibly even cut down to make room for more commercials. At any rate, stopping a film of this nature to show an ad for Tide Pods would be absolutely gutting to the flow and pace, and make for a far less enjoyable experience than watching it all in one go, like a stage play, as Anderson intended.

Netflix is honestly the perfect home for a film of this nature, and it’s not just this one. Although I have many issues and concerns with the streaming culture that we all live in nowadays, one of the main advantages I think it has given us is the freedom to make a film as long or as short as necessary to tell the story. 

Many people get twitchy at the prospect of watching a movie that’s “too long” (these people usually define that as anything north of 90 minutes). I don’t know if it’s a short attention span or a bladder that just can’t wait, but once they see that runtime creep towards 130, 140 or higher, there are lots of people who would rather skip the whole experience. I have no problem with a long movie – most of my favorites would fall into this category, in fact – so long as the story justifies the length. I hear people complain about the length of the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films, for example, but I’ve never been given a satisfactory answer when I ask them what they think could be cut for time without damaging the story. This is why miniseries became so popular in the 80s and 90s, giving more time to adapt a novel that couldn’t fit into a two-hour theatrical experience. It’s why full television series are now being based on books, things like Game of Thrones or Outlander, stories that just flat-out couldn’t squeeze into a movie. And this is, for the most part, a positive thing.

A priceless moment of cinema.

The opposite is also true, however. If stretching out a movie longer than it should be is dull, padding a short movie to make it feature length is deadly. As an avid and enthusiastic moviegoer, I’ve probably seen hundreds of films in theaters over the course of my life, and one of the few times I can remember ever actually falling asleep was in the 2001 film Imposter. (Side note: pound for pound, boring movies are even worse than bad movies. A boring action movie is simply unforgivable.) The film was about an alien race using androids as hidden human bombs trying to attack Earth, and Gary Sinese’s desperate attempt to prove he was not one of these living bombs. It’s a good concept, and Sinese is a great actor, so it’s almost criminal how unbearably dull that film is. I was baffled as to how such an excruciatingly boring movie could be made…until I found out that it was originally made as a short film, part of an anthology of science fiction stories, and it was then expanded out to feature length. If you carved out the parts of the movie that were part of the original short, you may have had a good, taut sci-fi thriller, but by adding additional unnecessary scenes to essentially triple the length of the film, it’s as entertaining as watching Hollywood accountants try to lie about how much money a movie made. 

This movie, for instance, made at least twelve bucks while I took a nap.

Telling a short story is an art that requires different skills than longform stories. The tools are the same, but you wield them differently. A long story can spend time developing plot AND character AND setting AND mood AND theme, whereas shorter works often have to settle for focusing on just one or two of the elements. When it’s done well, it can be a masterpiece. But even those masterpieces can be damaged if you go back and start adding things that don’t belong. It’s like taking a VW Beetle, cutting it in half, and inserting a segment from a stretch limousine. You’ve taken two perfectly good automobiles and turned them into an abomination that doesn’t belong on the road.

It’s hard to make a feature film out of a short story, because by definition, those stories are intended to be short. It CAN be done very well, of course. Several of Stephen King’s short stories have been made into solid features – 1408, the original Children of the Corn, and by all accounts the new adaptation of The Boogeyman (I haven’t seen it yet but I hear very good things about it) each took a brief story and expanded it into features that are engaging and entertaining. On the other hand, sometimes the filmmakers can’t quite build a feature out of a short story, giving us lesser offerings like The Mangler. And sometimes they just try to trade on the name and make no effort at adapting the story at all, and here I of course am referring to Lawnmower Man.

Children’s books are frequent victims of this problem. Books for kids – especially picture books for young children – may only have enough story to last 20 minutes or so. But if you want a theatrical release, that just ain’t long enough, and you have to start inventing stuff out of whole cloth. Sometimes it works. Dreamworks took two short children’s books – Shrek and How to Train Your Dragon – and turned them into flourishing franchises by using the book more as inspiration than a blueprint. On the other hand, look at the awful efforts that the late Dr. Seuss has been subjected to. There have been two separate feature films based on How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and both of them suffer from inflation and unnecessary backstory. What Chuck Jones nailed in 26 minutes, Ron Howard and Jim Carrey puffed out to a painful 104. 

The less said about The Cat in the Hat, the better.

Scientific proof that bigger isn’t always better.

The streaming world has changed this paradigm, though. Previously, there were only two “acceptable” outlets for a film: television or theatrical release. Sure, direct-to-video was a thing, but those usually tried to emulate theatrical movies in form, either to fool people or to maintain an air of respectability. But whether you were making a project for theaters or TV, either way you were chained by scheduling in one way or another. In traditional ad-supported television, almost anything you make has to fit perfectly into a strict schedule of 30 or 60-minute blocks, minus an exact amount of time for commercials. Deviation is not tolerated, because we have to fit in a very specific amount of advertising time. Even premium cable channels, which are not beholden to advertisers, often use that 30-minute grid for scheduling, then pad out the remaining time with promos for their own networks so they can start the next movie or TV show on the hour.

Theatrical movies have a little more wiggle room – there isn’t a hard and fast rule that a movie has to be EXACTLY 90 minutes – but there are still parameters that have to be adhered to. If a movie is less than 80 minutes, theater chains usually won’t run it, as filmgoers will be disappointed at spending $127 on tickets, candy, and soda to take their family out to see something that’s over in under an hour and a half. On the other hand, the longer a movie is, the fewer times a day it can be shown, meaning fewer tickets sold, which again makes theater owners hesitate unless it’s a film they feel is a guaranteed blockbuster. Marvel movies can get away with a longer runtime because they historically bring big box office. Oscar bait dramas can do so as well, particularly if they come from a major studio. But if you’ve got a no-name director, no big stars, and aren’t tied to a recognizable IP, showing up at AMC with your 3-hour long epic about the Battle of New Orleans probably isn’t going to fly.

But on Netflix, Prime Video, or any of the other bajillion streaming services, neither of these factors need to be considered. A viewer doesn’t have to be in front of their TV at 8 o’clock because that’s when their favorite show airs anymore. They don’t have to show up at the theater at 6:45 to get settled in before the previews roll at 7, and they don’t have to worry about running out in the middle of the film to feed the parking meter because Kumquat Warriors 7: The Kumquatening is a longer movie than the previous three combined. In a streaming world there is no reason to make a movie or TV show any longer or shorter than is necessary to effectively tell the story. 

By the time Avatar 4 comes out, you’re gonna need to get a hotel room for the night to finish it.

Streaming series have been running with this a lot. Although they still kinda aim for the old TV paradigm of half-hour comedies and one-hour dramas, they aren’t strict about it. If an episode takes 37 minutes instead of 30, no big deal. If it only reaches 48 minutes instead of 60, we can let it slide. The series The Orville, for its most recent season, jumped from the Fox broadcast network to the Hulu streaming service, and once they were no longer locked in to 42 minutes of show plus 18 for commercials, they delivered an entire season of episodes that went well over an hour. Several of them are long enough that they could have been released as theatrical films. And for the most part, they were very entertaining and compelling, using the freedom of the format to great effect.

And while movies can have the freedom to get longer, things like Henry Sugar are demonstrating that the real freedom is to get shorter. In 2020, in the midst of the Covid lockdowns, Rob Savage made a horror film called Host. The film used the lockdown to great effect, telling a story of a group of friends on a zoom meeting that accidentally summon a dangerous spirit. Shudder picked the movie up and it became a cult hit, despite the fact that the running time is only 57 minutes. This is a film that never could have found a theatrical release without adding a half-hour of fluff, but the streaming world allowed Savage to just tell his story as he saw fit, and that gave it wings that it wouldn’t have had with any traditional distribution model.

To be fair, though, most of us feel this way if we need to attend a Zoom meeting for work.

There are a lot of things about the streaming world that concern me – I’ve mentioned many of them before. But if there’s one thing that is definitely positive about it, it’s the fact that time constraints are largely a thing of the past. The freedom to tell a story in the most effective way without trying to adhere to largely arbitrary rules of running time has already produced some really great content. The important thing is that a filmmaker is allowed to include whatever is necessary but not forced to add things that don’t matter, and that path (in the hands of a skilled crew) will make better movies. If there’s nothing else we can learn, it’s that when it comes to telling a good story, size isn’t what matters at all.  

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He‘s hoping that this season’s finale of Lego Masters has a seven-hour streaming cut.

Geek Punditry #27: Death and Taxes-A Streaming Crisis

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A few days ago, between eating entirely too much barbecue and trying to figure out if there was room for apple pie, my sister and I were talking about movies and TV shows we’d recently watched with our kids. She mentioned a Disney+ original film called Crater, a science fiction adventure about a bunch of kids living on a lunar mining colony. I’d heard of the film before, and I thought it would be something that my son might have an interest in, at least the spaceship parts, and made a note to check it out soon. Unfortunately, “soon” didn’t turn out to be soon enough, because the next day word came down that Crater was being removed from the platform less than two months after its release, and would no longer be available anywhere.

Turns out the title was actually a reference to the film’s chances.

This isn’t the only Disney+ original to get this treatment. The Willow series, canceled after just one season, was also unceremoniously axed, as well as the quirky documentary The World According to Jeff Goldblum, among others. Nor is Disney+ the only streaming platform to do such a thing in recent months. Netflix has removed shows such as Hemlock Grove, Hulu quietly evaporated Y: The Last Man, and before they dropped the “HBO” from their name, HBO Max made headlines by removing a lot of content, including the almost-finished but now never-to-be-seen Batgirl movie starring Leslie Grace and the most beloved man on the Internet, Brendan Fraser. 

If the new Betty White couldn’t save that movie, nothing could.

There have been various reasons given for these cancellations: merchandising revenue losses, a lack of viewers, to avoid paying royalties or residuals to the people involved, or most egregiously, some of them were cut so that the studio could use the massive cost of production as a tax write-off to counteract losses elsewhere in the company. Whatever the specific reason, they all boil down to the same thing: the studio believes they can somehow make more money by erasing these films and TV series and pretending they never existed than they can by allowing them to remain on the streamer. 

I am not an economist. I don’t pretend to understand exactly how these things work. What I’m seeing is that we are once again seeing creative work being strangled in the name of the bottom line.

Now let me be clear about this: no, I’m not an economist, but I’m not an idiot either. I know that it’s called show business for a reason, and I accept that the people putting out the money have to make money back if they’re going to keep doing it. There are few things in the universe I find stupider than when someone says that an artist or a writer should just do their creative work “for the art” and not worry about the money, as if artists and writers are somehow immune to the need to eat. These things need to turn a profit one way or another, and I’m okay with that in principle. I just wish they would find some way to do it that doesn’t come at the expense of the people who make the damn things.

I write. I try to write every day. And I’m not doing it just because it feels good to push buttons on a keyboard, I do it because I want people (like you) to read what I have to say. When I hear about things like what happened to Crater, I’m thinking about the people who wrote the movie, the director who steered the ship, the actors who performed in it, the set designers and special effects artists and musicians and everybody else who bled for that film, believing that their work would be out there for the world to watch whenever they wanted…except now it’s not available anywhere. That has to be gut-wrenching. Even if a movie or TV show is canceled because it’s objectively terrible, I feel for the people involved. Nobody tries to make a bad movie, after all. I can’t imagine anybody who walks on to a set thinking, “Let’s make this puppy suck.” They’re doing what they can to make an entertaining product so that it will be seen. Even the infamous 1994 Fantastic Four movie isn’t immune to this principle. The movie was literally rushed out as quickly as possible so that the studio wouldn’t lose the rights to the franchise, never having any intention of actually releasing it…but none of the people making the movie knew that. They did the best they could, and honestly, crappy special effects aside, they’ve done better than anyone else with the FF in live action so far. 

That’s not even a joke. This is literally the best we’ve had so far.

The issue here is that streaming services are bleeding money. None of them, not even the juggernauts, are making enough to cover the costs of the original content they’re creating, and that’s largely in part to the way the streaming universe has bifurcated. It wasn’t so bad when it was just Netflix, Hulu, and Prime Video, and pretty much everything you wanted to find was on one of those if it was anywhere. But then we saw the tentacles begin to reach out as nearly every studio or network decided to create its own service instead of signing with one of the existing streamers: Disney+, Max, Paramount+, Britbox, AMC+, Shudder, ESPN+, Screambox, Apple TV+, Peacock, MGM+…not only did it quickly get unwieldy, but it’s terribly frustrating how over fifty percent of them just stole the “Plus” from Disney rather than trying to come up with an original name. 

Pick one. I dare you.

There are simply too many streamers for the average person to keep up with. Even if they had the money for them all (which the average person does not), keeping track of what’s streaming where or what services have the shows and movies you actually want to watch is getting to be a full-time job. What’s more, there’s the question of signing up for a service just for one series or one movie – nobody sane would do that, right? So instead, people sign up for the free trial and binge what they want, then cancel once they’re finished. The streamers obviously don’t make money that way, and if they don’t make their money they’re not going to keep doing it. 

Let’s look at the biggest recent example. Paramount+ (previously CBS All-Access) was, frankly, the house that Star Trek built. The big selling point for the streamer when it launched was that it had every episode of every Star Trek series, and that furthermore, it was going to be launching several new Trek series, bringing it back to television for the first time since the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise twelve years prior. And for a few years, it was working out okay…until a few weeks ago when Paramount announced that the animated series Star Trek: Prodigy was being canceled, that the almost-finished second season would not be shown on the service, and that the existing first season would be removed. And before you could blink your eyes, the crew of the USS Protostar was GONE.

Cheer up, guys. They cancelled Kirk’s show too. Twice.

Now everyone who reads this column knows I’m a Trek nerd. In fact, my inaugural Geek Punditry column was all about how awesome the first season of Prodigy was. So nobody is going to be surprised to learn I’m upset about this. But I’ll bet I’m nowhere near as upset as the cast and crew of that series.

Something funny happened once Prodigy was removed, though. Within 48 hours, the Blu-Ray of the first season was sold out at Amazon, Target, Walmart, Best Buy…pretty much anywhere you can buy Blu-Rays. Sadly, the Blu-Ray only had the first half of the first season, not the second set of 10 episodes, not the cliffhanger ending that may never be resolved now. But the fans mobilized and actually spent the money, which is what Paramount wanted in the first place.

Streaming is a great thing in terms of convenience. It’s fantastic to be able to pull up any episode of Star Trek (except for those 20 episodes of Prodigy) from my remote control without worrying about changing discs or tracking down when it’s going to be broadcast. But as if we didn’t know it already, the unstable landscape of the streaming world means that no matter how much you love something, it can be taken away at the whim of some studio accountant. Supporting the things you love, while important, is only ever going to be part of the equation. What I think we’ve all learned here is that having a permanent way to keep them is more important than ever.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. After he heard about Prodigy getting the ax, he added all of the Star Trek Blu-Rays he didn’t already own to his Amazon wish list. Can you blame him?

Geek Punditry #3: Beware the Binge

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“I’m not going to start watching a show on Netflix. They’re just going to cancel it anyway.”

Everyone reading this, I promise, has heard someone on social media (or maybe in real life, if you’re the sort of person who has such a thing) echo that very sentiment recently. Every time a new show hits, someone says it. Every time a show gets canceled, someone says it. Every time I go through the drive-through at Wendy’s someone says it, which is actually kind of weird and makes me wonder if they’re still having staffing issues. But the point is, I get it. In this day and age, when television has become more more serialized and most shows – even half-hour comedies – have ongoing story arcs that play out across a season or even across an entire series, there are few things more frustrating to a television fan than getting invested in a series, watching their way through the end of the first season, feeling their pulse race with the cliffhanger finale, and then learning that there will never be a season two. 

The blame for this is usually placed on Netflix itself (although they’re hardly the only culprit), and while I agree that Netflix deserves a lion’s share of the culpability, I don’t think it’s for the reason most people usually mean. 

The assumption people have is that Netflix is just impatient. They won’t give people a chance to find a show and get to enjoy it. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening, not exactly. Netflix (and most streaming services) rarely release their actual numbers, so it’s hard to say with any degree of certainty how many people are watching any given show or how quickly, but a hypothesis has been making the rounds that I think is worth examining. Some shows are getting the axe despite seemingly large numbers, while others with smaller viewership are being allowed to continue, a practice that doesn’t seem to make any sense if you consider it series-by-series. It makes a lot more sense, though, if you look at it episode-by-episode.

What seems to be happening is that Netflix is basing their decisions not on total numbers of hours watched, as people tend to assume, but by how many people finish a season. If, for example, 20 million people watch the first episode of Mind Your Manners With Simon Cowell, that sounds better than the 15 million who watched the first episode of Toenail Fungus Finds of Eastern Europe, right? 

But keep watching the numbers. How do they trend? What percentage of that original number stuck it out to the end? If, by the end of the season, Toenail Fungus has retained 11 million viewers, but Simon Cowell has dropped down to 4 million, what makes more sense to renew? People who skipped out on Simon after three episodes are far less likely to come back for a theoretical second season than the much larger number of people who stuck around to find out exactly what kind of mold was growing under Slobodan Milosevic’s left pinky toe in the pulse-pounding season finale. 

The practical result of this is that shows that don’t get binged heavily in the first couple of weeks are far less likely to get invited back, and this is where that conventional wisdom comes back into play. Shows are not being given time to find an audience, you’re right. But the solution here is not to require every damn person on the planet to binge every show the second it hits the streamer. Doing things that way makes it far, far harder for a show to get traction unless it’s based on an existing IP like Wednesday. Something like The Midnight Club may be every bit as worthy of getting a new season, but as it doesn’t have that built-in fanbase, the chances of it hitting the same way are much worse. 

There are exceptions, of course. Stranger Things and Squid Game are both shows that seemingly came out of nowhere and had no ties (other than thematic ones) to previous movies, characters or TV shows that could have carried over their audience – but they’re called exceptions for a reason. For each of those, how many series like The October Faction, Cursed or Archive 81 have suffered an ignoble death?

There is a solution to this problem, but Netflix doesn’t want to hear it. In fact, I think a lot of you reading this right now will be horrified at the suggestion. But I’m going to say it anyway.

You know how to deal with the problem of people not binging shows quickly enough to save them?

Stop making shows bingeable. 

Excuse me, I need to go wash the tomatoes people just hurled at me from my hair and clothes.

But I’m serious about this. The problem is that Netflix is basing their decisions on how many people watch an entire season of a series in X amount of days, with X being some magical number they’re not going to tell us but which was clearly too small to save Jupiter’s Legacy. And as it seems these shows are getting cut faster and faster, you cannot blame any viewer for deciding not to invest their time, which means that the new shows won’t have anyone to watch them and then they’ll get cut too, and now we’re just in a never ending loop of cancellation and misery, like being back in high school, but sandwiched between a baking show and a murder documentary. 

But let’s look at other streamers. Netflix isn’t the only game in town anymore, after all, and few of their competitors have suffered from this same cancellation outrage. So what’s the difference?

Part of the problem is that tiny little “X” number – expecting people to find a show, binge a show, talk about a show, and then expand the audience in a remarkably short period of time. It’s really hard, and considering just how many entertainment options now exist, it’s nearly impossible. But look at the Marvel or Star Wars shows on Disney+, or the assorted Star Trek series on Paramount+. Not only are people watching, but people are talking about them. And not just for the days or (in rare cases) weeks of a Netflix hit, but for months. What’s the difference?

Disney and Paramount release their series the old-fashioned way: one episode a week. And that lets the audience find the show in a way that Netflix’s “drop ’em all right now” model never will.

How many Star Wars fans, disgruntled by Disney’s cinematic output, had to be convinced to try the likes of The Mandalorian or Andor? How many Star Trek fans immediately dismissed Prodigy or Lower Decks for being animated series until other fans persuaded them to give them a chance? If they had been released the Netflix way, the conversation would have ended in a few days, and a lot of people would never have given these shows a try.

It’s not a perfect analogy, I admit, because those are shows based on existing – and, let’s be honest, massive — IPs, but it still demonstrates something. I hear people talking about these shows not just on the weekend after they’re released, but for months. Love them or hate them, these series have people engaged for a very long time, posting about them on social media, writing thinkpieces, and making memes. And every week, when a new episode comes out, the cycle repeats. This doesn’t happen with a binge show. Even Wednesday, Netflix’s most recent hit, had a quick surge of popularity, a lot of people talking about a dance sequence, and that one meme with Wednesday Addams next to a girl who looks like Luna Lovegood crossed with Phoebe Buffay, and then…it kinda dried up. Sure, people liked the show. Sure, people are looking forward to season two. But nobody is talking about it anymore right now, less than two months after it dropped. 

Compare that to the third season of Star Trek: Picard, which I guarantee will have people on the internet wildly pontificating for the entire ten weeks it’s on the air. And love it or hate it, they’re going to come back every Thursday for the next episode and do it all over again. And while they’re talking, other people will hear them, and the more people who hear them, the more people are likely to watch it, and that’s where the binging comes in. 

I’m not going to pretend I don’t binge watch. Of course I do, it’s 2023, it’s how media is consumed now. But for a new series it’s just not an effective strategy. Pre-streaming shows like Lost or How I Met Your Mother built their audience because fans got invested in the story, the characters, and the mystery, and they came back to talk about them again week after week, season after season. They shared their theories, they wrote fanfiction, they drew pictures of their favorite characters and, most importantly, they told other people how much they loved their favorite shows for a very, very long time. And say what you will about how those respective shows ended, they still have devoted and passionate fan bases that will spend more time talking about them than anyone is spending on Uncoupled. The ability to binge is a great tool for new fans, to get people who are discovering a show later to catch up and to join in on the fun. But as a way of kicking a series off? It’s like Netflix is Lucy holding the football and Inside Job is Charlie Brown, running in for his chance without realizing it’s already a lost cause.

Abandoning the binge-release model won’t save every deserving show, of course. Even in the days before streaming there were lots of great shows that never got past a first season, including some that weren’t even on the Fox Network. And sure, some viewers have no patience for the weekly release anymore, but I sincerely believe that the potential audience that never gets to find these shows under the current system outnumbers the people who will refuse to watch just because they can’t do it all at once.

So there’s my challenge, Netflix. Instead of dropping full seasons in 2023, try doing an episode a week. Then look at how many viewers make it to the end. 

And then maybe give The Joel McHale Show With Joel McHale another chance, would you?

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He hasn’t actually gotten around to Wednesday season one yet, if we’re being perfectly honest here.