Between Bag End & Orodruin

There was a time not too long ago (1990’s & early 2000’s) when a TV series had a season to warm up. Not only that, a Season was a good 20+ episodes. A series had time to grow, find it’s feet and an audience had time to see the multi-dimensionality of characters, and the ideas the series was trying to explore.

There’s no doubt these days that’s not the case. It’s all about Lowest Common Denominator – LCD (and not the screen). Series with any real intellectual and creative stimulation are ruthlessly “euthanised” because audiences in general clearly can’t deal well with show’s that don’t spoon feed them every thought and emotion. Couple that with a medium rigidly unresponsive to the way a large number of viewer wish to absorb the media (i.e. WHEN AND WHERE they desire. Instead of embracing new opportunities to let viewers enjoy shows, studios continue to try to tie their viewers down to schedules that don’t mesh with their daily lives.

It seems we’re in the decade of no imagination or creativity at all. A significant number of movies are poor remakes of classics or cult favourites. Even series are beginning to follow suite. Is it that Studios believe that there is no one alive that remembers the originals? There are some that clearly attempt to ride the fame of their antecedents, and then make a mockery of them. Effects don’t make up for creativity and challenging your audience. Clearly the Electronic Games Industry is following in it’s cousin’s footsteps with many pretenders and few rebels.

My TV has been nothing but a “display for more than fifteen years. I don’t even think about what’s on TV, don’t use it for “news” or any other type of information. In fact I find a TV on and displaying a transmitted show invariably annoying to the extreme. Not only is the content utterly appalling for the most part, but insulting. Certainly I watch products generated by the industry, but for so long I’ve chosen a “removed” mode like many others. Pay TV went that 15 odd years ago when they started advertising. The only possible thing that could persuade me to engage that service is if I could literally pay for the 4 or 5 stations I might likely watch on a regular basis. I don’t want 20 channels of rubbish, just so I can have 3 or 4 reasonable ones to try and pick some content from that I can choose to watch at a time of my choosing.

Equally I’ve tired to a large degree of buying many PC games. Copy Protection has become so annoying that I can’t be bothered taking chances on many games I’ve not researched and clearly have a strong pedigree or some outstanding feature. And just because I’m not buying a lot of games doesn’t mean I’m pirating them. I honestly can’t even remember the last time I “evaluated” in any form other than a demo.