I’m about halfway through “Cloud Atlas” and it might end up being my favorite novel of all-time (!), though I’m not quite certain yet. Depends on how well David Mitchell sticks the landing at the end with all these interwoven plots; they’re all obviously connected somehow, even if only loosely.

Each story has been better than the last so far, I must say. The first one (the first 40 or so pages) is a little difficult to get through; much of the language is outright bizarre. Once you get to the second one though, Robert Frobisher’s (the POV character) prose paints such beautiful mental pictures, reminding me of one of those “The Age of Innocence”-esque romantic drama movies they used to make a lot of in the 80s and 90s (before the “mid-budget” film collapsed within Hollywood).

I just finished the third part, the Luisa Rey one, and it plays out as this extraordinarily riveting espionage thriller. I was rushed this morning because I had to just go ahead and finish that section all in one sitting (I read w/ breakfast before the gym). I couldn’t put it down once it was nearing its end.

Brilliant, brilliant work, I highly recommend it.

>It’s unfair to people who can’t afford to have multiple services.

Have you heard of the Seven Seas streaming service by any chance? It’s completely free and it has every mainstream show in existence on it. You should check it out.

I’m too lazy to articulate why but this is really bleak to me.

That show was a mess imo but I’m glad other people enjoyed it. I didn’t get past the second episode.

Haven’t watched it tbh but the near-unanimous consensus seems to be that after S1, the answer to that is definitely no until S4, at which point it was too late to rescue its own reputation.

Viewership declined after S2 and absolutely plummeted after S3.

Zaslav has yet to cancel a good show.

S1 is a good show, so this was safe.

Exactly. Every single decision Zaslav has made so far has been an excellent business decision. The problem is it’s not favorable to people wanting a shitty straight-to-streaming capeflick with atrocious test scores and TWO $100-200m budgeted esoteric sci-fi series with poor ratings.

What, specifically, is not going well in your opinion?

Luther too, as well as Steven Knight’s A Christmas Carol, HBO’s Empire Falls, and Netflix’s Dracula. I love me a great miniseries I can watch all in one evening.

Same

All of those shows get solid viewership for their budgets or you can be confident Zaslav would’ve axed them. The budget level is key, Westworld and Raised By Wolves are held to different standards than Succession (which had better ratings than either of the former this season lol).

>I can elaborate, but I'm currently watching something and my fingers are tired. lol. I wished you'd caught me on a day where I could debate this for hours.

Bruh put your phone down when you’re watching something! (unless it’s trash lol)

Lmao more content doesn’t literally = better, otherwise you could take that to the extreme and just upload random hour-long videos of paint drying on the studio walls or something. Netflix has clearly taken the quantity over quality approach and is now getting burned a bit for it, both in long-term brand image and short-term Wall Street metrics. Disney is now feeling the effects of this too where we’re starting to see that the average consumer no longer sees the “Marvel” and “Star Wars” brands as special and “event-worthy” bc of the 27 Disney+ series they release each year for each franchise.

Disney is blatantly gunning to win the streaming wars race, or at least be left standing with Netflix and 2-3 others when the “streaming bubble” inevitably pops in a couple years, so perhaps they have no choice. But other studios have recognized this and that’s why you don’t see Universal developing Jurassic World or F&F series for Peacock, for instance.

Apple TV+ is also clearly playing the “quality over quantity” approach, and yeah they’ve had to be patient bc they had no back catalog, but their patience (in not rushing out dogshit) is being rewarded with people finally coming around to seeing that almost all of their shows are at least good, maybe as many as 1/3 are brilliant, and their subscriber count is going up as a result.

I won’t downvote you for your opinion (not what that function’s for), but you may get them, as you’re definitely in the minority there lol.

Case in point: The Witcher. The haters put me off of it for years despite my love for Henry Cavill and a premise that sounded cool. Finally started it a few days ago, absolutely love it so far. It’s not a Mad Men-level masterpiece in storytelling or anything, but ridiculously enjoyable 4/5 television for me. Surprisingly brutal fight sequences, lavish visuals, solid acting, and even (hot take!) solid writing.

Wish I’d started it sooner but I’m kinda glad I’ll finish it right before Blood Origin comes out on my birthday (along w/ Amazon’s Jack Ryan, another show Reddit hates but that I really like!)

Lol, the doomsday narrative around Zaslav has gotten stale. He’s already publicly committed to letting HBO continue being HBO by extending Casey Bloys’ contract being one of the very first things he did when he took over. He’s renewed everything that’s worth renewing (Succession, Barry, Industry, Euphoria, HOTD, Tokyo Vice, The Gilded Age, OFMD).

Frankly, everything he’s cancelled isn’t/wasn’t going to be great, maybe good at best (Raised by Wolves, Made for Love, Batgirl, Hack Abrams’ Demimonde and DC shit that inevitably would’ve been trash). Westworld could go either way. So if anything Zaslav actually signals a more aggressive quality over quantity approach, which is HBO’s brand.

Netflix on the other hand practically seems to be in competition with itself to see how much money they can piss away on big-budget productions that are horrendous and almost immediately get canceled. They’ve allowed their brand to become synonymous w/ low-quality garbage, even when they do release their fair share of very good (multiseason) shows (House of Cards, The Crown, Mindhunter, Black Mirror, Narcos, Ozark, Stranger Things, Squid Game, Dark/1899, Babylon Berlin, Kingdom, etc etc etc).

Idk but Cavill himself said he really wants to be in it as long as Amazon is planning on being faithful to the games.

For a long time mine was the Foundation books, but Apple actually gave that the Rings of Power treatment. I don’t really have a saga now, but I would kill for mammoth-budget series set in the worlds of Jurassic Park (more faithful to the darker novel than the movie), Terminator (this would entirely depend on nailing the showrunner, directors, and cast tho), The Abyss, and Blade Runner (I know Amazon is doing that, we’ll see how that turns out).

A couple Paul Verhoven movies like Robocop, Total Recall, and, like you said, Starship Troopers may actually lend themselves better to an extended miniseries format than a two-hour movie. To do right they would require insane budgets that only Apple and Amazon can really afford tho.

individual novels I’d love to see done right in a limited series that would require a huge budget are World War Z, Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pychon), and The Island of Dr. Moreau (a proper adaptation, not whatever the hell the Brando thing is).

The Sparrow and Dark Matter also, but those are already in development at FX and Apple, respectively.

Lastly, Amazon needs to get moving on Mass Effect w/ Henry Cavill. It’ll happen one day cuz video game adaptations are pretty much guaranteed hits as long as they’re decent, but I want it soon lol.