I think I figured out what bugged me about Netflix-produced live action shows: their gloss-to-effort mismatch.

Imagine a 2x2 with the horizontal axis showing effort required to make something (time spent developing the script, repeating takes, editing) and the vertical axis showing how glossy the output is (which is mostly a function on equipment quality and CGI). Here are the four quadrants, clockwise from top right:

1. High effort, high gloss: the HBO quadrant or, if you are move into movies and like aliteration, the Kubrick quadrant — where show runners obsess over every detail and are sometimes even accused of mistreating employees. The quadrant where a man notorious for going behind schedule over budget builds a ship only to sink it — and win nearly dozen Academy Awards for it. Note, however, that many HBO shows are actually in the
2. High effort, low gloss: the CGP Gray quadrant, where hundreds of hours of research are sublimated in talking stick figures. The Wire and Curb Your Enthusiasm would be here, as would some of the best movies coming out of Hollywood which have to make an additional effort not to be too glossy and feel “more authentic”, though there is a thin line between actual and high-gloss authenticity. Interestingly, CGP Gray himself is on YouTube, but most of YouTube is in the
3. Low effort, low gloss: the YouTube quadrant, epitomized by its very first upload and now flourishing with DIY instructions, unboxing videos and attempts at ASMR. I suppose most if not all of TikTok, YouTube shorts and Instagram Reels (or are they Stories?) would also be in this, the quadrant for the rest of us. Note, however, that much of what we now think as “YouTuber content” falls instead in the
4. Low effort, high gloss: the Netflix quadrant, also known as “we’ll fix it in post”. Expensive actors aren’t that expensive if you only do one take per shot and you don’t need to scout for locations if every scene is shot in front of a green screen, but hey it’s a Dolby Atmos DolbyVision Dolby Everything 4K HDR 120Hz wonderland which screams high-quality but feels fake. Much of highly lauded AppleTV+ content would also be here, Disney+ as well, Amazon Prime Video goes without saying. Billions of dollars spent on fake gloss that people easily sense, and even if they can’t put it in words they vote with their eyeballs which continue to be glued to the other 3 quadrants.

To be clear, there is effort spent on the gloss too — but that effort could in some cases be seen as polishing a turd. So another way to name the quadrants would be:

1. Polished diamond
2. Diamond in the rough
3. Turd in the rough
4. Polished turd

Only one of those doesn’t make sense, and it’s the one we are avoiding! “Turd” may be too harsh — I view this very blog as having both its feet planted firmly in quadrant 3, but I hope you get the idea. Terminology aside, it’s a useful mental model to have.

Netflix has just scooped up two of the very best things I recently saw:

• Scavengers Reign (originally on Max)
• Godzilla Minus One (originally in theaters)

They mostly make chum, but between licensed excellence like the above and a few gems of their own a subscription is still worth it.

📺 3 Body Problem (The Netflix version) was a great introduction to the topic for my non-science-fiction-reading spouse, but of course couldn’t even begin to approach the depth of the original. Some unordered observations:

• The first season of the show encompasses the entire first book and a part of the second. I didn’t mind that as much as I thought I would, though huge chunks of the parts I liked were cut out.
• The plot had more handwaving then I remembered from the book, which I believe was the result of the above cutting but I’ll have to re-read the books to be certain.
• The signature blandness of Netflix shows works in its favor for the VR scenes and is muted in “the real world” for a net positive effect.
• Several key (Chinese) characters from the book were combined and re-sliced into an unlikely team of five Oxford buddies who have an oversized role in the future of humanity. I hope that’s the worst we see of the show runners' interventions.
• I liked the intro and loved Ramin Djawadi’s theme song but Netflix decided to show the whole thing only in the first episode and cut it down to 2 seconds in all the subsequent ones. Thumbs down for that.
• The first season was the easy one. I hope technology catches up to make Death’s End feasible to film.

Prompt: “Give me an elevator pitch for a TV show called Stakeholders, a corporate dramedy with vampires.”

ChatGPT-4:

“Stakeholders” is a cutting-edge corporate dramedy that intertwines the cutthroat world of business with the dark, secretive existence of vampires, offering a unique twist on the workplace drama. In the bustling metropolis of New York City, a prestigious investment firm, Bloodline Capital, serves as the battleground for power, ambition, and survival. The catch? The firm is run by vampires who’ve been pulling the strings of the financial world for centuries. By day, they’re savvy business moguls navigating mergers, acquisitions, and corporate espionage. By night, they engage in a more primal struggle for dominance within the vampire hierarchy and their quest for the elixir that promises them daywalking abilities.

Our protagonist, a young, ambitious MBA graduate, unknowingly becomes embroiled in this supernatural corporate world after landing a dream job at Bloodline Capital. They must navigate the treacherous waters of vampire politics, corporate rivalry, and their own burgeoning vampiric powers after a fateful encounter. As alliances form and secrets are uncovered, they discover that in the world of vampires and venture capital, stakes are more than just a financial term—they’re a matter of survival.

“Stakeholders” blends dark humor with thrilling drama, exploring themes of power, identity, and the quest for immortality against the backdrop of the high-stakes corporate world. It’s ‘The Office’ meets ‘True Blood,’ where every negotiation has fangs and every boardroom battle is a fight for eternity. This show promises to captivate viewers with its witty dialogue, compelling characters, and a plot that twists and turns like a stock market chart on a volatile trading day.

I’d watch it.

This morning I learned that one of the many plot lines in the British TV show Bodies has been lifted from real life:

The Tichborne case was a legal cause célèbre that captivated Victorian England in the 1860s and 1870s. It concerned the claims by a man sometimes referred to as Thomas Castro or as Arthur Orton, but usually termed “the Claimant”, to be the missing heir to the Tichborne baronetcy.

It goes without saying that the real-life Claimant was not as successful as the fictional one — this is why Wikipedia makes for better reading than most fiction.

📺 Beckham (2023) seems to have had full access to David and Victoria. It may have paid for that access by painting too rosy of a picture of the couple. But that’s OK! I have new respect for both realizing how young they were when they had their family photos plastered all over tabloids, and how dedicated David Beckham was to football and family — in that order. Most of all, how dedicated his parents were to his career, which is all the more poignant when you realize, in the last few moments of the last episode, that he could not show the same dedication to his own children.

📺 True Detective: Night Country comes 10 years after the first season, if you can believe it has been that long. It is a different show for a different time now: the atmosphere of confusion, uncertainty and dread from the original is still there, but so many other things are different that it is a bit of a stretch to have them share the True Detective title. A few spoiler-ish observations:

1. Like the original, there is an actual real-world solution to the murder mystery. Unlike the original, which had a slight layer of the supernatural added on top, Night Country has supernatural tendencies up top, down below, and everywhere in between but somehow leaves out any of the Lovecraftian horror that would have been perfect for the setting. Oh well.
2. Night Country had too much vagueness in some key aspects for me to be fully immersed: What kind of pollution, exactly, is threatening the town that is able to cause so much misery but also… speeds up thawing of the permafrost? And how could those substances, whatever they are, possibly speed up studying bacteria?
3. Jodie Foster and Kali Reis are as good of a couple as McConaughey and Harrelson were in Season 1, if not better, but True Detective is not only about dysfunctional cops partnering up in barely inhabitable locations.
4. When I saw that the season was set in Alaska I was hoping for some more callback to H.P. Lovecraft. Sure, At the Mountains of Madness was set at the other pole, but dark horrors lurking deep beneath the ice would have fit perfectly with the season’s premise. Alas, nonsensical mentions of time being “a flat circle” and people “asking the wrong question” were the only artifacts brought back from 2014.
5. The intro sequence was the only time I tolerated a Billie Eilish song.

If nothing else it made us start watching Season 3, which we hadn’t noticed at all when it came out in 2017. It looks promising!

📺 Silo, Season 1 is the first show I finished watching on AVP and all I could think about after the last episode was how very appropriate that Apple would be the one producing it — I’ll write no more lest I spoil it. Highly recommended, especially for fans of Fallout 3.

📺 I have high hopes for the fourth season of True Detective. There is no one better to play a detective in an ice-cold town than Jodie Foster. And the frigid, sunless setting pairs well with the Arctic weather we have been having. Now if only the murder mystery itself actually went somewhere.

It was a good year for television! Or for my clearing the backlog, as some of these came out years ago:

• The Last of Us, which I have to thank for making my wife interested in something video game-related. Because Pedro Pascal is in it, to be clear, but I’ll take it.
• Severance would have been even better if played at 1.25x. The office party scene was masterful, though, and at the right speed.
• Slow Horses, Season 2 and Season 3 were the best 12 hours of live-action TV this year.
• Ted Lasso, Season 3 was a disappointment the more I think about it, so I try to think about it less.
• The Bear, Season 2 was the opposite of Lasso and I look forward to Season 3.
• Guy’s Grocery Games was a bad habit which we broke shortly after I wrote about it.
• The Afterparty, Season 2, which was… fine, but a bit too West coast for my taste. Unlike…
• Only Murders in the Building, Season 3, which hit just the right spot. The soundtrack is still a hit with the family on our rides to school.
• Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake was the perfect sequel to the original.
• Bodies were a nice surprise, although Primer (2004) is still the only one with time travel that makes sense.
• The Great British Baking Show, Season who-knows-which had some of the “worst” contestants to date — quotation marks here because they were all good both in personality and baking skills — but some of the best moments, so one of the better seasons overall.
• Scavengers Reign were the best 6 hours of any TV this year. Not for everyone, to be sure, but I hope it will be for enough people for their flaky Warner/Discovery corporate overlords to order another season.

Last year’s list is here.