Today I learned that Max canceled Scavengers Reign, a show that was in fact the best thing to come out on TV last year. A pox on HBO/Max and a pox on anyone in the TV industry who doesn’t care about good TV. May YouTubers dance on your graves.

📺 Only Murders… Season 4: a better-than-average mystery, now with a movie industry twist that makes it even more self-aware. At this pace I fully expect the show itself to become an independent life form and gain consciousness by Season 6.

📺 The Great British Baking Show had more serious and professional bakers this year than the last, but also more panic attacks, insecurity, large swings in quality and overall lack of composure that kind of reminded me of the NBA. Entertaining nevertheless.

📺 Slow Horses, Season 4 has reached a plateau, in that it is “only” as brilliant as the previous season. Which is to say, it continues to be the best live-action show of the decade. Has there been a better TV character than Jackson Lamb as played by Gary Oldman?

Gravity Falls (2012–2016) is the king of our household, but if there were ever a contender to replace Dipper and Mable it could only be Over the Garden Wall (2014). Well, November 3–7 were the 10-year anniversary of it coming out on Cartoon Network, and there is a stop motion short voiced by the original cast to commemorate. It’s been a busy few weeks so I only saw it now, but it made my day (and will quite possibly be the highlight of my week). (ᔥwaxy.org)

Is Yellowstone that good of a soap opera that a NYT reporter cries when interviewing the lead actress, who in turn reveals that she has to sleep for days after filming a particularly emotional scene. Or have we reached peak snowflake?

📺 Bodkin (2024) is the clearest example yet that Netflix has a deeper problem than just its flat style: they are deeply, thoroughly, undeniably unoriginal. To make a slightly comedic murder mystery they took the concept from Only Murders… (podcasters!), credits from Afterparty (2D!) and soundtrack from The White Lotus (all that whooping and whistling), then added a good dose of completely uncalled-for Ireland bashing, a plot that meanders without making sense, background drama that seemingly raises stakes only to be resolved deus ex machina, and some ridiculous cold open intro patter that again tries to mimic Only Murders… in suspenseful and mysterious vibes but can at best arouse only slight discomfort to the banality of it all.

What a way to waste Siobhán Cullen and David Wilmot, who were the only reason I stuck through all seven episodes.

Here are four good articles on this fourth day of the week:

• The pharma industry from Paul Janssen to today: why drugs got harder to develop and what we can do about it
• The State of Culture, 2024
• A Decade Later, ‘The Leftovers’ Seems Almost Like Prophecy
• “ugly” drawings from korea

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.