Presumably it’s the big fucking piles of cash money it’s making for everybody. “Hey, execs, we found a money spigot, show of hands, who thinks we should open the valve some more?”

We were saying "bad" for things that were good, in the 80's. It's just a piece of slang that was a little dated by the time they used it in the movie.

Does anyone know the trope namer for this? What was the first episodic drama to end with a guy literally hanging from a cliff?

The thing about True Detective is, I literally can’t remember any of the mysteries or the solutions. I remember the casting I remember the performances and I remember the vibe, especially the weird Lost Carcosa vibe of the first season, but I can’t remember what any of it wound up actually meaning.

> Or the arc where there was the fertility clinic that was breeding freakin demon babies then it’s never mentioned again.

This is mentioned over and over again in the show, it's a big part of the most recent season.

The end of the second episode, when the volunteers head underneath the reactor into the dark, with just the ticking (then buzzing) Geiger counters - it’s so tense my Apple Watch asked if I was having a heart attack.

Hapsburgs were fairly inbred by then, I guess

Well, in a couple of months you’ll probably undergo a bunch of physical changes, including changes to your voice, to the hair on your body, and to whether or not you’re fascinated by the appearance of Jenna Ortega in Wednesday.

They’re not mixing dialogue to the center channel anymore. It doesn’t help. Finding that out was $600 right down the fucking drain, by the way.

The one thing I’ve done that did help is get an Apple TV and two HomePods, which I placed right where we sit on the couch. Just physically being nearer to the speakers was a marked increase in intelligibility.

> Are you using a sound bar or speakers? Modern televisions have awful speakers

They’re honestly not, not on a TV larger than 40” and made in the last ten years (they’re using the same computational audio correction that’s in laptops now) and no reciever at any price point can fix a bad mix or a mumbling actor.

It’s the mixes and the actors that are bad. Your 400W reciever isn’t going to make “naturalistic” mumbling intelligible or fix fight scenes lit by tea candles, it’s just going to make your neighbors one floor down hate your fucking guts.

Like, not everybody’s room can functionally support 5.1 audio, just based on geometry and materials and other architectural details beyond your control.

We should still get to watch TV too, though!

Yes, literally everyone who watches TV is complaining about it, but actors want to mumble their dialogue now (it’s “naturalistic!”) and directors want to mix wall-of-sound music over it and everybody’s content to blame bad TV speakers even though you can watch it with a 7.2 cinema-level sound system in an anechoic chamber and it’s still incomprehensible.

Under my regime these idiots are first up against the wall, along with every cinematographer who says “why actually light the scene, it’s not like the viewer needs to see anything - they’ll get it from the dialogue.”

Supernatural romance needs to rotate through different monsters to stay fresh. I’m hoping we get Sexy Frankensteins soon, although maybe we already did in Penny Dreadful.

In the case of The Good Wife and The Good Fight specifically, it's because the shows are a series.

> all of literature isn’t in a shared universe

I mean, technically the realist stuff is

> With that said, I think you know damned well what genre “comic book movies” tends to describe.

Yeah, but I think you know what kind of movie "novel adapted for film" tends to describe, too.

“Comic book movies” is like saying “novel movies.” As long as people are making new novels and comic books, some of them will get made into movies.

> William Gibson literally invented the cyber punk genre.

I love William Gibson; I’ve read Neuromancer probably once a year for the past 25 years. The Peripheral is a truly tremendous work.

But Gibson didn’t “literally invent the cyberpunk genre”; Akira and Blade Runner both beat him by two years, and the word was coined by Bruce Bethke in a short story two years before those. Walter Jon Williams’ Hardwired is more responsible for the tropes of the genre (drug use, crime, cybernetic modification, hacking) and Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk TTRPG, largely responsible for cyberpunk in its most popular conception, is almost a direct line-by-line data dump of things that feature in Hardwired, as much as everyone wants to act like it’s the playable version of Neuromancer.

Gibson is a hugely influential author but he’s actually kind of the edge of cyberpunk, rather than its barycenter. (On the other hand, he really is double-handedly responsible for the steampunk genre, having written The Difference Engine with Bruce Sterling.)

The Peripheral is a good, Gibsonian show for real, though.