… do you have a different specific pathology for the Boomer/X people born in the 1960s?
1 Like
The A League of Their Own series is getting a four-episode miniseries to wrap up its one season. Really wish this was the norm. *stares longingly at GLOW
2 Likes
Hey, I’m still annoyed about how “Soap” ended–or, more accurately, how it didn’t end. And that was 42 years ago. (And no, “ghost” Jessica showing up on “Benson” a few years later doesn’t count.)
6 Likes
That’s how they wrapped up Game of Thrones
The final season had fewer episodes, each episode was longer, they took an extra year to make it … and it was a total disaster 
3 Likes
Confused? You will be.
6 Likes
My questions, and many others, were NOT answered.
4 Likes
I’m down with complete story arcs. Some of the best TV shows get there and end. Often just b/c they’re cancelled.
i did say probably. but to argue the point. i think something like sinbad, which iirc was a serial, doesn’t really count.
it wasn’t the sort of narrative neverending story that rob was talking about - it:was episodic: watch any in any order. ( and, i don’t know much about the planet of the ape sequels but i imagine it’s similar. )
it’s also the difference between something like star trek tos, and discovery. tos has no overarching narrative, and discovery is an arc with cliff hanger never ending next season hooks
fwiw: i think modern star trek ( as opposed to modern star wars ) gets away with it slightly better because none of the shows really interact with each other. trek is universes - plural - of similar themes. wars is one overlapping… mess… of people who apparently all like to visit tatooine… for reasons.
3 Likes
I wont even start a tv show that i know has been cancelled and has no end, so i will never be watching 1899 or what ever the big boat thing is.
1 Like
7 Likes
This is an example of one of my favourite and least favourite series of books ever:
Spoiler: It never ends.
5 Likes
It took forever to convince my Italian Cinema/History of Rome professor to give this one a shot because she thought it would be rather shallow, but once she saw it she was instantly regretful she’d waited so long. Big Dan T. was one of her favorite characters.
4 Likes
Back in the day I would get to the last half inch of a three-inch-thick novel with nothing being resolved, and I would get the feeling that this was just the beginning of a whole load of of other three-inch-thick novels and I’d throw the book down in frustration.
I hated that feeling of being duped and manipulated and I’d reject the author and the assumption of my loyalty.
I began to get that feeling again a few years back with the Marvel universe in particular. It’s not that the movies were bad (Deadpool and Guardians were excellent), I just hated being taken for a sucker.
Add to that one after another childish, disappointing Star Wars movies, a couple of sub-par Terminator movies a bunch of pretentious and overwrought Batman flicks, and now the the term ‘Franchise’ makes me twitch.
Fuck it all!
Burn it all down.
2 Likes
You know, I watched it like 2 times in the theater before I had any idea it was The Odyssey. I felt so stupid upon rewatching; it’s so damn obvious.
ETA: But I guess in a way, that’s an endorsement of the film and the original stories. They’re universal and deeply culturally embedded because they speak to fundamental elements of human nature and can be adapted to any era or setting.
5 Likes
More like the matinee cliffhangers that Star Wars was supposed to be an homage to back in 1977. Those tales, like Flash Gordon, or the cowboy serials, or newspaper comics like Prince Valiant and Steve Canyon, were written to keep you coming back to the theater or buy the next Sunday issue of the paper.
I personally trace it back to how Marvel Comics has always operated, each issue even when I was a kid ended with either a cliffhanger, or a hook into the next episode. All very soap opera like in that respect, and what turned me off of Marvel at a young age and into buying DC with my allowance instead. (Green Lantern/Green Arrow and Batman were also cooler than any Avengers stuff, but that’s beside the point) The thing is, Marvel took its serials hook approach to blockbuster cinema, and now every studio with an accountant sees the profit to be made by making stories into serials.
But getting back to Star Wars, for all of the posing that Lucas does, he’s a dirty liar and never intended to do more than the one movie, and you can see that. Its success was a surprise, and he wasn’t really prepared to make a sequel and had to bring in other writers and directors.
3 Likes
Apply liberally.
1 Like
Hmm…
So, where does George R. R. Martin fall on this scale? Also, how much falls on writers or directors vs. the demands of the Hollywood machine?
3 Likes
I don’t think people are complaining so much about remakes and sequels, but more about “cinematic universes” with never ending stories. I think you can draw a very clear line between, say, Back To The Future, and any Marvel movie. BTTF was, for starters, intended to be a single movie and stands up very well in its own right if you never watch any of the others. It was so successful that they decided to do two more which again, formed a complete story with a nice ending watchable in a reasonable amount of time. That’s, again, very different from any Marvel movie wherein you have no idea what the fuck is going on if you haven’t seen twenty other things and none of it is going to wrap up in a way that makes sense.
Furthermore, it’s all goddam superhero stuff. I’ll be happy when I can go watch anything (even a franchise) that isn’t some comic book I never cared about. Remember when movies weren’t about superheroes? I sure do. My nephew doesn’t. Literally his entire life has been “Movies are about superheroes. That’s just what movies are”.
This makes my point above, frankly. There are so many little franchises that you can choose from, all of which are short, good, and wrap up nicely. You don’t have to take or leave a giant monolith comic book thing that took over every theatre for 15 years. I pretty much stopped going to movies because it became all superheroes all the time. Once in a long while, a little gem like Bullet Train comes along, but otherwise if you don’t like superhero shit, well fuck you.
Plus, in addition to the mini franchises, we used to have many standalone blockbusters to choose from. Look at the 80s and early 90s. We had Gremlins, Real Genius, Ghostbusters, Weird Science, Goonies, Karate Kid, Full Metal Jacket, Top Gun, Stand By Me, A Fish Called Wanda, and on and on. Going to a movie used to mean getting dropped into a new little world you’ve never seen before, being told a story in that world, and then leaving it again. Movies are not that anymore.
Of course, most of those successful films got sequels. I don’t think anyone is complaining about the existence of sequels. They are complaining about an inescapable 58 sequel universe that never ends.
I don’t think this is fauxstalgia. I think there’s a clear line you can draw when blockbuster movies got taken over by superhero franchises that never end. The MCU made me hate movies, basically. I didn’t think that was possible. I used to go to two movies a week. I saw basically everything that came out. Now, I think I’ve been to half a dozen movies in the past ten years. I didn’t change, movies did. This is a real effect.
.
Aside:
Ugh, yah, I’m a huge WD fan (I’ve watched the whole run several times through) but even I admit that towards the end it gets really pointless. Every major character has left or is dead and the remaining side kicks are just walking around in the woods grumbling at each other for three seasons. What the hell. Circling back to the thesis of the OP, what they did with Rick is unforgivable. To make us wait years to wrap up where he went, only to reveal that it was all a setup for a stupid romantic spinoff that I don’t want to watch and he’s never actually coming back? Fuck you, AMC. Fuck you.
6 Likes
That’s a good question. When he wrote the first book in the series, I think he wanted to have a continuing series but wasn’t thinking of any sort of ending. And I don’t think he was thinking of HBO at the time that he wrote it, he was just thinking of the publisher giving a forward on the next book in the series.
I don’t fault George R. R. Martin, he’s not as bad as J. J. Abrams who comes up with good beginnings, but has no clue which way the story is going to go, much less if there is to be some sort of finale the story is building to. Neither are J. Michael Straczynski in that regard.
That’s also a good question to ask, since the Hollywood machine has been around long enough that it has evolved. Its roots are in the “come back next Saturday for the next exciting episode!” era, but also from later, where syndication demanded the episodes did not need to be shown in order, and then the home video era of buying entire seasons as box sets, and now the streaming services era where viewers demand entire seasons.
I think the real problem lies in stories that keep promising that everything is building to some sort of giant climax, and then moving it ever further into the next book, the next season, and denying us release. Eventually we get tired of constantly being teased.
1 Like
I think fantasy authors get a pass on this, because the genre has always been about multi-book epics. That’s its whole jam, pretty much following the pattern set by Tolkien. Fans expect it and want it. Enormous world building spanning multiple books is arguably necessary to the genre*.
What’s new and exhausting is that everything is trying to be like that now. You can’t just have a good story that wraps up anymore.
.
*There are exceptions of course. There was a series of Dragonlance short story anthologies that were really excellent self contained small fantasy stories. They were sorta cheating though because the Dragonlance setting already existed and had been built up by many other books and games
3 Likes
