The Year in TV & Movies
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From The New York Times, this is The Daily. I'm Melissa Kirsch, Deputy Editor of Culture & Lifestyle. As we close out 2024, I'll be talking with my colleagues around the newsroom about what they watched and listened to and read this year, about the things they loved and the things they didn't love. Today, chief television critic James Ponowozik is here to talk about why TV might feel a little blah right now. And then our chief film critic Manola Dargis on her favorite movies of 2024 and why you shouldn't let the algorithm tell you what to watch. It's Thursday, December 26th. Jim Ponowozik, thanks so much for being here.
Oh, thanks for having me.
Okay, so Jim, fill in the blank. In the world of television, 2024 was the year of... Mid-TV.
Mid-TV. Yeah. It's not great. It's not terrible. It's just mid-TV. Explain what you mean by that. Mid-TV is okay TV of the present that kind of reminds you of great TV of the past. It's, you know, got a famous cast. It was shot in fancy locations. It's sleekly produced. It's tasteful, but it's just not especially memorable. It doesn't have the quirks and bumps and idiosyncrasies that mark a show that you are going to remember and will stick with you for a long time.
So give me an example of what you mean.
Uh, Palme Royale on Apple TV. There are no doors on the back of the Palme Royale.
I never said I used the door. I barely remember this show.
Exactly. Who among us does? The cast was absolutely loaded. Kristen Wiig, Laura Dern, Carol Burnett. It looked fabulous. And if you watched the whole thing, you probably forgot that you'd seen it a week later.
I am never in over my head. It would be disrespectful to my hairdresser.
Okay, but it wasn't that long ago that everybody was talking about prestige TV, right? Like these highly polished hour-long dramas that were as good as movies. Walk me through how we got from prestige TV to mid-TV.
So I think of the prestige television era as the era beginning around the turn of the 21st century, when you had the emergence of a lot of new cable outlets, ones like HBO. that in order to distinguish themselves in the marketplace, started taking big bets on unusual shows that they had freedom to produce that traditional broadcast TV didn't. And a classic example of this is The Sopranos.
Whatever happened to Gary Cooper, the strong, silent type?
Right. On NBC, ABC, you couldn't do a show about a kind of sympathetic mobster. On HBO, you can.
And then it's dysfunction this and dysfunction that and dysfunction my fucking goal.
We get The Wire. We get Breaking Bad. I am the one who knocks. People like Martin Scorsese start making TV series. Actors like Glenn Close start starring in cable TV series.
Hey, big man. You want to get into it?
TV was, you could argue, the premier popular art medium of its time. And also, it's now big business. Netflix, which used to be the company that you got DVDs from in the mail, starts making original TV programming. You look great. I mean, who knew you could rock orange? And then it ultimately is joined by Amazon. We don't need cops like you anymore, Bush. By Apple. Hey, how y'all doing? I'm Ted Lasso. Disney. Guilty of being the god of mystery. Paramount.
Your honor, the issue here is not intellectual property. And on and on and on. Amazon.
And that creates this money gusher directed at starting up a lot of new shows in order to create enough content for these platforms to produce a lot of prestige-y looking thumbnails when you get to the home screen of the app. And what is serving up those thumbnails to you? It's the algorithm. It's deciding what you are likely to click on and keep watching to generate those viewing hours for them. And that creates a different kind of incentive. That's not the kind of incentive where you're like, oh, I'm going to create a drama about a mobster in New Jersey because people haven't seen that before and it'll be so surprising they'll watch it. It is, I'm going to generate something that kind of reminds you of that show that you watched about the mobster in New Jersey, so that you'll click on that and watch our streaming platform for a little longer. Each man in the 101st Airborne would be going home. You loved Band of Brothers back when it was on HBO.
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