Comment by dlcarrier
2 days ago
Which makes it even more tragic that the few good streaming shows produced recently are all on a network no one watches.
I am glad that they bought the rights to Brandon Sanderson's books, because I know Netflix wouldn't do them justice and Amazon prime would be far worse than that, but it also means that it will have a tenth of the available audience that a Netflix contract would have brought.
If they were serving the mass market then they would be making trash like Netflix.
I'm not sure how causality works on that one. Netflix made great stuff, back when streaming was still a small market, then they got big and started making trash.
It's not like they weren't trying to attract everyone when they were releasing content worth watching. Maybe it's because they didn't have any feedback yet on what works, so they couldn't even try to make safe bets, instead creating a little of everything, with most of it being bland, but a surprising portion being top-tier.
Hmm, your comment resonates in principle [caring about quality production of worthwhile narratives], but your specific examples show how much YMMV when it comes to subjective preferences. I was so grateful that Amazon Prime somehow did justice to The Expanse [I highly recommend the novels, and feel the show was one of the best-ever translations of sci-fi to the screen] and could never get into the Wheel of Time book series [tho I guess that was Jordan, not Sanderson, shrug].
Amazon didn't start The Expanse as a TV show, though. They bought it after Sci-Fi ran it then cancelled it. They didn't screw it up after that, but that's a very different sequence from creating it themselves.
Compare to their much-ballyhooed exercise in lighting money on fire that was their LOTR series.
I will never forgive them buying the rights to Utopia (UK) - probably the greatest show ever made - and remaking it into absolute shit. Just thinking about it makes my blood boil. Fuck Amazon (even if The Expanse was pretty good)