Babylon is always either the best movie of the year or “what, why are you doing this?” and never anywhere in between and sometimes both at once. I kinda loved it except for the few times when I hated it. I will never stop thinking about it. I will also never stop listening to the score because the score unquestionably ruled.
we talk a lot about why streaming is killing television, but i think one factor that is under-discussed is syndication. there have been some good short-run series, but the majority of our most beloved series had long runs. like, 5+ season runs. runs that hit that sweet 100 episode mark, meaning they qualified for the most lucrative syndication deals. streaming shows are reducing and eliminating the need for such deals because they’re so siloed. instead of making a syndication deal with another station (and paying your creatives fair residuals), streaming services host their shows on their own platforms and instead pay the streaming rights residuals that are nowhere near as fair.
because these streaming networks (both streaming-only, like netflix, and core networks with original content streaming, like cbs and nbc) aren’t selling their shows off-platform, they don’t need to hit any kind of episode landmark to be cost-saving. you can host a show in any increment, so having a 20-episode series is the same as having a 60-episode series. except the 60-episode series, of course, takes longer and costs more to produce. as long as a network makes one season of a show, they get to market it for new viewers. and once they feel they’ve gotten all the new subscribers they will out of a series, they drop it to save money.
until there is some monetary benchmark incentive to get a series past one or two seasons, television as long-form storytelling is dead.
Photos during the Civil Rights movement were in Black and White because they were cheaper and because News Papers were in black and white (most of the people taking pictures were taking them to publish them).
So here’s some color photos of Martin Luther King to remind everyone that this was recent. This is recent history. This is recent memory for a lot of people. People are alive today that got to witness MLK’s speeches.
