(no subject)

[olivermoss]

I swear TV execs are in a competition to see who can make the worse decisions possible.

Showtime is planning to make franchises out of Billions and Dexter following the model of the TV shows spinning off from Yellowstone. The spin offs from Billions will be called... Millions and Trillions. jfc...

For those of you who haven't seen Billions, it started off as a good show with a surprising basis in the tiny social circles and other realities about the lives of the super rich. One season, in a brilliant move, they added a political appointee to the prosecutor's office to oversee things and keep them in line and they cast Clancy Brown. He was this gross, intimating, avatar of GOP interests. But then the show went to shit and it was clear that the new writers didn't even understand anything about finance. Clancy Brown even said on a podcast that they'd been gutting the writer's room to cut costs.

Billions was a surprise because it's portrayal of the rich wasn't about wish fulfillment or just giving the audience a chance to feel superior to them. It dealt the reality of the social stratifications, at first. Then it fell to shit and now it's going to have a spin off about trillionares and trillionares don't exist and aren't going to any time soon.

Also, the whole point of the new Dexter season that happened recently was to kill him off and not create a new Dexter because he's a thing of the past that needs to be left there. Dexter: New Blood was a farewell to Dexter

Comments

[raine]

Sounds like they want the sandboxes, but not the toys that came with said sandboxes.

[olivermoss]

It's like they have a car factory and went 'let's build houses! The materials and skills must be the same, a product is a product!'

A home-grown IP is what all the networks want right now, but they can't build one out of Billions and Dexter. I might have watched a Dexter prequel before New Blood, but that show is basically 'we feel very differently about white men who can't control their murderous impulses these days, time to move on'

[raine]

Nobody in Hollywood seems interested in developing a unique IP. It's like "let's copy these seven ideas and, oh, wait, [competitor] has a hit with this random idea, let's do that one too!"
I just want awesome characters with interesting stories, with plot-driven arcs. Why is that so hard?

[olivermoss]

Yeah, they are just chasing what other networks are doing and not thinking about the lag time of production or whether they've got the right tools for the job. Alot of production studios (and gaming companies) keep being late to the party with something that doesn't really work. They aren't focusing on making great content or even solid mid-level stuff for people who just want to relax with a show at the end of a day.

This is why it's getting harder and harder to resist getting HBO for The Last of Us as it sounds like it's setting records for audience growth.

[mistressofmuses]

Ugh. That's really all, lol.