I feel so good. I feel so damn good I’m a bit pissed off at how good I feel. How dare I feel this good? Me, in the year two kay two two, Pandemic Year Three? This good??
Some things I realized this week:
1/ Now that I have a trainer and I’m going to a gym and I’m starting to feel a lot better about the things that put me there, oh boy, am I ever one of those assholes who is going to mention the gym constantly, to show off. “Me? Just came from the gym.” “Yeah, I’m not staying. Gotta go to the gym.” “Yeah, I’m a little sweaty. But you gotta work hard to get hard, y’know what I’m sayin’??”
2/ My day job is never more engaging than when I’m in full diagnostic mode, sweeping through 90% of the data to find 10% of the insight, to arrive at the solution for an unexpected problem. This week has seen me IP-browsing in the Sea of Japan, deconstructing the rules of time zoning by browser and country, and experimenting with the way variable incentive deals stack (or don’t stack) in a streaming platform. This shit used to keep me up at night (out of stress). Now it does it cuz it’s fun.
3/ I actually think I have a reasonable shape for the next phase of my work/life, and it’s not easily achievable, but it’s also not out of reach. Once this year’s film festival (and post-festival trip) are done, I might actually start putting some of those pieces on the game board and working towards them, because I think they’re potentially the spine of my years before turning 50.
Star Trek has won the streaming wars
I am so, so, so impressed by the IP management over at Star Trek. And I’m realizing that I’m impressed because of, not in spite of, my having fully dropped out on both Discovery and Picard. Here’s why:
Star Wars and the MCU’s TV projects are starting to blend together (and fall apart) for me, out of sameyness. They all look the same, they all behave the same, and even if the overall effect is generally good (I’m quite enjoying She-Hulk! My Tatiana Maslany crush grows yet again!), the blurred edges are becoming blurrier. (And, if the overall effect is generally “meh,” like in the Star Wars shows… well, it’s amazing how much I want/need Andor to make good on its claims of being something very, very different. Starting with getting rid of that fucking video wall!!!*)
The brand management approach for both of these is basically “that thing you like? Here’s a fuck of a lot more of it!! We hear you like spaghetti! Get ready to eat more spaghetti than you’ve ever seen in your life!” It’s as much a threat as a promise, in a variation on the Patton Oswalt Black Angus Steak routine.
The Star Trek franchise went a different way, and I’m beginning to think their series are the argument for this being the only way to do multi-platform IP at this point. It doesn’t hurt that the risk threshold on Star Trek is a generally lower than the highest-profile entertainment brands on the planet; it also doesn’t hurt that Trek and Yellowstone are tentpoles holding up Paramount+, which is far enough down the streaming rankings to spend some cash without having to fear that every single decision is the wrong one.
The way Star Trek is doing it is: fully leaning into the idea of each series being tonally and conceptually distinct from one another. So you have:
- Picard, which is the legacyquel;
- Discovery, which is the “peak TV” effort at serialized dark storytelling;
- Strange New Worlds, which — hooray! — unshackles Trek from serialization to experiment with individual stories and genres like the original shows did;
- Lower Decks, the deeply nerdy workplace comedy; and
- Prodigy, the childrens’ adventure show.
These are all very different value propositions for a series. They all, to one extent or another, have the potential to be the only Star Trek show a certain viewer watches. Trekkies like myself will watch most or all of them; but also, Trekkies like myself might realize that Picard and Disco are badly-written and weakly made, and realize they want to spend their time with SNW, LD, and Prodigy, because we’re only on this planet for so long, and why bother with badly-written, weakly made?
Why I think this is fantastic brand management is just that: there’s no jeopardy associated with me, as a viewer, bailing on fully 2 of their 5 series. I’m still a subscriber, I’m still enthusiastically supporting the brand, I am still telling anyone who asks that they should be watching the shows that I watch. They’ve done the thing none of the Disney brands have quite figured out yet: they’ve balanced the portfolio, to reduce hiccups when one or the other part of it goes up or down. It’s so glaringly obvious I’m astonished no one else has managed it yet.
*That fucking video wall
While we’re tangentially on the subject, it’s kind of amazing how much I’m convinced that the video wall is the actual worst thing that could have happened to Lucasfilm’s management of the Star Wars brand.
To be clear, it was an ingenious idea. And it was used spectacularly in the first season of The Mandalorian to achieve almost impossible camera effects. (There’s a sequence in the first or second episode of Mando sitting on a dune on Tatooine at dusk where I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out how, on earth, they could have filmed such a lengthy scene at magic hour.)
But like most major innovations, the use of it was taken on by people who clearly didn’t understand the discipline required to use it well [cough 3-D cough], and the result is that season 2 of The Mandalorian, season 1 of The Book of Boba Fett, and season 1 of Obi-Wan Kenobi, made me wish they’d never invented the fucking thing in the first place. Like, it’s a hard, hard bar to clear to make something that looks generally more artificial than the Prequel Trilogy’s use of greenscreen, but… they found it.
The issue is that the video wall does not do either very bright, or very dark, well. It’s part of why that dusk scene in The Mandalorian blew me away! The video wall, ironically, does magic hour lighting almost flawlessly, because (I suspect) that’s the exact luminance value at which you get the impression of highlights and lowlights in the backgrounds, without needing the highlights to be (actual) bright white, and the lowlights to be (actually) below the black point.
So when you’re using the video wall to, say, handle bright daylight on Tatooine (which was, by my count, more than 90% of all episodes of The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan), I don’t think the cost savings of using the video wall remotely compares with the production value of actually… uh… going outside. The sun — “God’s key light” — is hard to fake.
And why is this the worst thing that’s happened to Lucasfilm / Star Wars? Well, it just feels to me like the laziness inherent in misusing the video wall — the “meh, good enough”-ness that it almost intrinsically communicates in every shot it’s used in — can’t help but infect the minds of the creatives actually making the shows, and the minds of the audiences watching. There is something deeply, deeply hazardous in the removal of complexity and tension from the creative process, or literally producing “content” that lacks highlights and depths. It retrains the brains, on both sides of the camera, and that does not end well.
I don’t want creativity to be torturous or out of reach, either; but the video wall is a fuzzy middle ground between achieving specificity of vision on a budget, and eradicating the need to problem-solve and find creative solutions. Could you do Star Wars on a TV budget indefinitely? Of course not. But assuming the video wall is the universal solution to that constraint, and that it doesn’t have its own constraints and limitations which can/should force creatives in new directions, is a mistake.