this cultural amnesia of what TV used to be btw is precisely why we get articles praising The Bear for their "incredibly fast production schedule" and people wondering how they're so good at putting out episodes on such an efficient schedule
like gee idk maybe it has to do with the fact that The Bear is filmed across like 1-3 recurring locations and every location is just a room in a building
or the fact that The Bear features regular people in a regular kitchen environment with a focus put on the writing and editing to create the drama
or the fact that The Bear doesn't require as much post-production editing because it doesn't employ gratuitous amounts of CGI
or maybe just the simple fact that The Bear knows it's a fucking TV show and knows it isn't productive to keep audiences waiting 4+ years for a new season made up of 4-6 films
like what The Bear is doing isn't unique, it's not "new", it's literally just what television used to be. We're deadass just not used to it anymore because TV has become this binging marathon where we sit and watch 4 episodes for 12+ hours straight.
yes Stranger Things is a different genre from The Bear, it's obviously going to require a different workload and different accommodations and it has unique and different challenges to face in its production
but it's absolutely not the first show of its kind, we owe the success of shows like Stranger Things to the shows that came before - Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, Doctor Who, the list goes on - and all of those shows that ran so Stranger Things could crawl at a glacial pace were capable of being produced similarly to shows like The Bear - with effective writing and camera work that pushed the limits of their set designs, and practical effects that could make up for what they couldn't achieve with CGI (either because it just wasn't viable enough yet or because it wasn't worth the expense).
the real irony here is that Stranger Things is supposed to be an 80's-reminiscent show, and yet it couldn't be further from the philosophies of 80's television that gave us the formats of modern TV and its cultural environment that both Stranger Things and its predecessors owe their legacies to
TV used to be this sort of liminal space where you could kick off your shoes after work / school and watch 20-40 minutes of your show in between your other obligations like making dinner, doing homework, working on other hobbies, and self-care
movies, on the other hand, were a special occasion, you either went to the theaters to fully indulge in a feature length film that was usually at least 90 minutes (but not always, some would be as little as 70-80) or you rented a VHS/DVD to watch at home for some uninterrupted family time
and while TV definitely had its own host of problems as an attention-whoring device, streaming productions like Stranger Things have really managed to find the next exploitation in the attention economy - by turning TV into a whole ass movie marathon that takes longer to get through per season than watching the entire uncut Lord of the Rings trilogy or a single 25-episode season of House MD
and not because it necessarily has more to offer - but because every episode demands your attention for 2-4 times as long as the norm of what used to be expected out of TV, and every season has a production cycle that somehow manages to take longer than it would have taken them to just make a fucking movie
i'm sorry b/c this really turned into an "old man yells at cloud" rant but it's just absolutely insane to me how much we've lost the plot of what TV is and what it was specifically designed for - quick, manageable hits of entertainment that weren't as demanding of your time and attention as movies. that was it. that was the whole appeal. and Netflix has convinced people to pay $10-$20+/month just to wait for their TV content because they decided TV should be a bunch of back-to-back movies now
we have just as much of ourselves to blame as we do the corporate entities that took the simple and elegant concept of TV away from us
because we (as a society) keep paying for it and waiting for it until it eventually decides to give us what we were paying and waiting for
and i can't help but feel with how successful and profitable these shows wind up being in spite of the criticisms people have to make of them, there's never going to be a way back to what we lost
we thought we were just cutting our monthly cable bill but what we were really cutting was an essential limb of entertainment culture that's now being threatened by Netflix Netflix Netflix Netflix Netflix Reddit Netflix Netflix and their two favorite dimwits with beards and plain t-shirts who collectively call themselves "the Duffer Brothers"
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