In terms of production The Mandalorian is pretty amazing. In terms of script it is predictable, fairly boring and drowning in various "the plot needs to happen" moments.

For some reason I cannot phantom, Netflix and others seem to have tons of money to throw at the production, but don't seem to want to spend more than a few pennies on script.

I tried watching Cursed on Netflix, and had to force myself past the first episode due to the horrible writing. It never got better. The pieces were there for a fairly interesting show but it clearly needed more work on the writing side. Instead they pushed it into production and made another predictable flop.

We consume more literature in a year than last generations consumed in a lifetime. Filling all of that with groundbreaking writing is an impossible prospect. Competent production is much more scalable: if you can make one good episode you can make 100.

> We consume more literature in a year than last generations consumed in a lifetime.

This is probably true if you take the average person, but there have always been people reading their entire lives, and there has been a mass market for bad literature for hundreds of years. Cervantes was decrying the state of literature and the huge amount of poor, samey chivalric books in 1605.

We don't need to fill all of it to have some good shows, especially when those shows are already on top of the production ladder and aren't limited by funding. The top shows should be equivalently "top" in all aspects.

It's because money cannot manufacture good writing. There are reliable processes by which a holder of capital can turn $10 million into good production and $100 million into great production, and you can parallelize this as much as you want. There are enough serviceable directors, editors, camera operators, etc. to scale up your production volumes to dozens of shows and billions of dollars.

There is no such repeatable mechanism for original writing. You can find great writing for nothing and pay through your nose for terrible writing. You can find a great writer who delivers a great concept but then she has nothing else in the tank. Or she does, but you can't find another one of her.

You see billionaires buy their way into being big-time movie producers but you never see them buy their way into being big-time screenwriters.

Absolutely. Good is what you enjoy. Mandalorian is predictable friendly format produced with maximum talent.

You can love just watch just the "production value" and not to be ashamed to like endless repeating of familiar.

Star Wars franchise also provides frequent scenes of characters taking a posture and saying some short sentence that becomes a meme you can share with friends.

> Star Wars franchise also provides frequent scenes of characters taking a posture and saying some short sentence that becomes a meme you can share with friends.

Or you can cram a movie full of it and call it Star Wars IX...

there are a lot of visually/technically impressive movies and tv shows that are (subjectively) awful-mediocre in terms of their substance (see: Avatar)

i don't see how the OP's take on the mandalorian is at odds with the idea that the people who make it are probably pretty good at their jobs

I assume you're talking about the James Cameron Avatar, and not disparaging the beloved Last Air Bender!