Mad Men and Breaking Bad are both masterpieces. They made them before the "streaming wars" and proved that non-major networks and studios could make good stuff. They just didn't figure out how to bottle that magic, and let it get away.

Mad Men had Matt Weiner, who wrote on The Sopranos. Breaking Bad had Vince Gilligan, who wrote on The X-Files.

I suspect the common theme here for what makes good television is the creative staff in general and the writing in particular.

The tragic thing is, according to the video's narrative, AMC has made very good shows since TWD - HCF, Lodge 49, and The Terror, which were all critically well-received. Critics even liked the Preacher adaptation. But audiences just don't seem to care about AMC anymore besides Better Call Saul.

This jives with my theory of what makes bad TV: bad writing. It's exactly why I've never revisited Lost, even though I loved the first few seasons. The suspense and mystery never paid off, and it was too important a piece of the entire show to bother trying again.

Oddly, Battlestar Galactica has provided a pleasant rewatch every year or two for me for the past decade. It has good writing within each episode, and even though it doesn't hold up in the final season, the writing is overall satisfying enough that I don't avoid it entirely.

I could probably write something really mean about Westworld here but I'll just instead say that it's really, really, really sad that they canceled it after season 1. I'm sure the writers would have built satisfyingly on the world established in season 1 instead of jumping off the rails and expanding into unnecessary niches of convoluted storytelling.

> It's exactly why I've never revisited Lost, even though I loved the first few seasons. The suspense and mystery never paid off, and it was too important a piece of the entire show to bother trying again.

I'm not gonna claim it was good or anything, but Lost was more than just the show - and a lot of the payoff for the island's mysteries came from the ARG The Lost Experience - https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Lost_Experience

> The narrative for the The Lost Experience was designed to be a parallel story line not part of the TV show. Considering the deep mythology to LOST, the Experience acted as a way to cover some background that could not be feasibly addressed in such depth on the main show. In particular, TLE developed the backstory to the DHARMA Initiative and its parent company, the Hanso Foundation. It also established some clues about the Island and the true meaning of the numbers.

Some people still think Lost was good after around the first 3 seasons. Like you, I gave up after that because it was pretty clear that the show would be nothing but red herrings and new distractions.

When my parents tuned in to watch the final episode, I predicted that the ending would be bullshit and not resolve anything. That's exactly what happened. Yet so many people who watched the show all the way through are in denial to this day.

> I could probably write something really mean about Westworld here but I'll just instead say that it's really, really, really sad that they canceled it after season 1.

Funny, because by the end of Westworld season 1 my first thought was that it was just going to be like Lost. The "maze" gave me "hatch" vibes, and I noped out permanently.

Don't look back - you made the right call. I enjoyed Westworld S1, and just finished S4. So full of self-important idiocy. Every line half-whispered as though it's the ultimate drama, but not a single character anyone might care about or identify with.

One of their problems was dragging various actors/characters through season after season - I got absolutely sick of every single one of them. I don't know how they managed their lines with a straight face.

Another was setting everyone up for this ongoing global-stakes quest. Andor just showed that you can make an exceptional story out of small slices of a bigger setting. It often feels to me that when a show/movie sees its character attain super powers, they struggle with storytelling afterwards, being forced to invent higher and higher stakes. Marvel movies (outside of something like Logan), The Matrix (IMO), etc.

Westworld had so much potential and in the end it just all became basically magic pulled out of thin air. Even going to the real world I thought was awesome - it just got TOO out there

Was it best just wrapped up as a nice, concise package? As an example, Ex Machina was great, but I don't need to see Ex Machina II: The Adventures of Ava.

Or if there's value in Westworld (the other themeparks, James Delos storyline, etc), tell a fresh story in that world. Dragging out Maeve and her daughter was tiresome.

It ended up with zero tension, despite all the grand standing. I just didn't care who was about to fight who and even less who might win. The ideas were convoluted and pointless. S2-3 had some decent ideas/plans mixed in. S4 had almost nothing I think would be worth keeping.

Final season of Battlestar Galactica was a flop because of Hollywood screenwriters strike which lasted 3 months

Interesting. I liked the original run of the Lost. I've liked it even more when I rewatched it a few times. For me the characters were the most important part of the show, and writers did a great job developing them. I also see a common thread about "good first seasons", but theses seasons were more about ever growing mysteries. Second half of the run gave us great episodes like The Constant, LaFleur, or Ab Aeterno. Me caring for the characters is what made them great.

And writing is what makes me care about these characters. The mysteries were fun and most of them resolved by the end of the show, but for me it is a lesser part of the show.

Lost was one of a breed of "mystery pilots," where high-concept pilots imply deep and complicated backstories to explain that concept, by filling themselves with surreal non-sequiturs. If the pilots get picked up, the writers have to come up with a story to connect the nonsense. In the worst case, which I believe is the case with Lost, the people who wrote the pilot have actually moved on to the next project once it gets picked up, and a completely different set of people have to interpolate some kind of sense out of the pilot to continue the series.

The continuing story of Lost (and similar series) was a desperate improvisation being written by hired guns of whom there's no reason to think that they would have any more affection for the show than a random person off the street.

For an on-the-nose example, check out the recent, similarly-named FROM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_(TV_series) For a fun (<- minority view) absolute commercial and storytelling disaster version, check out Aftermath(RIP): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftermath_(2016_TV_series)

This is not how Lost was developed. The original idea was from an ABC exec, they hired a writer that failed. They hired another two who came with the general plot, the theme and a plan for five seasons of the series. This was their show, not some randos.

I avoid anything by Abrams or Lindelof at this point because they are emblematic of this writing formula. You can see it in Lindelof's The Leftovers, Abrams' Star Wars, and of course LOST. It's also present in any pilot they help create, for example Once Upon A Time.

I agree with your deconstruction: these shows are optimized for selling an engaging pilot episode with only a back of the napkin roadmap for the rest of the show. The finale comes only when there's no more money to be made.

I'm very excited by writers like Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese who are able to write interwoven plots comparable to LOST, but with cohesive endings. Check out Dark for an example.

Watchmen is a Lindelof show, but well worth watching.

The Leftovers is also a Lindelof show that I thought it was really really good.

I really don't think that's a fair take on The Leftovers. It was adapted from a novel, which season 1 follows the plot of pretty closely and completely. The remaining two seasons are entirely new plot but iirc the author was involved.

The novel doesn't resolve the core mystery. I won't spoil whether the show does, but it's kind of beside the point anyway. One of the core themes is how people grapple with sudden loss, something beyond their control, something unknowable. In any case the show resolves itself with a satisfying amount of closure in three seasons. Much fewer open threads and plot holes than LOST. The unresolved aspects of The Leftovers are genuinely thought-provoking and deep.

I wholly agree with Wikipedia's summary: "The first season received mostly positive reviews. However, the second and third seasons were highly acclaimed, with many critics referring to The Leftovers as one of the greatest television series of all time, with particular praise for its writing, directing, acting (particularly Theroux’s and Coon's) and thematic depth."

You say "The finale comes only when there's no more money to be made" ... that doesn't jive with a final season having a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes and 98% on Metacritic!

The Leftovers is indeed aware of the show formula I'm critiquing, it's even in the theme song: "guess I'll just, let the mystery be." This is Lindelof indoctrinating the viewer to accept his style of writing, which doesn't burden plots with conclusions. He's still frustrated we asked 'why' of the LOST plot, to which there was no good answer. The Leftovers similarly offers no good answer to 'why'. Making that the point doesn't stop me from asking.

If the show was doing well HBO would have signed a fourth season and they'd have left enough room in the third for yet more surreal diversions headed nowhere. Online review aggregators are meaningless.

You asserted the show had "an engaging pilot episode with only a back of the napkin roadmap for the rest of the show", which clearly isn't possibly the case for a show whose entire first season was adapted from a novel.

The third season was written as a final season. Regardless of whether the mystery is resolved, the show's plot and character arcs firmly concludes in the finale. Professional tv critics nearly universally view it as one of the best seasons of any television show ever made.

Yes, there are unanswered questions. This is obviously intentional (although the theme song you reference was only used in season 2 and the finale in season 3). Similarly in real life you'll never find out which religion, if any, is correct. Or why the pandemic happened. You can still ask, and writers can still explore these topics, even though no one ever knows.

If you didn't like the show, or ambiguous art/media in general, that's fine, it's not for everyone. That doesn't mean it's all part of the same capitalist formula to produce bad art.

As an interesting counter-point, consider Twin Peaks, a show where the network demanded that the creators promptly resolve the core mystery at the end of the first season -- much to the show's detriment.

Lost should have stuck with the "it's a snow globe" explanation. Except they just made it a throwaway line.

Sounds like a few tv studios could do well to pick up Jonathan Hickman as a long-term series developer.

WW bored me with the endless McGuffin of who is a robot and who is a human. Zzzzz. Isn't BSG the same?

Not really. BSG quickly established that there's only a few different models, and who most of them were, but many copies of each. There were certainly a few 'surprise, that person's a Cylon!' moments throughout the show, but I think they were all quite well done. (Though to be fair, for at least two of the cylon characters, you could immediately tell they were a cylon because it was a famous actor playing them.)

If anything, I think in the earlier seasons BSG went for more of the 'cylon, human, who cares, they're all screwed up' feel.

Not having an ending for “Westworld” is very on brand for a Michael Crichton property.

Justified and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia was also on FX. As another example of small networks making great stuff.

Also 'The Americans'

The Americans is the rare example of a very good show which never had a dip in quality throughout its run and absolutely stuck its landing.

I think one of the things that really made it for me was Keri Russell playing a character that was so different from a lot of what we were used to seeing her in.

FX has always been a low-key prestige series powerhouse. They made The Shield, after all.

"The Americans" is staggeringly good in my opinion.

I am blessed with a bad memory, so after a few years, I was able to watch the whole thing again, and except for a half-dozen things I remembered, it was like new content to me.

The only criticism is that you know the main characters are going to be OK, so it takes away a bit of the suspense. I wonder if you could have a similar show where the main characters are caught at some unpredictable point in the middle of a season, and then the show continues with new characters brought in to do the same job.

Fox has pretty successfully positioned FX as a place for more ambitious shows that wouldn't survive on a bigger network. To the point where I'm willing to give a show a try just because their track record has been good.

The tragic thing is, according to the video's narrative, AMC has made some very good shows since TWD - HCF, Lodge 49, and The Terror, which were all critically well-received. Critics even liked the Preacher adaptation. But audiences just don't seem to care about AMC anymore besides Better Call Saul.

Lodge 49 was excellent. It was a shame that they dropped it.

Also, while trying to remember the name of Jim Jefferies' very original show, Legit, I looked at a list of FX original shows and they really have had an astonishing number of high quality shows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programs_broadcast_by_...

The Terror and Lodge 49 are both great, but AMC also had Better Call Saul, which was incontrovertibly one of the best shows on television and, by the end, the acknowledged successor/extension of Breaking Bad --- which is just to say, until very recently, AMC still had Breaking Bad as a going concern.

Maybe it just shows to go you that the make/break for these networks isn't prestige content so much as broader business execution issues.

Gee, I wonder if their shitty streaming strategy could have anything to do with this?

Funnily enough Breaking Bad benefitted from Netflix quite a bit

[0]: https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/14/21312595/netflix-breaki...

Halt and Catch Fire was even better (though more niche).

It’s this, as well as (IMO) an atrocious user experience in the AMC+ app. I mean it is truly very bad, both from an interaction perspective as well as performance. It doesn’t even hold a candle to the major players in the streaming app space.

Another thing, they have taken some transparently user-hostile approaches to rolling out content (like splitting Better Call Saul up multiple times) in order to drive signups. The streaming ecosystem is a defragmented mess right now, but AMC have nobody to blame but themselves here.

Their user hostile approach to Better Call Saul just shows why they just don't get streaming. I cancelled them almost immediately when I realized I couldn't watch Better Call Saul episodes that had already aired earlier in the season.

> like splitting Better Call Saul up multiple times

This was the most annoying user hostile thing I've run into in awhile. I figured I would buy a months subscription and watch the last season then see if there were any other shows that looked interesting and would keep me paying for several more months of subscriptions. Not only did they remove the first episodes of the last season so I couldn't watch it, I couldn't even buy the episodes outright or pay extra to watch them. I finally gave up and hit the high seas.

It baffles me that corporations are so stupid they won't offer any way for people that are trying to give them money to do it. People that pirate your shows aren't going to attempt to pay for a subscription. The people who are willing to pay it don't want to put up with stupid BS tactics just to watch the content.

Yep. The _exact_ same thing happened with me. Seeing the forest for the trees appears to be a skill lacking at the top at AMC. What's worse, is that the entire thing killed my perspective on the brand. I didn't think of them as anything but the publishers behind two of my all-time favorite shows (BCS, BB) until the AMC+ debacle and everything around BCS. It's just bizarre to me. All of the major incumbents in cable took a "wait and see" approach after watching Netflix and Hulu eat their lunch. I don't know why AMC chose to wait, see, and then do everything wrong afterward.

Now here I am ranting with like 3-4 posts about how bad of a taste in my mouth they've left. It didn't have to be this way!

It’s because your money isn’t enough. They want more of your money.

> Late last month, James Dolan, the company’s chairman, made clear how troublesome that was for the company…. It was a surprising admission for Mr. Dolan, _whose family controls AMC Networks_. (emphasis mine)

I think this is just another case of a cash cow getting nuked by incompetence through nepotism. His daddy is a billionaire and his claim to fame is not investing in satellite television. He went from trust fund rehab [1] kid to media executive.

Edit: [1] there’s nothing wrong with going to rehab but most people don’t go from rehab to CEO of Cablevision.

How the f did James Dolan become CEO of AMC? You're vastly underselling his shittiness as a person and businessperson. He also bought a chain of electronics stores right before the industry all but vanished, then bought a chain of movie theaters right before the industry all but vanished, and is possibly the worst sports franchise owner in North American pro sports, destroying a hugely storied team in the basketball capital of the world, banning fans and former players from the arena for criticizing him, and also firing one of the most legendary play-by-play guys of all-time for criticism.

Then there's bullshit like this: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/07/inside-jim-dolans-fe...

Apparently after tanking New York City's bid for the Olympics because he didn't want Madison Square Garden to have to compete with the new venues that would be built, he tried to do something similar in Inglewood, but had his lunch eaten by Ballmer because he let some underlings whose names he can't remember handle the details and didn't get the deal he thought he was getting.

Dude could give Meg Whitman a lesson on how to fail upward better. She might be President by now.

It amazes me that Dolan the relatively successful hockey team owner and Dolan the bad basketball team owner are the same guy.

HCF was an amazing show.

Chiming in to add onto this. Fantastic show that is very much worth watching. I'd describe it as similar to Mr. Robot: Halt and Catch Fire uses tech to talk not only about the history of the tech industry, but also to say a lot about people.

Yeah, I saw a reference to HCF cold, and was like wait - that can't be a reference to the assembly mnemonic! But it was, and a good show. Brought back memories from the 1980s-90s for sure.

Halt and Catch Fire is great but definitely does not have the same wide appeal as the others. Great show but just a more niche audience.

'Halt and Catch Fire' appears to have been an experiment in targeting nano-audiences. In the case of the show, older tech millionaires and billionaires, and the rest of us were able to go along for the ride. It was difficult not to notice how many ads during the show were for luxury goods and high-end gadgetry. This may be why it kept getting renewed despite the low ratings: they had succeeded in reaching their very narrow, very valuable niche audience they targeted, and advertisers were willing to pay a premium for that access.

This is no doubt the most boring and prudish opinion in the universe, but I would have enjoyed Halt and Catch Fire if it had more computers and less sex.

Sex scenes are a dime a dozen, but a good computer joke is pure gold in my book.

So I initially gave up on this show part way through the first season, but not because I hated it exactly it just fell off my radar and didn't grab me. The sex in it did seem...out of place and kind of shoehorned in. And the Joe MacMillon character's out of control Jobish behavior irritated me. But the season 1 finale was solid, I liked many of the characters and the subject matter so I went back to it and I'm so glad I did.

It is now one of my favorite shows of all time. The characters were slightly retooled after season 1 and their bizarre family structure is very compelling. The backdrop of the era was why I really showed up for the show but the characters and performances were why I loved it.

I watched AMC when they showed older American films of some note. Same with HBO, when they showed movies before they were available to rent. All the shows they produced themselves never appealed to me. I tried to like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad but they just got repetitive and uncreative.