This mirrors what I am seeing as well. Lazy writing that produces a reaction of “why did they even bother making this movie?” despite the good actors and videography. Is it because good writers are difficult to find or, as with the actors, are the writers being constrained as well either by the streaming business model or poor taste in story selection by the streaming execs? The emergence of generative AI might make this even worse, as it’s only a matter of time till these are used to churn out scripts; although some of these scripts are so bad, maybe it has already started?

Anyway, I find myself terminating movies earlier and more readily than in the past due to the higher frequency of disappointing dialogue and story lines along with the fear of wasting my time. My response is cancelling streaming subscriptions for a year or so and then resubscribing for a few months in hopes that a few decent new pieces of content were created.

Yeah the writing is horrible on the vast majority of these new shows/movies, they've been able to cover it up with amazing production values and paying for high quality acting but once you are no longer dazzled by that the story just leaves you with nothing compelling.

Part of it is they are just producing so much content that the marginal quality of each script that now gets made is lower, but I do think script writing is an art that has been reduced to a series of tricks and cliches and storytelling has massively suffered.

There are a lot of people who look at a streaming channel’s lineup and say ‘huh; they have one or two good shows but the rest is just awful’

Trouble is, they all are pointing to a different couple of shows.

I mean, you’re aware that ‘Succession is the only good show’ is not an objectively true statement, right? That other people might disagree with you about that?

So I don’t know what your prescription here is. Do you want to just be able to subscribe to SuccessionTV?

I don't even like Succession so much, just didn't want to pick a fight with its many fans :) Actually it's an objetive fact that you can't say too loud that you don't like it, or else... anyway, I'd rather not talk too much about shows that I liked, disliked or started liking, later got disenchanted. It'd be distracting for the discussion.

Since you asked: what I would like is just to buy Succession. Do you know what happens when you want to watch something that's not on any platform? There is this cambrian thing called Blu-ray or you go straight to precambrian with DVD.

But if I'm not mistaken, there's no way to "buy" a digital copy of a movie or a series. Or even "rent" it. I don't really think I'd watch Succession a second time.

Mostly everybody prefers torrents, if they're available, that not always happens, specially in other languages. If not, you need a Blu-ray reader and paying not so nice prices from Amazon. Add some reaping software if you don't quite believe that optical disks last a hundred years.

If you come to think it, platforms really aren't. They're subscriptions to catalogs. Also moving catalogs. I've paused a season for some days, then found out that it had become pay-per-view at Amazon.

I suspect that the real power of "platforms" is copy protection... again. Studios wouldn't allow non-DRM shops, so they insist in DRM in the browser and thus they've given all the power to the gatekeepers.