Because good creativity is somewhat orthogonal to money after a certain level. Peter Jackson didn’t make the greatest films of my childhood because he thought it would make him a lot of money. It was the inverse: he had to convince other people they would make money in order to access the resources required to make the greatest films of my childhood.

It's a continuous vector transformation:

Initially, they're correlated and pointed in the same direction - do better work, get better pay.

At some point, they become orthogonal - they're just collecting a paycheck, the content has to exist but its content doesn't matter.

I do feel that there's a point beyond that at which they're inversely correlated: To navigate the power structures and economics at the top, you have to prioritize money and politics above art.

It's the same reason politics are broken: Local township boards can be just people who want to help their neighbors, at the middle levels in state and city posts you have to be good at fundraising and advertising but it's not all-consuming, but to win big races you have to be ruthless, because if you aren't, someone more ruthless than you will win.

My take is that design by comity destroys art. Art requires personality and a departure from median is a prerequisite for good art. As such, it scales poorly.

Money doesn’t buy taste.

And executive teams who are good at running a web service are not necessarily good at hiring creative production teams.

> I don't understand how streaming services with huge budgets are so constantly bad when it comes to writing

Because when there's a lot of money involved, writing is generally done by committee. We only see the writer(s) who get the writing credit but not the process. Studio execs, producers, etc will impose their opinions/ideas on the script.

Smaller projects can afford to take risks but with huge projects there's a lot more pressure to not fail.

Ironically, this usually results in a worse product...

They’re trying to create content solely to get people to sign up for and maintain an Amazon subscription, which means they have to fire as many arrows as possible into as many genres as possible. As with any DND weapon or spell, a spreadshot modifier reduces accuracy, impact, and/or to-hit percentage. So instead of producing content that they think deserves the light of day, they produce content to fill gaps in their spreadshot. That will automatically be less inspired, no matter how much they spend — and the more they spend, the less taxes they have to pay on their revenue. Thus a hundred million dollar adaptation that hits all the buttons with the same drab arrow that their spreadshot fires at every genre.

This leads to their unwillingness to risk alienating anyone by making good creative decisions. Endless cycles of focus groups and executive committee notes will ensure that the finished produce has maximized appeal at the cost of being polished and professional, because all of those reworks leave little time to get it right, and anything good has to be done in secret without execs realizing it and fucking it up. Disney, their elder, is quite familiar with this problem:

https://www.vulture.com/article/oral-history-of-lilo-and-sti...

https://www.vulture.com/article/an-oral-history-of-disney-th...

If you watch, for example, The Substance (2024) or Amélie (2001) or Hackers (1995), and then watch any modern generic Amazon/Netflix streaming movie, you can usually see the difference immediately. One is laser-focused on being the work of art it chooses to be, with no regard whatsoever for whether it attracts or repels any single person, and in fact will make decisions that drive away some percentage of viewers for some reason other than genre mismatch. The other is more often like a child trying to play all the keys on the piano at once, in order to make the loudest noise possible in a room full of other children doing the same. (For contrast, consider Hulu’s exclusive movies; they somehow made a best-in-category time loop movie?!)

If your product isn’t driving some people away for being a poor fit for their needs, then your product is probably too generic. In a field where nearly everything is generic, that may seem like it’s fine; but it’ll cost you customer stickiness to get away with it, as they’ll walk away from you the instant something less generic is a viable option.

Being good in selling stuff and running servers doesn't mean you are automatically great at producing movies and television series, even if you have a lot of money.

Dialogue is getting worse and worse in almost all newer films and series.

Netflix boss tells writers to “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/essays/casual-viewing/

“Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told [the author] a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” (“We spent a day together,” Lohan tells her lover, James, in Irish Wish. “I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” “Fine,” he responds. “That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”)”

Sounds like all new productions reading this. We really live in idiocracy.

It certainly feels like I'm watching shows with scenes where nothing happens but everyone just "says" their motivation over and over inexplicably not saying / doing anything else ...

The Godzilla series Monarch (another show I quit on) was like that with the younger characters constantly just saying their motivation (and still inexplicably not keeping it straight, it changed randomly). But they never DO anything about it, they just use up all the time saying it. It made them seem very wishy washy / spineless dispite supposedly being adults.

Come to think of it the Lord of the Rings series has a lot time wasting repetition too...