#vidrev

hello, and welcome back to your regularly scheduled roundup of-- what was that? i haven't updated this blog since september 2024? no way, that's crazy.

anywho, let's talk about some video essays.

video essays are a strange medium, though their strangeness has been somewhat obscured by their digital ubiquity. what was once the niche documentary-esque indulgence of the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and Orson Welles (though their genre was technically "the essay film") has exploded into a popular if not dominant mode of expression in the age of online video. this current transmutation of the form grew out of the vlogs of the 2000s and 2010s, when it was enough to just sit down in front of a camera and talk about your life. the vast majority of video essays lean pretty heavily on the "essay" part, owing to the fact that online video is the medium through which an essayist is most likely to have their work seen. but the very act of presenting oneself on camera delivering information is interesting, in a way that is quite distinct from the written essay. even a creator totally disinterested in the art of editing or public speaking is, by necessity, performing for a hypothetical audience. and once you decouple that form from the strict televisual structure (and network oversight) of something like At the Movies with Siskel & Ebert, you open up the door to a much more personal and subjective form of expression in the act of delivering an essay.

this is the dynamic that has drawn me to video essays from the very beginning. it's the reason i believe they're worth writing about. they provide a unique opportunity to blend art and criticism, two disciplines that have long been considered in academia as oil and water (when i went to film school in 2014 with the explicit desire to do film work while also studying the form academically, i was surprised to learn that this was unusual if not explicitly frowned upon).

vidrev is a blog dedicated to reviewing and sharing video essays. originally started on cohost, the idea is to examine the interesting qualities and blindspots of essayists from across youtube while also shining a spotlight on underrated videos.

i'm a video essayist myself, so i invite readers to check my work and see if i really know what the hell i'm talking about. my main tumblr blog is here.

[originally posted march 19th 2024]

like a lot of folks, i've grown weary of the preponderance of CGI in Hollywood flicks these days. it's all but a cultural tradition at this point to watch John Carpenter's The Thing, sigh wistfully at the goopy silicone animatronics, and say "man, you couldn't make anything like this today." the Marvel/Disney machine has done a lot of heavy lifting to engender this perspective, particularly in the cape department where every aspect of the film is under intense and non-negotiable executive revision until quite literally days before theatrical release (as was the case with Marvel's The Marvels). it doesn't help that this shift has a lot less to do with what's best for any given movie, and a hell of a lot more to do with the lack of unionization in the visual effects industries making them a readily exploitable source of labor. in such an environment, films that nevertheless lean on practical effects are enticing (and, quite often, demonstrably better) enough that we'll sing their praises to the point of hyperbole.

enter Jonas of The Movie Rabbit Hole, here with a genuinely essential series of video essays to slap some sense into that hyperbole and bring us all back down to earth.

one of the more important directors for the development of unobtrusive CGI is David Fincher. i have my fair share of issues with his films, but credit where it's due: they're constantly pushing technology in ways that you absolutely would not expect. there's a crane shot at the start of The Social Network that couldn't be shot with a crane for safety reasons, so instead it was stitched together in post from footage taken on multiple 4K cameras at once. a shocking majority of the blood you'll see in his movies is CGI. the praise i've portioned for his recent films, even as i find him sort of a fundamentally anti-human director, is that he understands that visual effects work best as a supplement to existing footage, rather than a pure replacement.

i share all this to underline my use of the word "essential" in describing this series. i worked in film for a few years, i went to film school, i try to understand the production process as pragmatically as possible. i am under no illusions that Christopher Nolan flicks or the John Wick movies are totally practical. i'm not an anti-CGI evangelist! and yet, even then, i had NO idea just how wrongheaded i still was on the subject until i watched these videos.

Jonas brings 18 years of visual effects experience to bear on a series that feels very much like him trying to settle an argument he's been having for about as long. he has countless examples of films praised for their lack of CGI that relied heavily on their CGI, using the demo reels of effects houses as the smoking gun. Jonas speaks with a plain matter-of-fact-ness that's bolstered just so by an edge of smug frustration, the kind you only get after bearing a cross for years. but it's not just an "i'm right, you're wrong" affair by any stretch. Jonas does a fantastic job communicating a lot of complicated subjects in ways that are friendly to even the most casual of viewers, rarely blaming the audience for their ignorance when studios and market trends are the real culprit. and because he's a veteran of the industry, he's able to interview prominent figures that would otherwise be inaccessible for the average essayist, like Academy Award winning VFX supervisor Paul Franklin.

(and here we come up against a question countenanced more than once on this blog-- where is the line between video essay and documentary? i think this readily qualifies as the former given the first-person direct address shot-in-his-living-room style, yet somehow i feel a bit uneasy with the classification. oh well, a topic for another day)

the most eye-opening section for me is also one of the first, where Jonas confronts the public image of Top Gun: Maverick. i haven't seen this film yet, but i have seen the endless and unqualified buzz about its practical effects. and to be sure, these deserve quite a lot of praise-- they put real actors in real fighter jets for crying out loud! yet in all that crowing, a very important fact totally fell by the wayside: nary a single shot in the film is without digital manipulation. and not just in the basic touch-up sense, removing safety anachronisms and the like. the jets, the cockpits, and the actors themselves were all extensively replaced with digital doubles! i felt like an utter fool when he pointed out that quite often films praised for their lack of CGI will have more VFX artists credited than any other department in production. like, holy shit, it's all right there on the screen? what job were those hundreds of people doing if it was "all practical effects"?

which is the crux of the series' title: "NO CGI is really just INVISIBLE CGI." we have --or perhaps it'd be more honest to say i have-- a tendency to address CGI in binaristic terms. either it's there, or it's not there, right? Fincher's team can put digital blood running down Daniel Craig's face in the shower after he gets shot in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, but it's Craig's physical presence that sells it. a film like Top Gun: Maverick makes its bones marketing the spectacle, and because there's such fatigue with CGI-heavy blockbusters any mention of intermediary visual effects carries with it a stain on the authenticity. but really, it does nothing to diminish the practical nature of the photography to also acknowledge how much of what makes it to cinemas is, essentially, an extremely realistic cartoon.

and this is what Jonas's series really exposes for me. a lot of what we're looking at here is rotoscoping, the longstanding tradition of animating over top of live footage a la Disney's Snow White in 1937, though the technique was truly mastered by Max Fleischer in the 1910s. is there some gradeschool nag whispering in the back of our head that a rotoscope is just elaborate tracing? that it's a cheat, because "real" animation is done without reference? (for anyone who has actually worked in animation, this is your cue to laugh derisively)

but the truth is that you do not get one without the other. it takes a lot of planning to film a scene with an eye towards being reanimated, just as it takes tremendous skill to make that animation look good. if Top Gun: Maverick feels viscerally real, it is because the visual effects artists had a real reference to work from. one is not inherently better than the other, more pure or authentic. this isn't the 80s anymore, man. i mean, to get real fucking technical, the instant we stopped shooting on film was the death of "true practicality" in cinema, because a digital sensor must by its nature interpret visual information as raw data and then translate it to something we'd recognize as an image. celluloid film is purely optical, but a digital sensor requires someone (or a team of someones) to write an algorithm to do that interpreting-- which is, inherently, subjective. different cameras have different image processing algorithms, different bitrates and dynamic ranges, to say nothing of custom LUTs and the extensive post-processing required to make RAW footage not look like complete ass. and even now, celluloid cannot be said to be truly pure, because any film shot on celluloid is then digitally scanned, subjected to the exact same post production processing as any other digital film, the final product re-scanned to celluloid to give it a true filmic look, and then yet again digitized for wide distribution (because most cinemas today only have digital projectors).

this is not A Bad Thing! it is simply the material reality of film production in the 21st century. it has many upstream and downstream effects, of course, many of which have negatively impacted the quality of films and television in various ways-- but these are not qualities inherent to digital technology! rather, they are the result of a profit-seeking industry eager to cut corners wherever possible. the existence of CGI is not to blame for the bad CGI in Marvel movies, it's the greedy executives exploiting non unionized labor, forcing crunch at every level with no regard for the human cost, endlessly meddling in the production with their indecisive market-analysis driven brand alterations. ah, the age of the executive auteur, when at last the soulless corporate mindset once commonly decried by artists and audiences alike has been fully naturalized and even embraced by people who call themselves fans, who would sooner throw a director under the bus than say a bad word about Kevin fucking Feige.

it's a pathetic state of affairs, and it can only be called a brilliant act of marketing that CGI burnout in the public has been leveraged to only further erase the essential labor of visual effects artists. Jonas here even points out, much to my slack-jawed amazement, that promotional behind the scenes footage today frequently removes green screens and other indicators of a digital-forward production as a way of unduly acquiring practical effects credibility. as someone who watches a lot of these BTS features, i feel lied to and manipulated, and ashamed of myself for not realizing that making-ofs are just as much marketing as they are educational, often moreso by a lot. it's all just an illusion! and it cannot be repeated often enough that this is an erasure of a historically under-unionized industry, one whose exploitation has been thoroughly documented for years. that this erasure is occurring at a moment when finally, finally, finally corners of the visual effects world have begun to shed the libertarian values inherited from the tech industry and actually unionize is pretty fucking conspicuous to say the least.

i call these videos essential because they reveal a tremendous blind spot in our media literacy, even among those like myself who've studied media extensively. we are, generally, pretty good at identifying the weaknesses in a finished film, but our lack of experience and our credulity towards marketing that doesn't feel like marketing leads us to utterly fail when we attempt to diagnose their cause. when our analysis lacks an understanding of the material conditions of production, as informed by firsthand accounts of those who actually do the work, we cannot help but embarrass ourselves and in so doing blatantly misinform our audiences.

it didn't used to be like this. i remember the late 90s and early aughts, when joints like ILM were praised for their innovations. how often do you hear about VFX houses today? probably only when they go bankrupt. it's such a shame, because what Jonas does in these videos most of all is reveal just how astonishing the work of visual effects artists actually is. these are the perils of an industry whose job is to be invisible, which is why it's so important that their labor be made visible after the fact, celebrated rather than papered over, analyzed extensively rather than mentioned offhand. the truth is that quite a lot of us have been boldly, profoundly wrong about CGI in movies for a long time, and we're well past due for a correction of the record.

all of which is to say that these are some really great videos and you should absolutely go watch them right now

[originally posted december 22nd 2023]

ANONYMOUS ASK: Not a recommendation because I know you've already seen it, but I remember you (this being like a year ago) calling Tim Rogers' action button reviews boku no natsuyasami something along the lines of "a triumphant demonstration of what's possible in the video essay medium". I was wondering if you could elaborate, provided it hasn't been too long. I recognise I'm blasting you from the past here lol. It was one of the few hours-long video essays that I didn't mind sitting through, though I'm still not sure it quite justifies its length. Tim's delivery helps significantly there, in a way that reminds me of Caleb Gamman's casual/improvised-feeling but thoroughly scripted shtick.

oh i still think Tim Rogers is hands down the best in the biz. i've watched the Action Button reviews multiple times, i've got a davinci resolve project with all his videos in, studied them under a microscope and taken lots of notes. i think his work absolutely does justify the length, because rather than trying to say Everything There Is To Say about a game, he instead focuses on digging into the game's relationship with his own hyperspecific subjectivity. i don't know how else to describe the Action Button reviews except as literary media criticism, using incredibly in-depth analysis as a jumping off point for discussing how these games shape us and the culture, the role they occupy at various stages of our life, and how who we are at any given moment is just as important to our opinion of a game as the game itself. sooner or later i want to do a full-on VIDREV on his stuff, probably in video essay form, but consider this a first draft overview of why i find his work so special.

there's little things. despite the length of his videos, he never fails to get to The Point (his term for the thesis statement) within five minutes of starting the essay proper. he is a talented and quick-witted tour guide, funny and clever and philosophically ponderous all at once. his work is clearly designed to reward multiple viewings, yet never fails to feel complete on a first watch. he writes with a precision of language that'll knock your socks off if you let it, especially if you're willing to go with him on his seemingly non sequitur tangents. but it goes a lot deeper than that.

i just don't think anyone else is putting nearly as much time, effort, and thought into the moment to moment particulate matter of his video essays than Tim Rogers. there are a ton of little mistakes that quite a few essayists make as a result of only doing one or two complete editing passes, or otherwise not sitting down and watching their video start to finish at multiple points in post-production. things like bad audio mixing, cut-off breaths and sounds that ought to be removed, stray frames from footage creating accidental jump cuts, flubbed line deliveries, misaligned overlay elements, sloppy compositing, the list goes on. it's no great sin to make these mistakes, mind-- no one's being commissioned, most essayists aren't professional editors, there's no quality control or review board or institutional best practices. it's the difference between giving the kitchen a quick once over with a rag and getting on your hands and knees to scrub every stain with a toothbrush. most people don't have the time it takes to do the latter, aren't getting paid enough, and the returns on putting the effort in are impossible to measure and therefore, practically speaking, nonexistent.

but as someone who tries to put that kind of work in (not always successfully), i can always tell when another essayist has done the same. longform video essays in aggregate tend to be messy, under-structured, rambling; they often arise out of an essayist's desire to say everything they could possibly say on a subject. not only is this an impossible task, it makes for a pretty dull viewing experience to boot. what i find so impressive about Tim Rogers' work is that despite their length, his videos are relentlessly structured. the attention to fine details in the moment-to-moment edit across the whole runtime is astonishing; that the script itself is so internally integrated never fails to make me furious (with professional envy). he always has a lot to say, not all of which is strictly speaking essential to the analysis, but nothing ever feels so indulgent that it drags the rest of the essay down in my estimation. he often repeats information, but he does so very strategically and in a way that's meant to help the viewer follow a thread from start to finish. i also think his presentation style goes a long way towards hiding how much effort he puts in, how relentlessly curated these things actually are in spite of their length. he's talked extensively about how much he cuts from these videos (most prominently is story 5 from the Cyberpunk 2077 review, which went from over an hour in length at first draft to, eventually, just over a minute), how he watches them back over and over and constantly makes fine adjustments. that work won't be apparent to everyone watching, but it's exceedingly apparent to me.

and then there's the cherry on top of it all, which is the fact that the Action Button reviews are constructed as being part of "seasons" that have a planned thematic throughline. taken as a whole, season 1 is a completely unique work of literary metacritical nonfiction, a series of six reviews (Final Fantasy VII Remake -> The Last of Us -> DOOM -> Pac-Man -> Tokimeki Memorial -> Cyberpunk 2077) that use specific games to talk about trends in game design, trends in gamer culture, the history of games development, all through an astonishingly earnest and open autobiographical document of Tim Rogers' own professional and personal life, which is given particular weight by his astonishing capacity for near perfect recall from early childhood. they are the clear result of a life spent thinking about and writing about and talking about games in between all the rest of his life, neither of which was ever truly separate. i know i'm throwing around a lot of superlatives here, but i really do adore these essays. i think a lot of folks doing longform games reviews try to achieve a sort of technical objectivity, limiting the scope of their analysis to strictly what's in the game (and often only that which involves numbers, leaving any narrative or thematic components to a brief aside at the very end). the Action Button method should fall into that category, and yet Rogers himself uses its technical objectivity as an anchor around which flows an endless and unquantifiable ocean of subjectivity, where game mechanics and thematic elements mix forever. each subsequent review drops a new anchor, and thus begins to compose a map whose purpose is as much a matter of self-reflection as it is pure education or analysis.

but i really do think it's with the first (and so far only) episode of season 2, his review of Boku no Natsuyasumi, that you can really see the cunning of what he's been up to all along. i often find myself thinking about his reflections on returning to Kansas ("it took me back to a place i had never never been"), on why people rewatch movies and replay games ("our memory only records the cold parts"), on the futility of trying to recapture the past ("places don't remember us"), on the screaming terror of our own looming mortality ("meanwhile our shattering animals"). i just know those quotes off the top of my head, man, that's how deep in it i am. the Boku no Natsuyasumi review is a masterpiece, and the ways it breaks from the style and approach of season 1's reviews only strengthens the choices he made in season 1, because suddenly we realize that they were choices. that's the artfulness of this series, in my opinion: it starts as, seemingly, a relatively bog-standard "i'm going to review some video games and make some jokes and tell some stories along the way" type joint, but slowly reveals to you essay by essay just how little of this project was automatic, unconsidered, arbitrary, and that its aims were never so miniscule as "tell you why a video game is good". there are themes running throughout the entire series, repeated phrases and ideas, theories of mind and play that build in the subtext, accruing like memories, subtly building mass until you look back and realize that what seemed like a random selection of topics was, in truth, premeditated with a conspiracist's attention to detail.

[originally posted august 1st 2024]

at last, it's time for another roundup! things were fairly dry for a minute there. i tend to go through peaks and valleys vis-a-vis video essay consumption, where i'll watch a bunch of them for a few months and then not be able to watch any for a few months after that. this has been especially true as i've been getting back into the habit of making my own scripted essays. did you know i did one about the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Specials a few months ago? i share this so you can judge for yourself if i know what i'm talking about enough to be worth taking recommendations from. i am a fallible beast, and our tastes are likely not the same! also i'm proud of that video and i'd like you to watch it.

but we're here to talk about other people's work, and let me tell you, the last month and a half has yielded a real bounty. let's jump in.

"Investigating a forgotten Edward Snowden Quote" by Allie Meowy.

edward snowden was a bit of a mystery to me beyond the headlines. all i knew was that he leaked highly classified documents detailing secret mass-surveillance, and that he liked hentai games.

this is one of the funniest, strangest essays i've encountered in years. what happens when the wikipedia page for games based on movies doesn't include Elf: The Movie: The Game for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance, and also you happen to discover that Edward Snowden is on the record as liking "some" hentai games? i'm not even sure what this essay ultimately adds up to, but i had such a blast watching it that i honestly don't even care. a wild ride that's well worth your time.

"a pocket full of stones" by Glouder Glens.

i've been thinking about an interview with People's Joker director Vera Drew where she talked about how many young queer artists have relegated themselves to the anti-recognition of youtube. if her film was proof that there's room in the film fest circuit for artfully essayish digital cinema, then we have no choice but to campaign for the incredible works of Sylvia Schweikert, AKA Glouder Glens, to reach a similar level of recognition. if you've yet to encounter its work, Sylvia's half-essay half-werewolf-erotica about it/its pronouns is a classic, but everything on her channel is a gem (not to mention its excellent short films). lately, Sylvia's been experimenting with the form in a big way. her last essay, "Self Discovery Stories," is artfully vertical, a true phone video that digs deep and hits hard. "a pocket full of stones" takes a huge step sideways, rendered in 4:3 at a scalding 360p and edited with a post-adobe-flash Lynch-esque animation style that rockets you back in time to the earliest days of internet video in the best way. what i wouldn't give to see this one on the big screen, i'm telling you. this kind of work simply doesn't have a place on youtube as far as youtube's concerned, so it's up to us as champions of the medium to share widely what the algorithm will not. definitely heed the content warnings though.

"The Miraculous Horror of Stop Motion" by Henry Kathman.

here's a cozy, enthusiastic dive into the often unforeseen externalities of stop-motion animation, that doesn't outstay its welcome or get too sanctimonious. i appreciate Kathman's use of alternate backdrops to give each section its own mood. through three unique and interesting examples of stop motion, he explores how the medium itself is an artform that can't be streamlined through technology the way so many other forms of animation have been-- even just to recreate the feel of stop motion digitally, you still pretty much have to hand animate it with an equivalent amount of brute labor. it's a satisfying analysis, which is unsurprising from the ever-consistent and thoughtful Kathman. and the soundtrack by Molly Noise is, as always, fantastic.

"The Religious Gamification of Indika" by Pim's Crypt.

i watched an essay a couple weeks ago about Indika which heavily criticized it for being boring and overly talkative, that really just convinced me that i wanted to see someone look at the game on its own terms. Pim here does a great job doing exactly that, wasting zero seconds of the universe's limited window of coherence on lip service to the harsh critical consensus in favor of simply examining what Indika says on its own terms. they explore how the complexities of faith are successfully gameified in Indika, making a compelling case for its quality. i've highlighted Pim in a previous roundup, and i'm happy to see them back with another solid work.

"So What's Up With Those PS2 Castlevanias?" by Trans Witch Reviews.

this one's pretty much what it says on the tin. when it comes to analyzing game franchises long-running enough to have titles across multiple console generations, i'm always drawn to essays that dig into the red-headed step-children no one ever really talks about. like the PS2 Castlevania games. i didn't even know they existed until now! granted that's probably because i never owned a Sony console before the ps4, but whatever. like a lot of games with 2D roots, Castlevania seemed to struggle finding its feet in the third dimension, and the historical consensus seems to have largely landed on "the 2D ones were best." i think this Trans Witch makes a very compelling case that at the very least Castlevania: Curse of Darkness is an underrated classic-- enough so, anyway, to make me want to give it a shot. i appreciate how she highlights the music of the series by focusing on the work of specific composers, though i think she lingers on those samples for a bit too long. regardless, this is a well put together essay made with readily apparent enthusiasm, and sometimes that's all you need.

"Why The Ring Didn't Use Color Grading" by WatchingtheAerial.

[originally posted august 29th 2024]

Captain Midnight is one of those creators i don't really follow because the vast majority of their work (mostly Big Corporate IP analysis) doesn't interest me, but every once in a while they'll come out with something that's EXTREMELY relevant to my interests. this one caught my eye because i've been on that "the streaming model is really bad for television" grind since 2018, and i'm always curious to see how mainstream perspectives on this stuff are evolving.

i'll just say at the start that this is a pretty good video. most everything i've watched by Captain Midnight has felt at the very least on the right track, if not always entirely on point, and the lack of cutesy overly familiar Content Creator-isms are a godsend from this type of channel. it makes for a bit of an odd duck for a full VIDREV, because i'm not here to discuss the shortcomings of what was said, but rather to take a closer look at what wasn't said.

in short, this is a video about how the now-standard 8 to 10 episode TV season in a post-streaming world has strangled much of what makes the medium unique, and he points to how many of the top-rated streaming shows are older titles with a hundred or more episodes as evidence (though he leaves out that streaming rights to shows like The Office have been the subject of contentious bidding wars in the past, a fact that would only strengthen his argument). he hits a lot of my personal favorite talking points: streaming tv is worse at good individual episodes, the idea of "filler" doesn't really make sense when applied to american television, the serial episodic structure lets you get to know characters better over time. near the end he pulls out the Netflix Marvel shows Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, each of which had a 14 episode first season that felt somehow overlong, despite their characters being literally tailor-made to support serialized week-to-week stories. these, he says, were an important early example of how the prestige streaming model encourages movie-like storytelling instead of TV-like storytelling. these are a good points, many of which i've made myself across my recent informal series of video essays about modern television writing practices.

but on the other side of all that analysis, Midnight's conclusion leaves something to be desired. here's the closing paragraph that jumped out at me, with my own added emphasis: "I love serialization on TV and I always have, I just think it can often be used better within the scaffolding of episodic stories. and for a while there it felt like TV was getting better and better at melding the two together into something truly interesting and special. but somewhere along the way that progress got lost, and many in the industry ended up thinking that serialization and short seasons were the shortcut to quality." take a good, long look at those bolded statements, and consider how important they are to Midnight's argument. after 17 minutes of wide-ranging and generally pretty good analysis of specific shows and recent trends, these three generalizations quietly paper over a gargantuan blind spot in order to get the script over the finish line.

first, "for a while there." for a while there refers to the internecine years between the dawn of the Netflix streaming era in 2011 and the eventual Wall Street-ification of all the media companies by 2018-19, when there was a big shift away from purely serialized television towards the more expensive "prestige" model we're so accustomed to now. what were the causes of this shift? what was actually going on "for a while there"? well, the 2007 writer's strike increased the writer's royalty take from home video sales, and gave them more bargaining power with networks. for this and a million other reasons, a lot of post-2007 shows saw a diminished episode-per-season count from 23 to 16-18. this was a huge boon to writers who now had more time to work on fewer episodes, meaning the quality of each individual episode shot through the roof. it helped that everyone coming into showrunning capacity at this period had years of experience working in the sitcom/cop-drama mines, developing a hunger for a show that could tell a continuous narrative within an episodic framework. with this new higher-quality television spreading away from cable-only networks into broadcast, suddenly everyone was talking about "the golden age of tv" and hyping up the medium as a place for nuanced, artful storytelling. Netflix saw where the wind was blowing and invested heavily into this trend, selling the idea that on streaming, there's no need for a set episode-per-season count for every show, no need for every episode to come in at a set length, no need to avoid more controversial adult topics for advertisers. of course, they very quickly reneged on that promise and have since become everything they promised not to be, but whatever. as Netflix succeeded, other networks decided they wanted to eat the streamer's lunch and develop their own services, making big deals with established names that made for great marketing. this meant a wave of well-publicized high-profile investment that pulled triple duty with audiences hungry for more mature media, creators hungry to make more mature media, and investors with dollar signs in their eyes. perhaps you can guess whose interests are the ones that actually matter in this equation.

but then after all that investment and quality increase, Midnight says, "somewhere along the way" the trend shifted, and "many in the industry" adopted the streaming model as the artistic ideal. now, hold on, wait. who in the industry? do you mean writers? directors? producers? executives? these roles each have wildly different relationships to the medium and to the stores of capital which allow it to be produced, and putting them all in a single consensus-bucket together as if they're all the same thing is wildly misjudged. you know what happened "somewhere along the way"? studios and streamers (and their increasingly powerful Wall Street backers) realized that favoring streaming over home video meant they didn't have to pay those costly royalties that were so painstakingly won in the 07 strike. you may recall that apocalyptically low streaming royalties were a major point of contention in the 2023 writer's strike. (the irony of Netflix starting as a DVD rental service is lost on no one.) like every service that emerges out of big tech, streaming was tailor made to break unions and steal profits without looking like that's what they were doing. they sold a big loud exciting bill of goods, got everyone to invest before regulators could catch up, made themselves an essential part of the creative economy, stole absolutely everything that wasn't bolted down while no one was looking, and left all their traditional unionized competitors scrambling to make up the shortfall. if this sounds familiar, that's because it is THE business model of the post-08-recession world. you might call it platform decay, or if you're Cory Doctorow you might call it "enshittification," but i'm gonna cut out the middle man and call it what it is: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. it's the enclosure of the commons in microcosm, the natural process of enclosure and monopolization inherent to an open market. as is always the case with their loud proclamations of innovation, tech has invented nothing new here. it's pretty much just What Capitalism Does.

we do not need bloggers to reinvent Marxism from first principles to understand what's happening. Marx already did that for us.

another key factor for understanding what happened "along the way" comes with the development of Mini-Rooms. instead of creating a crew of staff writers experienced at multiple levels of production who work for months together to write the scripts for a single season of television, streamers like Netflix would assemble small rooms of relatively inexperienced writers paid slightly above intern rates under the guidance of maybe one experienced showrunner that were only given a few weeks to pump out scripts to please investors. this has led to shows that often feel samey, rushed, and terminally inconsistent. now, instead of writers having more time to work on fewer episodes for the same (or greater) pay, they have less time to work on fewer episodes for worse pay and virtually zero royalties. this coincides of course with cost-cutting measures across the board in streaming, with producers desperate to decrease time on set wherever possible and eating the cost of breaking union regulations because Economies Of Scale Are Fucking Absurd, meaning everyone on a production has less time to do their work, which inevitably means that their work is worse. and with TV seasons being so drastically shortened, and the gaps between seasons so drastically widened (not to mention the expectation that few if any shows will make it past season 2 (because union contracts get a pay bump at season 3)), there are fewer opportunities for young filmworkers to gain experience, build connections with fellow filmworkers, and hone their talent pool over a period of years. a show isn't just its writers, directors, and stars after all, it's an entire business operation employing hundreds if not thousands of people. for a filmworker in the 90s or before, getting a gig on a popular show could be life-changing because it was one of the rare Hollywood situations that was relatively dependable for a long stretch of time. those kinds of jobs are increasingly rare, and the alternatives are starting to look more and more like undignified freelance work than a real sustainable career.

all of these factors and so many more have had the downstream effect of making the entire industry less stable, burning out promising young talent instead of developing it, discouraging others from trying to break into the industry in the first place, and lowering the baseline quality of popular media so the viewing public sees it as less valuable. perhaps you can fill in the blanks on the ensuing race to the bottom.

this is not the result of a creative consensus. this is not something that "many in the industry" just sort of randomly changed their minds about "somewhere along the way." this is an economic trend driven by economic forces far beyond the purview of any single working person's decisions. maybe you can find interviews that suggest otherwise, maybe there were lots of writers excitedly extolling the virtues of streaming media over traditional forms-- but those people are no less vulnerable to marketing hype than you are, and why should they have been more educated about the economic realities of streaming than we were? we are, all of us, simply reacting to systems in motion, trying our best to make sense of them, searching for the silver lining that keeps us from going insane at the instability of it all. this is why it's so important to have a materialist framework for your analysis-- without that anchor you're just judging by vibes, trying to divine an explanation from consumer trends and missing the forest for the trees. look not to the words of any given writer or actor or producer, but instead to the money, to the actual flow of material power. look at the victories of organized labor, and the resultant retaliations by organized capital. Midnight's thumbnail loudly states that "WE BROKE TV," but "we" didn't do a damn thing. our consumption habits didn't do this, the creative preferences of writers or directors or showrunners didn't do this-- it was rich people with lots of money who saw an opportunity to make even more money and took it, damn the consequences.

here's my problem with consumer-side criticism. it tends to see a hard dividing line between those who make media and those who consume it, and thus generalizes all of the makers into a single heterogeneous mass that can only be understood in the vaguest possible abstract. without a materialist economic framework for understanding the flow of power in these systems, consumer-side criticism can only go so far before it crashes headlong into a big scary Marx-shaped wall. there's a door to the other side only a few feet away of course, but it's rare for a critic in this mode to walk through it because I guess they see the business side of things as irrelevant or overly complicated. like, we're here to talk about the contents of media in a very layman's death-of-the-author sort of way, to judge trends on their own merits and not rely on outside sources to skew our perspective. this is fine when the scope of your analysis is relatively small, but as soon as you start asking questions like "why isn't [thing] as good as it used to be" your consumer-end framework fails you utterly. i'm not saying Captain Midnight is a uniquely craven paragon of this particular misstep by the way, in fact on the whole i'd say he's better about this than many. this is an extremely widespread problem for a generation of critics brought up after The End Of History, when trickle-down free-market hokum was adopted as Natural Law, leaving them only the empty feelgood individualist babble of neoliberalism to interpret the world. but it's not an insurmountable problem! i've yet to meet a commie my age that didn't start in that bubble and have to work their way out of it. i certainly made my share of embarrassing neoliberal apologia before finding the immortal science! it is the process of a lifetime to unthink these blind spots, and i point them out in all kindness in the hopes that others might avoid such mistakes in future.

and frankly, everyone is asking these "why is [thing] bad now" questions because it's begun to affect every facet of our lives. it's not just movies and television shows, it's basic web services, it's the USPS, it's the healthcare system, it's jobs and housing and education, it's everything. what is it, precisely, that you want to fix? you want to see better movies and tv shows? how do you propose to make that a reality, beyond "i hope that creators/audiences adjust their habits accordingly"? to my mind, this notable tension is a perfect opportunity to point people in the direction of an actual systemic cause, and thus an actual systemic solution. do not stop your analysis at "shorter seasons are bad and i hope they stop doing that" when you could help your audience think about these things in terms of class, labor, and solidarity, by giving them an illustrative example they might apply to their own working life. there is no fix to this macroeconomic trend in reform, no union so strong it can put a lance through the heart of capital's lust for profit. maybe bringing all this up in a video would feel too political for a lot of creators in this space, but the politics are gonna do what they're gonna do regardless and it's gonna be your problem (and your audience's problem!) sooner than later. i'm not saying every video essay should be a dedicated Marxist polemic, that would get old real fast, just that the current liberal individualist framework lets the real perpetrators off the hook and limits our ability to imagine better futures. if you want to feel like your fluffy unimportant media analysis is "justified" at a time of war, genocide, and crushing economic disparity, you might start by using them to normalize a more collective, materially-grounded way of thinking about the world. it's the little things that add up most in the long run, and you'd be surprised how easy it is to make "too political" into "too important to ignore" with a little strategic frog-boiling.

that's my opinion, anyway. this is still a pretty good video essay and i think you should go watch it. i'd also recommend Midnight's review of the Borderlands movie and the interminable nostalgia of modern Marvel movies for a bit of good fun.