Blogs and Ends: Friday Night Drive-by 1/20/23
FIRST
Why I’m Not Reviewing The Last of Us TV Show
I could end this sub-post with one sentence.
“Because I know what happens to Joel.”
Honestly, there is more than one reason.
I’m not really into zombie TV shows. The movies are okay, but zombie TV shows lean heavily into hopelessness, despair, and nihilism. It’s all doom and gloom for the span of the entire series and nothing is well thought out. Everybody is getting around in cars years after the event even though gasoline has a shelf life of six months. Diesel will be good for one year but will gel eventually. Ammo isn’t eternal either. Guns need maintenance on the regular and it rarely gets a mention.*
And finally, there are the zombies themselves. Plague zombies will be dead inside of three months and I am even granting hibernative states between intense bouts of hyperactivity. I’ll go as high as four months due to a lack of real-world data, but no more than that. Actual walking dead will be skeletonized due to cadaveric material loss in less than six weeks depending on the weather. Either can be easily defeated by heading north or retreating into a desert.
Zombies are a short term (if extremely intense) problem. That will work for movies and books but not for TV shows.
You can only neutralize these issues if you are talking about an actual supernatural cause. And zombie fans absolutely don’t want that.
Okay those are my objections in general. My specific objections to The Last of Us franchise is that the producers of this show got it greenlit for one reason. They want to give Joel a Red Wedding. That is absolutely and inevitably where this show is heading. Joel gets his brains beaten out while his adopted daughter is forced to watch.
After that it’s Ellie’s show. In the game Ellie was a young girl and young girls are the hope for tomorrow. They are the mothers of the future. Unless she gets Woke washed by Neil Cuckman into being a lesbian, and then she is a hateful, revenge obsessed, genetic dead-end. The ratings are going to fall off a cliff when Joel gets killed.
You can expect the screaming about homophobes to start when that happens.
*I will grant that Last of Us part one gave it a passing mention.
NEXT
The Mandalorian Season 3 Trailer.
(*long tired sigh*)
There’s the trailer.
Look at it.
Whatever.
Despite what Carl Weathers said, Star Wars is not turning into a genuine multiverse. It’s still officially headed into the unwanted and unloved Reyloverse. I expected nothing else. Disney has sunk way too much money into Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge to give up the malinvestment of Reylo. Maybe in ten years when it’s time update the Rise of the Resistance, they will do something with it. But by then Star Wars will be about as relevant as Flash Gordon.
And even if Reylo is replaced. I’ll never be able to unsee The Last Jedi. That memory is intact. It soiled the franchise forever.
The shill media is trying to pretend the various hints about the First Order in the trailer are going to create an emotion in audiences more energetic than complete indifference. I kind of feel sorry for them, Disney is probably breathing down their necks and it’s hardly their fault Mickey the Great and Terrible is incapable of making anything exciting anymore.
Most of the Advocate fans have detached their identities from Star Wars. The Intentionalists had already left the building. Consequently, the Mandalorian is trying to sell itself to the Culturalists and Flirts at this point. I suspect it will do better than Andor simply because it’s an established property but that said, interest is waning fast. I also suspect it’s going to be a truncated season because two episodes of this season’s Mando had to be force fed into Boba Fett in a desperate attempt to boost that disaster’s numbers.
Considering that most of the trailer comments I’ve seen are asking ‘how did Mando and Baby Yoda hook up again?’ I would have to say that didn’t work.
LAST
Cobra Kai is indeed getting its sixth and definitely final season on Netflix.
It has been a strange journey for the little sequel that could. It started life as a pitch meeting with Jada Pinkett-Smith’s brother. The Pinkett-Smith’s bought up the rights to Karate Kid for their son. That franchise went nowhere but they still own the rights. Normally the journey from pitch meeting to greenlit is a long one but in twenty minutes it was a go.
It first debuted on YouTube Red, which no longer exists. The first two seasons were shown there, and YouTube paid for a third but never ran it. Which is why Netflix ran three seasons rather than their standard two, the third had a bargain basement price tag.
However, it looked like there were serious clouds on the horizon for a grand finale season. Netflix put zero ad money into season 5 when it launched and that usually means they’ve quit on a show.
So far as Netflix is concerned what does another season bring to the table? By now, the market is so saturated that the only thing they get out of it are a few people resubbing for a single show but then they cancel their subscription as soon they’ve binged it. Sure, Cobra Kai is their number three show, but all that means is that it gets more and more expensive each year, since everyone on the production wants a raise each season.
If the numbers added up to a profit, fine, but Netflix was acting like they didn’t. They may have been right. It didn’t matter how many viewer hours were streamed if it didn’t equal more subscribers because that was how Netflix made it’s money
At least so far as the old model was concerned.
But now Netflix has added a “with ads” tier and that changes the whole ball game. Now the number three streamed show across the globe is worth quite a bit more so far as advertisers are concerned. They are the ones paying a premium to Netflix to be on Cobra Kai. But that also changes the amount of money that Cobra Kai wants to be paid by Netflix.
The extended delay in the announcement is just a reflection of how intense the behind-the-scenes negotiations were. I never had much doubt a sixth season was going to happen. It may have been a surprise to the trade papers but not the readers of Arkhaven Blog.
Okay, I’m done here.
