One my good friend's and his wife usually do a cookout and have a little party for every season of Stranger Things. He asked if I would be going this year and I said no. He actually has gotten tired of the show but his wife still wants to watch. I thought the second season was worse but still didn't annoy me until the third season. I have reached a point of being so tired of the "girls who are much better than men" trope that is in everything and to top it off, they have the "insert unnecessary lgbt character"
I remember reading that she was supposed to be added as a romantic subplot for the reformed jock (makes sense for a show paying homage to the 80s) but then they decided to subvert expectations. So I would imagine the next season the four original boys will be background characters so the girls can shine. Also, that little sister was annoying, but of course the critics raved and said that lesbian character was the best one.
I feel like season 5 Breaking Bad did kind of suck though.
S01-S04 Walt could be seen as pretty much justified in his choices; it was him or them, he was providing for his family and that's what a man does - a man provides.
But even back in 2013 it wasn't acceptable for a man to provide so he has to ham-handedly say it was never for them, he's working with literal nazis, and nobody can profit from drugs (because drugs bad) so they have to needlessly kill side-character Andrea, and so on.
You can say that's just a continuing evolution of his character, but it seems like a mad scramble to unwrite the previous four seasons to post-hoc remove justifications for his actions because people had accepted those as positives (self-defense, david vs goliath, guile/ingenuity).
I agree, they later said that the whole series was always meant to be a case study of how an audience can be conditioned to support an immoral character, and the producers wanted to test how far they could push him before most of the audience stops supporting him - with S5 being when most people broke. Walt was always the bad guy.
I found that hard to believe with some of the story beats, and the unpredictable nature of TV productions.
What I'm getting at is that what the writers believed was evil wasn't actually what actual people agree is evil.
A man providing for his family isn't evil, but to a woke it's the evil patriarchy.
They set out to see how evil they could make him, but they actually found out how tragically heroic they could make him. Does he make even a single decision out of malice? I can't think of any - until season 5. Walt isn't even the same character in S1-S4 and S5, and there's no explanation for it other than the show ending.
Well, that explains why I couldn't make it past the first season, because that's exactly what it came across as.
This is my problem with these shows and I think maybe the true brainwashing: getting people to sympathize with evil. Providing for your family by selling drugs isn't noble, it's evil from the get go.
That's exactly what it's about.
It's why the villains monologue about BLM (the ghetto bastard in Black Panther) and communist utopian ideology (Thanos) several MONTHS before those became the default setting for NPCs around the globe.
They've all been trained to "identify with the villain" to the point they think any story that doesn't have an identifiable villain is badly written. And of course, they excuse almost any evil as long as it was done by the guy they "identify" with. Which is just proactively excusing themselves from any evil they might do themselves.
Breaking Bad needed to end the second Hank learned. The song and dance after had a few great moments, but if the show ended right there, it would have been a pretty kino final shot.