I just finished watching the 3 episodes of Reacher and the final season of Jack Ryan. Which leaves me more confused at the state of show production at Amazon.
Reacher so far has been great, he's not ever belittled or sidelined for a woman to take the spotlight (in fact his nickname is 'the big guy' and a running joke is not to mess with him as he'll hit you like a freight train)
Jack Ryan was more questionable in the beginning, first season was good in proof of concept though that UAV pilot sidestory was unnecessary, 2nd season was weakest with Venezuela. 3rd season really improved from secret Soviet Union plots, using NATO to bait WW3, coup and false flag nukes. 4th season that I just watched would probably be something everyone here would like since the bad guys are NGOs using their fame as cover to run drug, exploitation and terrorist operations with the help of corrupt US officials in Government and CIA. Then we have something like Invincible too which haven't caught the second season yet but heard it's good.
Now I try to counter that with something like Rings of Power or the Wheel of Time and now you get where I'm confused. How can a company that can bring an audience to niche franchises flop SO hard with established well known franchises? The reason I'm MORE concerned than ever is because of this that there finally seems to be movement on a 40k production with Cavill as a producer but if the same people that did Rings of Power are involved, this might be used to bring in the worst thing imaginable: Female space marines..
Is it just which team is working on it as it sounds like after Rings of Power, that team has been largely demoted or how the contracts for adaptation are in place? I've not watched Netflix ever since Cuties was on there but they seem to be sticking a lot closer to the author's intentions with things like One Piece and Quiet on the Western front and been more successful for it so is that the main thing to look out for?
Sorry for long post just TDLR; trying to know how Amazon makes stuff so I know if 40k gets Rings of Power treatment or is actually good.
It's propaganda. They need people to trust the government so they portray the three letter agencies as the good guys.
Considering how the main story line of the 4th season was a corrupt former CIA director was the one greenlighting and funding operations to use black ops to help triad and cartel organisations, don't think it's that good.
Plus both Reacher and Jack Ryan seem to have the message that the organisations or institutions are corrupt or too slow to respond and you need a 'great man' to come in to fix the situation quickly, which is more popularist/right leaning than left.
Sure, but that still feeds into the boomer myth that the FBI and CIA are mostly good guys and it's a few bad apples.
"Former" being the key word there.
I just re-watched Die Hard 2 -- hadn't seen it in many years. The bad guys (spoiler!) were corrupt US army ... anti-communists.
It's funny, because at the time this came out (80s/90s), I considered anti-communists to be kind of kooks, because clearly nobody would ever think communism is a good thing. Turns out the reality is just that actual communists are decent liars and good at hiding when there's no pressure on them.
Even then in the movies the anti-communists always accused the US of being cozy with foreign communist governments, which could always be countered on real-politick grounds, instead of a more "the call is coming from inside the house!" style argument.
No Hollywood movie would dare talk about the net negative fiscal impact of Blacks and Hispanics and use that as evidence of US domestic policy being inherently communist in nature.
Exactly. It's why I've always found it so loathsome that every "manly" piece of entertainment is either military man fighting terrorists, or government man fighting terrorists. I don't relate to any of those groups, except maybe the terrorists, lately
Its the cost and control. Grand Toure is ending because the creators are too old to really continue. Its been a great show because the executives could be trusted to make a great show that would bring in viewers. If something cost too much, they stopped doing that the next season, for example the tent moving around everywhere.
Rings of Power cost a ton, and the creators weren't trusted, so they put in a lot of extra executives. These committee types were the ones demanding woman power and other ideas because they wanted to get as many viewers as they could. It was really dumb, but committees full of crazy people are like that. Its especially obvious the creators didn't actually understand Tolkien and his works to really continue. Add in a lot of ego and you have this result.
The shows you mentioned are way cheaper, have a fairly easy concept to understand, and people who want to make that. Way less committees and ego.
The reason why Disney fails is the same reason why Rings of Power failed. They love committees and meetings, have egos, and the cost means looking at every detail. This is why the movie or hotel is generic but specific details are amazing.
Add in a bit of weird funding problems like esg and you have a product for no one that's supposed to be for everyone.
Reacher has Lee Child heavily involved in the writing. So much so that he had a Stan Lee-esque cameo in the first season.
Henry Cavill nearly singlehandedly made Witcher good by actually caring about it. He failed, recognized his failure, and bailed.
But I think that's how these few good shows get made.
I don't know this Reacher dude, but being a hulk he's probably kind of like his character. The script makes his character a pussy and he just says "no". "But your contract!". "No."
The writers aren't even going to try woke because they know what'll happen - the production will stop and it'll be a huge disaster. And it's probably not just him. It's like a union of decent people working on the show that set the vibe that they can make a good show and so they do.
The best explanation I heard was it's socialism for TV, the good stuff keeps the subs rolling to fund the dross
If I had to say I think it would be two things. First being the negligence of oversight with productions. Amazon is hands off/doesn't care or does care when it comes to spreading a certain message that they allow in their creations. If someone inserts political messages in with Rings of Power for example, that gets a pass because it's something Amazon wants to promote.
That comes back to the 2nd thing where you have a production crew that's not politicized and makes a good product like Reacher, Amazon will still push that out because it's something that people will actually want, a.k.a, what they should be making.
It seems to me like they want to push both markets. This is just like the Roald Dahl rewrite campaign that Penguin did with his books. Say you're going to plagiarize it, release that, ignore backlash, sell compendium of completed works unaltered. Companies know how to market to both sides of the culture war. Rings of Power was promoted as being diverse Tolkien, Reacher is spread via word of mouth because it's unpoliticised.
For 40k I think it'll be good. Cavil has had two times now with Superman and Witcher being at the mercy of people who gave him bad scripts. If he gets that producer role, he has that power to push out bad influence and be true to canon. The question then becomes what does he adapt?
As far as adapting 40k goes, it would be hilarious to see 'If the Emperor had a TTS Device', but that would basically never happen. More realistically, it depends on what they have rights to adapt and what GW's primary goal is with the project. I assume that any and all Black Library stories are fair game to adapt, but maybe some of the authors had/have contracts that specified compensation that GW doesn't want to pay out to do an adaptation.
GW's goal with the adaptation is the real sticking point, though. If they just want something that will drive people to purchase books and models, then some adaptation of one of the various Astartes stories (retconned to include Primaris because fuck you buy biggerer and betterer new marines) would probably be the way to go. Cool and flashy, combat heavy, makes people want to try out the game(s) this is based on is the route there. There are a number of stories but one I always liked was the Space Wolves series about Ragnar Blackmane... and I just looked it up to make sure I was remembering the name correctly and FUCK ME SIDEWAYS THEY TURNED HIM INTO A PRIMARIS?! SO fucking dumb.
Anyways, if they instead want to make something that's a bit more understandable to ease a wider audience into 40k and something that can stand alone a bit better, several of the stories about the Guard would make for reasonably relatable military sci-fi. Gaunt's Ghosts would be a nice pick for something serious, and for something perhaps a touch more lighthearted (insofar as one can do that adapting 40k) adapting Caiaphas Cain would give opportunity for a bit of levity and help introduce some of the other Imperial institutions and Xenos factions since Cain's encountered a wide variety of both.
Well. You’ve laid out what I was thinking. I have some of the Reacher books. Need to read them
This.
I was going to write something similar.
It's no different than the first season effect of Netflix shows: put out something good (enough) to lure in fans and then hit them with the wokeness in subsequent seasons.
In Amazon's case, they have a rotation of shows across the spectrum to quell dissent. It gives them plausible deniability amongst the normies so that they can retort, "See, Amazon isn't woke because Reacher isn't woke".
It's the genetic fallacy, and we see people utilise this blinder-behaviour all the time for products or companies they like.
Just like, plenty of people will defend The Boys because some elements are "based" (like Soldier Boy), therefore in the eyes of normies, it's not woke.
Unlike Netflix and Disney, Amazon is being smart enough to boil the frog moderately. Push out crap like Rings of Power or Wheel of time, and then lure back in the normies and fans with Reacher and Jack Ryan. They can keep the see-saw going by pushing out Left-wing propaganda while still keeping their Right-wing viewership.
But make no mistake, even at Amazon, the Overton Window is still decidedly moving perpetually to the Left.
I just assume it's a complete lack of quality control.
About 15 years ago I attended a screening of a couple TV pilots. Both were awful, and neither were greenlit. From that experience I learned that as bad as TV shows that make it to air can be, the stuff that doesn't is so much worse (not to mention the stuff that doesn't even get funding for a pilot).
So I just assume if you're Black or a woman they just insta-greenlight whatever, and that just airs with everything else. So some stuff will be good (or what passes for good these days) and a lot will be garbage. And the floor for the garbage is a lot lower because there's effectively no filtering process anymore.
I would say because the people that want to adapt things like reacher and ryan haven't yet been corrupted with a woke "fanbase." Sure the Tom Clancy novels are famous and there were a bunch of movies, but the woke crowd isn't about to infest itself into what are largely still 1k page long novels. There also isn't a big cultural push for Clancy to be mainstream entertainment by YouTubers.
Things like Lord of the Rings and Warhammer became pop culture so thus they want to pervert them to their "message."
If suddenly there are a bunch of Tom Clancy movies coming out that make billions and technothrillers become the next big thing you'll see them all racing in to infect the fandom.
Season one of Reacher, I take it? Don't worry, gurl powr is coming.
Actually 2nd, they had a new female member join but she's so far only been able to buy time in fights for a guy to help her in anything where she doesn't have a gun on her.
So very accurate, she's more on the analytical side and possible relationship interest for Reacher.
There’s 0 chance there aren’t female space marines and at least many of the upper ranks are ofcolors.
They only propagandize something that they think will have broad appeal.
They don't have unlimited resources, it's not like they can be everywhere always. Stuff still gets made without their involvement. Though rarely popular stuff, they focus their attention on controlling anything with significant cultural relevance.
"They only propagandize ..." is the wrong way to put it. Rather, the things that can have broad appeal naturally attract the lizards, so they flock to where they think they can have the biggest impact.
They're a creepy hivemind. The infected are brainslugged NPCs, they zombily follow where the ideology drives them. The ideology is collectivist not only in its intention, but also in its function.
You missed a big data point in The Terminal List, a Prime show which is very much in the same heroic, conservative vein as the other unpozzed side of the bracket. So yes it is confusing.
The thing is, swashbuckling tales of adventure are just kind of what people default to when there's less of an agenda involved. There being less of an agenda involved sometimes does not mean there is no agenda involved overall. At the same time, there being an agenda apparent sometimes, does not mean that publishing less obviously woke stuff is somehow part of the same agenda.
Uncontaminated stuff creeping through is either a calculated move or uncalculated. Uncalculated could mean laziness (ie. lack of a strict ideological filter) or innocence, but Amazon are obviously not innocent based on the totality of their output, so you're left with laziness as one option. If it's calculated then it either means they're not fully invested in woke concerns yet mostly follow them anyway for some reason, or else their un-woke content is a way of making shows specifically for conservatives to placate them and keep them onside. Honestly, anything besides laziness (occasional slackening of agenda enforcement) seems too convoluted to me.
I'm reminded of a thread here about the show The Continental, on NBC's streaming platform. There was a smear article bitching about Mel Gibson's character in it. For my part, I'm going to assume that everything on an NBC streaming platform is pozzed - I'm just not going to watch. But someone on the production of that show must happen to be uncommitted to the culture war to the extent that they're happy to cast Mel in the first place. Yet their audience is fully committed and they want 100% message, 100% of the time - and so you get seething articles about how The Continental is problematic and Gibson's char is the worst part.
Your only hope for media in this era is that these producers are lazy enough to allow a whole show go unpoisoned. Weirdly, on Amazon it seems like you have a non-zero chance of this. I still wouldn't get my hopes up for any single show.
I didn't mention the Terminal List as I still haven't watched it (I'll see it over Christmas as heard good things) whereas I have context for the other 3.
It could be laziness but I'd like to put another point across: tiredness. Others have pointed out how Reacher, Jack Ryan, Terminal List etc are all smaller productions with competent teams so there's less to do than just give them a budget, a deadline and let them get to work.
Compare that to any if the left's pet projects and it's worse than if PETA meeting crossed with a Bridezilla bachelorette party. There's SO many hoops to jump through to get them to meet basic deadlines and if you don't jump through THEIR hoops quickly enough, you get 'cancelled' by their online sycophants. The only reason they got this far is thanks to ESG and shit like it.
With that drying up quickly now and a looming economic situation, seems like Amazon is too tired to do it anymore and will let the shows like Reacher be done because they don't need to do anything and Rings of Power gets a budget cut and less involvement because they are too tired to give a fuck anymore.
I'm hearing in the grapevine that it's not just studios affected by this, Twitch is REALLY in the cliff now as talk Amazon might just sell them off and that recent TOS change might've got them to slap them down because advertising was calling them.
I'm having some trouble getting through the first 2 eps of reacher s2. It's very cringe imo and there are a lot of scenes that don't appear in the book.
I think it's not helped by the fact that most of the actors in reacher arent very good actors
You have to appease feminists enough that they won't destroy you. For every good thing, you have to shit out two or three open male genocide propaganda pieces to appease them.
MeToo changed who holds the power.