Submitted 10 months ago by sighofannoyance@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
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The special efx haven’t gotten more expensive, cameras haven’t risen in price, writers don’t seem to be demanding particular high prices, netflix takes anything that you can pitch without saying the word disney.
So what in the world happened? X-files was an amazing show and watching it you are not only entertained but you care about mulder and scully. The show is genuinely a great time. Why did they stop making them like this?
I’m in the middle of rewatching X-Files yet again. It’s really hit and miss, even in the good seasons. I think people remember all the good episodes and forget about the bad and average ones.
You looking for a new X-Files type show? I can’t think of any good ones but I don’t really look for that type of show anymore either.
Not neccessarily x-files related, just of the same quality and make. Something that is as entertaining as watching xfiles.
Travelers
Supernatural seasons 1-5 are some quality monster of the week episodes. I never watched past that point because it was a fitting conclusion and I heard the show went off the rails after that.
I’d have to agree. I’m working my way through it again and got stuck on season 5 because I’m not really interested in the whole convoluted “aliens abducted Scully and Mulder’s sister but also maybe they weren’t really aliens” plotline. The monster of the week episodes were the best. I didn’t remember til this point how much I disliked this part of the show last time, and I’m really not looking forward to hearing “Agent John Doggett” 42 times per episode a couple more seasons from now.
But they still make good shows? I don’t understand your point? There were plenty of mediocre and bad episodes of xfiles. Are you just talking like low sci-fi? Also how old are you - depending on your age - xfiles may have just played a big role in shaping you, so it will be hard for you to find anything that tops xfiles. Like for example - no game has ever grabbed me as hard as Earthbound - there have been so many good games that have come out, but nothing tops Earthbound for me. So i think it would help if you didn’t compare other shows and media to xfiles and try to find something that makes each of those shows worthwhile in their own way - plus, would you really want another xfiles?
I mean there were great shows besides xfiles like twilight zone for example but that was in the 60s
Twilight Zone is a show that still holds up well. It covered topics like racism very well. Rod di a great job.
The only thing that can top Earthbound is Mother 3 🎮
I’m middle-aged, and Xfiles was great, but some of the best shows I’ve seen have been in the last decade
some of the best shows have been in the last decade
like what do you recommend?
For example, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are two series I could watch on repeat. Absolutely solid.
First few seasons of Orange is the New Black (really ran out of steam after that imo)
Now, sci-fi specifically … it’s been a while since I’ve seen a good one. Some people I know really, really like The Expanse, though for me it just didn’t connect. Black Mirror is hit and miss, but when it hits, it’s amazing (the stinker episodes are real stinkers though).
I mean … Game of Thrones. Just not the finale lol
Firefly. Watch the one season before the Movie. Then there are 8 novels now and comics by both Dark Horse & BOOM! Much disagreement about BOOM!'s but they got canceled too. It’s at least critical to read up on Wash’s family history and more, I think, but whatever.
Mr. sighofannoyance this is a lie detector.
I’m gonna make you some questions and you shall answer with honesty.
Have you ever watched any tv show other than “X-Files”?
Episodic vs Serial.
Everything is a serial now. They’re not bad, but you can’t just pick any random episode and have a good time. I prefer episodic stuff for that very reason.
The idea is to have you itching for the next fix. More money that way, you don’t cancel subscriptions, etc.
Sure… If they did 1 episode a week. But when they dump the entire season in one day, I can just watch the whole thing over a weekend and cancel my subscription until the next season.
I find myself enjoying episodic shows more than serials like star trek TNG, Voyager, House MD, etc. I tend to get bored with non episodic shows because with episodic ones I can look forward to watching a new story every episode. Keeps me interested.
Might be that it is hard to make good art.
And even the X Files got bad after about 5 seasons.
It’s also not like good stuff has stopped being made. And back then there was also plenty of bad stuff. You just remember the good shows.
I’m going to interpret the question more as "why don’t they make shows like “The X-Files” any more than on specific quality.
The 90’s was the last hurrah of quality serialized television. You were seeing a lot of improvements in the quality of writing and willingness to push against norms and standards. You could still make a shallow serialized series and they still do today, but you could make a show back then with a lore tied together from callbacks.
So why did these kinds of shows stop? DVD sets and ubiquitous time-skipping technology meant that writers could shift from good serialized content to longer form and continuous stories. You started seeing shows filled with “previously on…” because it became the expectation that viewers watched all the episodes up to then. Streaming make it the default.
There has been a recent push to go back to a serialized model, but the economics of the industry has changed. Writers rooms able to churn out 26 shows a year have been whittled away. You also have some actors that don’t want the work schedule that comes with it. You also had a time where a show that lasted a year found it easier stay on air to get to the 100 episode minimum to make syndication valuable; there isn’t that profit motive any more.
Because good is an entirely subjective measure. Ask a 5 year old what the best tv show is and you’ll get a different answer than if you asked a professional critic. There have been loads of shows since X-Files ended that are entertaining and have engaging characters. It’s okay to have a favorite.
Ask a 5 year old what the best tv show is and you’ll get a different answer
I get it everybody has different tastes, that doesn’t mean cooking can be of various levels of quality. Just because you like tamales and i prefer borito doesn’t mean there is good and bad attempts at both. However you would expect the frequency of well made boritos to be more or less constant over time. With the 5 year old at least you know whatever they’ll say is genuinely the best show available to them for their age bracket. A lot of the critics’ opinions just don’t add up.
Do you actually like serialised content? Most TV is now serialised, as opposed to being episodic like X-Files.
I’ll be honest, I’m not really sure what you’re getting at with the food analogy.
Your question is like asking ‘Why hasn’t there been another good band since Green Day?’ Some people don’t think they are a good band, some people like them but think other stuff is way better, ect. Again, because good is a subjective measure and (artistic) taste really isn’t quantifiable.
Have you seen Fringe? It's a tv show from about a decade ago, very similar vibe to the X-files.
If you don't like that and combined with all the other stuff in this thread, then I think you might just not like TV as a medium anymore.
Fringe ended weird though. I chalk it up to JJ Abrams getting bored (yet again) with his wildly successful project and letting it sputter to an end instead of letting it go out with a bang.
Blame the network for rushing the ending.
I watched Fringe when it came out and loved it but for whatever reason never saw the final season. Last year I finally went back and finished it. I will concede the ending was a bit rushed but also I’m grateful it did get an ending. A lot of great shows get axed and don’t get to wrap up anything. So while not perfect, I’m going to say it was decent enough and does wrap everything up.
It’s a great ride along the way too.
I’d just like to point out that the Stone Angels episode of Doctor Who came out after X-Files.
You mean the Weeping Angels?
Because they have started making better ones.
In TV there is a watershed moment. Before sopranos and after sopranos.
The shoes that came before were spaced to the particularities of broadcast television. Season length, episode lengths, budget, guest appearances, were all determined by the details of how broadcast television was organized in the last twentieth century, with seasons and sweep weeks and all that crap.
HBO was the first TV producer to bin all of that, and enable TV to reach its creative potential.
X files was a very cool show, but its late 20th century broadcast pedigree is on full display.
The BBC did it first, in part thanks to a lack of ad breaks and shorter seasons.
Eg. the UK version of House of Cards is genuinely excellent and arguably better than the US version, even before Spacey. There's also stuff like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People, starring Alec Guiness.
were all determined by the details of how broadcast television was organized in the late twentieth century, with seasons and sweep weeks and all that crap.
Another thing is the production schedule on some of these shows. They'd be doing 12 hour days, 6 or even 7 days a week, sometimes writing shows that were going to be released within days. Far harder to create a coherent arc or plan stuff, when you have to write and direct far more episodes in a limited time frame.
I haven’t watched sopranos, but after all the mafia/gangster movies, i felt the genre was done with, the god fater 1 to 3, once upon a time in america, good fellers, casino, scarface, the list goes on and on. I’ll give sopranos a shot but i am not holding my breath…
That's.... not what the poster was saying. Prestige TV extends much farther than the mafia genre, sopranos was just the turning point when higher budget dramatic things were more commonly greenlit.
The Wire, Breaking Bad, Watchmen, The Expanse Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Mad Men etc all absolutely blow X files out of the water. And while I do love X files, the monster of the week format is not even in the same ballpark as those long form character dramas.
I think you might be letting nostalgia blind you to how great television has become.
You have not understood anything I wrote.
Agree so much on HBO. We just moved to the US and got the "Max" subscription and we're finding gem after gem, some of it a decade old. Like TV that rivals any great movie, amazing storytelling/directing/music/concepts. Still plenty of filler to sort through, but some genuine art in there.
Too bad their mobile app is the worst thing I've ever seen in my life regarding streaming services. I know people like to rag on Netflix, at least their app is top notch. How can a big company like HBO have such a piece of crap software when dozens of better examples to copy from already exist is beyond me.
Yup! Now we get cheap crap shoveled out six episodes at a time once every couple of years! If we're lucky.
That's mostly Disney content. Most series are 8-10 episodes long still, and there's more series made than there was in the 90s and 00s.
Lived through peak TV… Why dOn’T x-FiLEs bE tV aS GoOD?
They still make amazing shows, it’s just a matter of taste and preference.
You can try Fringe, it’s obviously inspired by X-Files. I even prefer Fringe but I don’t think it’s a popular opinion.
There’s also From, it’s like the only mystery horror TV show that gets horror right in a series setting. It gave me some similar vibes though it’s a very different show.
Updoots for Fringe. Season 1 is very monster of the week but it’s laying groundwork for everything that’s coming. It’s a fun ride all the way through and it got a decent conclusion. Watch it if you haven’t already.
Shows like that are still happening.
The real issue is that instead of 5-15 channels, there are dozens-hundreds, plus a dozen streaming service, and intellectual property is constantly pinging back and forth between them all.
No media has a reliable “home” you can consistently access it from. And when it does you still run into the discoverability issue. So many shows are made that you can’t reasonably scroll through all of them, so personal recommendations and algorithms ultimately dictate what we find.
If you want unusual and stand-out sci-fi then I’d recommend Twin Peaks: The Return, assuming you’ve seen Twin Peaks.
Also the show “Dark” on Netflix is incredible.
I still have a cue of newer stuff I haven’t gotten to because there’s so much to try.
I think what we’ve really lost is the social element. When FAR fewer things were on, and everyone had to “tune in” to see new episodes, it meant a ton more people would be watching the same thing at the same time.
Now the default has become everything on demand, and released in full seasons at a time. “Dark” is actually from several years ago, but became big in the US just a few years ago, and I just found it last year.
The viewing and Fandom experiences are just more fragmented and scattered now.
Are you a fan of ratchet and clank btw? Are 3rd person platformers the only good genre and are games since PS2 all trash?
I understand this reference.
I think a lot of shows are AWESOME, but then late-stage capitalistic enshittification happens and they become... far less so, and often quite TERRIBLE even, though ostensibly still have the same title, even though nowhere near being an identical show.
One super-good example is Stranger Things, where the first season was really quite good! So many homages to nerd culture like E.T. and D&D - it was fantastic!:-) As I read though, the pair of creators had 2 rules: never use CGI, and absolutely do not "sell out", i.e. a story should want to be told, not sold merely for the sake of cash. So after the first season where they made it b/c of their love for the craft, you can guess how the subsequent seasons played out (I believe one of the pair even quit over it).
Arguably a better example is The Walking Dead - it started off REALLY good, but then... well... it too "sold out". Actually I keep trying to force myself to get through it, I even started watching it over again from the start (a couple times now) thinking that would help, but have yet to accomplish this feat.
Another is Designated Survivor. It had some big-name actors, most of whom quit (I think the show was sold to a different network... or something?), and the last season was just terrible, limping along before they finally put it out of its misery and ended it.
The really fantastic shows - like Star Trek - had to prove themselves, then the creators were given leeway to subsequently make great sequels and spin-offs and even entirely unrelated titles. Fun story: Gene Roddenberry even created shows after his death, as his wife took his unfinished notes and lead their creation under his vision, like Earth: Final Conflict.
TLDR: why offer you a good show when they can offer you a crappy show that they made for a tenth of the price, yet charge you the full amount?
(though stupidly enough, they also seem to be trying to offer us even more terrible shows that cost 50x the price to make, and yet somehow suck all the more for that!? anyway it all seems to be based on greed + arrogance - they want to make money, but they do not want to put in the effort to actually earn it, e.g. by paying the actors a decent wage)
OP, are you sure you’re not conflating the X-Files being your favorite show with it being good? Because Breaking Bad exists and that came out after X-Files. Also is arguably better than the X-Files lol
I hate breaking bad. Take that for what it’s worth. I hate it even more after people recommended it to me specifically praising how good of a show it was.
Fair enough - everybody’s tastes are different. Fwiw I didn’t really enjoy the X-Files that much when I watched it, but I have heard the same thing that it’s a really good show.
IMHO Breaking Bad is exactly like modern day X-Files. That’s why I hated it. BB happens in TV reality. It all feels incredibly fake, artificial and manufactured. In the 90s that’s all we had: fairly small and disjointed TV shows built on common tropes and similarly produced. Breaking Bad is a modern show that pretends to be more complex but in reality just regurgitates all the same tropes. That’s why it was so popular: it was same old stuff in shiny new packaging.
I’ve never watched the X-Files, but the crossover episode with the Simpsons is one of my favorites.
Since you seems to be a big fan, i’m gonna ask.
Does Mulder always show people a photo of him weaeing a speedo?
only in the early seasons
hahaha
Less money in tv nowadays, the whole medium is dying. Plus they figured out they don’t need to put in nearly as much effort for reality tv stuff. Streaming wars might have been able to drive quality stuff, but most places did a scatter shot approach instead.
What? There's tons of TV shows, many high budget, released in the last year
I think TV will still last for some years.
In my country (Chile 🇨🇱) we still aren’t giving up Analog TV until April 2024.
there have been good shows since but ill admit there is a lot of crap to wade through as the various media streams pump out anything they can.
I never watched x-files when it aired.
I tried to watch it a few years back but only made it to season 2. Maybe it gets better later, but the show was so formulaic that I grew bored of it pretty quick.
What TV shows do you like, OP?
xfiles, star trek (kirk, picard), twilight zone from the 1960s, twin peaks (first season), honey mooners, I did like the first season of true detective with mathew maccaughnahey and woody harrelson. I watched the first season of apple invasion before giving up after season 2 started (I just couldn’t do it anymore). I am a big fan of broad city though, a show that is very underrated, also workaholics was fun.
Reading through all your comments, you have tastes like my dad. He didnt like thrones or breaking bad, but he does like the expanse.
I’m gonna throw some things out here for you.
Mighty Boosh (comedy) Lexx (absurd sci-fi) Voyager (give it another shot you might like it this time) Severance (low sci-fi) Barry (dramedy) Faulty Towers (comedy) Farscape (sci-fi) The OA (if you watch this, you need to just Believe everything you are being told, question nothing and accept it) Dark American Crime Story (season 1 and 2)
So you mostly like episodic formats.
SwearingRobin@lemmy.world 10 months ago
There’s been plenty good shows since X files came out, maybe it’s more of a problem that you’re in a different head space than you were and not as open to like new shows anymore. Happens to me with video games, I keep going back to the ones I played in my early twenties when I had more time over the summer to invest time into games. Now I have much less time to start a new game and get over the boring introductory bits before getting to the good parts of it.