Tbf, its not just phones. At the end of the day, my mind is cooked. I just want to kick back and get fed entertainment. If I'm awake at the end of it, meh.
Yea, my wife hates watching shows with me 😆
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2026
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I have phone shows and no-phone shows.
On a tangential topic, why does almost every tv series changes after the first or second season?
Like not on just the story progressing, but the acting, the dialogue, the main "thing" stops being done and it just becomes a setting, that kind of thing.
Like a series about work, where they work on the first season, but on the next one they never work anymore, the theme is there, but gets different, work is just a thing they say they are doing while doing other things, maybe a scene or two they work.
Or the series keeps getting weirder and weirder, not on a change of topic, but the "events" keep getting more extreme, like they ran out of ideas.
Idk if it is something just I notice, but I keep seeing over and over: I like the first season, it seems like the hook, but on the next season it seems the same tv series, but with a different tone, like the company just says "yeah, but now don't talk about this, do that way because this tv series did this and made money" or the ideas were all made just for the first season.
Or I'm being dumb hahaha
Bc of capitalism, the same answer as why everything else is done.
In this case, someone may have a passion project and spend literally ten whole years writing and tinkering and crafting and perfecting that first season, and then continue the natural storylines into the second season as well. Eventually though, they just start phoning it in, as they put their more creative juices into writing their next project, while they crank out season after season on a deadline. Milking the show dry, whether it has anymore left to give or not.
And that's not even necessarily because they are greedy or otherwise want to - studio execs think that they know better than writers how to write, so whereas when a show was created it was made by writers, over time each show increasingly becomes written to please the studio execs idea of what the audience wants, rather than the artists' idea of what the audience wants.
So of course they suck - under those conditions, how could they not?
It certainly feels like you described. But damn, I just wanted something that didn't just gave that drop in quality from one season to another, I just quit after one or two seasons.
I remember reading about the making of Stranger Things, on Netflix, by that pair of brothers. They swore to themselves to do exactly 2 things when they made and sold the show: (1) never sell out for the sake of money - especially don't make stupid CGI animations that suck rather than staying true to the art - and (2) don't keep the show going longer than like one season, or basically don't just make them for the sake of making them, but instead keep it tight and only make something with a purpose in mind, you know?
And that explains why the show went off the deep end immediately, after like the first season. The brothers had a fight and I think split up even over it. One wanted the purity of the show, while the other wanted the cold hard cash.
Money isn't wrong. Even the love of money isn't wrong. It's wanting it above all else that leads to the enshittification of everything that that attitude touches.
Fortunately there are other things to enjoy, besides TV:-).
I still enjoy watching the final(?) season, but I was very late to the Stranger Things train (watched it ~anyear ago) and the break between season 1&2 was there and quite obvious, especially when you watch them back to back. At the start of season 3 I was like "they're trying to make the same story arc again, but bigger and escalate it even more right?"
Now, I'm more interested in how "deep" they manage to go with it and how much they can escalate while retelling basically the same story arc again and again.
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Alternatively: Use 1.5x or 2x speed if you get bored and have trouble concentrating.
The only time I am on my phone while watching something else is when I throw on a random meme compilation on YouTube so I can get more memes per minute.
People should try reading more books and watch less TV/streaming precisely for this reason. Also maybe if you want to watch a movie consider watching older movies.
This is a fascinating article/podcast that talks about this but is focused on how it impacts your attention span and has data: https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/attention-spans
Mark: So I was very surprised to learn that TV and film shot lengths have decreased over the years. They started out much longer. They now average about four seconds a shot length. That's on average. If you watch MTV music videos, they're much shorter. They're only a couple of seconds. So we've become accustomed to seeing very fast shot lengths when we look at TV and film. Even commercials have shortened in length. Commercials used to be much longer. Now it's not uncommon to see six-second commercials, even shorter than that. Now it's a chicken and egg question. We don't know if TV and film have affected our attention spans on computers and phones. We don't know if our attention spans have affected the decision-making of film editors and directors. We don't know exactly if there is any causal connection we see these two parallel trends.
It could be the case that directors and editors are influenced by their own short attention spans when they create these film shots or it could be that they're creating short film shots because they think that's what the viewer wants to see. But this has become quite ubiquitous. In fact, on YouTube, there's a particular YouTube aesthetic which uses jump cuts. So when you're watching a YouTube film, the film becomes very jumpy. The natural pauses that people make when they speak it is removed. So the idea is to pack more content into a shorter amount of time. So we're seeing short lengths of content from all directions. It's not just what we're attending to on computers and phones.
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Pathetic, frankly.
You'd think by now one of these digital media gurus would have invented some sort of feature where a user could replay a complicated scene or a subtle bit of dialog. Then their subscribers could properly appreciate more sophisticated cinematography.
Of course they fucking do...
Soaps are a bit like that too.