Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Thursday, October 28th, 2021
The Metaverse is a really bad idea
Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Thursday, October 28th, 2021. I'm writing this from the Twin Cities, where AllYourScreens HQ is still recovering from an old-fashioned cold (or maybe the flu). Regardless, it's a wonderfully normal illness to have. But it has really slowed me down. Which is why there was no newsletter yesterday and why today's is a bit abbreviated.
THE CASE AGAINST THE METAVERSE
The Internet has a way of elevating a marginal idea and making it seem as if you're an idiot if you don't jump on this wonderfully innovative brainstorm. Which brings us to the so-called "Metaverse," which has become so quickly ingrained in the tech world that Mark Zuckerberg is expected to talk about it extensively when he announces Facebook's rebrand tomorrow.
I wrote a piece in this newsletter over the summer where I voiced my concerns with the Metaverse and I have taken that idea and expanded it for this piece I posted on AllYourScreens.com a few hours ago. I believe I might be one of the few people in the industry arguing the Metaverse concept is flawed to the point of being unworkably dangerous. Although I'm not sure if that makes me a visionary or an idiot:
I don't mean to be a snarky troll, but is anyone who isn't trying to sell something asking for this? We live in a world where participating in online bubbles and quickly falling down rabbit holes of crazy is a common predicament. The Metaverse is all of the evils of Facebook and the YouTube recommendation engine, wrapped into a shiny gaming interface. You think it's impossible to talk to half of the people in your life now? Wait until they spend their days in an interconnected online world where businesses can track their purchases and target them based on their past behavior on every site they visit and every public interaction they do. We haven't scratched the surface of solving the problems connected with our current 2-D Internet and digital hypesters are already planning on how they can strip mine the profits out of the upcoming interconnected world they are convinced will be much more efficient.
One of other lessons we've learned as a society in the past 30 years is that the tech world and its investors have no interest in considering the consequences their products have on their users. When they use a word like "frictionless" or talk about stripping out the gatekeepers, what they really mean is that they want to use their products to make it easier to manipulate consumers and sell products. Creating a platform that makes it easier for neo-Nazis to find each other online? Well. sure, that's not ideal. But on the upside, we can sell advertising that targets them!
Read the entire piece here.
I WON'T LIE, I WISH I HAD THOUGHT OF THIS IDEA
At Vulture, Eric Vilas-Boas and Josef Adalian have ranked 13 streaming services based on how much they "love Halloween." Paramount+ is number 13:
User friendliness: Here’s how bad the user experience is on P+: The Halloween hub has rows devoted to “CBS Halloween Classics” and “Nickelodeon Hallowscream” (which is great!), but the individual shows included are listed without the show title. Seriously. In order to find out that “Room Full of Heroes” is an episode of Frasier, you either have to recognize the disguised faces shown in the poster art or click on the tile because the name of the show isn’t listed. (Its original airdate, however, is included.) And as noted, there’s very little depth here, with just a few dozen titles overall. Given the overall lack of effort Paramount+ devotes to curating its ever-expanding content library, it’s sadly no shock so little attention was paid to making the Halloween experience rewarding. (In fairness, the branding is clever and the spooky picture frames illustrating the section are excellent. Maybe put the graphic-design folks in charge of the whole user-design team?)
Seriously, I can't believe I didn't think about this idea. Especially given how much time I spend writing about UX issues on streaming services.
THIS IS THE OPPOSITE OF THE METAVERSE
Starting October 29th, Mubi subscribers in NYC can see one film per week in participating theaters, curated by Mubi, at no additional cost. MUBI Go "rolls out nationwide in selected markets" in 2022:
"The theatrical moviegoing experience is so essential, and we’re thrilled to extend Mubi’s curatorial voice beyond our streaming platform to hand-pick great films for people to watch in theaters — first in New York, then across the whole country,” said Chris Wells, director of U.S. distribution. He joined earlier this year from Kino Lorber, where was director of theatrical sales. Previously programming director for the Quad Cinema, Wells was one of a trio of new hires Mubi announced in March.
RIP MORT SAHL
It might be impossible to imagine in 2021, but there was a time when stand-up comedy was considered to be a half-dead leftover from the days of Vaudeville. The comedy of the 1950s and early 1960s was loud and obvious (think Milton Berle at his gaudiest). While a number of young comics helped change that industry in the early 1950s, if there is one comic who can be considered to be the father of modern stand-up comedy, it's Mort Saul. He just passed away at the age of 93 and it's worth remembering the impact he had on stand-up comedy, especially on television:
Sahl came to the Bay Area after being rejected by Los Angeles crowds who didn’t know what to make of a comic who didn’t tell jokes. But at San Francisco’s hungry i in the early 1950s, he broke new ground with what was then a radically casual approach to performing — riffing, as if by free association, from the headlines in the folded newspaper he always carried and dressed as the UC Berkeley mathematics graduate student he was at the time, in what would become his trademark V-neck sweater.
“I started out with a fistful of typewritten jokes doing intermission monologues at jam sessions,” Sahl told The Chronicle in 1955. “What I like to do is a jazz solo in words — an improvisation on a theme. The old jokes just disappeared. My material is a patchwork of old and new ad libs."
Within a decade he had become one of the nation’s best-known and most successful comedians, on TV as well as in clubs, with nine well-selling comedy albums to his credit and a Time magazine cover profile that called him “Will Rogers with fangs."
At the height of his fame, he became obsessed with the assassination of JFK and his act began to include segments of him reading passages from the Warren Report and commenting on the findings. His career cratered and while he had a bit of a comeback in the 70s and 80s, he never recovered that widespread popularity. But his impact on the comedy world is immense. Everyone from Chris Rock and Jon Stewart to Lenny Bruce and George Carlin considered him a major influence.
I did stand-up for more than a decade and he was easily my biggest comedy inspiration. While our joke-telling styles and points of view were very different, I approached my act in a way Sahl would have found familiar. I had a couple of set opening jokes and a rotating sure-fire closer. Everything in between was a mix of old and new jokes, thrown together on the fly as if I was playing jazz. It's a scary (and old agents of mine would claim stupid) way to perform. But I loved the feeling of hitting the stage and never quite knowing what was going to happen.
I was never lucky enough to meet Mort Sahl. But he'll be missed.
TWEET OF THE DAY
ODDS AND SODS
* Greetings from St. Paul, MN, which Outside Magazine has just named one of the 20 most livable towns and cities in America. Technically, AYS HQ is located in a suburb just south of St. Paul. But that's close enough for the Internet.
* With a Netflix show, new book series, museum exhibit and a Thanksgiving parade balloon, Ada Twist is flying high.
SEE YOU FRIDAY!
If you have any feedback, send it along to Rick@AllYourScreens.com and follow me on Twitter @aysrick.