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Post by magnusgreel on Jun 23, 2012 4:56:31 GMT
Success ossifies. No one dares change the formula.
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Post by jjpor on Jun 29, 2012 19:22:41 GMT
Very true. It's the main principle modern film and television operates upon.
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Post by Maggadin on Jun 29, 2012 19:36:58 GMT
Hollywood and the telly industry is generally much slower-moving than actual society.
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Post by magnusgreel on Jun 30, 2012 17:52:50 GMT
I think we've got a society where everyone is looking to others to let them know what to do. A huge chunk of the mainstream public gets its sense of what the world and people are like from TV, and adjusts its mindset accordingly, probably without realizing it. TV executives make themselves slaves to ratings, and cancel or adjust programs accordingly, based on this "proof" of what the public supposedly wants.
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Post by jjpor on Jul 5, 2012 20:50:41 GMT
Well, everybody's always trying to replicate whatever the last success was. I'm not sure NuWho is guilty of that, precisely - more usually it's been the thing being replicated in the past few years - but I definitely don't think it's as groundbreaking or as unconventional as old Who was in its heyday. Certainly, it seems to adhere to a lot of the received wisdoms of our current society.
See the way NuWho mostly - mostly - treats well-known historical figures when they feature in stories. It's not as if they even choose to parrot the themepark version of history as an artistic choice - it just never occurs to them to do it any other way. However, I suspect this isn't so much a problem with NuWho particularly as it is with contemporary television and popular culture in general.
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Post by Maggadin on Jul 5, 2012 22:32:30 GMT
I had a very interesting conversation last night (due to my dissertation topic) about the de-politicising of sci-fi. And I'm reading a very interesting book called Science Fiction, Social Conflict and War. The first essay talks about sci-fi used to be a sort of refuge for more ''audacious'' political ideas, both due to not being entirely accepted as a ''legit'' genre, and because it could disguise current politics in the guise of aliens/robots etc. Sci-fi proved a haven for that sort of thing during the Cold War, for instance.
I'm not trying to be all hipster, here, as in ''everything mainstream is bad'' (though Classic Who was a national institution, and still managed to be bold), nor am I claiming that everything old is good and everything new is bad. But entertainment is definitely less political now than it used to be.
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Post by jjpor on Jul 6, 2012 20:15:17 GMT
I think that's definitely true. And I think it's also true that the degree of popular political engagement in the UK at least is a shadow of its 70s or 80s self. I think the 90s and getting rid of Maggie made us soft and complacent and postmodern, or something. I mean, NuWho occasionally feels the need to make references to things like the "massive weapons of destruction" thing, but usually as an aren't-I-clever wink and a nod rather than anything sincere. I think (hope) I can see signs of our society's pendulum swinging the other way in the past few years.
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