One thing I hate about modern TV shows is that they have been further sliced into ~5-10min sequences between ad breaks, and even if you watch them without ads, you get narratively unnecessary cliff hangers just before a break, complete with dramatic music and a closeup of some dramatic gesture, trivially resolved in the next 5 seconds after the break.
You're constantly yanked out of the narrative in service of ads even if you never see them, which has disfigured the medium.
That was the hallmark of old TV, on networks. Since the start of TV in the 50's.
There are tons of modern TV shows that don't do anything you're talking about because they're made for streamers or paid TV without ads.
It sounds like you watch different shows than I do, but I watch a lot of TV and haven't seen what you're talking about in many, many years. Not with Squid Game or Stranger Things on Netflix, or Andor on Disney+, or White Lotus on HBO, or Severance on Apple TV+, or even something like Alien: Earth currently on FX/Hulu.
You might want to find better places for watching TV...
This is mostly an issue for content produced to still be on regular tv and streaming, like on Paramount. Star Trek Discovery and Strange New Worlds, for example, are not as dramatic as described above but you can always spot where the adbreak would have been. Cut to black and a re-establishing shot at the least. These are modern shows like you describe but still the TV medium has some influence.
One thing I do notice more and appreciate from streaming (sense8 in particular) is that shows are more varied in their runtime. Episodes being 40 minutes to 75 in length just depending on the needs of the plot, not even finale related or anything
I agree with your feeling that those mini cliff-hangers break the immersion, especially when watching without ad-breaks, although I can mostly deal with it. I agree with some of the other replies though, that it is more prevalent in older shows.
I find that laugh-tracks are the aspect of older shows which I find harder to ignore. Still worth bearing with for some old shows though, especially as I gradually stop hearing them.
Modern tv shows are more often than not released in a single go on a streaming service, intended to be binged in a single go. Often the episodes form a single narrative and a single episode cannot stand alone. The MOTD format is all but dead.
Do you have an example of a modern show that has the dramatic-music-and-cliffhanger ad-break?
>One thing I hate about modern TV shows is that they have been further sliced into ~5-10min sequences between ad breaks,
If it is on a broadcast tv network, it's not really worth watching. Sure, there are the one or two exceptional shows, but with so much premium content, why would you want to watch that?
I assume you mean it's not really worth watching if it's currently on broadcast TV?
Surely there's a huge list of old broadcast TV network shows that are worth watching, and that still suffer from the ad-break problem to various degrees.
Obviously I'm pulling from a wide time-period, and I'll probably get some of these wrong because I'm not in the the US and don't quite grok the network/cable divide, but off the top of my head, I think these are/were all worth watching:
Seinfeld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Freaks and Geeks, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, Community, Schitt's Creek, The Office, The X-Files, various Star Trek series, Cheers
That list could be easily improved on, but I assume it's missing your point anyway if you were only talking about current broadcast network TV (if it exists :) )
> As far as I can tell, the divide is pretty straightforward:
> Cable: nudity
> Broadcast: everything else
This is almost entirely wrong; non-premium cable (which is and was always the vast majority of cable) had and observed essentially the same structure and content rules as broadcast, with ad breaks and no swearing or nudity. Premium cable where each channel or later small branded group of channels is a separate surcharge on top of the broad package tended to have no ad breaks and looser content rules.
24 was Fox, if I'm not mistaken, and its format is very much the same as all broadcast shows.
Breaking Bad isn't the same format. No obvious commercial breaks, no saccharine Hays-Code-like bullshit.
Others mentioned The Shield, which is FX, and I tend to think of FX shows as not being of the broadcast mold. Monk was USA, I think, which as a network was borderline, but seems like a few of their original programming shows were not-horrible. Then someone said Deadliest Catch, but that's just cheap reality tv sludge and I feel dirty having typed out its title. Even the worst 1980s NBC sitcom was better than reality tv shows.
It's come to my attention that you're all, every last one of you, watching tv wrong.
Yes, apologies, that was poor wording on my part. The "lives on" was meant in the "continuation" sense but I can see how "lives on https:" implied it was in that specific repo. Sorry about that
But it's a continuum, not a hard cutoff. They start hallucinating as soon as you query something they haven't learned verbatim, and they hallucinate/extrapolate sucessfully up to a point, beyond which they start bullshitting, maybe up to a further point where they start saying "I don't know".
The key question is where the boundaries are. Maybe they should be part of the response - a per sentence or per paragraph "confidence scale" that signals how hard they extrapolated from their trained space (I know transformers work per token, but sentence/paragraph would be better human UX).
Of course, if they were trained on garbage input, that would only tell you how accurately they sticked to the garbage. But it would still be invaluable instrumentation for the end user, not to mention for the API provider. They could look at high demand subjects with low confidence answers and prioritize that for further training.
I hate this contant emphasizing with a burning passion; even some newspapers do it. It's like trying to hold a conversation with someone that shouts the important bits to your face.
I'm gonna go ahead and be a stinky and say I'm lukewarm on DadBod (as a name, the plugin is awesome). It's just a reference to a well-liked tweet he made and otherwise the only thing it really has to do with databases are the initials. I actually remember he released it under a different name and someone opened and issue saying it was a missed opportunity to call it "dadbod," lol.
Head trackers don't map movement 1:1, more like 1:10 (or so). Thus if you want to look 180 back, you turn maybe 30degs but can still eye the screen. Basically you gesture with your neck.
It sounds awkward but it works very well as an input method. It's also way less intense than VR for longer sessions.
Not saying it's absolutely superior, just that it's pretty good as designed.
If you're interested in the subject, the book "Longitude" by Dava Sobel (mentioned in Resources) is a very good read with lots of historical perspective on how these clocks were built.
I was lucky enough to come across this book in elementary or middle school and found it absolutely mind blowing. In retrospect it exposed me to what are still among the most important ideas sloshing around my brain:
1. The realization of how much of the world has to be “invented.” Latitude and longitude didn’t strike me as an invention, but they are, and more interestingly longitude specifically is a conceptual invention that more or less had to sit downstream of a rather immense physical invention (Harrison’s clocks).
2. “The world has a surprising amount of detail”: as evidenced by looking at H1, H2, etc… there’s a lot you have to account for to achieve the apparently simple task of measuring time aboard a ship.
3. The social components to invention/discovery/progress: The competitions, funding/lack thereof, the need for “evangelism” around the different approaches, the need to find patrons (VC’s basically) to create a breakthrough, etc.
This book would make a great gift to an intellectually-inclined young person in your family!
You're constantly yanked out of the narrative in service of ads even if you never see them, which has disfigured the medium.