Are we going to bring up that the Rings of Power had hired a Tolkien scholar (not just fanboy, but a guy who was literally paid to be in the know about everything Tolkien) and then fired him shortly after because he said that their story didn't work with Middle Earth's lore and history? Because I find it really funny.
Wheel of Time also hired a WoT expert, Daniel Greene interviewed her at some point before the first season dropped. I have no clue what happened to her but man was she excited to be working on the show back then. I'm guessing they didn't listen to her a whole lot
That was a huge red flag. Then they had the cast doing interviews before the release saying they improved on Tolkien and that fans were bigots for not watching.
@@Banzai51 The alt-right Nazis absolutely organized review bombing of the show because it had a black dwarf woman in the trailer. That is a thing that absolutely happened.
@@alexmikhylovIts was before that even. Seasons 1-4 were books 1-3, but after that they kinda just ignored most of books 4-5. Reading them a couple years after the show was such an enlightening experience, as they’re so much more interesting than most of seasons 5-6. Some book characters are left out or character assassinated, while everything plot wise makes a lot more sense. D&D chose not to adapt AFFC or ADWD like the previous seasons had adapted the books because by this point they seemed to have believed they could write the story better than George
Step 1: buy popular and successful fantasy book series. Step 2: throw ungodly amounts of money on it. Step 3: hire inexperienced people with no interest or respect for the series and allow them to change it so much its only the series in name. Step 4: ??? Step 5: cancel the show, fantasy tv is dead, start again with video game series.
Dead ass. Loved the Witcher but don't care for the source material. Netflix made it more palatable for me BUT there were parts of me that hit me wrong like they didn't like the thing they were adapting in the first place. Once Cavill left I had no reason to stay.
thanks for not turning this into a 1 hour video essay where you start by explaining to us the origins of television, human imagination, and tolkien’s WW1 experiences
Pay 100 million for the rights to established IP. Pay my nephew $2,000 to change everything. Spend another 100 million on ads. Why is this not working?
The nephew - sooo true. And the nephew wants to bring 21st century, diverse, cosmopolitan perspectives to a fantasy world 'cause they are saving lives and changing hearts and minds while fisting the original story and characters which they had absolutely nothing to do with in being created.
I think one important factor to consider here is that Game of Thrones’ early seasons were incredibly low fantasy. You got to see the dragons and whitewalkers for maybe one or two scenes per season, but for the most part it was just people with swords discussing politics. This not only made people keep watching to see if more fantastical elements would show up (I still remember it being a big moment when the manticore appeared in S2), but it also meant studios didn’t need to rely on a ton of expensive cgi to tell the story, so they could also afford to commission more episodes. Compare this with the Rings of Power. You have a very high fantasy world straight out the gate, so you can’t really surprise audiences with any new elements you introduce later on. Most of the budget also has to go towards cgi for rendering lots of explicit fantasy elements which, due to the sheer amount of them, probably won’t look great anyway, and you’ll probably only be able to afford six episodes because of them. The result is an extremely rushed and underwhelming viewing experience.
Exactly... I think the Publics' concern and lack of trust in these Industries now, makes us maybe hyper-critical of Products they Release. We used to Consume Entertainment ... As mostly Entertainment? And NOTHING ELSE . Maybe some Commercials / Ads. Now People from around the World are now Invested With Corporate - Hollywood -Tech merger so a lot of Money is being Tossed around. Liv Golf Sports for example Breaking into American Markets on Streaming/Cable/Social. A lot of Talent Got BOUGHT UP . A lot of Artists, Creative People, Men, and Women, have been tossed out / juggled around in the Gig Economy of Hollywood(and all over America in General). The Market needs New Ideas , New People, Creativity, Honesty, Integrity, Dignity ffs. Sorry for the rant bro lol
I mean... You're correct in explaining GoT's success (low fantasy, grimdark brutal HBO sexy time + political intrigue) but RoP doesn't work for a myriad of reasons. There's an interesting show about the titular rings and their effects and influence that was only hinted at in Jackson's LOTR prologue. It doesn't need to be GoT, just as long as it's entertaining and well-paced. RoP is so over-the-top dull I find myself watching middle earth history TH-cam videos instead.
@@Mr.IndoorPants For me, that's what made Wheel of Time (the books, not the show) work. A lot of people complain that it leans too much into Lord of the Rings (especially the first one), but that's intentional. You don't really need to explain the bad guys because you already know them from LotR. You don't need to explain the good guys, because they're the run-of-the-mill conservative hillbillies that everyone knows. That way you can focus on learning the world alongside them, since it's both new to the reader as well as the characters. And then, once they leave Rivendell, instead of making a left to Mordor, they take a hard right and end up in Vietnam, and that's where it really kicks off. The show, however, did away with all that, without explaining anything. The conservative hillbilies were replaced with progressive hipsters that never questioned the world, learned nothing new, and the audience never even learned about the Dragon, other than it was the Chosen One (which wasn't stated as such in the first book). The audience is pretty much dumped in a world they don't understand without a way of learning more about it. They don't even explain the magic system, while we learn all about it in the first book, before we even meet our second Aes Sedai. In the show, they just throw one Aes Sedai after another at the audience and we're just supposed to guess what's up with them. And to make matters worse, the writers skipped all the boring stuff to get to the cool epic bits, without realizing you need the boring stuff to make the epic stuff epic.
Because deep down, at its core, GoT is really a family drama set in an alternative medieval world with a few fantasy elements. It's arguably not "conventional fantasy" as in the epic quest and saving a damsel in distress. It's melodrama; the equivalent of saying Star Wars is sci-fi, which isn't and technically a fantasy set in space.
Fantasy TV needs to be done in the animated medium. It will still be expensive but not as much as live action (ie with cgi of living creatures like dragons). You see it done well with shows like arcane, and Frieren Beyond Journeys end etc. It helps to suspend disbelief as well as looking stunning visually. It's not perfect but that's where Fantasy needs to go visually
What "live action" has turned into is basically animation anyways, but with a higher expectation for fidelity by putting it next to a famous man's face.
@@DomR1997 Sure but I also think such people are pretty hesitant to give fantasy a chance to begin with. And animation is only going to gain cache as anime continues to eat the west’s lunch. If stormlight were done with brilliant animation and true to source material I think it would be a juggernaut that would bring in people who wouldn’t consider it normally. It just might need a bit to gain momentum, as GoT did.
@@jamesfrederick.Anyone using DEI unironically is not someone who's opinions are worth hearing. If you think the entire world isn't watching a show because they have to be reminded brown people exist and not because it's just a badly written, shot, and acted show your brain is too melted to engage in conversation.
@@jamesfrederick. Hate to break it to you, but did you really think "northern European fantasy" was a thing? It's just called FANTASY. A bunch of white people running around onscreen for, what? Like, forever?!? That's a dumb idea. DEI hiring has nothing to do with why these shows are failing, it's everything else about these shows. If you can't see that, you're an idiot.
@@Toastybees An unfortunate thing about a fantasy show actually including people from the so-called "rest of the world" or even reflecting changing modern demographics in this dude's special place called "northern Europe", which somehow exists in fictional worlds too is that it gives idiots like him an excuse to be racist about a show's failure. Instead of what you said, bad writing, cinematography and acting, and I would emphasize the executing meddling that has been the ultimate cause of the failure of every one of these shows, and was also behind the failure of the last season of GOT too. But blaming DEI hiring is more exciting than stupid executives who hire bad showrunners who then f*ck up everything else. Because that's totally not been a thing since, like, forever.
@@knightmare5097 It only works well if the box occasionally has something in it. Pulp Fiction doesn't need to show what's in the briefcase, but if Tarantino made that briefcase the driving force of all of his movies, we'd get pretty goddamn sick of it.
It's so frustrating because it almost seems as if success is the downfall of a fantasy show nowadays. You can really feel when a show is shaped by people who want to make lots of money and when by people who want to tell a story. Rings of Power felt like dragged out attempted fanservice without an actual effort to give something meaningfull to the fans because big viewership was pretty much guaranteed. Andor on the other hand didn't have these expactations placed on it and wasn’t written to please fans but to tell a story, and it was great. And then there are shows like Shadow and Bone which was successfull, mostly loved by the fans, and then got cancelled because reasons I guess, probably because it wasn’t GOT-successfull and the second season didn't match the success of the first, so it wasn’t worth continuing. It feels like the companies just assume what the fans want and then completely miss the mark almost every time. I didn't like LOTR because it had Hobbits in it but because of the impactful story, so I didn't need the Halfling-storyline in ROP. The results of these fanservice-attempts are often almost insultingly superficial. I don't like fantasy because of fantastic elements but the way they can enhance a good story.
I'm sure Andor was not written to please fans. All the writers got into a room with the production staff and all the actors and said "We're not here to please fans" and then a masterpiece happened.
The problem with the Shadow and bone storyline is that the storyline from the Shadow and bone book is delulu fantasy romance at its worst but it was saved by the brilliant six of crows storyline. That fell apart in season 2
@@ΕρνέστοςΣμίθI would really love a fantasy series that just... didn't have romance. At least not when it gets so painfully annoying. They just drag the story down. like a CW show but with ✨dragons✨
Shadow and Bones was actually GOOD. Funny thing is? I think making it into a TV show - on NETFLIX - is what made it get cancelled. If it was a movie? We could have trilogies BACK. But alas.
The problem is that corporate boards started saying "can't you make Game of Thrones?" when they met with directors and producers who had no interest in fantasy, but who wanted to use any opportunity as a stepping stone to make something they find interesting. There was no boom, it is no bust. It was over before it started. It was the flight of a chicken.
it's fine though because the minecraft movie will make warner bros 300 trillion dollars and they can use that to make one extra episode of dragons cooing at each other
I know this is a joke but lowkey the existence of certain shows did often affect the success of others. For example, GOT started a while before Breaking Bad was ending, but the death grip BB had on viewership and critical acclaim kept it relatively obscure. When Bravo Vince and the boys were done collecting Emmy's, GOT started getting higher viewership and I believe won its first Emmy the next year.
Unpopular opinion: there was never a golden age of fantasy tv / movies. It's always been expensive as hell, divisive, and a niche interest to the public with only the occasional hit. The advantage of this is that books haven't really been supplanted by movies as the favourite medium for fantasy and the genre seems to be doing very well, and looks likely to continue to turn out stone-cold classics that will unlikely ever be turned into consumer 'watercooler' TV.
Can we go back to Merlin please? I mean it is nice to have realistic cgi but in the end what makes a fantasy book a great thing is characters ,storylines and worldbuilding. You can do more with less
My god Merlin was such a masterpiece. Yeah I know thats hyperbole and it had its flaws, but they were SOOOOO SMALL and the rest was so damn great. I must rewatch it now, thank you friend
Oh yeah, Merlin! That's another fascinating fantasy miniseries from the past. It used to be possible to do fantasy on network TV for budgets far less than six million an episode.
And it wasn’t so bloody grim. ASoIaF’s early works were written and published in the mid 90’s, the height of the grimdark edgy era. So everyone is swearing and an awful person and there’s lots of nudity and cynicism because all of that was the style at the time. And not even the fun over the top edgy of the era, the boring miseryporn kind. Witcher was written in this timeframe too which is why it’s full of boobies and abuse and other such things. When the show came out and got big, everything wanted to be the next GoT and thought being ‘mature’ in that 90’s sense was part of it. There’s definitely a place for that, but it isn’t ‘the overwhelming majority of big projects’. I almost feel like it damaged the genre in a big way, it’d be like if every sci-fi series tried to be 40k. Fantasy can be fun and colourful and have threat and emotion without anybody taking someone to bed, and I miss that. I miss Merlin and Charmed and Supernatural and all that stuff. I miss when things didn’t have to be epic and ‘adult’ to be considered good fantasy.
Remember loving Merlin when I was younger. Honestly, only criticism I have is that they never got to the whole Arthur making magic legal again and Merlin acting as his wizard advisor part.
The main issue why Hollywood has shit the bed so massively with these fantasy series is that they taken the source material - and changed it completely. They think they could take stories that has been wildly successful, with hordes of book fans, and "improve" them. I've read all of the books for these shows and i stopped watching any fantasy adaptation entirely after 2 episodes of The Witcher and 1 episode of The Wheel of Time. Why? Because they deviated too far from the books. Why is that a recipe for failure? 1) You alienate the book readers, thereby generating poor word of mouth. 2) By "improving" adaptations you remove the worldbuilding which is essential for fantasy to function\be believable, thereby making viewers feel the world is just fake and generic. 3) Fantasy novels gains popularity and fans because of a rich world, great characters and a great story. When hollywood "improves" on that, they remove that which made the novels garner such popularity in the first place, so why would new viewers be a fan of a messed up adaptation?
I think people forget the first season of GOT was super small scale, basically just a political drama with lots of scenes of characters talking with a little bit of fantasy sprinkled in. When the show got to the one big battle scene in the first book Tyrion gets knocked out and misses the whole thing cause the show just did not have the budget for it. Maybe if these shows took more time to build the characters and not spend hundreds of millions right out the gate they’d have more chance at success
@@blazenfate and yet they continue to surprise you later on. Jamie begins as a stereotypical dorck, but by season 3 you realise he is a very complex character and an antihero.
People actually used to complain about how the big battles in the earlier seasons didn't make sense (why bring spears along if you're not gonna use them? Why are they just used as decorations?) but yeah, the writing, acting, music and cinematography were basically the reasons why people loved the show back in the day. *Especially* the writing. The moment the show runners stopped following the books is when it all went downhill.
@@CyanRooper The battles in GoT never made sense. Battle of the Bastards is fucking horrible and I know so many ppl that love it. One of the stupidest battles I've ever seen in media
Remember Once Upon a Time? Remember how it had 7 seasons of 22 episodes? Remember how the visual effects looked crap, but it didn't matter because people were more invested in the character arcs and relationships and stories? I don't need photo-realistic dragons, I just need more time to get to know characters so I can care about them when something bad happens.
The Magicians is great too. Im shocked how limited exposure the show had. The production team was very sincere in their character writing and capturing the fun but ugly side of magic despite limited cgi. There was so much improvisation they did to make up for it.
@@TaurielTheElf I came from the show first, and reading into the books now. If slow pacing and Quentin's introspection was too much, then the show fixes the plot pacing and emphasizes ensemble cast instead of just Quentin emotionally reacting to things, and it also emphasises the quests more. The books is kind of like if OUAT just hyperfocused on Emma's abandonment issues, and put Regina and Rumpel's arcs out of focus.
@@cooltoonist It's not the pacing or the perspective, it's the story itself. The magic lore. The worldbuilding. That's the thing that I didn't like. And the show can't fix that for me unfortunately.
Mistborn will probably be the first Sanderson IP to get adapted imo. Easiest to get into for the books, probably the easiest to get into with movies as well
@@jatzi1526 Not to mention how much easier it would be in terms of set design for a world that's similar to Earth like Scadrial compared to the fairly alien world of Roshar.
I fundamentally disagree with the conclusion. The modern fantasy landscape is dying because writing as a discipline is pretty well dead in the mainstream. People aren't avoiding fantasy because it's expensive... They aren't watching it because it's trash.
I blame the 8 episode formula. Demanding that EVERY..SINGLE. SHOW. run 8 episodes seasons isn't okay. It's literally ruining almost every new show that has the potential to get "big". Idk why studios suddentky started doing this but I would happily take a 12 episode season, let alone the old standard of 24 - 26 episodes when cable television was at its peak! We don't have those constrictions anymore thanks to streaming! So please, stop forcing shows into random formulas such as the 8 episode one for zero reason!
Most of the shows that we're talking about barely even have eight episodes of content though. They're just dragged out to make sure the only real dramatic thing happens at the end of the episode.
@@smittyjjensin558 Apparently it was, and HBO cut the budget during production (thanks again, David Zaszlav!), so they had to push the climactic battle/s into the start of the next season and draw this one out a bit.
It certainly didn't help that every single one of these shows made each and every location within their Medieval-esque settings into mirror images of downtown Toronto.
Fantasy died when they replaced the space from competent writers to fanfiction writers, on shows, movies and games. All we are seeing is teenage drama on a fantastic setting, that makes you feel like seeing a soap opera with medieval costumes, a cosplay party. There's no more lore, no more tone, it all feels the same. These mfs went into fantasy worlds and are trying to make it feels more like our world.
Witcher was such a let down. Perfect example of the showrunners wanting to do their own thing, thinking they had better ideas and my god was that not the case. Also, there is a show that I think rises to the level of awesome that was Game of Thrones but in sci-fi and that is Foundation on Apple+. I would say it's the best show on television that people don't know/not watching
I think a lot of adaptation projects today suffer as a result of showrunners wanting to make something original, but NEEDING to use an existing IP to get greenlit, so they care more about their own changes than the material itself
Like half of The Witcher season 2 was just completely made-up with zero basis in the novels. It's just tiring. I pretend that show doesn't exist and I'm happier for it.
@@ManCarryingThingShame they think that way. Surely creating a great adaption would make it easier to get an original project greenlit? The Witcher crew, for example, could’ve made a proper adaption of the books and I would be willing to watch their original material after. Though I, like many, don’t work in film/tv so it’s hard to know what actually goes on behind the scenes.
The Witcher had a great start, unlike Rings of Power or Wheel of Time. Then it veered off into complete fan fiction to the point where Cavill washed his hands of it, but he only put the final nail in the coffin. Why adapt an IP if you aren't going to actually adapt it and just use it as a brand name for your courageous and brave adventures of someone else?
Why do all shows that are adaptations do this? The Boys literally only shares the name with the comics and people don't complain about that. Granted, they did a good job at changing pretty much every single aspect of the source material and the ones you mentioned did not. But almost every adaptation veers off the source material. People still praise the first half of game of thrones despite it being essentially a bad book report from kids who didn't actually read the books and just skimmed them or found abridged summaries and copied those. I feel the reason the witcher failed so bad is people actually know the source material, well they know one of the games (which are also bad adaptations, but we don't talk about that).
@@TheJohhnyE the boys get a pass on this one for having an absolute trash source material in the first place, the show really needs to take creative liberties keeping the premise This is unlike the witcher which required no deviation because the books are gold fantasy standards
@@TheJohhnyE Well, the biggest and simplest reason is that if the adaptation is good, the changes it made to get there do not matter, and if it is trash, those same changes exacerbate the problems. As Kung points out above, The Boys in particular was trash source material, so the numerous changes made have created a superior adaptation. In a different vein, 300 had zero females in the original graphic novel but they added in one that allowed the story to provide more depth. Most people don't consider 300 to be a particularly poor adaptation or poor source material. In the Daredevil movie, Kingpin was played by Michael Clarke Duncan (RIP), and not only do most people not find that a problem, he's often cited as the best part of the entire movie. Despite being both black and somewhat different in personality from the Kingpin in comics. Meanwhile, if you watch The Witcher, and I say this as someone whose first exposure to the franchise was through the show, Season 1 is leagues better than Season 2, and Season 3 is unwatchable. Season 1 did the cool time shifting, it has a very focused narrative, enjoyable episodic adventures that tie together and are very rewatchable. Also sexy leads who look good naked. Season 2 seems to lose that focus, wanders around, has characters act out of previously established character for what I assume is to advance the plot in ways that are deviating from the book and lacks a satisfying conclusion that the first season provided. Season 3 was unwatchable. As someone who has no idea what they skipped or added from the books. Rings of Power is dull. No amount of black halflings, dwarves and elves is going to change that about it. Wheel of Time is tiresome, and hammers a multiracial cast into the story clumsily (all of them in the super remote village leagues away from anywhere important?) when the original writer really had provided a setting that would have included diversity very organically with all of the different human cultures.
Cavill didn't wash his hands of it, he has been reported several time as an abusive co-worker harassing people on set to the point that they had to push him away from the show. No actor would shy away from doing the corniest shit in exchange for a ton of money.
I HATE how every single polish cultural thing is erased in the Netflix Witcher. They choose such an interesting books and setting to adapt and made it generic uninspired fantasy with no connection to slavic/polish folklore.
What happened with House of Dragon is really depressing. GRRM obviously was trying to not let what happened with the original show happen again. He has been heavily involved in literally anything involving related to the IP now. Instead of trusting that the show runners will do his work justice. Now it seems like we are hitting the too big to succeed point. Too many hands in the cookie jar.
Wheel of time is hilariously terrible I love it The Witcher had that classic tv fantasy feel with a big budget. Season 1 had mainstream audiences interested but they lost that with season 2. Rings of Power is boring and they clearly have no idea what they are doing. HOTD…IS NOT DEAD YET! I STILL BELIEVE
I... Really appreciate Wheel of Time's TV show. There are obviously flaws (my favorite character in the books was Perin, but I aint feeling him too much in the show yet), but... For the most part, I feel like it's a pretty darn good adaptation. I don't know how much of my feeling is because it was actually a good adaptation, or if my low expectations were surprised. ... ... I will say, I think Rosamund Pike is also a really good actor, I think.
@@Jackolantirn I think this adaptation has really great elements to it (passionate actors, nice set design, faithful adaptionish etc) but the whole show has never really clicked for me. I'd love to see it really shine in s3 but I think the Amazon factor is rlly holding it back. P.s. can they pls give my boy rand like ONE climactic fight at the end of a season...he's owed two now.
@@tomm8120 lmao I absolutely forgot... I remember watching the season 2 trailer when it came out... we see the bad guy with the long nails perform a crazy fighting stance and I thought to myself "oh wow, that looks like it's gonna be a crazy showdown."
I always enjoy these long form videos. I sincerely believe you make great short and long form videos; tis a rare ability. Keep up the great work mr. man :)
as an og subscriber, i love the long form videos. you make a really good point here and maybe when the transition to everyone getting adverts on their streaming services is complete we will get higher budget tv shows and something like GoT will come along.
I agree with you! Sorry about the exclamation mark, it's just that TH-cam randomly recommended your video and I'm a bit surprised we see the issue in such a similar way. The problem is that fantasy is too expensive to make, at least the way that streamers are making it right now. As an old guy I remember when fantasy mostly came in the form of TV mini-series. They were usually between six to ten episodes, and adapted some preexisting story. There was the Arabian Knights, The Odyssey, Peter Pan, Stephen King, The Wizard of Oz and about five hundred different versions of fairy tales. The results were somewhat mixed in terms of quality, but my impression is they cost about the same amount as a prime time drama series, or maybe slightly more. But not six million an episode! I agree with you that animation is the best way forward right now. Something like Wheel of Time could be adapted in animated form far more faithfully than in live action, for less money. Netflix's "The Dragon Prince" shows that it could even be done on a streamer. It's more a matter of adjusting audience expectations than any kind of technical or financial barrier.
if it helps games aren’t over imo, there are tons of good indies on steam and itchio, tho it might take a bit more looking around to find ur niche Idk re the rest tho :P
Only the first 4 season of game of thrones were amazing. Everything else? Trash. Even the first 4 seaosn had some iffi parts were im like "was this necessary?"
If you don't have couple of strong creatives that have the freedom to bring their vision out like they wanted. It's gonna be meh. All those post GOT fantasy series were cookie cutter commitee created slop. I understand how networks are terrified when it comes to fantasy productions, because they cost so much to make. So they have the urge to micromanage, and try to put in things that make it appeal to broader audience etc.. but it just makes generic slop in the end. Also nepotism. Some of those series have people writing/producing etc.. that have NEVER made anything that hasn't flopped or been poorly received. Why would you ever let such people go anywhere near a project you are banking on being a megahit?
IMO they also go in too big too quick. You look at many popular shows fantasy or otherwise, you'll find that the first season tended to be much less grand than what it would be come. It built up the epic plots and big twists over time once we had a solid foundation of good telly. Wanting a show to be a big epic thing straight away is a big gamble that misses more than hits
I’ve never seen a fiction project work with more than 3 key creatives at the head. Usually fewer is better, but some diads or triads have the secret sauce.
imo frankly the last bastion was the Peter Jackson LOTR movies. I don't think a studio will ever be as convinced to give such a huge amount of freedom and money to such artists
See I don't think freedom is the issue. WB just gave a $200 million check for Todd Phillips to do whatever he wants for a Joker sequel and people hated it (so far?). I think it's more, high fantasy (i.e. wizards and dragons) is a very difficult genre to adapt to live action. Peter Jackson is an enormous, once-in-a-generation talent. As beloved as LOTR is, Tolkien's books are not easy-peasy to manifest. They had to innovate new technology just to get Gollum to work.
i think another major problem is "premature pitching". the phenomenon that usually only set in after a couple of seasons or when a show got syndicated and the writers realise they didn't have any story to tell but kept making episodes because their next season was already approved. but in these cases the shows are pre-approved, they get 3 seasons of budget based on the high pitch to some executive, like it's the 80s and we're making action movies. not even a pilot or proof of concept it is just "okay so there's galadriel, she's great. some stuff about the rings those are important. we'll throw a hobbit or 2 in there, they'll go on a walk"
All TV used to be made this way. Most 2000s era shows were written as they went along with only a few key things decided as they went. It's just a lost art to be able to do it all. LOST did it great.
We have gotten to a point where there isn't just one cultural event or media that everyone tunes into. There is so much content and people like finding smaller communities. I think people are realizing that the huge communities have too much toxicity and don't like being involved with that. This is just in addition to what you already mentioned.
I agree with your first point, and I want to agree with your second one, but I feel like it’s kind of wishful thinking that smaller communities are a place to escape from toxicity. Tragically some are just as bad as the big ones were, and often don’t have the nice cushion that big fandoms had of casual fans who aren’t so uptight. Idk just my 2 cents. I hope fandom is getting healthier though. Wishing you all the healthiest fandom interactions 🙏 gotta hope and pray for them sometimes lol
If something gets too big it attracts toxic people (and there's also the fact that some people hate popular things simply because those things are popular). In a way, I'm kinda glad that "cultural icons" aren't really a thing anymore and people just pick whatever niche they like and join the communities associated with that niche until they don't like it anymore and they move on to a new niche.
Shadow and Bone was doing great, followed the books closely, did everything right, but got cancelled when other series like Rings of Power were getting criticized for making slop, and they just said "fans don't want fantasy anymore I guess"
@@staggerlee7301 While true. Almost every book series does need ADAPTATION in order to work in a visual medium. And that opens the door to people who think they're 'fixing it'. Let's not forget that even the gold standard for fantasy adaptation, Peter Jackson, did not make a perfect recreation of the book version of LotR. And fans used to argue about this endlessly.
I have a huge love-hate relationship with Merlin but I truly do miss the times where everyone found bad CGI endearing because the story was decent enough and the actors were charismatic. I do not need big dragon battles every episode. I want to see the how people interact with each other and the world around them, and I want to see the process of their problem solving-not just cutting to a giant dragon battle..
Agreed about Game of Thrones raising the bar too high, but the signs that fantasy tv was doomed came much earlier than Wheel of time. In the immediate aftermath of Game of Thrones other networks chased it by trying to recreate the "house of cards, but swords" political intrigue. Season 1 of Thrones didn't have much magic in it, and in a way that's what a lot of people liked. So the initial wave of networks trying to recreate that success instead looked to history. Reign, Vikings, The Last Kingdom, Marco Polo, and a whole bunch of others. I think there were some YA fantasy adaptations whose names I can't remember too. All of these shows to one degree or another were terrible (I do have a soft spot for parts of Vikings though) too. It just seems like there is a huge disconnect between what people want and what writers are creating on tv. We can talk about executive meddling and budgetary issues, but 8-10 episode seasons are clearly not the problem when most of the season feels like filler anyway. HotD season 2 in a 22 episode format would have been unwatchable at the pace the writers were adapting the story. They had time, they just used it poorly. Imagine how many Tolkien fans would be on the verge of protesting outside of the various Tolkien family homes if Rings of Power dragged for 20 episodes of painful nonsense every season. It just seems like there are so so so many shows being produced by so many networks, and a historical shortage of good tv writers to make them. Amazon could throw another 2 billion dollars at Rings of Power but with a writing staff determined to not write what Tolkien fans want to see, determined to subvert expectations or rewrite the lore, it will *never* work. This happened to the historical fiction wave of GoT wannabes, and it's happened to all the fantasy ones too, and it even happened to GoT itself from season 5 on. We need like 90% less shows being made every year, and bigger writers rooms on the shows that are made so more writers can learn from the best firsthand. Also JJ Abrams should be imprisoned for what his mystery box bullshit has done to this industry.
Was fantasy TV was ever really "alive" if Game of Thrones was the only highly popular fantasy show? And there are a lot of other shows that tried to capitalize off the popularity of Game of Thrones besides the big four in this video. Like Shannara, Black Sails, Reign, Marco Polo, Last Kingdom, etc. Granted, some of those were historical fiction and not fantasy but they tried to do the same kind of storytelling and scale of GoT. Even the ones that were good failed to be that successful.
Same. The only other successfull fantasy show I can think of is Merlin. Even fantasy cinema, aside from LotR and Harry Potter, has never been that strong either.
That's such a good fucking take! Fantasy shows 99% suck. They usually always did. Game of Thrones was an exception. They're trying to make lightning strike twice and failing, and then we overreact using nostalgia as a catalyst to create false memories of a time where shows were exceptional or something. Merlin, anyone?
Yeah before GOT it was crime dramas that held the biggest spot on TV and the highest ratings. Brealing Bad, The Wire, The Sopranos, often considered the three best television shows ever produced, all about crime. GOT couldn't even win an Emmy when Breaking Bad was running.
@@TomiOATyeah, the most popular fantasy shows other than GoT were much lower budget shows like Buffy, Charmed, Supernatural, Hercules, Xena. Occasionally, you'd get a higher production one like Penny Dreadful, but they never had high enough ratings to sustain the budget.
@KingOfMadCows And for me one of the things all these shows other than GoT had in common was that they weren't so self serious. Stuff like Merlin and Xena I watched several times because they were just fun and a bit campy. I feel that in trying to make shows big and epic, they've lost that sense of wonder where kids would wave sticks around pretending to be the characters, while the adults laughed at the jokes that went over our heads😅
Everyone forgets about Arcane (and eventually other Runeterra stories) in this topic. Why? Do you not count steampunk as fantasy? Does it have to be live-action fantasy? Does it have to have a new season every year or two? Why?
I think GoT fumbling at the finish line, combined with The Witcher's bizzare narrative changes and creative direction, and Rings of Power just being trash, led to a crash of the big fantasy genre. Too many nails for the coffin.
I couldn't finish season 3 of the Witcher. I still think that there were some good performances outside of Henry Cavill, but it became clear that the writers simply didn't have an interest in faithfully adapting the series. Which is a shame because I loved the world-building of the books and games.
The biggest issue with The Witcher on Netflix is the misalignment of expectations. Everyone talked about wanting an adaption of the games, but the writers were actually adapting the original (not English) books. They literally had the original (again, NOT ENGLISH) author consult on the show, but that just wasn't good enough for the Witcher fanbase (who were mostly games fans).
Funny thing is, the shows would be better without that much budget. Like imagine if Wheel of Time didn’t go the CW special effects route but instead went a retro medieval 80’s style look with more practical effects. Would’ve looked better, been better for marketing, and have been cheaper!
I had to check up the HotD Vs GoT viewership (in millions) HotD S1 (10) S2 (~8) GoT S1 (9.3) S2 (11.5) I mean it's not that bad. GoT just grew and grew, year on year (S8 had a whopping 46M! A worldwide phenomenon). Asking ANY show to be comparable to the landmark GoT is a bit mean. It's like asking an album to be as big as Thriller. Enjoyed the vid! Cheers
You touched on this but I want to stress it: the Lord of the Rings copyright is WEIRD! You basically have two versions of it: the New Line Cinema version (aka the Peter Jackson movies) and the Tolkien estate version. The New Line version allows you to use the general look of the Jackson films but you are only allowed to adapt the Lord of the Rings/Hobbit books + their appendices, while the Tolkien estate one bars you from looking like the recognizable Jackson films but you can use books like the Silmarillion. (This is why there LOTR video games that were movie adaptations and then weird cartoony looking ones within a year of each other) Rings of Power uses the New Line version of the copyright and they make do with some Lord of Rings book appendices but legally have to change a lot of things cus they can't adapt Silmarillion exclusive stories.
Except they pretty much ignored the stuff they had the rights to from the Appendices. Here's what the Appendices say happened 750 Eregion founded by the Noldor. c. 1000 Sauron, alarmed by the growing power of the Númenóreans, chooses Mordor as a land to make into a stronghold. He begins the building of Barad-dûr. 1075 Tar-Ancalimë becomes the first Ruling Queen of Númenor. 1200 Sauron endeavours to seduce the Eldar. Gil-galad refuses to treat with him; but the smiths of Eregion are won over. The Númenóreans begin to make permanent havens. c. 1500 The Elven-smiths instructed by Sauron reach the height of their skill. They begin the forging of the Rings of Power. c. 1590 The Three Rings are completed in Eregion. c. 1600 Sauron forges the One Ring in Orodruin. He completes the Barad-dûr. Celebrimbor perceives the designs of Sauron. 1693 War of the Elves and Sauron begins. The Three Rings are hidden. 1695 Sauron’s forces invade Eriador. Gil-galad sends Elrond to Eregion. 1697 Eregion laid waste. Death of Celebrimbor. The gates of Moria are shut. Elrond retreats with remnant of the Noldor and founds the refuge of Imladris. 1699 Sauron overruns Eriador. 1700 Tar-Minastir sends a great navy from Númenor to Lindon. Sauron is defeated. How does that bear any relation to what the 'Rings of Power' showed? They couldn't even get the order of the Rings creation right, and no that's not some minor detail. And neither is the attitude of the Númenóreans to the Elves at this point. In addition, when they want to they include things that are not in Lord of the Rings or its Appendices, such as the name Anatar, or the map of Númenór
First, main problem is that executives never understood that what made GoT successful was great writing (in the first seasons ofc). Witcher and RoP die mainly due to bad writing (in case of RoP it is terribly bad). I watched fully all of them except for the Witcher which I stopped watching in the middle of the 2nd season due to huge changes in the story comparing with source material. It was also visually the worst of those 4. I had most fun watching Wheels of Time, but prolly because I do not know the books, so I am not pissed off by changes, while the world feels fresh to me :D. Though some parts were annoying :). Writing is the best in HotD, but the pace became glacial, though it looks great in terms of cinematography, costumes and effects, has great dialogs and awesome acting. Alas it feeled more and more stretched. RoP is absolutely terrrible. It feels like written by 12 year old and has lot of copy pasted scenes, characters, plots and even shots. It also doesn't care about lore at all. Best are special effects and cinematography, but still not on HotD level IMO.
Maybe making movies will become so cheap in the future, that we get a bunch of great "indie" series that revive the genre. In the past it would have taken a whole studio to create a masterpiece like "Plankton farts and dies"
they will never find the next GOT, because GOT was a product of his era that would be basically impossible to recreate now At the time people were just starting to take serial productions seriously with the rise of mature, well written and acted tv shows like the sopranos, breaking bad and so on, ASOIAF was an untapped IP with a fanbase already built-in and themes perfect for the tastes of the era now GOT has massively failed, creating an unsustainable standard for similar shows and bad faith/apathy towards the genre add to that executive meddling, budget cuts and idiotic pandering and you have shows that are not only doomed to fail, but they accelerate their demise with unnecessary changes to the source material: the Witcher could have worked IF THEY ADAPTED IT RIGHT, same with HOTD now is too late, companies don't understand their own audience and think throwing money at the problem will solve everything
I don't think it's necessarily fantasy TV that's dying. I mean sure, we finally seem to have a lot of it, but there was always a little fantasy here, it just became mainstream. However Hollywood as a whole is just crumbling.
Meanwhile in Japan, especially in manga and amine, seeing a resurgence of high fantasy series and adaptations. Such as Frieren: Beyond Journey's End and Delicious in Dungeon
Fuck yeah! Have you read the Frieren manga, or just the anime? edit: I just remember an old friend that I lost contact with long ago telling me in 2017 or how anime is so bland now, and how he wanted the anime industry to crash for a few years like the game industry did so we could get more good stuff more often again. I wonder how he feels about anime now.
7:28 This is similar to the ya boom followed by the ya sci-fi with Hunger games being the star; and then the Divergency series and Maze Runner which didn't reach the same height as Hunger Games
Small correction seasons 1 through 3 exists already on Netflix for The Witcher seasons four and five Henry was replaced and they're filming them back to back season 5 will be the last season. There's also a little animated movie coming out on Netflix in February that brings back the voice actor from the games to be Geralt.
I can't recommend Dungeon Meshi and Frieren enough. If these two shows set a precedent, we can wave the reign of boring Isekai good buy and say hello to the new savior of Fantasy: Anime.
With Meshi, you come for the quirky humor but eventually realize there's a seriously great worldbuilding formula where everything is "D&D with one difference". What's cool is that the differences are never contrary for their own sake ... they're 90 degrees, not 180.
It makes me so happy that the current most popular anime are actually really, really good, unlike in many previous years. I hope it does set a precedent.
@@newseason3917 Thank god I grew up right before Adventure Time and didn't have to have my eyes bleed watching that horrible horrible animation style. I grew up with Teen Titans and it had normal animation and it was great.
@@jatzi1526 If by normal you mean anime-inspired, then sure. On that note, Avatar: The Last Airbender was amazing as well, probably still the gold standard for animated fantasy shows.
I really liked the first season of The Witcher. It felt like it captured the feeling of the world it was placed in, and almost every episode had both beautiful and incredibly tragic moments. It was the second season that, for me, completely dropped the ball and didn't seem to know what it wanted to do with its main characters.
It's been a very painful ride. I'm a huge fantasy reader and big fan of all the written series you went through. From my perspective, it's always felt like big studios have a belief they can buy off fantasy fans. We're all obsessive, devoted and neurotic, and will only accept adaptations if we feel like they represent the source material well. But the people with money seem to think if they spend enough on special effects and dragons, we'll somehow celebrate the butchering of worlds we've put a lifetime of nerdy devotion into. If it doesn't feel authentic, it can't matter how good the special effects are or how massive the CGI battles are, because you've failed to convince me it's a part of the world I'm invested in.
Fantasy TV did GREAT in the early 90s-00s. The problem now is nepo baby writers ruining existing fantasy IPs by doing their own thing and not changing things with awareness.
I genuinely don't know how they spend so much on each episode, they look barely any better than stuff from a decade ago and often worse. It feels like they get given such a big budget that they don't know what to do with it. So instead of doing their best with the budget they've got. They overpay for stuff, leading to rushed work as they crunch at the end, it feels like they George Lucas so much by asking for stufd to be added in and just small changes that mean nothing but then cause the scenes to look more artificial as everythings had to be adjusted. Bit like how Furiosa looks significantly worse than Mad Max Fury Road.
Y'all money laundering is making money taken from an illegitimate source and making it look like they're the profits of your legitimate enterprise. You don't launder 10 million by _spending_ 10 million, even if its on a business project. You would have to make the 10 million look like profits from the show.
Poorly run projects get very expensive yeah. Also corruption as the other comments imply. And ppl taking advantage of a cash cow like a big budget show to overcharge as you said yeah. Its wild how costs balloon so quickly sometimes.
GoT won its initial popularity as a very talky R-rated costume drama that shared more in common with something like Rome than Rings of Power. There's a search for the "next massive budget, ultra cinematic high fantasy show" but GoT only became that thing *after* getting popular, and it became a worse show when it did.
Showrunner was bragging that his writers didn't all read the books at one point. With all the cuts, he probably shouldn't have included his boyfriend as a completely new storyline's main character. He was clearly capable of standing up to executives, but only used it to help his boyfriend get an acting gig.
@@loxodoncyclotis1823 The short answer is that they had zero show running experience and almost no writing experience. Other than the Rings of Power that have one uncredited writing project to their name, working on Star Trek Beyond. Which means they probably were just doing dialogue touch ups on set when the director adjusted things to make a scene work. This is the actual problem. Not their personal ideology. They're just incompetent. As in NOT competent. Because they never actually put in the work to gain competency.
actually, the success of fantasy is directly connected to how many Sean Bean deaths there are, and so far they all score 0
show the studios the bean data and they'll give you a trillion dollars
That's why they are called the Bean counters.
Haha funny
Then let's cast Sean Bean as Gavilar in the Stormlight Archive show, simple.
hahaha...uh, wait
Are we going to bring up that the Rings of Power had hired a Tolkien scholar (not just fanboy, but a guy who was literally paid to be in the know about everything Tolkien) and then fired him shortly after because he said that their story didn't work with Middle Earth's lore and history? Because I find it really funny.
Wheel of Time also hired a WoT expert, Daniel Greene interviewed her at some point before the first season dropped. I have no clue what happened to her but man was she excited to be working on the show back then. I'm guessing they didn't listen to her a whole lot
"We hired experts!" is unfortunately very much not the same statement as "We listened to experts!"
That was a huge red flag. Then they had the cast doing interviews before the release saying they improved on Tolkien and that fans were bigots for not watching.
@@kashiichan They did both. As you would know if you watched the show. The lore is EXTREMELY deep.
@@Banzai51 The alt-right Nazis absolutely organized review bombing of the show because it had a black dwarf woman in the trailer. That is a thing that absolutely happened.
Giving someone nearly a billion dollars just for them to call it a huge learning experience has got to be a kick in the nuts
ironically, Game of Thrones was run by 2 guys who later admitted they had no idea what they were doing.
@@alexmikhylovand they really didnt, they just adapted pretty much everything from the books with a little hollywood sprinkled in
@@yhwh1321 I know, the cracks started to show at exact moment they started running out of source material, it was very obvious
@@alexmikhylovIts was before that even. Seasons 1-4 were books 1-3, but after that they kinda just ignored most of books 4-5.
Reading them a couple years after the show was such an enlightening experience, as they’re so much more interesting than most of seasons 5-6. Some book characters are left out or character assassinated, while everything plot wise makes a lot more sense.
D&D chose not to adapt AFFC or ADWD like the previous seasons had adapted the books because by this point they seemed to have believed they could write the story better than George
Step 1: buy popular and successful fantasy book series.
Step 2: throw ungodly amounts of money on it.
Step 3: hire inexperienced people with no interest or respect for the series and allow them to change it so much its only the series in name.
Step 4: ???
Step 5: cancel the show, fantasy tv is dead, start again with video game series.
Can't buy a Fandom
@@amnewl727my favorite Steely Dan album
@@amnewl727 But you can win them over with good writing.
Step 3 main issues why many show fail and why so many in Hollywood getting layoff.
Dead ass. Loved the Witcher but don't care for the source material. Netflix made it more palatable for me BUT there were parts of me that hit me wrong like they didn't like the thing they were adapting in the first place. Once Cavill left I had no reason to stay.
thanks for not turning this into a 1 hour video essay where you start by explaining to us the origins of television, human imagination, and tolkien’s WW1 experiences
for realv
i would have watched that actually
Your videos were too effective, people just read books now
That's why the movies fail
People only carry things now
😮
Fr
Lol
Pay 100 million for the rights to established IP.
Pay my nephew $2,000 to change everything.
Spend another 100 million on ads.
Why is this not working?
You need to spend $250 million for partial, temporary rights.
They hated him because he spoke the truth
don't forget spending a whole 50 dollars on costuming for plastic and chainmail printed spandex! a vital part of the process
😂😂😂😂
The nephew - sooo true. And the nephew wants to bring 21st century, diverse, cosmopolitan perspectives to a fantasy world 'cause they are saving lives and changing hearts and minds while fisting the original story and characters which they had absolutely nothing to do with in being created.
Thanks again Man. Our parasocial relationship will continue going steady until I am ready to take it to the next level.
...stalking?
@@jasonbhuntfoot stuff.
I feel my bond with Man Carrying Thing growing deeper...
RANK 6
Nice
Parasocianal?
I think one important factor to consider here is that Game of Thrones’ early seasons were incredibly low fantasy. You got to see the dragons and whitewalkers for maybe one or two scenes per season, but for the most part it was just people with swords discussing politics. This not only made people keep watching to see if more fantastical elements would show up (I still remember it being a big moment when the manticore appeared in S2), but it also meant studios didn’t need to rely on a ton of expensive cgi to tell the story, so they could also afford to commission more episodes.
Compare this with the Rings of Power. You have a very high fantasy world straight out the gate, so you can’t really surprise audiences with any new elements you introduce later on. Most of the budget also has to go towards cgi for rendering lots of explicit fantasy elements which, due to the sheer amount of them, probably won’t look great anyway, and you’ll probably only be able to afford six episodes because of them. The result is an extremely rushed and underwhelming viewing experience.
Exactly... I think the Publics' concern and lack of trust in these Industries now, makes us maybe hyper-critical of Products they Release. We used to Consume Entertainment ... As mostly Entertainment? And NOTHING ELSE . Maybe some Commercials / Ads. Now People from around the World are now Invested With Corporate - Hollywood -Tech merger so a lot of Money is being Tossed around. Liv Golf Sports for example Breaking into American Markets on Streaming/Cable/Social. A lot of Talent Got BOUGHT UP . A lot of Artists, Creative People, Men, and Women, have been tossed out / juggled around in the Gig Economy of Hollywood(and all over America in General). The Market needs New Ideas , New People, Creativity, Honesty, Integrity, Dignity ffs. Sorry for the rant bro lol
I mean... You're correct in explaining GoT's success (low fantasy, grimdark brutal HBO sexy time + political intrigue) but RoP doesn't work for a myriad of reasons. There's an interesting show about the titular rings and their effects and influence that was only hinted at in Jackson's LOTR prologue. It doesn't need to be GoT, just as long as it's entertaining and well-paced. RoP is so over-the-top dull I find myself watching middle earth history TH-cam videos instead.
Huge part of what I loved about GOT and ASOIAF in general. Make me buy into the world/story/characters before throwing magic and monsters in my face.
@@Mr.IndoorPants For me, that's what made Wheel of Time (the books, not the show) work. A lot of people complain that it leans too much into Lord of the Rings (especially the first one), but that's intentional. You don't really need to explain the bad guys because you already know them from LotR. You don't need to explain the good guys, because they're the run-of-the-mill conservative hillbillies that everyone knows. That way you can focus on learning the world alongside them, since it's both new to the reader as well as the characters. And then, once they leave Rivendell, instead of making a left to Mordor, they take a hard right and end up in Vietnam, and that's where it really kicks off.
The show, however, did away with all that, without explaining anything. The conservative hillbilies were replaced with progressive hipsters that never questioned the world, learned nothing new, and the audience never even learned about the Dragon, other than it was the Chosen One (which wasn't stated as such in the first book). The audience is pretty much dumped in a world they don't understand without a way of learning more about it. They don't even explain the magic system, while we learn all about it in the first book, before we even meet our second Aes Sedai. In the show, they just throw one Aes Sedai after another at the audience and we're just supposed to guess what's up with them. And to make matters worse, the writers skipped all the boring stuff to get to the cool epic bits, without realizing you need the boring stuff to make the epic stuff epic.
Because deep down, at its core, GoT is really a family drama set in an alternative medieval world with a few fantasy elements. It's arguably not "conventional fantasy" as in the epic quest and saving a damsel in distress. It's melodrama; the equivalent of saying Star Wars is sci-fi, which isn't and technically a fantasy set in space.
Fantasy TV needs to be done in the animated medium. It will still be expensive but not as much as live action (ie with cgi of living creatures like dragons). You see it done well with shows like arcane, and Frieren Beyond Journeys end etc. It helps to suspend disbelief as well as looking stunning visually. It's not perfect but that's where Fantasy needs to go visually
I agree because I work in animation, but also they pay us less than live action 😅 that's why it's cheaper. They don't value our labor.
What "live action" has turned into is basically animation anyways, but with a higher expectation for fidelity by putting it next to a famous man's face.
Animation is still treated like a genre, so really, that's drastically reducing the odds of many people giving it a chance to begin with.
Not that it’s a fantasy show, but scavenger’s reign is a good example. I don’t see how that could work in live action
@@DomR1997 Sure but I also think such people are pretty hesitant to give fantasy a chance to begin with. And animation is only going to gain cache as anime continues to eat the west’s lunch.
If stormlight were done with brilliant animation and true to source material I think it would be a juggernaut that would bring in people who wouldn’t consider it normally. It just might need a bit to gain momentum, as GoT did.
man carrying my tv please give it back
Hopefully the DEI in north European fantasy will stop and hate to break it to the modern audience but people like attractive women
@@jamesfrederick.Anyone using DEI unironically is not someone who's opinions are worth hearing. If you think the entire world isn't watching a show because they have to be reminded brown people exist and not because it's just a badly written, shot, and acted show your brain is too melted to engage in conversation.
@@jamesfrederick. Hate to break it to you, but did you really think "northern European fantasy" was a thing? It's just called FANTASY. A bunch of white people running around onscreen for, what? Like, forever?!? That's a dumb idea.
DEI hiring has nothing to do with why these shows are failing, it's everything else about these shows. If you can't see that, you're an idiot.
@@Toastybees An unfortunate thing about a fantasy show actually including people from the so-called "rest of the world" or even reflecting changing modern demographics in this dude's special place called "northern Europe", which somehow exists in fictional worlds too is that it gives idiots like him an excuse to be racist about a show's failure. Instead of what you said, bad writing, cinematography and acting, and I would emphasize the executing meddling that has been the ultimate cause of the failure of every one of these shows, and was also behind the failure of the last season of GOT too.
But blaming DEI hiring is more exciting than stupid executives who hire bad showrunners who then f*ck up everything else. Because that's totally not been a thing since, like, forever.
@@jamesfrederick. stfu with the offtopic bs
JJ Abrams "mystery box" and its consequences have been an unmitigated disaster for storytelling and I really wish this concept would go away forever.
It’s honestly worse than AI.
It’s honestly a decent idea that only works so well if the writing’s good. Unfortunately, that hasn’t always been the case.
It dillutes storytelling down into buzzwords that execs can understand, so of course they love it
JJ Abrams has been an unmitigated disaster period
@@knightmare5097 It only works well if the box occasionally has something in it. Pulp Fiction doesn't need to show what's in the briefcase, but if Tarantino made that briefcase the driving force of all of his movies, we'd get pretty goddamn sick of it.
It's the old "Let's kill the Golden Goose and then we'll have ALL the golden eggs" way of thinking.
It's so frustrating because it almost seems as if success is the downfall of a fantasy show nowadays. You can really feel when a show is shaped by people who want to make lots of money and when by people who want to tell a story. Rings of Power felt like dragged out attempted fanservice without an actual effort to give something meaningfull to the fans because big viewership was pretty much guaranteed. Andor on the other hand didn't have these expactations placed on it and wasn’t written to please fans but to tell a story, and it was great. And then there are shows like Shadow and Bone which was successfull, mostly loved by the fans, and then got cancelled because reasons I guess, probably because it wasn’t GOT-successfull and the second season didn't match the success of the first, so it wasn’t worth continuing. It feels like the companies just assume what the fans want and then completely miss the mark almost every time. I didn't like LOTR because it had Hobbits in it but because of the impactful story, so I didn't need the Halfling-storyline in ROP. The results of these fanservice-attempts are often almost insultingly superficial. I don't like fantasy because of fantastic elements but the way they can enhance a good story.
I'm sure Andor was not written to please fans. All the writers got into a room with the production staff and all the actors and said "We're not here to please fans" and then a masterpiece happened.
The problem with the Shadow and bone storyline is that the storyline from the Shadow and bone book is delulu fantasy romance at its worst but it was saved by the brilliant six of crows storyline. That fell apart in season 2
@@ΕρνέστοςΣμίθI would really love a fantasy series that just... didn't have romance. At least not when it gets so painfully annoying. They just drag the story down. like a CW show but with ✨dragons✨
@@ΕρνέστοςΣμίθ I watched it for Shadow and Bone Trilogy adaptation. Thowin in Crows destroyed for me that series.
Shadow and Bones was actually GOOD. Funny thing is? I think making it into a TV show - on NETFLIX - is what made it get cancelled. If it was a movie? We could have trilogies BACK. But alas.
The problem is that corporate boards started saying "can't you make Game of Thrones?" when they met with directors and producers who had no interest in fantasy, but who wanted to use any opportunity as a stepping stone to make something they find interesting.
There was no boom, it is no bust. It was over before it started. It was the flight of a chicken.
My dude literally said "the sex or failure of a project" and didn't even pause, the absolute legend.
@@VirtualBoy500 second takes are for cowards
Man Carrying Freudian Slip
I was wondering if anyone else heard that, lol.
@@ManCarryingThing I got something you can carry...
Glad that wasn't just me that spotted that...😅
it's fine though because the minecraft movie will make warner bros 300 trillion dollars and they can use that to make one extra episode of dragons cooing at each other
hey look it's glingus
hey where tf is dragon time ep 10
@@okkh-q8r you don’t even know what you’re asking for
Glimbo ova here who can't even count to 10!
Vermithor going after that Sliverwussy
I mean GOT didn’t reach the highs of M.A.S.H. ratings so I blame M.A.S.H.still to this day.
Mash killed fantasy tv (3hour fifteen minutes)
@@ManCarryingThing It brought on many changes.
I know this is a joke but lowkey the existence of certain shows did often affect the success of others. For example, GOT started a while before Breaking Bad was ending, but the death grip BB had on viewership and critical acclaim kept it relatively obscure. When Bravo Vince and the boys were done collecting Emmy's, GOT started getting higher viewership and I believe won its first Emmy the next year.
@@sjoerdthAnd it take Or leave it if it pleases
We can hope that Mike Flanagan is a huge enough name that his planned tv adaptation of The Dark Tower will really take off.
4:06 I will hear no Merlin slander. Merlin the only fantasy show in the last decade that was good to great from beginning to end.
Amen
It had its problems, but I have never seen any production do so much with so little. They had like 3 sets
There were definitely dud episodes, and even dud seasons imo. Still a good show though.
F'n loved Merlin, great show 👏
Attack on Titan. Is that not fantasy? I think it has a very epic high fantasy tone.
Unpopular opinion: there was never a golden age of fantasy tv / movies. It's always been expensive as hell, divisive, and a niche interest to the public with only the occasional hit. The advantage of this is that books haven't really been supplanted by movies as the favourite medium for fantasy and the genre seems to be doing very well, and looks likely to continue to turn out stone-cold classics that will unlikely ever be turned into consumer 'watercooler' TV.
I'm not here for long form, good content. Unsubscribed.
Same
Give me a predicable punchline in less than 60 seconds any day.
You shall not pass
@@LuisSierra42 man carrying not pass
What if it's longform but evil
Can we go back to Merlin please? I mean it is nice to have realistic cgi but in the end what makes a fantasy book a great thing is characters ,storylines and worldbuilding. You can do more with less
My god Merlin was such a masterpiece. Yeah I know thats hyperbole and it had its flaws, but they were SOOOOO SMALL and the rest was so damn great. I must rewatch it now, thank you friend
Oh yeah, Merlin! That's another fascinating fantasy miniseries from the past. It used to be possible to do fantasy on network TV for budgets far less than six million an episode.
And it wasn’t so bloody grim.
ASoIaF’s early works were written and published in the mid 90’s, the height of the grimdark edgy era. So everyone is swearing and an awful person and there’s lots of nudity and cynicism because all of that was the style at the time. And not even the fun over the top edgy of the era, the boring miseryporn kind.
Witcher was written in this timeframe too which is why it’s full of boobies and abuse and other such things.
When the show came out and got big, everything wanted to be the next GoT and thought being ‘mature’ in that 90’s sense was part of it. There’s definitely a place for that, but it isn’t ‘the overwhelming majority of big projects’. I almost feel like it damaged the genre in a big way, it’d be like if every sci-fi series tried to be 40k.
Fantasy can be fun and colourful and have threat and emotion without anybody taking someone to bed, and I miss that.
I miss Merlin and Charmed and Supernatural and all that stuff. I miss when things didn’t have to be epic and ‘adult’ to be considered good fantasy.
Remember loving Merlin when I was younger. Honestly, only criticism I have is that they never got to the whole Arthur making magic legal again and Merlin acting as his wizard advisor part.
@@thuranz2773 Yeah ending was lucklaster
I watched this video for 5 minutes waiting for the punchline only to realize it was an actual video
Man carrying actual video
Man said in a interview that he wanted to work in one longer video per month besides his more frequent smaller ones. In other words, get used to it.
🤣😅😆
I almost did lmfao. I started the video thinking it must be a joke.
"Sauron All Along", coming to Disney+
Ok this wins best comment award for the comment section of this video
The main issue why Hollywood has shit the bed so massively with these fantasy series is that they taken the source material - and changed it completely. They think they could take stories that has been wildly successful, with hordes of book fans, and "improve" them.
I've read all of the books for these shows and i stopped watching any fantasy adaptation entirely after 2 episodes of The Witcher and 1 episode of The Wheel of Time. Why? Because they deviated too far from the books.
Why is that a recipe for failure?
1) You alienate the book readers, thereby generating poor word of mouth.
2) By "improving" adaptations you remove the worldbuilding which is essential for fantasy to function\be believable, thereby making viewers feel the world is just fake and generic.
3) Fantasy novels gains popularity and fans because of a rich world, great characters and a great story. When hollywood "improves" on that, they remove that which made the novels garner such popularity in the first place, so why would new viewers be a fan of a messed up adaptation?
I think people forget the first season of GOT was super small scale, basically just a political drama with lots of scenes of characters talking with a little bit of fantasy sprinkled in. When the show got to the one big battle scene in the first book Tyrion gets knocked out and misses the whole thing cause the show just did not have the budget for it. Maybe if these shows took more time to build the characters and not spend hundreds of millions right out the gate they’d have more chance at success
Well said.
Ppl didn't forget, the characters were just vastly more interesting right from the beginning.
@@blazenfate and yet they continue to surprise you later on. Jamie begins as a stereotypical dorck, but by season 3 you realise he is a very complex character and an antihero.
People actually used to complain about how the big battles in the earlier seasons didn't make sense (why bring spears along if you're not gonna use them? Why are they just used as decorations?) but yeah, the writing, acting, music and cinematography were basically the reasons why people loved the show back in the day. *Especially* the writing. The moment the show runners stopped following the books is when it all went downhill.
@@CyanRooper The battles in GoT never made sense. Battle of the Bastards is fucking horrible and I know so many ppl that love it. One of the stupidest battles I've ever seen in media
Remember Once Upon a Time? Remember how it had 7 seasons of 22 episodes? Remember how the visual effects looked crap, but it didn't matter because people were more invested in the character arcs and relationships and stories? I don't need photo-realistic dragons, I just need more time to get to know characters so I can care about them when something bad happens.
The Magicians is great too. Im shocked how limited exposure the show had. The production team was very sincere in their character writing and capturing the fun but ugly side of magic despite limited cgi. There was so much improvisation they did to make up for it.
I don't remember, because I would never watch that show.
@@cooltoonist I read the first book and hated it, so I could never watch the show.
@@TaurielTheElf I came from the show first, and reading into the books now. If slow pacing and Quentin's introspection was too much, then the show fixes the plot pacing and emphasizes ensemble cast instead of just Quentin emotionally reacting to things, and it also emphasises the quests more. The books is kind of like if OUAT just hyperfocused on Emma's abandonment issues, and put Regina and Rumpel's arcs out of focus.
@@cooltoonist It's not the pacing or the perspective, it's the story itself. The magic lore. The worldbuilding. That's the thing that I didn't like. And the show can't fix that for me unfortunately.
"Fantasy TV is dead, but I'll see what I can do."
- Kaladin "Bridgeboy" Stormblessed
And for my boon, I challenge Brightlord Zazlav to right of combat!
Mistborn will probably be the first Sanderson IP to get adapted imo. Easiest to get into for the books, probably the easiest to get into with movies as well
@@jatzi1526 Not to mention how much easier it would be in terms of set design for a world that's similar to Earth like Scadrial compared to the fairly alien world of Roshar.
Fantasy TV: Dying
Fantasy Anime: Flourishing
Delicious in Dungeon is literally my second-favorite show of the year (after Slow Horses).
I fundamentally disagree with the conclusion.
The modern fantasy landscape is dying because writing as a discipline is pretty well dead in the mainstream.
People aren't avoiding fantasy because it's expensive... They aren't watching it because it's trash.
Watchya yellin' at!? Hey, those are some nice fluffy clouds up there!
Cost and writing quality are both issues. I don't see how you can "fundamentally disagree" with the idea that cost is a significant barrier, though.
i wrote a short scifi story recently that was a metaphor for my trauma!!!!! so dont blame me im doin my part
@@henlo1910 the more something costs, the less writing risks TV execs are willing to greenlight.
There's a correlation.
Expensive trash.
Plankton is farting and dying. Heres why
NO ONE is talking about it!
I blame the 8 episode formula. Demanding that EVERY..SINGLE. SHOW. run 8 episodes seasons isn't okay. It's literally ruining almost every new show that has the potential to get "big". Idk why studios suddentky started doing this but I would happily take a 12 episode season, let alone the old standard of 24 - 26 episodes when cable television was at its peak! We don't have those constrictions anymore thanks to streaming! So please, stop forcing shows into random formulas such as the 8 episode one for zero reason!
As a Brit short shows are so much better, pacing wise, 24 episode shows feel like a total marathon.
8 episodes is fine if writers actually effectively write and 8 episode arc. House of the Dragon seemed like it was written for a 10 episode arc.
Most of the shows that we're talking about barely even have eight episodes of content though. They're just dragged out to make sure the only real dramatic thing happens at the end of the episode.
@@smittyjjensin558 Apparently it was, and HBO cut the budget during production (thanks again, David Zaszlav!), so they had to push the climactic battle/s into the start of the next season and draw this one out a bit.
12-13 episodes is 3 months, hence it's called a season.
If moist critical made this video the title would just be: "This is sad"
"The Fantasy TV Situation is Insane"
That guy has the safest, most lukewarm takes of all time
It certainly didn't help that every single one of these shows made each and every location within their Medieval-esque settings into mirror images of downtown Toronto.
Fantasy died when they replaced the space from competent writers to fanfiction writers, on shows, movies and games. All we are seeing is teenage drama on a fantastic setting, that makes you feel like seeing a soap opera with medieval costumes, a cosplay party. There's no more lore, no more tone, it all feels the same. These mfs went into fantasy worlds and are trying to make it feels more like our world.
Man carrying long video
11 minutes isn't long
@@aphato2770 It is in contrast to every other video on this channel.
@@aphato2770 11 minutes isn't long but its got a great personality
I didn’t even know he made real videos
Witcher was such a let down. Perfect example of the showrunners wanting to do their own thing, thinking they had better ideas and my god was that not the case. Also, there is a show that I think rises to the level of awesome that was Game of Thrones but in sci-fi and that is Foundation on Apple+. I would say it's the best show on television that people don't know/not watching
I think a lot of adaptation projects today suffer as a result of showrunners wanting to make something original, but NEEDING to use an existing IP to get greenlit, so they care more about their own changes than the material itself
Like half of The Witcher season 2 was just completely made-up with zero basis in the novels. It's just tiring. I pretend that show doesn't exist and I'm happier for it.
@@ManCarryingThingShame they think that way. Surely creating a great adaption would make it easier to get an original project greenlit? The Witcher crew, for example, could’ve made a proper adaption of the books and I would be willing to watch their original material after.
Though I, like many, don’t work in film/tv so it’s hard to know what actually goes on behind the scenes.
@@ManCarryingThing truuueeeee, they'd never get their own stories greenlit otherwise so they gotta insert that garbage in there
@@ManCarryingThing Tbf interesting adaptations can also come out of this process, like Joker.
The Witcher had a great start, unlike Rings of Power or Wheel of Time. Then it veered off into complete fan fiction to the point where Cavill washed his hands of it, but he only put the final nail in the coffin. Why adapt an IP if you aren't going to actually adapt it and just use it as a brand name for your courageous and brave adventures of someone else?
Why do all shows that are adaptations do this? The Boys literally only shares the name with the comics and people don't complain about that. Granted, they did a good job at changing pretty much every single aspect of the source material and the ones you mentioned did not. But almost every adaptation veers off the source material. People still praise the first half of game of thrones despite it being essentially a bad book report from kids who didn't actually read the books and just skimmed them or found abridged summaries and copied those.
I feel the reason the witcher failed so bad is people actually know the source material, well they know one of the games (which are also bad adaptations, but we don't talk about that).
@@TheJohhnyE the boys get a pass on this one for having an absolute trash source material in the first place, the show really needs to take creative liberties keeping the premise
This is unlike the witcher which required no deviation because the books are gold fantasy standards
@@TheJohhnyE Well, the biggest and simplest reason is that if the adaptation is good, the changes it made to get there do not matter, and if it is trash, those same changes exacerbate the problems. As Kung points out above, The Boys in particular was trash source material, so the numerous changes made have created a superior adaptation. In a different vein, 300 had zero females in the original graphic novel but they added in one that allowed the story to provide more depth. Most people don't consider 300 to be a particularly poor adaptation or poor source material.
In the Daredevil movie, Kingpin was played by Michael Clarke Duncan (RIP), and not only do most people not find that a problem, he's often cited as the best part of the entire movie. Despite being both black and somewhat different in personality from the Kingpin in comics.
Meanwhile, if you watch The Witcher, and I say this as someone whose first exposure to the franchise was through the show, Season 1 is leagues better than Season 2, and Season 3 is unwatchable. Season 1 did the cool time shifting, it has a very focused narrative, enjoyable episodic adventures that tie together and are very rewatchable. Also sexy leads who look good naked. Season 2 seems to lose that focus, wanders around, has characters act out of previously established character for what I assume is to advance the plot in ways that are deviating from the book and lacks a satisfying conclusion that the first season provided. Season 3 was unwatchable. As someone who has no idea what they skipped or added from the books.
Rings of Power is dull. No amount of black halflings, dwarves and elves is going to change that about it. Wheel of Time is tiresome, and hammers a multiracial cast into the story clumsily (all of them in the super remote village leagues away from anywhere important?) when the original writer really had provided a setting that would have included diversity very organically with all of the different human cultures.
Cavill didn't wash his hands of it, he has been reported several time as an abusive co-worker harassing people on set to the point that they had to push him away from the show. No actor would shy away from doing the corniest shit in exchange for a ton of money.
I HATE how every single polish cultural thing is erased in the Netflix Witcher. They choose such an interesting books and setting to adapt and made it generic uninspired fantasy with no connection to slavic/polish folklore.
What happened with House of Dragon is really depressing. GRRM obviously was trying to not let what happened with the original show happen again. He has been heavily involved in literally anything involving related to the IP now. Instead of trusting that the show runners will do his work justice. Now it seems like we are hitting the too big to succeed point. Too many hands in the cookie jar.
4:37 “a mixed bag” is being comically generous. It’s an insult to art itself
this is like if hbomberguy made a 24-hour long video.
So business as usual?
The world is not ready for that
Wheel of time is hilariously terrible I love it
The Witcher had that classic tv fantasy feel with a big budget. Season 1 had mainstream audiences interested but they lost that with season 2.
Rings of Power is boring and they clearly have no idea what they are doing.
HOTD…IS NOT DEAD YET! I STILL BELIEVE
I read this in your voice :)
What's HOTD?
Edit: Oh, House of the Dragon, fair enough.
I... Really appreciate Wheel of Time's TV show.
There are obviously flaws (my favorite character in the books was Perin, but I aint feeling him too much in the show yet), but... For the most part, I feel like it's a pretty darn good adaptation.
I don't know how much of my feeling is because it was actually a good adaptation, or if my low expectations were surprised.
... ... I will say, I think Rosamund Pike is also a really good actor, I think.
@@Jackolantirn I think this adaptation has really great elements to it (passionate actors, nice set design, faithful adaptionish etc) but the whole show has never really clicked for me. I'd love to see it really shine in s3 but I think the Amazon factor is rlly holding it back. P.s. can they pls give my boy rand like ONE climactic fight at the end of a season...he's owed two now.
@@tomm8120 lmao I absolutely forgot...
I remember watching the season 2 trailer when it came out... we see the bad guy with the long nails perform a crazy fighting stance and I thought to myself "oh wow, that looks like it's gonna be a crazy showdown."
I always enjoy these long form videos. I sincerely believe you make great short and long form videos; tis a rare ability. Keep up the great work mr. man :)
Thanks!
as an og subscriber, i love the long form videos. you make a really good point here and maybe when the transition to everyone getting adverts on their streaming services is complete we will get higher budget tv shows and something like GoT will come along.
I agree with you! Sorry about the exclamation mark, it's just that TH-cam randomly recommended your video and I'm a bit surprised we see the issue in such a similar way. The problem is that fantasy is too expensive to make, at least the way that streamers are making it right now.
As an old guy I remember when fantasy mostly came in the form of TV mini-series. They were usually between six to ten episodes, and adapted some preexisting story. There was the Arabian Knights, The Odyssey, Peter Pan, Stephen King, The Wizard of Oz and about five hundred different versions of fairy tales. The results were somewhat mixed in terms of quality, but my impression is they cost about the same amount as a prime time drama series, or maybe slightly more. But not six million an episode!
I agree with you that animation is the best way forward right now. Something like Wheel of Time could be adapted in animated form far more faithfully than in live action, for less money. Netflix's "The Dragon Prince" shows that it could even be done on a streamer. It's more a matter of adjusting audience expectations than any kind of technical or financial barrier.
Everything is over, apparently. Movies, TV shows, games, careers, jobs, rent, owning property, even the damn food is over and sucks.
I'm not sure if this is really pessimistic or you're just making a joke
@joblohnny It’s a joke, and it’s funny because it is true
@@zacky7572 i mean there are still cool stuff in media out there right now but I get your point
@@joblohnny I'm not trying to be pessimistic, just stating what I've noticed, the world is ending in the most boring way imaginable haha
if it helps games aren’t over imo, there are tons of good indies on steam and itchio, tho it might take a bit more looking around to find ur niche
Idk re the rest tho :P
The closest thing to a GoT successor was Succession.
Succession is not even fantasy
@@LuisSierra42He means in terms of quality and the attention the show received.
Only the first 4 season of game of thrones were amazing. Everything else? Trash. Even the first 4 seaosn had some iffi parts were im like "was this necessary?"
In general succession is way better then got
@@LuisSierra42 no way! really?
If you don't have couple of strong creatives that have the freedom to bring their vision out like they wanted. It's gonna be meh. All those post GOT fantasy series were cookie cutter commitee created slop.
I understand how networks are terrified when it comes to fantasy productions, because they cost so much to make. So they have the urge to micromanage, and try to put in things that make it appeal to broader audience etc.. but it just makes generic slop in the end.
Also nepotism. Some of those series have people writing/producing etc.. that have NEVER made anything that hasn't flopped or been poorly received. Why would you ever let such people go anywhere near a project you are banking on being a megahit?
IMO they also go in too big too quick. You look at many popular shows fantasy or otherwise, you'll find that the first season tended to be much less grand than what it would be come. It built up the epic plots and big twists over time once we had a solid foundation of good telly.
Wanting a show to be a big epic thing straight away is a big gamble that misses more than hits
@@thecrispymasterConcord
The son of the guy who makes Ancient Apocalypse works at Netflix. I'm not sure which direction the nepotism goes, but it's definitely there.
I’ve never seen a fiction project work with more than 3 key creatives at the head.
Usually fewer is better, but some diads or triads have the secret sauce.
imo frankly the last bastion was the Peter Jackson LOTR movies. I don't think a studio will ever be as convinced to give such a huge amount of freedom and money to such artists
See I don't think freedom is the issue. WB just gave a $200 million check for Todd Phillips to do whatever he wants for a Joker sequel and people hated it (so far?). I think it's more, high fantasy (i.e. wizards and dragons) is a very difficult genre to adapt to live action. Peter Jackson is an enormous, once-in-a-generation talent. As beloved as LOTR is, Tolkien's books are not easy-peasy to manifest. They had to innovate new technology just to get Gollum to work.
i think another major problem is "premature pitching". the phenomenon that usually only set in after a couple of seasons or when a show got syndicated and the writers realise they didn't have any story to tell but kept making episodes because their next season was already approved. but in these cases the shows are pre-approved, they get 3 seasons of budget based on the high pitch to some executive, like it's the 80s and we're making action movies. not even a pilot or proof of concept it is just "okay so there's galadriel, she's great. some stuff about the rings those are important. we'll throw a hobbit or 2 in there, they'll go on a walk"
All TV used to be made this way. Most 2000s era shows were written as they went along with only a few key things decided as they went. It's just a lost art to be able to do it all. LOST did it great.
We have gotten to a point where there isn't just one cultural event or media that everyone tunes into. There is so much content and people like finding smaller communities. I think people are realizing that the huge communities have too much toxicity and don't like being involved with that.
This is just in addition to what you already mentioned.
This is why I will unsubscribe from Man Carrying Thing the moment he hits 500k subs.
I agree with your first point, and I want to agree with your second one, but I feel like it’s kind of wishful thinking that smaller communities are a place to escape from toxicity. Tragically some are just as bad as the big ones were, and often don’t have the nice cushion that big fandoms had of casual fans who aren’t so uptight. Idk just my 2 cents. I hope fandom is getting healthier though. Wishing you all the healthiest fandom interactions 🙏 gotta hope and pray for them sometimes lol
If something gets too big it attracts toxic people (and there's also the fact that some people hate popular things simply because those things are popular). In a way, I'm kinda glad that "cultural icons" aren't really a thing anymore and people just pick whatever niche they like and join the communities associated with that niche until they don't like it anymore and they move on to a new niche.
Fantasy will come back if people learn to tell a good story
Man carrying good stories
Or learn that an already good story doesn’t need fixing
Shadow and Bone was doing great, followed the books closely, did everything right, but got cancelled when other series like Rings of Power were getting criticized for making slop, and they just said "fans don't want fantasy anymore I guess"
@@staggerlee7301 While true. Almost every book series does need ADAPTATION in order to work in a visual medium. And that opens the door to people who think they're 'fixing it'. Let's not forget that even the gold standard for fantasy adaptation, Peter Jackson, did not make a perfect recreation of the book version of LotR. And fans used to argue about this endlessly.
Or executives don’t scare stuff up
This meme has too much talking. 10/10
I have a huge love-hate relationship with Merlin but I truly do miss the times where everyone found bad CGI endearing because the story was decent enough and the actors were charismatic. I do not need big dragon battles every episode. I want to see the how people interact with each other and the world around them, and I want to see the process of their problem solving-not just cutting to a giant dragon battle..
Agreed about Game of Thrones raising the bar too high, but the signs that fantasy tv was doomed came much earlier than Wheel of time. In the immediate aftermath of Game of Thrones other networks chased it by trying to recreate the "house of cards, but swords" political intrigue. Season 1 of Thrones didn't have much magic in it, and in a way that's what a lot of people liked. So the initial wave of networks trying to recreate that success instead looked to history. Reign, Vikings, The Last Kingdom, Marco Polo, and a whole bunch of others. I think there were some YA fantasy adaptations whose names I can't remember too. All of these shows to one degree or another were terrible (I do have a soft spot for parts of Vikings though) too. It just seems like there is a huge disconnect between what people want and what writers are creating on tv. We can talk about executive meddling and budgetary issues, but 8-10 episode seasons are clearly not the problem when most of the season feels like filler anyway. HotD season 2 in a 22 episode format would have been unwatchable at the pace the writers were adapting the story. They had time, they just used it poorly. Imagine how many Tolkien fans would be on the verge of protesting outside of the various Tolkien family homes if Rings of Power dragged for 20 episodes of painful nonsense every season. It just seems like there are so so so many shows being produced by so many networks, and a historical shortage of good tv writers to make them.
Amazon could throw another 2 billion dollars at Rings of Power but with a writing staff determined to not write what Tolkien fans want to see, determined to subvert expectations or rewrite the lore, it will *never* work. This happened to the historical fiction wave of GoT wannabes, and it's happened to all the fantasy ones too, and it even happened to GoT itself from season 5 on. We need like 90% less shows being made every year, and bigger writers rooms on the shows that are made so more writers can learn from the best firsthand.
Also JJ Abrams should be imprisoned for what his mystery box bullshit has done to this industry.
“The sex or failure”… this an observation about GOT?
Man Carrying Freudian Slip
Was fantasy TV was ever really "alive" if Game of Thrones was the only highly popular fantasy show?
And there are a lot of other shows that tried to capitalize off the popularity of Game of Thrones besides the big four in this video. Like Shannara, Black Sails, Reign, Marco Polo, Last Kingdom, etc. Granted, some of those were historical fiction and not fantasy but they tried to do the same kind of storytelling and scale of GoT. Even the ones that were good failed to be that successful.
Same. The only other successfull fantasy show I can think of is Merlin. Even fantasy cinema, aside from LotR and Harry Potter, has never been that strong either.
That's such a good fucking take! Fantasy shows 99% suck. They usually always did. Game of Thrones was an exception. They're trying to make lightning strike twice and failing, and then we overreact using nostalgia as a catalyst to create false memories of a time where shows were exceptional or something. Merlin, anyone?
Yeah before GOT it was crime dramas that held the biggest spot on TV and the highest ratings. Brealing Bad, The Wire, The Sopranos, often considered the three best television shows ever produced, all about crime. GOT couldn't even win an Emmy when Breaking Bad was running.
@@TomiOATyeah, the most popular fantasy shows other than GoT were much lower budget shows like Buffy, Charmed, Supernatural, Hercules, Xena. Occasionally, you'd get a higher production one like Penny Dreadful, but they never had high enough ratings to sustain the budget.
@KingOfMadCows And for me one of the things all these shows other than GoT had in common was that they weren't so self serious. Stuff like Merlin and Xena I watched several times because they were just fun and a bit campy.
I feel that in trying to make shows big and epic, they've lost that sense of wonder where kids would wave sticks around pretending to be the characters, while the adults laughed at the jokes that went over our heads😅
Pretty sure half the viewership of Rings of Power are TH-cam critics mining the show for their next video.
This is genuinely a good long form video. I’d honestly love to see more of this from you.
Everyone forgets about Arcane (and eventually other Runeterra stories) in this topic. Why? Do you not count steampunk as fantasy? Does it have to be live-action fantasy? Does it have to have a new season every year or two? Why?
Because it's animation, which makes it a completely different category. We are talking about live action here
I see everybody just forgot the Willow show existed. Probably just like Disney wants.
I know, and it was actually pretty good, as was the Dark Crystal TV show which suffered a similar fate.
I really loved Dark Crystal, was so upset it got cancelled @kohhna
I think GoT fumbling at the finish line, combined with The Witcher's bizzare narrative changes and creative direction, and Rings of Power just being trash, led to a crash of the big fantasy genre.
Too many nails for the coffin.
Can someone tell me what this video is about? I'm incapable of watching anything above the length of 0:59
Fantasy TV farts and dies
It's about how there are now so many types of cheese that the average consumer is paralyzed from so many options and ultimately buys no cheese
@3:25 the sex or failure?
I just want my Sanderson adaptations man
I trust Sanderson enough to believe that when we get an adaptation it'll actually be good
@@ADHDlanguages Or at least VERY long! XD
for now we have the Cosmere TTRPG though!!
I wanted a Mistborn game by Arkane so bad before Redfall, I still really think that series has perfect mechanics for a video game.
@@ethanalienx Yup! Makes me wish I had friends!
I couldn't finish season 3 of the Witcher. I still think that there were some good performances outside of Henry Cavill, but it became clear that the writers simply didn't have an interest in faithfully adapting the series. Which is a shame because I loved the world-building of the books and games.
It's wild that Netflix spent millions on the rights, then gave it to a showrunner who wasn't interested in adapting the stories.
@@Kevin_Street How did these showrunners even get involved in a Witcher show anyways?
There’s a season 3??
The biggest issue with The Witcher on Netflix is the misalignment of expectations. Everyone talked about wanting an adaption of the games, but the writers were actually adapting the original (not English) books. They literally had the original (again, NOT ENGLISH) author consult on the show, but that just wasn't good enough for the Witcher fanbase (who were mostly games fans).
Incorrect @@kashiichan
Man carrying the Fantasy genre
The man carrying the fantasy genre was the man we made all along.
Funny thing is, the shows would be better without that much budget. Like imagine if Wheel of Time didn’t go the CW special effects route but instead went a retro medieval 80’s style look with more practical effects. Would’ve looked better, been better for marketing, and have been cheaper!
I had to check up the HotD Vs GoT viewership (in millions)
HotD S1 (10) S2 (~8)
GoT S1 (9.3) S2 (11.5)
I mean it's not that bad. GoT just grew and grew, year on year (S8 had a whopping 46M! A worldwide phenomenon). Asking ANY show to be comparable to the landmark GoT is a bit mean. It's like asking an album to be as big as Thriller.
Enjoyed the vid! Cheers
Please save us hypothetical animated Stormlight Archive show
I think Sanderson said he would only do a live action version, which is really disappointing.
@@Bivuki777 I've heard some people say that and I've found no source.
A 90’s-esque anime of Stormlight would be cool. Imagine the sick Escaflowne style designs of the Shardplates.
Hypothetical Mistborn Era 1 movie trilogy would be goated ngl
@@Bivuki777If he's saying that, I hope he realizes how expensive good CG is.
You touched on this but I want to stress it: the Lord of the Rings copyright is WEIRD! You basically have two versions of it: the New Line Cinema version (aka the Peter Jackson movies) and the Tolkien estate version.
The New Line version allows you to use the general look of the Jackson films but you are only allowed to adapt the Lord of the Rings/Hobbit books + their appendices, while the Tolkien estate one bars you from looking like the recognizable Jackson films but you can use books like the Silmarillion. (This is why there LOTR video games that were movie adaptations and then weird cartoony looking ones within a year of each other)
Rings of Power uses the New Line version of the copyright and they make do with some Lord of Rings book appendices but legally have to change a lot of things cus they can't adapt Silmarillion exclusive stories.
Except they pretty much ignored the stuff they had the rights to from the Appendices. Here's what the Appendices say happened
750 Eregion founded by the Noldor.
c. 1000 Sauron, alarmed by the growing power of the Númenóreans, chooses Mordor as a land to make into a stronghold. He begins the building of Barad-dûr.
1075 Tar-Ancalimë becomes the first Ruling Queen of Númenor.
1200 Sauron endeavours to seduce the Eldar. Gil-galad refuses to treat with him; but the smiths of Eregion are won over. The Númenóreans begin to make permanent havens.
c. 1500 The Elven-smiths instructed by Sauron reach the height of their skill. They begin the forging of the Rings of Power.
c. 1590 The Three Rings are completed in Eregion.
c. 1600 Sauron forges the One Ring in Orodruin. He completes the Barad-dûr. Celebrimbor perceives the designs of Sauron.
1693 War of the Elves and Sauron begins. The Three Rings are hidden.
1695 Sauron’s forces invade Eriador. Gil-galad sends Elrond to Eregion.
1697 Eregion laid waste. Death of Celebrimbor. The gates of Moria are shut. Elrond retreats with remnant of the Noldor and founds the refuge of Imladris.
1699 Sauron overruns Eriador.
1700 Tar-Minastir sends a great navy from Númenor to Lindon. Sauron is defeated.
How does that bear any relation to what the 'Rings of Power' showed? They couldn't even get the order of the Rings creation right, and no that's not some minor detail. And neither is the attitude of the Númenóreans to the Elves at this point.
In addition, when they want to they include things that are not in Lord of the Rings or its Appendices, such as the name Anatar, or the map of Númenór
I just think it’s funny to think about the Shadow of Mordor games too. The story in those games is basically RoP level changing of canon before RoP
Damn, I didn’t know any of that. Such messy copyright seems like it’d make it really hard to make a good adaptation
I feel like Rings of Power exists just so they can say the name "Celebrimbor" and make that sound really cool.
Don't we have the Shadow of Mordor games for that?
The power of Tolkien's vocal tics are still being felt today.
First, main problem is that executives never understood that what made GoT successful was great writing (in the first seasons ofc). Witcher and RoP die mainly due to bad writing (in case of RoP it is terribly bad). I watched fully all of them except for the Witcher which I stopped watching in the middle of the 2nd season due to huge changes in the story comparing with source material. It was also visually the worst of those 4. I had most fun watching Wheels of Time, but prolly because I do not know the books, so I am not pissed off by changes, while the world feels fresh to me :D. Though some parts were annoying :). Writing is the best in HotD, but the pace became glacial, though it looks great in terms of cinematography, costumes and effects, has great dialogs and awesome acting. Alas it feeled more and more stretched. RoP is absolutely terrrible. It feels like written by 12 year old and has lot of copy pasted scenes, characters, plots and even shots. It also doesn't care about lore at all. Best are special effects and cinematography, but still not on HotD level IMO.
I don't usually see your long format videos. Pleasantly surprised! I'm here for more of it!
Maybe making movies will become so cheap in the future, that we get a bunch of great "indie" series that revive the genre.
In the past it would have taken a whole studio to create a masterpiece like "Plankton farts and dies"
Man carrying original purpose of the channel
Man now carries long video
A wild Vee appears
It’s almost like people don’t want to watch bad shows
According to critics they don't watch good shows either
It’s simple. Showrunners don’t care about books
they will never find the next GOT, because GOT was a product of his era that would be basically impossible to recreate now
At the time people were just starting to take serial productions seriously with the rise of mature, well written and acted tv shows like the sopranos, breaking bad and so on, ASOIAF was an untapped IP with a fanbase already built-in and themes perfect for the tastes of the era
now GOT has massively failed, creating an unsustainable standard for similar shows and bad faith/apathy towards the genre
add to that executive meddling, budget cuts and idiotic pandering and you have shows that are not only doomed to fail, but they accelerate their demise with unnecessary changes to the source material: the Witcher could have worked IF THEY ADAPTED IT RIGHT, same with HOTD
now is too late, companies don't understand their own audience and think throwing money at the problem will solve everything
Man carrying frodo up mount doom
(i can’t carry Thing for you, but i can carry you!!)
Man Sharing The Load
I don't think it's necessarily fantasy TV that's dying. I mean sure, we finally seem to have a lot of it, but there was always a little fantasy here, it just became mainstream. However Hollywood as a whole is just crumbling.
If hollywood does fully crumble, then what will take its place? Maybe the internet and audienced backed stuff
hell yeah a serious video
streaming media is a nightmare and i'm not even sure who's dreaming it
Your short stuff is pure gold, but you should do this more!
Man carrying video essays now? I’d watch more of these :)
I enjoy fantasy stories the way they were intended: around a kitchen table with dice and a bunch of socially maladjusted nerds
Yeah but it aint bad if we also got good adaptations of them as well
If books aren't a visual medium, why do I need my eyes to read them?
Because they don't tell the story visually (think film or animation), but in written form
Meanwhile in Japan, especially in manga and amine, seeing a resurgence of high fantasy series and adaptations. Such as Frieren: Beyond Journey's End and Delicious in Dungeon
Fuck yeah! Have you read the Frieren manga, or just the anime?
edit: I just remember an old friend that I lost contact with long ago telling me in 2017 or how anime is so bland now, and how he wanted the anime industry to crash for a few years like the game industry did so we could get more good stuff more often again. I wonder how he feels about anime now.
Also Hunter x Hunter is getting new chapters next month and I don't care if you don't call it fantasy because it rocks anyway
@@thevinisoIf hxh isn't fantasy then I don't know what the fuck is.
Yes but even then most fantasy anime is unwatchable isekai trash for 12 year old edgelords like Overlord.
Both of those have incredibly generic fantasy settings like most manga.
7:28 This is similar to the ya boom followed by the ya sci-fi with Hunger games being the star; and then the Divergency series and Maze Runner which didn't reach the same height as Hunger Games
Small correction seasons 1 through 3 exists already on Netflix for The Witcher seasons four and five Henry was replaced and they're filming them back to back season 5 will be the last season. There's also a little animated movie coming out on Netflix in February that brings back the voice actor from the games to be Geralt.
I can't recommend Dungeon Meshi and Frieren enough. If these two shows set a precedent, we can wave the reign of boring Isekai good buy and say hello to the new savior of Fantasy: Anime.
With Meshi, you come for the quirky humor but eventually realize there's a seriously great worldbuilding formula where everything is "D&D with one difference". What's cool is that the differences are never contrary for their own sake ... they're 90 degrees, not 180.
It makes me so happy that the current most popular anime are actually really, really good, unlike in many previous years. I hope it does set a precedent.
I'm reading the Powder Mage trilogy and I keep thinking it would work really well as an anime
I watch a ton of fantasy TV, it's just mostly animated, which I prefer.
Exactly - gravity falls, Hilda, adventure time? Peak fantasy TV right there
@@newseason3917 Thank god I grew up right before Adventure Time and didn't have to have my eyes bleed watching that horrible horrible animation style. I grew up with Teen Titans and it had normal animation and it was great.
Frieren and Dungeon Meshi were amazing and soon well finally be getting Witch Hat Atelier. Good fantasy is still out there and being made
@@jatzi1526 If by normal you mean anime-inspired, then sure. On that note, Avatar: The Last Airbender was amazing as well, probably still the gold standard for animated fantasy shows.
bait used to be believable
I really liked the first season of The Witcher. It felt like it captured the feeling of the world it was placed in, and almost every episode had both beautiful and incredibly tragic moments. It was the second season that, for me, completely dropped the ball and didn't seem to know what it wanted to do with its main characters.
It's been a very painful ride. I'm a huge fantasy reader and big fan of all the written series you went through.
From my perspective, it's always felt like big studios have a belief they can buy off fantasy fans. We're all obsessive, devoted and neurotic, and will only accept adaptations if we feel like they represent the source material well. But the people with money seem to think if they spend enough on special effects and dragons, we'll somehow celebrate the butchering of worlds we've put a lifetime of nerdy devotion into.
If it doesn't feel authentic, it can't matter how good the special effects are or how massive the CGI battles are, because you've failed to convince me it's a part of the world I'm invested in.
Fantasy TV did GREAT in the early 90s-00s. The problem now is nepo baby writers ruining existing fantasy IPs by doing their own thing and not changing things with awareness.
I genuinely don't know how they spend so much on each episode, they look barely any better than stuff from a decade ago and often worse. It feels like they get given such a big budget that they don't know what to do with it. So instead of doing their best with the budget they've got. They overpay for stuff, leading to rushed work as they crunch at the end, it feels like they George Lucas so much by asking for stufd to be added in and just small changes that mean nothing but then cause the scenes to look more artificial as everythings had to be adjusted. Bit like how Furiosa looks significantly worse than Mad Max Fury Road.
Money laundering.
Laundering money.
Y'all money laundering is making money taken from an illegitimate source and making it look like they're the profits of your legitimate enterprise. You don't launder 10 million by _spending_ 10 million, even if its on a business project. You would have to make the 10 million look like profits from the show.
Poorly run projects get very expensive yeah. Also corruption as the other comments imply. And ppl taking advantage of a cash cow like a big budget show to overcharge as you said yeah. Its wild how costs balloon so quickly sometimes.
Wheel of time show could’ve been so good 😭
moral of the story: don't hire talentless writers to helm your multi million dollar IP.
Because all of these modern fantasy TV shows are barely distinguishable from one another and may as well be modern day LA with swords and spears.
GoT won its initial popularity as a very talky R-rated costume drama that shared more in common with something like Rome than Rings of Power. There's a search for the "next massive budget, ultra cinematic high fantasy show" but GoT only became that thing *after* getting popular, and it became a worse show when it did.
'budgets are going to effects, actors, locations.' not in the case of Wheel of Time, I'm sure they just set fire to that money.
Or the Rings of Power. How did the most expensive show in history manage to look so cheap?
Showrunner was bragging that his writers didn't all read the books at one point. With all the cuts, he probably shouldn't have included his boyfriend as a completely new storyline's main character. He was clearly capable of standing up to executives, but only used it to help his boyfriend get an acting gig.
@@loxodoncyclotis1823 The short answer is that they had zero show running experience and almost no writing experience. Other than the Rings of Power that have one uncredited writing project to their name, working on Star Trek Beyond. Which means they probably were just doing dialogue touch ups on set when the director adjusted things to make a scene work.
This is the actual problem. Not their personal ideology. They're just incompetent. As in NOT competent. Because they never actually put in the work to gain competency.