Or, as I’ve heard it called, “Boobs and Beheadings.” 
I like two of those things!
The TV shows you listed as your examples are all violent. That does it for me right there. I don’t care how well it’s produced… I ain’t spending my time to champion/support/watch ANY more violence in this world.
Or tits, for that matter. I mean, I love them but I don’t watch them on TV.
And that’s why I don’t watch much modern TV. It’s too fucking violent, apathetic and sexual. I’ll never get past those points to see any “precious production” value that may be there. If the producer and/or director is/are so talented, have him work his magic w/o using such low-hanging fruit.
People invest so much time into media they come to identify with it and take it as a personal insult if someone criticizes their cherished escapism. Especially these TV shows that take 80 hours to watch. Or when the fans take it to have insights into human nature or politics, instead of realizing it’s pandering to their demographic, playing to their power fantasy, and probably isn’t as deep as they think compared to literature or philosophy. Is it really a surprise a board full of nerdy middle aged white males love Breaking Bad?
Hype backlash is also prevalent. Forget not watching sub-categories, most people ignore whole mediums. You should ignore what you don’t like. Life is short. If there’s an exception, you’ll hear about it.
I reject your framing of the issue. Violence is a frequent theme in all forms of literature dating back to the epic of Gilgamesh. Should Tolstoy have eschewed “low hanging fruit” in War and Peace? Should Homer have eschewed “low hanging fruit” in the Iliad and the Odyssey?
Sure, there’s such a thing as gratuitous violence (or sex), and some generally high-quality shows have been guilty of that. (Game of Thrones, in particular, was very guilty of gratuitous nudity in its first couple of seasons, although it’s improved over the course of its run.)
But you don’t just seem to be saying that you, shunpiker, just don’t enjoy violence. Which would of course be perfectly reasonable. You seem to be saying that it is an objective failing if a work of fiction includes violence, no matter what… that whoever was telling the story should have figured out a way to tell the story without violence, or should have chosen to tell a different story, one with no violence. I reject that outright.
(That said, if you personally dislike violence, then yes, the vast majority of the “best” modern dramas have some amount of violence. However, you might enjoy:
-The West Wing
-Friday Night Lights (skip the strike-shortened second season, which isn’t very good and also has one major act of violence) )
Plenty of comedies have little or no violence (not surprisingly). Maybe you would enjoy The Good Place or Crazy Ex-Girlfriend?
This is why, with no snark intended and all respect for the OP, any time someone thinks there’s anything wrong with any reason to have not consumed X piece of art/media, they might as well be holding a bright neon sign above their head that flashes “My perspective is blinded by my own interests!”
Maybe The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, etc etc are all great, amazing TV, that break new ground in this “renaissance” of the art form (or, at least some of them are), but this has no bearing on whether you or I “ought” to watch/like them, or bother to make time for them. There is more culture out there than you can shake a stick at by multiple factors of 10, and no one has time for it all.
I don’t think that’s fair. “Boobs and beheadings”, as someone mentions later in the thread, is closer to accurate. But fairly few of the most memorable scenes in GoT’s history include dragons, and fewer still include nudity.
Massive spoilers for all seasons of GoT:
Far and away the defining moment of season 1 is Ned being beheaded. That has nothing to do with either tits or dragons. Probably the defining moment of the entire series, so far, is the Red Wedding. Again, no tits, no dragons.
A few highlights do include tits and/or dragons:
-Dany walks unharmed from the fire with baby dragons (both tits and dragons)
-Dany’s dragons kill the masters and she “steals” the unsullied (dragons)
-Drogon rescues Dany from the arena (dragons)
-Shadow baby, general Melisandre nudity (tits)
-Cersei’s walk of shame (tits, although not salaciously, which makes the scene all the more powerful)
Many of the series-highlight-moments include violence or death, actually:
-Oberyn fights The Mountain
-Horde of zombies attack Wildling city
-Arya’s dancing master beats the crap out of a bunch of city guardsmen
-Joffrey dies
-Tyrion kills Tywin
-Jon is betrayed and murdered (and brought back to life)
-Battle of the Bastards
-Hold the Door
But there are also a number of fantastic moments which include none of the above:
-Robert and Cersei talk about their marriage, and how their hatred has grown to boredom
-Jaime and Brienne become friends
-The Hound and Arya become friends
-Pretty much everything Tyrion ever says or does, particularly his speech when he’s on trial for Joffrey’s murder, and the story of his first “marriage”
-Pretty much Olenna Tyrell ever says or does
-The play-within-a-show retelling the recent history of Westeros which Arya watches while training to be a faceless man
-The Hound becomes friends with first Sansa and then Arya (granted, there is violence along the way, but the memorable part is his character development and their bonding)
…and so much more.
Game of Thrones is a show with sex and violence and dragons. At times, it leans heavily on them, particularly with the “sexposition” in the early seasons. But it’s also a show with an incredible roster of richly drawn characters, impeccable acting, wonderful dialog, and a very human story being told on an unprecedented epic scale.
If it’s not to your taste, fine. There are plenty of people I like and respect who I wouldn’t recommend it to. And for that matter I’m not necessarily claiming it’s “high art”, depending on how you define that. But to dismiss it as just “tits and dragons” is flat out preposterous.
Do NOT, I repeat do NOT, watch Battlestar Galactica.
(In fairness, though, Lost is a bit of an outlier as far as “constantly introducing mysteries and clues, never satisfyingly resolving them”. I wouldn’t say that’s a common characteristic of modern “prestige” television.)
Hmmm… I’m a fan of classical music in general (my favorite work is Mahler’s 2nd Symphony), so I’ve certainly been on the side of being irritated by people who outright state their lack of interest in classical music as a genre.
That said, I don’t think it’s an entirely fair comparison, although I don’t think I expressed myself very well in the OP, and have been trying to clarify my position.
I think what I’m getting at is people whose description of what they dislike seems overbroad. Continuing to use “superhero movies” as an example, suppose someone saw both Iron Man and The Avengers, and didn’t care for either of them. Hey, I loved both those movies, but they didn’t. Cool. More power to them. I’m certainly not going to keep pestering them to give Thor or Captain America a try, or even the more-dissimilar Ant-Man or Guardians of the Galaxy.
However, if they didn’t like those two movies, and then proclaim that they don’t like “movies based on comic books” or “movies with superheros”, I will take issue with that, because not all movies based on comic books have anything to do with superheros at all (Persepolis, anyone?), and not all movies (or shows) that involve superheros are anything similar to the mixture of action and humor and sfx and the occasional character moment that define Iron Man and The Avengers.
That said, it’s also the case that there is a near-infinity of media out there to consume, and if they want to say they don’t like superhero movies, it’s not like anyone has some moral obligation to poke and prod and experiment until we find precisely the actual boundary of what they do like. If it turns out they would have enjoyed Jessica Jones or V for Vendetta if they’d given it a chance, it’s not like that’s a catastrophe.
Ultimately, I think it comes down to taste, and opinion…and some of your criticisms / replies in this thread seem to come across (to me, anyway) as less “I think these are cool shows / movies, and people may have mistaken impressions about what they really are about,” and more, “I reject your opinion because I don’t think it’s valid.” And that, IMO, is a little rude and a little snobby.
Quite possibly. I’ve been trying to be aware of the hard-to-define-line and stay on the polite side of it… certainly it’s a topic rife with the possibility for insult and rudeness.
But “broad” choices about styles/genres are always going to seem broader to those inside who are versed in (and care about) sub-categories/distinctions. Sure there’s infinite possibility for diversity within the superhero genre, for example. Of course there’s probably some work that exists or that has yet to be written that the person who says “I don’t like those kinds of things” would actually enjoy. But, there also is some fundamental aesthetic that holds a genre together, and that thing, amorphous and indescribable as it may be, is still a fine reason to choose to not watch something.
I simply have no patience for passive media, particularly fiction. I spend my time with video games and reading educational-ish things online (like the Dope). TV just doesn’t make any sense to watch when there are more interesting things to do.
A few years ago I tried watching House of Cards. I thought it was awful, in many different ways. I haven’t watched Breaking Bad, but from the plot synopsis, it sounds like I would hate it for many of the same reasons. It just doesn’t seem like something I would want to subject myself to when there are so many other different things to do that actually bring joy to my life.
I’m surprised that nobody has pointed out the issue of word usage in the thread title–this is the Dope, after all!
Please note that many of us are not disinterested when it comes to these shows. I, for one, am uninterested. There’s a useful distinction between these 2 words that’s well worth preserving. A disinterested attitude towards any subject, meaning fair and impartial, is very different from a lack of interest.
Suffice it to say, I think you are greatly overestimating the artistic merits of Game of Thrones. I’m a fan of both the show and the books, but let’s not pretend they are more than just well made escapist fluff. There are good guys and cartoonishly bad guys and Dany’s story line as the white savior of the brown people is racist enough to be straight from a 1930s Tarzan movie. It is fun escapist pap. There’s nothing wrong with that, but let’s not get carried away with it’s artistic and cultural impact.
Indeed. All those lists of “Best Album of the Year,” “15 Books About ____ That You Have To Read,” “Must-See TV,” etc. make me feel like I’m missing out; but nobody could possibly have time for all of them.
Okay, that’s a valid point. I was really referring to my own feelings about these shows, but I get the implication. And in the interest of debate, I’ll stay with it.
I don’t think it’s fair to equate or really even compare a flash-in-the-pan, 21st century artist’s wares with the works detailing the lives of Odysseus or Gilgamesh. First off… those have historical significance that we’ll never get from an ep of GoT. Also, wasn’t War and Peace taking place in a time of war?
And I’ll stay with this low-hanging fruit analogy. Sex and violence are just ways to get more eyeballs in to see your work (as you said, gratuitous). It can be disguised as having some artistic value, and maybe it does. But I’m not going to invest enough time and attention to see anything more that may be in that packaging.
And Max, you kinda hit the nail on the head. If I watch TV… it’s usually comedies. If I watch a movie, i want to be challenged, not simply entertained.
There’s all kinds of stuff that [list=a][li]I can see that it is well done []I can see why it is popular, and []it doesn’t appeal to me.[/list]Adele (the singer) is like that. I can tell that she has a great voice. I can see why she is very successful. I don’t like her voice.[/li]
Breaking Bad and Mad Men were like that. I can see that they were good and might have been interesting - to someone else. Likewise with GoT - it did not seem to me that it would be worth the time to develop the taste for it.
“How dare you not like X!!!” is the flip side of “X is for the commoners - I don’t even watch TV”.
Regards,
Shodan