But Is It on Netflix? - Streaming Video Service Thread: Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Disney+, Peacock, YouTube TV, AT+T Watch, Philo, Playstation Vue, HBO Max, HBO Now, Facebook Live and many more

Thanks for the “Hacks” review – I was wondering if worth checking out.

airplane film you half-watch is exactly my speed these days

i watched shtisl the other night and i was a little bit like, this is not trashy enough

i really like Hacks so far!

also i learned last night that the costar Hannah Einbinder is Laraine Newman’s daughter

I only recently learned that as well! Her other child, Spike, is on Los Espookys!

i am also enjoying Girls5ever - first 2 eps were v funny imo

i got through half an ep of Girls5eva and bailed

Same for Rutherford Falls, though i kinda bet it will find its way by the end of getting all its characters together so i'm probably in for s2. fairly certain there has never been a US sitcom focus on contemporary native american culture so that's a great draw but it's just so hacky.

I like the actual show Hacks though! I have been watching an enjoying Jean Smart telling bad jokes on a television since i was a kid, why stop now.

You know what's pretty great btw is Chad on TBS which is pretty clearly a benefactor of PEN15 and Ramy as it is a weird sort of amalgam of both. It's not-so-secretly about male privilege and consistently funny.

I am clearly a Hacks outlier, people love it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyuDnI8TJ3I
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/arts/television/chad-nasim-pedrad.html

“I really knew that I could disappear into looking like a little dude in a way that would be helpful to the performance,” she said. “I felt like a 14-year-old boy could get me further from me than had I been in pigtails, as a grown woman, playing a teenage girl.”

She said that it was especially important to her that “Chad” include the home life of an Iranian immigrant family. Going back to the start of her acting career, she said, “All the representation that I did see of Middle Easterners on TV was predominantly negative. Everyone who looked like me was either working actively for or against a terror cell.”

Fox commissioned a pilot episode but passed on the series in the summer of 2016. Pedrad said there were no hard feelings but suggested that the network may not have been fully on board with its central conceit.

“When I first pitched it, there was definitely an emphatic hope that I would change my mind and play his mom,” she said with a laugh.

here's an indicative clip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNCyH3Mmpl4

pretty funny! i am still incredibly weirded out by Nasim Pedrad playing a teenage boy, though

Girls 5 Eva's opening "Your boobs are perfect" joke is EXACTLY what I've been missing.

"It must be fun to have hundreds of billions of dollars on hand to patch over the inevitable fallout from your chronic incompetence."

various citations in response

"ones which are part of a wider telco/broadcast offering probably have more stamina to ride it through than standalone offerings. in theory there are huge war chests from mergers to create new content

AT&T took on $170 billion in debt to buy/merge with Warner/DC/HBO and DirectTV, they're probably in a far worse position than standalone offerings."

― huge rant (sic), Thursday, December 17, 2020 11:55 AM (five months ago)

AT&T now looking at spinning off all of WarnerMedia and CNN into a new company in order to do a merger with Discovery.

No matter what becomes of the AT&T-Discovery talks, it’s clear that AT&T is maneuvering to find a new configuration for the assets that it acquired for $84 billion only three years ago — after a hard-fought anti-trust battle with the federal government to complete the deal.

But AT&T has been grappling with the enormous $170 billion-plus debt load racked up by its $48 billion acquisition of DirecTV in 2016. That deal proved disastrous from a timing and bottom-line perspective. AT&T acquired the satcaster just as the pay-TV marketplace started to unravel in earnest with the rise of SVOD and free streaming alternatives like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and now Disney Plus, HBO Max and Discovery Plus.

DirecTV has steadily lost subscribers at a fast clip over the past three years and its operations have been a drag on AT&T’s earnings. AT&T put the company on the block last year as part of its debt-reduction campaign but wound up setting a deal in February with private equity giant TPG to spin DirecTV out as a standalone company, in which AT&T owns 70%. The enterprise value of DirecTV in that deal was $16.25 billion — a far cry from the price AT&T paid five years ago.

https://variety.com/2021/biz/news/att-discovery-hbo-cnn-food-network-hgtv-1234974077/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-t-in-talks-to-combine-media-assets-including-cnn-with-discovery-11621183450

cool cool cool

(muffled screaming)

From a consumer perspective, it’s welcome to see AT&T turfing out on DirecTV & WB, so their hubris is checked and they can focus on what they’re (sort of) good at. I also assume a Warner-Discovery JV will work better as a media company than WB has under AT&T’s management (tho it seems they’ve already f’d it up).

(by which I mean, made big changes that have hurt the studio in ways that may not have happened if Warner had stayed out of AT&T’s hands and then combined w/another media company on its own.)

At least we got this:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lVJBsKyTW2c/mqdefault.jpg

lmao

More at the Hollywood Reporter, including that a knock-on effect of this might be NBC trying to take over CBS, and Jeff Zucker seeing the HBO Max fuckup as such a shitshow that it's better not to be promoted.

FilmStruck died because these jerks didn’t know what they had https://t.co/88h9YHgz7K

— 🏳️‍🌈 Ms. Marya E. Gates🦩 (@oldfilmsflicker) May 17, 2021

does this mean I'm not going to get HBOMax for free with my ATT plan any longer?

You might not get AT&T with your AT&T plan for much longer, who can even say

In a Viacom/NBCU merger, they’d have to at least divest one of the broadcast networks, and I’m honestly not sure even combining the studios would be approved. I guess we’ll see.

Jason Kilar, the executive CEO John Stankey entrusted with cutting down the ranks of WarnerMedia and beheading some of the TV industry’s most respected figures in the process, just got a taste of his own medicine. As The New York Times first reported Monday, he’s negotiating his own exit from the company in the wake of its announcement to join forces with Discovery—a deal for which he was reportedly kept out of negotiations.

The schadenfreude flowing through Hollywood is surely at peak levels today considering the ill will that came Kilar’s way in the wake of his audacious decision to blindside the creative community with his move last year to release day and date Warner Bros. entire film slate on HBO Max and in theaters.

https://variety.com/vip/omg-they-killed-kilar-att-backstabs-its-own-hatchet-man-1234974883/

I had literally started discussing with my wife the prospect of signing up for HBO Max (through Hulu) last week. Holding off now.

well this isn't going happen immediately

Yeah, why hold off?

We watched a couple of more episodes of Rutherford Falls, and they were soooooo frustrating. It's such a good concept, with some actually radical (or at least compelling) ideas going on, but it's so stiff and zip-less; no one has any chemistry. If other ensemble shows are any indication, maybe it'll pick up or gel in season two, but right now we can barely slog through season one.

As Kilar, who imposed the day-and-date HBO Max policy, negotiates his payout to leave, the studio looks to be negotiating a return to theatrical-only windows by Dune's release in September.

xp yep, that's my take too

yeah same

watched the first ep of Girls5eva and it has enough of the "30 Rock methadone" feel that I'll try another couple

(Kimmy Schmidt had its own distinct verve and manic energy; Great News was watered-down with human relationships we're meant to care about; Mr. Mayor feels like everyone's paralysed with fear of catching COVID, not just in the distanced staging*, and multi-millionaires writing jokes about how a multi-millionaire is out of touch with the needs of regular ppl makes those jokes suck (plus writing them about the specific needs of citizens in a city you don't live in weakens the premise further); this seems frivolous enough + an excuse for Richmond to write more songs that it might end up better than MM.)

Latest episode of "Mare" was a pretty impressive riff on "Silence of the Lambs."

Also, this most recent ep is almost "Murder on the Orient Express"-level in its everyone-did-it vibe.

It's such a good concept, with some actually radical (or at least compelling) ideas going on, but it's so stiff and zip-less; no one has any chemistry.

haven't watched but the promos look terribly unfunny. I will check out Girls5eva at some point but I don't know, I feel like I haven't vibed with a new comedy series in a long time. feels like we're in a weird transitional phase where shows are trying to pivot to a kinder more humane tone while still actually being funny and it seems like a lot of shows I try out can't make that leap work

I'll watch every sitcom on the air if it means killing the Chuck Lorre era

re: Mare, I wasn't really expecting that story line to get resolved so quickly, but I was glad to see that my prediction that the two major storylines were not connected was correct.

Girls5eva is a worthy successor to 30 Rock and Kimmy and although the methadone comment applies to the first few episodes, by the third or fourth it stands up on its own. Anyway, some of us are plotting about it here: GONNA BE FAMOUS 3GETHER - The GIRLS5EVA thread

Plotzing, rather.

Super cool these are the companies buying all the film libraries https://t.co/maWngCoLRC pic.twitter.com/i3ikE9aBWq

— John Frankensteiner (@JFrankensteiner) May 18, 2021

"content" != "films"; HBO Max has tons of older films, there's no way the majority are from the '10s (those graphs, if accurate, must be lumping everything together, from docs to comedy specials etc.).

Also, Netflix & Amazon haven't bought any film libraries afaik (and if Amazon were to buy MGM, it would presumably have a bunch of new library content that would shift those bars).

Netflix has been utter dogshit on that front since they first started streaming.

SUPPORT PHYSICAL MEDIA

I love the idea of supporting physical media but, uh, even if you want to stick with that it's getting increasingly more and more difficult.

I had to stop in Best Buy the other day to pick up a phone case for my wife, noticed the Blu-Ray/DVD section has been shrunk to about 1/8th of the size it used to be - tiny and completely disheveled/disorganized. I could be wrong, but instant flashbacks to what their music section looked like the last year before they eliminated CDs completely. Our local Target also went through a COVID era remodel, their movie section is less than half of what it was before, with most of the space given over to their ever-expanding shelves of Funko Pops and other movie/TV culture ephemera.

Which isn't to argue that there aren't other methods, just saying that the average Joe switching over to majority streaming is already changing how the big boxes are stocking physical film/TV releases.

Did anyone watch Made for Love (HBO)? It was pretty funny & good imo. I didn't even hate Ray Romano like I normally hate Ray Romano.

xp I mean yeah, the home entertainment market has taken a nosedive.

"content" != "films";

yes

Yeah, it's tough to support physical media by shopping in an actual store these days, but there are dozens of boutique labels and tons of mail order options. It's a small but thriving market if you have the patience to seek stuff out.

Did anyone watch Made for Love (HBO)? It was pretty funny & good imo. I didn't even hate Ray Romano like I normally hate Ray Romano.

Yeah, it's tough to support physical media by shopping in an actual store these days, but there are dozens of boutique labels and tons of mail order options. It's a small but thriving market if you have the patience to seek stuff out.

Oh of course, it's just going to become more niche. I get it, just pointing out some parallels with the CD market (which of course is not direct apples to apples) semi-collapse. Smaller companies will step up and fill in some holes, assuming they can squeeze physical rights out of the streaming titans (still a big if, at this point), but the bigger companies will point to decreasing sales at big box stores as a data point to say, "see? no one buys DVDs anymore, why should we make 'em". See that mostly, sorta, kinda debunked rumor about Warner killing physical releases next year.

I started up Mythic Quest again and hadn't realized they released a couple of special eps in the meantime, the first mid-quarantine, the second last month. Both were quite good, I think, with the first one one of the funnier Zoom episodes I've seen this past year.

Oh, I missed the second one. Agree that the first one was one of the only good Zoom things from last year. Maybe the Apple connection helped?