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I think sitcoms are over, primarily because of binge watching.
Most viewers of a TV show will not see it on the night it airs (if its produced by a traditional tv network) but rather later on a streaming service, or on the network’s on demand service. So there is little reason to keep the 20 minute format – which causes the story lines to be shallow with poorly developed stereotypical characters.
I think modern viewers demand more. I think the 1 hour comic drama might have more legs in this on demand environment. Each episode has the time to develop characters with both episodic and serial story lines that could keep viewers engaged.
Especially with what seems to be the increasing tilt towards the European “system” of having maybe 10 or 8 or even 6 episodes in a “season.” Rather than the typical 22 or 24 episode TV season.
I appreciate it, because some shows dont have a concept strong enough to carry 20 strong episodes, I think this is one of the ways they keep higher quality standards.
Maybe, but what if your audience drifts away during the 9 or 10 MONTHS of no show – or even TWELVE months if they release all 8 episodes at once! – and doesn’t come back for the next “series?” In a YEAR. IF they even remember to look for it…
Yea, I agree that’s a problem. Maybe they’ll have to increase their operational tempo, and only have 4 – 6 months hiatus between seasons. Although that might make some of the actors a little cranky, as they’ll have fewer opportunities to do other projects while doing a TV series.
Look at “Killing Eve” a brilliant 8 episode crime drama – but it was a year between seasons – that ended on cliff hanger…
Rob Long has commented in other contexts that writers etc already don’t like the streaming systems, because they get locked into projects that might only do 6 or 8 episodes, and MIGHT be back next year, but they don’t know, and they’re contractually bound not to do anything else in the meantime.
Yea, I am sure there are draw backs. One solution might be to have a season divided into 2 segments of 10 or 12 episodes – After the first block gets streamed, the service can determine if there is enough interest to do the second block – if not they know quickly and can move on.
Traditional network TV had the same problem with pilot season, if the short ordered first season of a TV show didnt get picked up, the writers and crew where also left in limbo.
First off, there is no such thing as a dangerous weapon…just dangerous men (or people if you are kinked that way). As for compromise on weapons control, my answer is just “no”. Been there and done that (LOTS of weapon control laws on the books already) and the current laws are notable for mostly not being enforced. Enforce what is on the books, then maybe we can talk. Until then, just “no”. Punishing millions of people for what a bare handful do is just plain crazy. So crazy that one wonders what the real point they (gun banners) are chasing.
This is like saying that the lesson from I Love Lucy is: always try to get into Ricky’s act. Try naming a comedy that doesn’t have at least one character that makes you feel uncomfortable. They’re the ones that make you laugh. If you want to be like them, you’re probably missing something. Jerry Seinfeld found it very odd that people would proudly say to him: “All my friends say that I’m like George.” His comment: “if all your friends say you’re like George, you need new friends.”
SParker
This is like saying that the lesson from I Love Lucy is: always try to get into Ricky’s act. Try naming a comedy that doesn’t have at least one character that makes you feel uncomfortable. They’re the ones that make you laugh. If you want to be like them, you’re probably missing something. Jerry Seinfeld found it very odd that people would proudly say to him: “All my friends say that I’m like George.” His comment: “if all your friends say you’re like George, you need new friends.” Absolutely. That final episode had its problems, but it made it quite clear that the shows creators knew these were awful people. Fun to have on a little screen for half and hour, but would have been a horror to live with.
100% dead-on. The whole thing.
Gun control works in Manhattan for reasons that are completely unique to Manhattan. I’ve heard Rudy Giuliani explain it. It takes him like five minutes. It’s not going to work anywhere else.
Long guns are hardly ever used in crime. No one is going to ban semi automatic rifles without starting a Civil War.
The big problem I see are Republicans trying to look reasonable by saying we need to just try something. Everything has been thought through and discussed over and over already. All you have to do is find those discussions. The only new thing is going to be something constitutional around mental health. We don’t even resource the laws that we have. That’s what happened with the guy that shot up the church in Texas.
Finally, look at how Bloomberg spends his money. It’s basically 100% on electioneering. He doesn’t spend his money on media training for gun grabbers, and most of them are just embarrassing. He never spends any money on any kind of communication that doesn’t relate to electioneering because anybody knowledgeable about gun policy can defeat all of it. He just wants to grab guns with his money and the ignorance of the electorate.
Regarding the part about the Overton window: the Republicans can’t lead on what is causing populism and socialism to take off. I’m sick of talking about it. I’ve explained it over and over.
Owning tanks is not a right? Darn. I thought the reason there are not more tanks in driveways is that they cost so much, even the used ones.
If you want to get up to speed on gun policy effortlessly, listen to this. It’s one of our local gun lobbyists. He has to be one of the best gun rights guys in the nation. Start at 30:00. 14:00 minutes.
“DFL” means Minnesota Democrat party.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/53-sue-jeffers-28270544/episode/guns-guns-guns-47606676/
Also notice what they are saying about universal background checks. Are they wrong? It’s totally onerous and it won’t accomplish a damn thing.
It’s not so much the cost of the tanks. It’s the cost of all the repair parts. Oy vey!
Yeah. It’s like owning an Audi.
But unlike Audis, tanks also get like 5 gallons per mile…
Jerry is wrong about many things, and that’s one of them. Getting new friends wouldn’t change that. If your friends say you’re like George, maybe you ARE, and you need to clean up your act!
The plastic-frame glasses on peter are a bit of anachronism, but yes.
With three of my friends, we say we are like the Seinfeld gang. The problem is that there is a lot of truth to it.
Fair point. What I meant, of course, was that no court of which I’m aware has ever held that the Second Amendment gave anyone the right to bear military-grade weapons as such weapons now exist.
You’re comfortable excluding rocket launchers but cannot see any argument at all for excluding assault rifles? What would you make of this statement by Ronald Reagan on AK-47s? This is a genuine question, by the way–I’m not in any way trying to be contentious. Someplace or other, a line needs to be drawn between rocket launches on one hand and, say, ordinary hunting rifles on the other, and, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, finding the right place to draw that line isn’t a matter of seeing the obvious but a matter of fine judgment, open to argument. No?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG4V_6pCLVo
Peter, again, I think the question answers itself: an AK-47 rifle is, unambiguously, an arm. You can debate whether a rocket launcher is an arm in the sense that the founders intended — or, for that matter, whether a canon or a warship is an arm — but you can’t reasonably argue whether a pistol or a rifle is an arm.
So the question becomes, did the founders intend for citizens to be allowed to possess rifles comparable to those possessed by the military? And, again, we need only look at the context in which they were discussing this right, that of the need to arm a militia, a military unit, to conclude that, yes, citizens have the right to possess handguns and rifles comparable to those possessed by the military.
If one wishes to argue that the founders never anticipated that weapons would get better and better, and wouldn’t have asserted a right to own military-grade rifles if they’d known just how good military rifles would become, I suppose one could try to make that case. I think that’s where you’re headed. But then an analogous case could be made regarding free speech in an age of telephones and the internet. Do we really believe, or wish to argue, that the founders would not support robust free speech rights in light of revolutionary changes in the way we communicate?
Again, I’m sympathetic to people who are uncomfortable with assault weapons, but I think that discomfort comes more from a lack of knowledge than from a realistic assessment of these weapons. These weapons stop being frightening when one discovers that they are simply another variety of personal arm. My sons and I own “assault weapons,” shotguns, and a variety of other rifles and handguns. (My daughter owns a couple as well, for that matter.) As people familiar with guns, we would be skeptical of the suggestion that the founders intended that some of these guns be kept from civilian hands.
And thank you for the reply. It’s always a pleasure when the “big guns” of Ricochet put in an appearance. ;)
An “assault rifle” is any semi automatic rifle. We aren’t going back to bolt action rifles. An AR-15 fires 45 rounds per minute. Can you put a governor on that? No. Next, Google on the topic of the actual efficacy of regulating magazine size or magazines at all. Complete waste of time. After that Google the topic of fixed magazines. Fixed magazines are almost completely defeated by stripper clips.
Rifles are rarely used in crime. Hands, feet, and knives are worse.
There are four types of gun violence: suicide, which in Minnesota is 80% of gun violence. (I’m not sure what the national percentage is. It can’t be that different.) Mass shootings as commonly understood are 1%. The rest is split between gang violence which is limited to certain ZIP Codes and ordinary crime. All four of those require separate solutions.
What they need to do is outlaw the stupid gun free zones, encourage concealed carry, and resource the laws we have.
This is a slight over simplification, but Michael Bloomberg only spends money on electioneering for good reason.
Henry, I just don’t see this–I don’t see it at all. The question doesn’t even begin to answer itself. Dictionaries are loose or vague out the definition of “arms,” and in the Heller decision Justice Scalia, hardly a man to waste time on anything self-evident, devoted a good deal of analysis to the definition. Far from answering itself, indeed, the question of what does and doesn’t qualify as “arms” in the Constitutional sense is the very essence of the question.
But I’ve just put in a request to the Blue Yeti to get us a constitutional expert as a guest for a podcast soon. Let’s hope the expert can decide this one for us.
@peterrobinson, I look forward to a Constitutional scholar weighing in. But, I don’t need a Constitutional scholar to know what my rights are. Not just 2A rights, but 1A rights, 4A rights, 5A rights, and on. If a free-born American citizen (which, at this point, is all of us) needs a Constitutional scholar to explain his rights to him, then we are already far afield.
Because you’re not a gun guy, you don’t get that any modern “assault weapon,” rifle or pistol, that is semiautomatic. Which is all of them (revolver fanatics excepted).
Look beyond the guns for the answers to your questions, Grasshopper.
This is likely your best all-in-one gun policy expert for the Flagship podcast. He also knows smart people on the anti-gun side, which, trust me, isn’t easy to find.
https://twitter.com/RandyEBarnett/status/1161251479816167426?s=20
Well, we are “far afield”: for example, we pretend not to notice that the Supreme Court erased the first five words of the First Amendment in the early 20th century, to make itself the ultimate arbiter of speech, religion, and the press.
Similarly, the Second Amendment is mostly grayed out: as long as Republicans control the Supreme Court, it survives as a vestigial right to self-defense, as opposed to helping keep the militia “well-regulated”, that is, well-equipped.
One wonders if any of them ever go to church, other than to shoot the place up. (My guess: no.)
Would legalizing prostitution help? Prostitutes not only provide sexual release but often pretend to like their, um, client. Or so I hear!
There’s a passage in Heinlein in which an early 20th-century father explains to his son that prostitutes help keep good women like his mother and his sister safe.
Peter,
In response to your comment, I went and read Scalia’s decision in Heller. Having done so…
… I’ll concede your point: you are correct that I was entirely too quick to characterize the matter as self-evident and beyond reasonable debate. While I will continue to argue that so-called “assault weapons” are common and unexceptional, and therefore should by Scalia’s reasoning meet the Second Amendment definition of arms, even Scalia left plenty of room for future courts to back away from that interpretation. So I’ll maintain my objection to your original statement, arguing that your use of “clearly” was unjustified — but admit that I overstepped in the opposite direction as well, and you were right to stand your ground.
H.