Joseph Mallozzi's Weblog

January 14, 2025: Tuesday already?!

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After banging my forehead on the bathroom counter while putting towels away the other day and suffering my second head injury in about a month, Akemi has threatened to make me start wearing a helmet around the house.

A great article on the state of the entertainment industry –

Your Hollywood Career.  How to Tell When the End is Nigh

My favorite quote: “The problem is that just as reading was once considered too taxing, now watching a video longer than 34 seconds is hard. Have you seen young people try to watch a movie? It’s like asking them to sit through Mass on the Easter Vigil.”

Love this – yet another Sharky-themed gif from JenBlood this one with a Dark Matter twist –

Thursday, I head back to Montreal to take care of mom and give my sister a break, then back on Monday ahead of a pre-pitch for that action-adventure series we’ll be taking out…probably after my Japan trip.  Speaking of which, I have borrowed a bunch of Japanese language audiobooks from my local library and am brushing up ahead of Tokyo/Osaka.  Dansu ga suki desu ka?  Do you like to dance?  I had a wonder time!  Tanoshikatta desu yo!  Dessert!  Dezato!  Ice cream!  Aisu kurimu!

P.S. Making a concerted effort to remind myself that it is 2025 as I update this blog.

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8 responses

  1. Gildermcc Avatar
    Gildermcc

    Safe travels to Montreal and safe caregiving.
    🫂 (hug)

    Without getting into details, my brother & family are fine and making progress, with moral, physical, and telephonic help from the extended family, local friends, and community resources.

    Reply
    1. Joseph Mallozzi Avatar
      Joseph Mallozzi

      Good to hear, Gilder.

      Reply
  2. The Hinoeuma Avatar
    The Hinoeuma

    Again? Have you always been accident prone. Get two helmets…indoor/outdoor. Speaking of Japanese, look up my moniker “The Hinoeuma” or Hinoe Uma. Then, look up what happened to the Japanese women from 1906.

    Reply
  3. Colleen J. O'Shaughnessy Avatar
    Colleen J. O’Shaughnessy

    Unfortunately, we are continuing to experience the intentional “dumbing down of America ‘ (and probably Canada) in which the use of technology has caused our brains to atrophy. First it was television, then computers, and now phones being used as implements of destruction. The lack of thought and minimal effort required to use tech, especially AI, to do our thinking for us has created a generation of people who can actually graduate from college without having to learn how to read and write properly. YouTube and the like have provided near instant gratification while shortening our attention spans to that of a flea. When it comes to education and proficiency upon graduation, the U.S. is practically a third world country.

    Of course, there are brilliant exceptions. Unfortunately, they are the “Zuckerbergs” helping to make most of us incredibly lazy with mush for brains. Personally, I find it terrifying because as long as the power grid holds up, the downward spiral will continue.

    Please don’t get discouraged to the point of quitting. There are still occasional excellent shows being made that are complex, entertaining, well written, and worth watching. Your shows fall into that category. I am eager to see you return to writing and producing a show that gives me something to watch other than British series on PBS.

    JenBlood’s Sharky gif is so cute and clever!

    Reply
  4. gforce Avatar
    gforce

    Haha, love the Sharky GIF. When is the Japan trip? I seem to remember you saying late January, but it could be my faulty memory.

    Reply
    1. Joseph Mallozzi Avatar
      Joseph Mallozzi

      Yep. Late January to mid-February.

      Reply
  5. dasndanger Avatar
    dasndanger

    My take on the demise of the television industry isn’t about the abundance of 34 second content, but rather the abundance of television shows in general. Who has time to watch 20 or 30 great shows a week? Very few. And there are great shows out there – on the networks, on PBS, on streaming channels, online.

    It does seem that sports still do well, mainly because they have dedicated viewers with fewer options. A sports fan usually only watches “their team”, and many follow just a couple sports, most of which are spread out seasonally.

    But tv shows? There are hundreds of them, many with similar themes, many with great actors and storylines. How do you pick just a few shows? How do you choose between all the cable and streaming channels? There is just TOO much, and it becomes overwhelming after a while.

    Let’s go back to the 70s and 80s. In the 70s most of us grew up with just a handful of channels. Where I lived, those channels were the Big 3 (ABC, NBC, CBS), PBS, and a few channels out of Philly and North Jersey. If I recall correctly, we had 9 and 11 out of North Jersey, and 17, 48, and 29 out of Philly. Most of those showed reruns and oldies. Channel 48, I believe, is the one that featured Kung Fu Theater on weekends, and another showed old Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan movies at midnight on Sunday. PBS gave me Monty Python and British comedies, Doctor Who, and (eventually) Mystery!, amongst other things. Very simple times.

    Back before 1980, our world was small. Most everyone in the country watched the same shows. The Tonight Show, All in the Family, 60 Minutes, Starsky and Hutch, Kojak, MAS*H, Happy Days. These shows gave us a sense of connection with fellow human beings. They were the subjects of water cooler talk at the office. We had something in common!
    Everyone – even people who never watched tv, knew who the actors were, or knew a catch phrase or quote from a number of shows. Meathead. Who loves ya, baby? Hot Lips and Radar. “AYYYYY!”

    Even when cable tv started creeping into our lives we didn’t feel overwhelmed, but excited. New channels, new stories. And music! I want my MTV! HBO availability became more widespread, and now other pay channels started jumping on the bandwagon. New channels started popping up everywhere – AMC, Sci Fi, TCM, A&E, USA – the list goes on. Oh, oh, oh – and 24/7 news and weather, too! Ah, the 1990s. I was still young enough to keep up. I had my routines – watch the weather and news in the morning and the Tonight Show at night, mystery shows on Sunday and Monday nights, a couple shows during the week, and my Saturday night line-up of 21 Jump Street, ST-TNG, and COPS.

    The year is now 2000. Thanks to all those cable channels, I have discovered rugby. Thanks to the newfangled interwebs, I can go online (with dial up difficulty) and join others in a forum discussion about my favorite show, sport, food, movie, animal – whatever pops into my head. My first discussion forum was on A&E’s website for the Horatio Hornblower miniseries. I spent waaaaay too much time there, discussing historical nautical fiction and the Age of Sail. But I really learned a lot:: 1. I type waaaay too much, and 2. There are other people in the world like me. It reminded me of those days back in the 70s, where everyone was talking about the same exact show. Connection.

    But as the years sped by, something changed. More and more shows started popping up, and more communication with the world became possible through the internet. Discussion forums, for wordy folks like me, started to disappear as short and not always sweet social media pages started taking over. Instead of bringing people together, the combination pushed people apart, with each one huddled in their little entertainment corner with their little tribe. Viewer commitment died off as people jumped from one show to another like someone jumping on stepping stones to cross a raging river. And that river? The internet, with it’s criticism, and ridicule, and intimidation. “That show sucks!” “EVERYone must watch THIS!” “This is the best!” “This is the worst!” “I love this channel!” “This channel is too expensive!” And then there’s the nitpicking (guilty!), pointing out plot holes, criticizing storylines, and picking apart actors and writers and producers. It’s easy to jump ship when there’s too many choices and too many personal opinions. The result? That connection with fellow human beings, created through television, was broken, and everyone went their separate ways. To where?

    Content creators. These content creators speak directly to their followers, giving people a sense of community again. If you follow the same one or two you might start to feel a bit chummy with them, kind of like that office gathering around the water cooler, discussing a thought-provoking All in the Family episode. But don’t worry, Joey, content creators won’t last more than their allotted 15 minutes of fame. Why? Because there’s just too damn many of them out there, grabbing up the ducats while they can.

    Bottom line for this coastal dwelling gal? Load up your trawler with too many scallops and it will sink. See, sometimes a scalloper’s crew gets greedy and takes on too much, and then a big swell comes along and gives it a jolt, shifting the load. That’s all it takes for the boat to go down to the depths. Well, the television industry’s heavy load has shifted, jolted off-balance by the internet wave. Can it recover? I don’t know. Can it be salvaged? Not a clue.

    Maybe someone has an answer, but as for me, I only have long, drawn out personal opinions. 😀

    das

    Reply
    1. Joseph Mallozzi Avatar
      Joseph Mallozzi

      Whew. You have a lot to say on the subject! I do agree with most of what you’re saying. Coincidentally, I have a related poll as part of today’s blog entry…

      Reply

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