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New Escapist Column! On the Third Season of “The Mandalorian”…

Posted on March 3, 2023 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the premiere of the third season of The Mandalorian this week, it seemed as good a time as any to consider the long-delayed return of Disney+’s flagship streaming show.

After nearly three years off the screen, The Mandalorian returns with three very different objectives: to reassure viewers that it is still the same show, to fill in viewers on how much has changed since The Book of Boba Fett and to set up a new status quo and a new over-arching plot. It’s a fairly ambitious piece of television, just in terms of logistics, both rebooting the show and also attempting to maintain a strong sense of internal continuity. It doesn’t entirely work, but it also works better than it should.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: disney, jon favreau, star wars, streaming, structure, the mandolorian, writing | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the Pre-Packaged Cult Appeal of “Cocaine Bear”…

Posted on March 1, 2023 by Darren

We’re launching a new column at The Escapist, called Out of Focus. It will publish every Wednesday, and the plan is to use it to look at some film and television that would maybe fall outside the remit of In the Frame, more marginal titles or objects of cult interest. This week, we took a look at the release of Cocaine Bear, which is an obvious attempt to manufacture a cult hit.

On one level, it seems like a fool’s errand to try to build a movie with the express purpose of making a cult hit. After all, cult hits only grow organically, often over years and through home media or television. However, changes to the industry – including the collapse of home media and the decline of linear television – make it very difficult for movies to find that sort of niche. Cocaine Bear feels like a movie designed with that understanding in mind, a film very consciously pitched towards streaming virality as much as theatrical box office.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: cocaine bear, cult, cult hit, cult movie, film, home media, Movie, rental, streaming, Television, universal, video stores | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On How “Willow” Was a Perfectly Average Streaming Series…

Posted on January 14, 2023 by Darren

I am doing weekly reviews of Willow at The Escapist. They’ll be dropping every Wednesday evening while the show is on, looking at the legacy sequel as it progresses from one episode to the next.

With its season finale, Willow revealed that it was basically the statistical mean of Disney’s streaming shows built around existing intellectual property, even more than their Marvel of Star Wars shows. At various points in the season, Willow felt more like a checklist of familiar narrative beats than it did a cohesive story, and that was particularly true of the season finale, with its non-deaths ands its beams of multi-colour energy.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: disney, finale, Season finale, streaming, streaming shows, willow | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On How “Willow” Found Itself Adrift “Beyond the Shattered Sea”…

Posted on January 8, 2023 by Darren

One of the both interestign and frustrating aspects of Willow is the way in which the show feels very much like an archetypal streaming show. It hits all of the marks and rhythms of the emerging medium, particularly in how it structures its story. There are several points in the season where the larger mechanics of the season arc become transparent. Wildwood was one such example, and Beyond the Shattered Sea is another. The second-to-last episode of the season very quickly entangles itself if doing all the necessary set-up for the looming season finale.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: beyond the shattered sea, fantasy, penultimate episode, season, streaming, the escapist, willow | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On Netflix’s Cancellation of “1899”…

Posted on January 6, 2023 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. This week, it was revealed that Netflix had cancelled 1899, their prestigious and high-profile mystery drama series. It’s especially notable because the announcement didn’t even come from Netflix, but fits a pattern for streaming services.

Streaming is not like regular television. It adheres to different rules and conventions. In particular, streaming shows don’t operate according the same real-time conveyor belt as conventional broadcast television, where it is possible for a network and a production team to react to audience response in real-time. As a result, the only space that these shows have to grow is in between seasons, and that becomes increasingly difficult in a climate where many streaming companies are cancelling these shows after just a single release.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: 1899, cancellations, in the frame, netflix, renewal, seasons, shows, streaming, the escapist | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On How the Bad Batch Are the Worst Part of “The Bad Batch”…

Posted on January 4, 2023 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist last week. With the release of the second season of The Bad Batch, it seemed like a good opportunity to review the series.

The Bad Batch is an interesting series. It is essentially a spin-off from The Clone Wars, but one that rejects the anthology nature of that show for a fixed central cast and a linear series of episodic adventures. This is somewhat frustrating, as it strips the most compelling part of The Clone Wars in favour of a generic riff on The A-Team or Kung Fu. Still, when the show gets out of its own way, The Bad Batch is a surprisingly compelling and thoughtful addition to the Star Wars universe, a meditation on what happens to soldiers at the end of a Forever War.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: clone wars, disney, escapist, star wars, streaming, Television, the bad batch, the escapist | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the Modesty of “Kaleidoscope”…

Posted on January 2, 2023 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. This weekend saw the release of Kaleidoscope, Netflix’s big interactive heist drama. The hook is that the viewer’s experience of the show is randomized, with different viewers watching in different orders.

It is a very modest experiment, particularly when compared to something like Bandersnatch from a few years back. Kaleidoscope is much more interesting on paper than it is in execution, a high concept that feels somewhat half-executed. There is something about streaming as a medium that lends itself to experiments like this, to viewing experiences that are truly singular and unique, where each viewer ultimately consumes their own version of the media in their own way, in a way that challenges the idea of mass media as a communal experience. Kaleidoscope isn’t quite that, but it hints at the possibility.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: adventure, bandersnatch, choose your own adventure, communal, in the frame, kaliedoscope, mass media, media, netflix, random, streaming | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the HBO Max and the Future of Disappearing Media…

Posted on December 26, 2022 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist last week. With the recent chaos at HBO Max and the removal of content from the service, it seemed like a good time to discuss of film and television have suddenly become ephemeral again.

One of the big selling points of the streaming age was that everything would be immediately available to audience members at the click of a mouse; vast libraries of content would be made available to stream via these services, representing a boon for conservationists and archivists everywhere. Nothing would be lost, because everything would be at hand. However, the removal of entire shows from HBO Max illustrates that these projects are as intangible as they have ever been, and that they can removed and even destroyed without any warning whatsoever.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: access, archiving, availability, HBO Max, history, lost destroyed, preservation, record, streaming, Television, westworld, wiped | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On How “Willow” Got Lost in the Wildwood…

Posted on December 22, 2022 by Darren

With Willow officially past the midpoint of its first season, the show hits a sizable bump in the road. Wildwood is the first episode of the show that feels purely functional rather than narratively engaging on its own terms. It’s a very mechanical piece of television, with the plot grinding to a halt so the series can run down a checklist of character and plot beats that it needs to articulate for the audience before moving any further. It does a lot of necessary place-setting, but stalls the season and the show around it.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: escapist, exposition, Narrative, show, stakes, streaming, structure, the escapist, wildwood, willow | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Review! On “The Witcher: Blood Origin” as a Bloody Mess…

Posted on December 15, 2022 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist earlier in the week, a review of the upcoming Netflix show, The Witcher: Blood Origin. It is a live action four-episode miniseries spinning directly out from the streaming service’s fantasy hit, The Witcher.

Blood Origin has had a famously troubled production, with the show being cut down from six episodes to four in the editing bay, and undergoing fairly involved reshoots to work around this truncation. The results are as muddling and disheartening as this back story suggests. Blood Origin is a show that is filled with lore and backstory, but with no interest in its characters or their motivations. It’s a frustrating mess, a show that has clearly been hacked apart and reconstructed to hit a pre-determined runtime.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.