“It’s viewers who are scared of trying new talent, not commissioners. It’s viewers who nine times out of ten will choose a mediocre true crime or celebrity doc over a brilliantly made doc about almost anything else. It’s viewers who — overwhelmed with choice — are terrified to take risks on unfamiliar-looking new propositions.”

I am someone who does make an effort to try new things and even I constantly feel the pull to choose something mediocre in a "safe" genre I like (mystery, for example), rather than take a risk on a documentary or drama that is of much higher quality. Instead of challenging myself to learn more about the world or face some new/complex themes that I can reflect on, I'll choose some derivative slop and get halfway through before bailing.

Many of us have too much going on in our lives and feel so overwhelmed that screen time (TV/film/social media/gaming) has become this drug that we repeatedly go to so we don't have to think about and deal with our problems. It's like feeling guilty about your poor diet, but instead of actually taking a stand and planning your meals out, buying the ingredients and cooking for yourself, you just indefinitely delay it and continue the cycle of eating bad and feeling bad about eating bad. Screen-based entertainment has become a fast food for too many people; they are addicted to it, and the cognitive dissonance in the face of that fact is so strong that they'd rather blame someone else or ignore the problem than take some agency over their own lives.

[–] thejoker954@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

It's still kind of an issue of their own making though. Their metric for acceptable viewing numbers is ever changing. And they tend to pick and choose what counts as a view as well.

So if you don't watch it in their time frame and/or on whatever platform they extrapolate view counts from then you basically didn't watch the show to them.

if one show does really well, now all those other shows are expected to reach around the same number without taking into consideration all the circumstances.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I am someone who does make an effort to try new things and even I constantly feel the pull to choose something mediocre in a “safe” genre I like (mystery, for example), rather than take a risk on a documentary or drama that is of much higher quality. Instead of challenging myself to learn more about the world or face some new/complex themes that I can reflect on, I’ll choose some derivative slop and get halfway through before bailing.

I mean if this was uniformly true, then Netflix, Apple-TV and HBO etc would also be similarly struggling. It's not as if Channel 4 puts out challenging content themselves anymore to test that suggestion themselves.

[–] Ilandar@lemmy.today 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I mean if this was uniformly true, then Netflix, Apple-TV and HBO etc would also be similarly struggling.

Struggling in what way? Netflix, Apple TV and HBO are all losing by a mile to YouTube. Channel 4 also has a much bigger share of the audience than Apple TV or HBO (which isn't even listed). It's doing better than most.

But I guess I interpreted this argument as about more than just viewer share in the UK. All of these services use algorithmic recommendation systems to feed more of the same to their audiences, which pushes people towards the same shows and types of shows, which result in trends that influence production. All of this waters down the quality and variety of content and results in an echo chamber that doesn't reflect the true diversity and creativity of humanity. The criticisms in the article weren't based on the financial success of Beast Games, but rather its lack of artistic merit and value to society.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago

Struggling in what way? Netflix, Apple TV and HBO are all losing by a mile to YouTube. Channel 4 also has a much bigger share of the audience than Apple TV or HBO (which isn’t even listed). It’s doing better than most.

Well I'm speaking beyond the UK here. There's clearly still an appetite for content that isn't just brief brainrot. I think the wider impact of Youtube is absolutely eating into the audience for Channel 4 and further, terrestrial television because for the most part the content from them in the last decade or so was never that much more high-art than a lot of Youtube in the first place.