#i had never watched a tv show before unless you count like. random cable tv episodes of like chhota bheem

[dykrophone]

pll was my entire adolescence i swear to god. like i grew up on that franchise it also was the original catalyst for turning my entire friend group gay

[mcrmadness]

For the x files: 🎥💕🏳️‍🌈!

HEY thank you so much for sending these for the hyperfixation ask game and sorry for taking so long with it, but now I’m here!!!

So these are for my pretty much favorite TV show aka The X-Files 8)

🎥 do you have any favorite scenes from your hyperfixation?

Oh plenty of them! Anything that is funny is awesome! :D But I think my favourite of them all is the whole Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster episode on the 10th season. I watched the season for the first time this year and when this episode started, I literally spent the first 10-15 minutes cry-laughing because every time a funny scene ended, the next started and I just could not stop to even breathe inbetween :DDDDDDDDDDD It’s literally my favorite episode of them all, what comes to funny episodes!

And another ones being the ones written/directed by Duchovny, especially the Hollywood A.D. on the 7th season, I’m not exactly sure if it was this one or some other episode where Mulder or someone called Skinner as Skin-Man but I always lose it at that :D

The whole 10th season also was great because they kinda hid lots of good messages into the stories and especially this one episode about another religion was already ready to make me angry but I’m so happy with how they ended it and I wish other tv shows would do similar things! I’m kinda proud with how it turned out. Also the Were-Monster episode had very important messages and it was great to see some old characters again!

***

💕 tell us about one of your favorite characters and why you like them!

The character from the Were-Monster episode aka Guy Mann is definitely one of them! I like them because the idea behind the character was so awesome and interesting and I have never really thought it like that, and somehow it’s also kinda philosophical episode? But yeah, I really like that one, also because of how hilarious it is :D

My another favourite will always be the “monster” from The Post-Modern Prometheus from the 5th season ;___; I have a soft spot for anyone and anything misunderstood so it’s not even a surprise. But I also really love the humour hidden between the lines here :D (Also when I first saw it on TV I thought my TV was broken and I tried to fix the cables and all because it was in black and white before I realized the whole episode IS filmed in black and white XD)

Then there’s also this black gay couple in the the X-Cops episode on 7th season, they’re so hilarious too :DDD That whole episode is a mess but also a quite interesting concept!

I just realized I told about four but I guess it’s okay lol. (And of course Mulder is a fave but just wanted to mention some of the numerous side characters :D)

***

🏳‍🌈 do you have any headcanons (lgbt, race, neuro, etc) that are important to you?

I had to google what is headcanon because I’m not the best with these fandom terms :D But I don’t think I have? I usually like to take what tv shows, movies and such give us and the only “fanon” (is this a right word???) thing is ships and I don’t really have any in TXF unless you count the one I was shipping so hard when I was a teenager (in 2006) but did not know yet that it also had became canon a long time ago :D Imagine my and my friend’s faces when we hadn’t even seen the whole series yet and went to see the I Want To Believe movie in the cinema and suddenly our ship was canon and we had no idea?

But yeah, I have never had the need to create any headcanon things with this show because it has always included people and non-people from all those groups anyway. There’s been LGBT+ characters, people from different races and also “people” from different species (you know, aliens, for example :D) and many of the cases deal with super-human or non-human, unnatural stuff a random character is capable of and sometimes they have connected these to mental disorders or neuropsychiatric stuff but not always in the negative way. Sure this show also has made the mistake as portaying e.g. dissociative identity order as someone whose “alter ego” is a monster and murderer, but in a way I kinda understand it with this show because that is just how it goes with every episode that is about a human. It’s not saying all are like this but that this character is like this and it’s not typical for them all, just the case with this one. E.g. take a schizophrenic character and they won’t be like the normal schizophrenic person would be but they take it to a level that makes it into an X-File, as that is exactly what the series is about. The X-Files.

[chipotle]

The revolution will have a monthly subscription

Introducing the first iteration of the Apple TV with an app store, Tim Cook (in)famously declared, “We believe the future of TV is apps.” The Apple TV stands out from its competitors for only two things: the App Store, and a much more powerful CPU than its competitors. So it’s safe to say that Apple genuinely does believe this is the future of TV.

It’s also safe to say, though, that it doesn’t appear to be panning out. Pretty much nobody buys Apple TVs for much other than what other streaming boxes do.1 We’re watching Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and Amazon Prime. (Well, we will be watching Prime. Later. Theoretically.)

What we want from TV is—sorry for the buzzword—content. In practice, it doesn’t matter how we get Game of Thrones or Star Trek: Discovery as long as we can get it easily on demand. Apps are arguably less help than hindrance. Imagine having a storefront that had all the shows, and we just paid per episode or per season for permanent access to our favorite shows–we could stream them or download them. Wouldn’t that be much better?

Ha ha! I’m pulling a fast one on you. Sorry. We had that from Apple and Amazon by the mid-2000s. Have you ever bought a TV show on iTunes? No? Yes, but only because it wasn’t available on Netflix? Once we got “all you can eat” streaming for $10–12 a month, we all said fuck this à la carte thing. We’ll just wait for all the networks and all the studios to put all the things on Netflix. Everybody wins!

But studios don’t make as much selling to Netflix as they used to in old syndication deals. They make a lot less. So what are they going to do? Start their own streaming service. Yay! You know Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime, and HBO Go/Now. Maybe you know Walmart’s me-too Vudu service. And you’ve recently heard Trek nerds bitch about CBS All Access. But there’s also Crunchyroll, Feeln, Acorn TV, Filmstruck, BritBox, Shudder, Screambox, Youtube Red, and others that I’m certainly forgetting–and that’s without counting the “cable replacement” services like Sling Orange, PlayStation Vue and Hulu Live. Disney is gearing up for their service, with plans to pull their stuff off other streaming services. And there’s whatever the hell Apple is doing.2

“But nobody’s going to subscribe to all those streaming services!” Not if you’re already paying $100+ a month for cable before you add any streaming services, no. But imagine a world (it’s easy if you try) in which you’re only paying, say, $50 a month for network access with no bundled television. All your shows now come from streaming services. So the chances are you’re going to end up subscribing to more than just Netflix and one other.

If you look at cord cutting as a money-saving move, this sounds depressing: it’s painting a picture of a future where the money you save by going data-only gets eaten up by streaming services. Well, true. But now you’re paying for everything on demand, in most cases commercial-free. Honestly, that’s still a win.

“Okay, but even if you get me to pay for five or six services, you listed eighteen services and claimed you were probably forgetting some. That is not gonna happen.” No, it isn’t. Most of those services aren’t going to survive long-term. They’re going to merge with other services or just quietly vanish. (SeeSo, we hardly knew yeeso.) But streaming video will likely never consolidate to a point where you can get every show you want by ponying up for one or two big names.

Is this just about money? Is it just greed that stops networks and studios from making it easier on all us consumers by just putting everything on Netflix or Hulu? Sort of. But it’s also about control.

Giant aggregators kind of reverse the way we think of monopolies working: instead of giant companies gaining control over a market and gouging consumers at retail, they lower retail prices and deliver the real pain to the suppliers. Walmart is the original giant aggregator, and it’s not hard to find stories of companies driven to bankruptcy by “success” selling through them. Twenty-First Century Walmart, Amazon, is remarkably cavalier about counterfeiters selling physical goods on their site. And you don’t have to be on the take from Penguin Random House to wonder whether it’s particularly healthy for self-publishers to rely on Amazon for three-quarters or more of their sales. If they decide they’d rather only give “indies” a 50% cut of the cover price instead of 70%, well, what are you gonna do about it? Pray they don’t alter the deal any further.3

The music industry still blames Apple’s iTunes ecosystem for destroying the once-lucrative CD market. So it’s not surprising that studios have decided that if on-demand streaming was truly going to be the future of television, they did not, in fact, want to chill with Netflix. Think about streaming music: artists say that unless they’re Taylor Swift, they’re making bupkis from Spotify, yet Spotify pays out so much for music that they’re still not profitable. These sound mutually exclusive, but they’re not: Spotify and friends should have charged $15 or $20 a month for unlimited music streaming, not $10.

Does that mean that Netflix should be charging us more than $9.99 $10.99? If they wanted to be the video version of Spotify, yes. But they don’t: they want to be a network. Amazon wants to be a network. Hulu wants to be a network. Apple (probably) wants to be a network. CBS wants to remain a network.

And at the end of the day, that’s what this boils down to: video streaming services aren’t the new airwaves, they’re the new networks. And since we’ve pretty much all collectively decided we can’t stand commercial breaks–how we “paid” for most network programming for sixty-odd years–we’re going to end up paying those networks directly.

So the future of TV is not apps–the future of TV is, just like the past of TV, networks. The key shift is a move from an advertising-supported model to consumers paying the networks directly.4

But will this future last as long as what it’s replacing? The network-and-affiliate broadcast model has been with us for nearly a century, predating television itself. That’s a lot harder to say. The model definitely needs tweaks–streaming services need to stop treating their metadata as proprietary secret sauce and let companies building streaming appliances build comprehensive cross-service program guides, for a start. But it seems to me like this future, even if it’s not precisely the one we wanted, has legs.

It’s much less clear to me whether this model will work well for software, as more and more programs take cues from Adobe and Microsoft and move toward subscription models. That, however, is another post.

The Apple TV is arguably most of the way to being a solid “casual” game console, but it’s become clear that Apple has no idea how to make it attractive to either developers or consumers in that space. ↩

I suspect Jason Snell is correct: Apple will take an “HBO approach…offering a dozen original series and a curated collection of films and classic TV shows.” ↩

This is what much of Amazon’s stock price was historically based on: investors bet they would do exactly what Walmart did. That this hasn’t come to pass may well be due to Amazon Web Services becoming the company’s biggest revenue driver. ↩

Advertising-supported services that are free to watch will stick around, but there’s a strong antipathy toward services with monthly bills and ads. I doubt that “blended” model will be with us long-term. ↩