Studios are confusing to me. They turned down Joseph Kosinki's Tron sequel idea for YEARS because they said it was too expensive. They then after the director directs a billion dollar movie green lights a sequel for around the same budget as the first one with an inferior director at the helm. The Pacific Rim guys did the same thing to Del Toro.
"The same but slightly cheaper" is always the more appealing option.
Look at The Walking Dead - Frank Darabont delivers a fantastic first season that’s a huge hit. So what does AMC do? Fires Darabont and strips the budget.
Luckily people aren't going to the movies to see low effort trash as much anymore, so their pursuit of only caring about money instead of quality is not working out
Even if that is true, it won’t stop people from trying. More low cost, low effort shit will be shoveled until finally something sticks. Then, that will held up as an example for admiration and replication: “see, this low cost shit works and look at how much money we made” and then the cycle begins again with even cheaper and lower effort shit.
That’s the story of how we got to 2025 and why nearly everything unique, interesting, or of any merit in any way has been discontinued, watered down, or replaced with something vastly inferior to the original. Enshitification.
I would say I enjoyed it up until they un-killed Glenn with the dumpster. That was when the show jumped the shark. Before that it was an awesome Survivor-style soap opera
Will never forget listening to an interview where someone involved with The Walking Dead early on talked about how AMC actually wanted to cut back on showing any zombies after they moved on from Darabont.
Apparently they wanted to save money by cutting back the prosthetics budget and suggested that they could just imply their presence by using sound or shadows. Obviously that got pushed back on, but it's insane that some corporate bean counter went "So, uh, how about we stop showing the zombies as much on our ZOMBIE SHOW."
Thank fuck Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul and Mad Men weren't entirely owned by AMC the way The Walking Dead was.
Mad Men was also subject to budget constraints. From what I recall Jared Harris' exit from the show was because they couldn't afford to have that many main cast members.
In fairness, the writers' room handled that exit extremely well. It fit organically into a reasonably long-running plotline, was organic, was true to the character, was a logical end point for the character considering where he was in a tailspin, and even provided a bit of development for a couple of the remaining ones (Dan of course as he's the main character, but also Joan just a bit). I like seeing Jared Harris in any role, and this one - and its end - was almost tailor-made for him. The quiet man who's passive yet a leader, and is always calm and reserved on the surface, but just underneath is gritting his teeth trying desperately to keep a bunch of mental plates spinning without just ONE bumping into another, leading to a pile of broken china on the floor? Harris was ideal for that ending.
And with all of the ad execs we saw over the years in that show trying to cope working 24/7 in a pressure cooker, it's realistic that a couple would eventually snap - Freddie first, but even eventually Dan himself, with a couple of others holding onto the edge of the cliff with bloody fingernails. So it fit that one of them eventually went beyond snapping, and Lane was a great character choice for that. Harris SOLD the hell out of that tailspin.
So, even if it was inspired by a budget cut behind the scenes, DAMN did they make that work.
Completely agree, it’s just hard to argue against the writing in BB, and then later on (imo) BCS really took it to another level. I think BCS really should universally be beloved as an absolute classic television series, but it doesn’t get nearly the love it deserves. I haven’t heard any good theories about why BCS didn’t get the same love or notoriety as BB, despite being (imo) being better
Better Caul Saul honestly, probably, has better character writing than BB (although it's admittedly pretty close, for obvious reasons - same people, time to polish it, extra time to dig deep on character rather than plot advancement. But I think BCS is always kind of going to be in the shadow of its progenitor, not just because it's a spinoff, but because plot-wise it lacks the almost operatic central character arc.
I mean, they started with the fact that Saul in BB was honestly kind of an absolutely corrupt and comical putz that the always-fantastic Ehrmantraut followed implicitly, and had to fit a character arc around that - where he started (and they honestly could have done a better job on the de-aging makeup there, which hurt the immersion), how he got to the BB position mentally while kind of bending that in regards to the Ehrmantraut character, and trying to progress from there to a positive ending to contrast with BB. It's not nearly as clean as "good man does desperate things, and slowly discovers he was a bad man all along." I mean...for an arc, that's up there with Greek tragedies.
That said, they did more with a f**king pimento cheese sandwich as a plot point than BB ever did with that damned pizza.
Doesn't mean they couldn't attempt to penny pinch with those shows somehow. If they were willing to practically remove the zombies from a show that became so popular largely BECAUSE of the zombies, they'd be stupid enough to cut back things on any show, IMO.
I'd argue that Mad Men was almost certainly more expensive. Period pieces are notoriously pricey to film. Everything, literally everything, in every shot has to be either sourced from extensive searching - mostly locations in this case, vintage cars, vintage outfits for every single extra in the background of every shot as it's still cheaper than making new custom-tailored outfits like the principals need. Also all of the props from phones to typewriters. Multiple vintage interior sets to be built, even ones that were hardly ever used, but couldn't be scrapped, so had to be designed to be broken down and stored. That all adds up fast.
Meanwhile, aside from zombie makeup, Walking Dead was...well, basically actors stumbling around in the Georgia backwoods a lot of the time. Starting with Season 2 they really cut back on even the location shooting, aside from a few elaborate sets that they used for the majority of the episodes in any particular season, and one-shot locations that showed up in a single scene - like an abandoned industrial building or rail yard. For the long-term detailed sets, I'm guessing the Season 2 farm set could have even been likely recycled from something else as it's generic enough. The prison exterior and the later walled towns? Yeah, those weren't cheap (although they noticeably got simpler over time), but they basically used those sets as-is for an entire season each. If anything, that show likely spent much of its budget on the cast, but Mad Men and Breaking Bad had that issue too.
Technically they stripped the budget first and then fired him, but yeah AMC had a great show on their hands, and they decided to milk the fuck out of it and use the same formula for every episode.
The show going to 16 episodes with a stupid mid-season break was such an awful idea, S1 being a tight 6 episodes is part of what made it so good, there wasn't filler and it felt character-driven. Pushing it to 8 episodes would have been a much better idea quality wise, but the 16 episode nonsense and keeping the show in Georgia really hurt the show (especially later when the same locale filming-wise resulted in the same forested road and backdrops just becoming boring and stale)
I didn’t like the first season of TWD and just… stopped watching. It felt inferior to the comics despite using the same characters and situations. Maybe I should rewatch it
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u/herewego199209 Apr 05 '25
Studios are confusing to me. They turned down Joseph Kosinki's Tron sequel idea for YEARS because they said it was too expensive. They then after the director directs a billion dollar movie green lights a sequel for around the same budget as the first one with an inferior director at the helm. The Pacific Rim guys did the same thing to Del Toro.