\n\n\n\n\n\n\npeople seem to enjoy watching charismatic actors playing emotionally resonant characters in a lovingly rendered setting with a consistent and unique aesthetic where the plot is merely a rough scaffolding that makes no real sense
Which is funny, because plot is at least theoretically the cheapest aspect (in some cases it can be done by one person working alone with no special equipment!), and therefore the one it makes the least sense to cut corners on.
\nBut I suppose movies and tv involve a lot of editing, re-takes, doing things out of order for various pragmatic reasons, cutting things out for time or because they didn\u2019t look good onscreen, and with all that maybe it\u2019s not surprising that plot falls by the wayside, because plot is about the gestalt and not about any individual scene.
\nPlus, it\u2019s easy enough to suspend your disbelief until it\u2019s over\u2013if you\u2019re immersed, you probably won\u2019t worry too much about what seems like minor inconsistencies or whatever, because you\u2019re trusting that by the end it\u2019ll all hang together.\u00a0 And when you get to the end, well, you may have forgotten or at least no be longer thinking about various quibbles!\u00a0 So it\u2019s entirely possible to watch a movie, enjoy it, come out of it thinking \u201cgosh that was great, very emotionally satisfying\u201d, and only later go \u201cwait, actually what happened there\u201d\u2026 especially if you rewatch it.
\nthat\u2019s just it! you would think that good writing would be prized, considering it\u2019s so cheap relative to a single visual effects shot, but in practice you would rather sacrifice it in favour of literally any other aspect of the production.
\n\u201cit looked terrible and the acting was wooden and the actors unappealing but gosh that plot was fantastic, 10/10\u201d just isn\u2019t a common review summary
\n
A lot of this just has to do with the structure of filmmaking by which the director is the boss (though accountable to studio funders/moneyman producers)
adjust to the other factors - actors and sets have already been paid for and film has already been shot, actors might be tied to production or promotions deals, but scripts can be rewritten easy separate from all of that, on the fly, even a new writer (this was how Joss Whedon really made his name)
In TV this is different writing has higher priority, some structural reasons relating to time pressure \u2013 you NEED to deliver a coherent time block by this deadline, every week, but the sets and actors are paid for for the season, at least the first 13/22s of it
A lot of the \u201cGolden Age\u201d of \u201cPeak TV\u201d has to do with the formation of writers rooms\u2019 and the rise of the showrunner - the head writer who runs the whole production, has approval over casting, writing, directors - in the early \u201880s
Before TV tended to be more like standup comedy or magazines - you might have a core group of staff writers pitching ideas and guiding episodes but they solicited a lot of outside writers to submit stuff, or took pitches on spec, which is why a lot of old shows kind of play like commedia dell\u2019arte, with the characters representing broad types with trademark quirks that any writer can pick up and run with
Then in the \u201880s you started to get more funding for staff, which let you bring on more writers and have them spend more time rewriting what outside stuff you had. That\u2019s when shows started to get more distinct - Miami Vice was an obvious example but that was more in the way the action played to the visuals; that had something to do with writer-showrunner Michael Mann being one of the first-generation film school graduates coming out of the \u201870s, who\u2019d been trained on the field as a tradition to innovate with. This is also how you get the densely knit comedy of early Simpsons, with money into writing
That was well-funded network shows at least, first-run syndicated shows \u2013 ones that weren\u2019t run on a network but directly took bids from broadcast stations in each market \u2013 tended to be lower-funded genre pulp stuff. But even there there were standouts in the \u201890s, Xena, Babylon 5, even Star Trek: The Next Generation were syndicated
The Star Trek franchise of series was one of the last to take a lot of outside scripts, too, their tradition was always drawing on the wide pool of SF print writers. Anyway the syndicated angle kind of died as FOX and WB and the UPN gathered a lot of spare channels and regularized them, ran stuff like Buffy and Voyager themselves
So as the \u201890s went on you started to see more and more seasonal arcs as shows gained in their narrative capacity, then you saw the premium channels (which had more been doing anthology shows or soft porn for their original series) latch on and away we go
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