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What Lesson can Creators Learn From Late 90s Entertainment?
Respect the intelligence of your audience, and they’ll stick around
Entertainment in the late 90s/early 2000s was disappointing to me, and with few exceptions, movies, music, and television were too dumb to watch. Yet people ate up the latest offerings of bland dialogue, dull and uninteresting characters, and predictable played-out storylines. But hey! They had special effects.
Eventually, I just stopped going.
I think the turning point happened in the mid-2000s with the reboots. The studios seemed to acknowledge their failures and wanted to revitalize their languishing franchises.
Television shows raised viewer expectations and delivered. Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones and Mad Men were massive hits.
I remember some of my nerdy coworkers telling me how excited they were about Batman Begins.
I had no interest and never planned on seeing it. But it was on cable one day and I decided to watch. And holy crap! Storytelling. Acting. Dialogue. And reluctantly I had to admit that it was actually… dare I say it… good!
