Why We Need Law & Order: Hate Crimes or Something Like it

When I first heard about the plan for this show, I felt that it was long over do. We need a show like this in reality. And having something being pulled from the headlines like they would do in this show seems like we would need to see something like it in order to further grasp what goes on in reality. We could have used something like this from at least 2016 and the rise of Trump.

Hate crimes were on the rise from then on forward to now. But some people just aren’t familiar with it. That is why a TV show specifically about it would help bring this issue to light. Some people don’t think that the racism because of coronavirus is as big a deal as it is because they aren’t aware. It is a global problem affecting more than just the US. 

This show was at one point going to premiere in the 2020-2021 TV season, but this didn’t happen. It may not even premiere on the NBC network due to language concerns. Apparently, they can’t do this show without including all of the offensive slurs directed at people uncensored. Why can’t they do a version of a show without it? I wouldn’t know. The project as of yet remains in development hell and only remains a possibility that could happen with no certainty that it will.

That is why they need to make sure that this show gets made. If they don’t do it, some other network or streaming service is going to beat them to the punch and do a show focusing on hate crimes. It is a show that needs to be made. It wouldn’t be a show without gruesome content. But it could be a medical drama that talks about it from time to time. While I haven’t seen all of the current season of Grey’s Anatomy, I would think that they could do a good episode focusing on the serious topic of someone being treated for having been the victim of a hate crime. I wouldn’t know just how many people would watch or want to see a show like it. But it needs to be made so that people will know.

Paramount+ Has Gone Too Far

It wasn’t that long ago when CBS announced a streaming service once called CBS All Access and since changed to being named Paramount+. It seemed like an idea that wouldn’t have worked. Why pay money to buy a streaming service when you could get the DVDs or blu-rays instead?

First, they throw the bait and then they see if fish will come to the bait. First, the service put up a new show called The Good Fight which was a sequel series to The Good Wife which aired all of its seasons on the CBS network. And then they put the first episode of The Good Fight on TV with the rest of the episodes put on the streaming service.

One may not think that this was going to work. But the streaming service took off and many watched the show with it being renewed and is still set to air in the future. There have been other shows that have also aired on just that streaming service.

Now how did the streaming service go too far? It was recent things that made me wonder more about this in the future. I would have thought that most of what wound up on there was because it could not air on network television without edits. When the first season of The Good Fight made it to the network in 2019, it was clear that they were editing out swears in these network broadcasts. When another CBS all access show aired on the CW, namely Tell Me a Story, they edited out nudity at one point based on the one episode that I saw of it on TV.

Then we get to Star Trek: Discovery. With it airing on CBS in both 2020 and 2021 to fill in for stuff that was not ready due to the pandemic, it didn’t seem like these were edited down for the network in any way, shape, or form. Thus, there was no real reason why it had to air on streaming services versus on the network like any other show based on the information I can tell about it at the time.

If putting content on the streaming service that could have easily wound up on the network wasn’t going to far, then the plan for next season is. After only airing on CBS, the show SEAL Team is moving to the streaming service. Now while I stopped caring about that show, many people did not and will only be pissed off by that. It isn’t alone. Both Clarice and Evil will be airing their second seasons on the streaming service instead of the network. Is there just not enough room on the network for all of these shows? Do they not want to wind up like the CW by biting off more than they can chew? 

Honestly, I still have no interest in signing up for any paid streaming service. I may have Disney+ for now, but that was more of a family decision that I wasn’t part of. I won’t have any issues going without these shows as I can always buy seasons of The Good Fight on DVD and stop watching as much fucking shows that I don’t need to put up with. But I do hate not just the steaming service of Paramount+ for doing this, but also CBS for letting them do this. While I should be happy that these shows will live on and do exist, I see this problem as having gone too far.

Why I Prefer Shows on DVD to Streaming

I may yet change on this. At the moment, I have no reason to watch shows that are only available on streaming services. This may change in the future. But if a show is on DVD, I will buy it and watch it. I would like this and prefer it to having some or all of it on streaming.

Why is this? Well, for one, buying a DVD box set is a onetime investment. I wouldn’t have to keep up with constantly having to pay money for the same thing over and over again. And in the event that it is on a site for free, I wouldn’t have to put up with ads over and over again. Granted, there probably will be some on the DVD at some point, but I wouldn’t have to put up with it constantly.

Now maybe things are confusing regarding how something is available to stream. While I am pretty sure that season 3 of 8 Simple Rules is on ABC’s website to stream for free, I only plan to watch it again if they put it on DVD or bluray. I don’t want the ads or possible issues with loading. While any disc would run into potential loading issues, it wouldn’t be the same type of issue that you’d get from the internet or any website.

Of course, you might wonder, what if it isn’t available outside of streaming and you can’t ever get it any other way? Well, I simply wouldn’t watch it. I can only hope that they don’t release just some of a show on DVD with me having only part of the collection forever. But it wouldn’t be too much of an issue to not have a show on DVD since there is so much more in life that I could do.

And that’s about it for this post. Sorry that I didn’t do a fantasy schedule this year. It would have been too hard to predict although it still would have been fun to try if I had the chance too. But I do need to work more on other posts and get them done including something special that I have to put more work into than I would like, but can at least get done sometime.

On Recasting

This is an unfortunately common part of TV. Well, it’s common, but thankfully, it doesn’t happen that much. Sometimes a character is played by multiple actors throughout their time on a show. It can often be annoying in many ways. Sometimes, they look nothing like the previous version of the character. And if it is a voice role, they can sound different as well instead of the same.

 

While this is always annoying, it can often be unavoidable at times. Unless we want to say goodbye to the character itself, we may have to say hello to a new actor doing them. Often, it may only work that way. The show Arthur relies on some characters being played by kids so they get new kids to do the voices when the old ones grow up. Its problem was that the new voices don’t sound the same to the old one. It was often annoying. Buster has always sounded the same on that show on all the episodes of it that I have watched. Why does Arthur sound different?

 

Now while I and many people understandably don’t like recasting, it can often be hard to stop watching a show because of it. Jane the Virgin had interesting plots that I wasn’t wanting to miss. I liked the show of Modern Family enough to not care when Lily was played by a new person. It’s not like the old actress had much of a role on the show before she took over. Often the people recast are very minor to the point where it doesn’t matter. Sometimes they do a good job recasting that you don’t even notice at first or at all that someone is different on that show.

 

What can happen is that the show can be creative with how they do it, giving it interesting props when they do it. In the show Dynasty, for instance, they had the character’s face be put in a fire, giving it a good reason why this character would eventually have a new face later played by a different actress. On the show Black Lightning, the character exploded in space, but was put back together, albeit with a different appearance. That was a creative way of doing things. If they can acknowledge it in a fun and believable way, then it can be nice to see their take on it. If they look alike to their old self, then one may not notice at all that a recast took place at all.

 

Other times, they are very poor and doing it. When American Housewife recast Anna-Kat, it was the first time that I ever stopped watching a show because of a recast. The new Anna-Kat looked nothing like the old one and didn’t seem right based on the one episode I saw of the show after it happened. When you see the first season of Last Man Standing, you will notice that the oldest daughter looks nothing like how she looks in later seasons. They also rapidly aged the son too, which is kind of dumb but not worth talking about as much in this post, even though it always leads to recasts.

 

There’s not much else to mention in this post. I don’t have much else to talk about and really need to get done with other posts that take more time and effort into doing. I will not be doing one of the things that I like to do having once again ran out of time for it. Plus, I wouldn’t know what I would have done this time around for it anyways. But I do need to spend the time doing these big posts at some point in the near future to ensure that they get done. Stay tuned for them later.

Why are so Many TV Characters such Terrible People?

It is often seen on TV shows that characters just aren’t nice people. They are quite terrible. This happens a lot in TV shows. I have no idea why this is. It can happen on shows that are good, but normally only happens on shows that are bad.

It was the show Mom that had characters that were just so horrible and had no one to root for that I just couldn’t stay with the show beyond its first episode. The only positive that I could think of was that Anna Farris was cute. That was it. There was nothing else about the show that I liked as it was about a bunch of horrible people doing horrible things with no one to root for.

This show is hardly the only show that has horrible characters in it. That is such a common problem in shows. Training Day was awful like that as well, even if there was a potential good person on it. And it would be hard to go through all of the shows that just don’t have good people to root for.

Sometimes, this isn’t actually that much of a problem. You wouldn’t think that such a thing would be the case, but it would all depend on the situations going on in the show. Shades of Blue had terrible people on it, but it more than made up for it with intriguing plots and enough going on with it that could keep you interested beyond the people that are bad. There was enough in there that wanted you to see what would happen and keep you invested in everything on the show.

Often, though, it is just a sign of bad television. There are too many issues with a show based on a whole bunch of people that are just terrible in many different ways. Why would we watch a show that has terrible people on it all the time? It doesn’t make sense.

Why is this the case? I have no idea. I would think that if they were going to show people evolving from this situation into better people, that would be something that we’d like to see. But I don’t see this as something that often happens most of the time. It is just a horrible problem that shouldn’t happen, yet does, over and over again. And we need better TV than this.