The Rumbelle Dilemma

[nevermore]

Sadly, I will be right along with you and with the bitter after taste afterwards.

I think it has less to do with A&E’s skills, if you can call it that, and more with how people watch shows nowadays. I am very reluctant to give A&E too much credit for their core audience sticking with them because I think they, more than any other show makers I can think of, are totally parasitical on how the fandom is mediated. The way many people now watch shows is so heavily refracted through social media, and the fan communities that it affords (this place a case in point), that there’s more to being “committed” to a show than simply turning it on while you’re cooking your dinner on a regular basis. In practice, this means that the threshold for abandonment is probably higher, because you are also plugged into a separate community oriented around the show, and dropping the show means, in part, dropping the community alongside it.

I say parasitical because A&E seem to pander to the fans, while very obviously winging their plot lines and world building in an inconsistent, seemingly completely ad hoc way, then put on grand airs about how they’ve planned this all along. I would frankly have a lot more respect for them if they just said “look, this is a crazy experiment where we’re totally improvising from season to season, but we have awesome actors, and have you seen our costumes?” Instead, they seem to feel that they can afford to write lazy or downright offensive drivel without a significant penalty to their pocketbooks. That’s the other “bad aftertaste” part of this for me.

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