a reply to:
frostjon361
Hi. I've worked on the special effects for 4 of the shows you listed.
I can't give you a complete answer because there isn't one.
The most I can tell you is it boils down to time and money.
This is complicated so bear with me.
The current television market is really now dived into two markets.
Old School over the air broadcast networks, ABC, NBC, CBS, CW etc.
and Pay services like HBO, Netflicks, Amazon etc.
The broadcast networks season runs from the fall, from mid September, to April or May the next year.
Usually a show will have full order of 23 to 26 episodes. Once a TV show gets going a new episode will usually air every week. The show your going to
watch in October is probably currently shooting now.
If everything goes right each episode may only have 6 to 8 weeks to Shoot, process, edit, ad vfx, sound etc. Sometimes it's more like 3 or 4 weeks or
less.
The show episodes are usually known going into a season but things happen and stuff has to change on the fly. Sometime in mid season the producers or
network will decide “Hey this isn't working, let change something to get the audience numbers back up”.
On top of this you have the constraints imposed by the producers, the networks and the advertisers.
Lets face it TV shows are really made to sell stuff. They are designed to hopefully keep you in a seat so the advertisers can whack you over the head
with their product. Thus each show is designed for a certain demographic audience. The audience for a super hero show, males from 20 to 30 years old,
is not the same for a mystery/crime show, usually Females 35-55 years old.
So the writing has a lot of constraints on even starting out. The you add in budgets, a tight schedule and bad decisions made at the last minute and
you end up with a bit of a mess.
Nobody sets out to make a bad tv show. Remember if the show is good everyone stays employed, if not they are all out looking for a job.
On broadcast network the shows are also constrained to an extant by Network standards and practices.
Thus the stuff Game of Thrones gets away with will never happen on a network TV show.
Also shows like Game of thrones, Walking dead etc are not bound by the same schedule network TV has. So they can spend a bit longer planning and
working on each episode. Thus the quality of the shows can be a little better. Sometimes that is, A&E cut the budget for Walking dead season 2 in
half. That's what everyone ended up sitting around a kitchen table or wandering around in the woods for the whole season.
The other major problem right now is is the demand for content. There used to be 3 Main networks in America. They stopped broadcasting at midnight.
I'm old enough to remember when the national anthem played and then the TV turned to static. That means they only had to fill 57 hours of programming
a week. Now they have a few hundred channels running 24 hours a day.
Thus a lot more stuff is getting made to fill that demand. Some good, some not so great.
About shows getting canceled. If a shows Nielsen rating numbers fall below a certain percent the show gets canned. Why? Because the advertising people
that are really paying for the show are not getting their moneys worth. No matter how good or bad the show is or how much you like it always comes
down to numbers. If no one is paying for the advertising time for a show the show gets canned. So every time you skip a commercial your actually
slowing killing your favorite show.
Which leads to another problem. TV as you know it is dying and no one is exactly sure what to do.
In the old days you got off work, went home, had dinner and watched tv. If you wanted to see a particular show you had to watch it when it aired. Now
people are binge watching without ads. This means the money that used to go into a single show is now being spread over a wider area. Meaning less
money to make shows and producers less inclined to take risks and they end up going for the lowest common denominator.
Probably doesn't answer your question but maybe it will help you understand a little about whats going on behind the scenes some.