Social Realist vs. Corporate Streaming TV: Real People vs. Virtual Entities
Smaller budget series in Ireland and Australia confront the mega-budget corporate "shell" series of the major streamers
Social realist TV: Escaping the corporate streaming bubble
North Sea Connection
Previewing North Sea Connection, Savage River, After the Verdict, True Colours
Corporate streaming TV seems to be engulfed in a never-ending chasing of its own tail as its programming attempts to more frantically flee any form of social reality, even as that reality becomes more desperate for those working- and middle-class viewers living it. Digital companies use the programming to simply present the virtual world as an ever-expanding source of the abundance so sorely lacking in the actual lives of workers.
Take Amazon’s The Peripheral, part working-class Southern rural woman’s struggle, à la Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, but the larger part, and the inducement for the series, is that same woman roaming freely through time and space in her online gaming life à la Westworld, or the much better, because also critical of that dichotomy, Ready Player One.