There is still no algorithm that knows how to predict which series are going to be liked

The oligopoly of the platforms is two mergers away from becoming a monopoly, and the concentration is already noticeable in the increasingly homogeneous offer.

Since the series are mass-produced, they are more like industrial pastries than the pastries from the century-old oven in your neighborhood.

As much as everything is cast from the same mold, there is still no algorithm to guess which stories are liked and which are not, and that uncertainty forces producers to surrender to the Socratic principle: in the end, they only know that they know nothing.

After all, we all know how to explain why something succeeds, but hardly anyone knows how to predict success or failure.

The entertainment industry is still a lot like a casino game: you roll the dice and keep your fingers crossed that the bet pays off.

Thanks to the fact that nobody knows anything about the capricious tastes of the public, we enjoy wonders like

(on HBO Max, for now, until it's called something else), a meta-cinematic and self-parodic series that brings together all the sins that would make it anti-commercial (and, therefore, detestable) for a television director: it is slow, choral, without plot twists, without narrative tricks, adult, ambiguous and requires an accomplice viewer.

To top it off, it has silent movie tickets in black and white!

Although his worst crime is that he makes fun of superhero movies from the codes of auteur cinema (because there are a few parodic series of superheroes from the code of superheroes, but no one has dared to make fun of the genre dressed as

French, with the unapologetic snobbery that this entails in this populist age).

is one of those cracks that still appear in the uniform, windowless building of the platforms, and must be fully exploited.

You can follow EL PAÍS TELEVISIÓN on

50% off

Subscribe to continue reading

read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber