Week 11: Long Form Television

Week 11: Long Form Television

Group: Alaura, Brandon, Linda, Selina

What is television? 

It is a form of entertainment to pass time, it's not a necessity but is something that is an escape.
It is also for communicating ideas, bringing people together, selling products through commercials and depending on if you are poor or rich, storytelling for characters and situations, personal expression like animation and music. Another form is live television and news channels, knowing information about the world and politics and reality TV that go through everyday life and explain whats either going on with a specific person or location. This can also be applied to documentaries.


What is different of long form television?

After the 2000s, television series started to get very popular and more widely used.  Sometimes it can be used to have adaptions of multiple books and even graphic novels. Studios are fairly different and reused. Characters and places are repetitive. Also unlike most movies you can watch episodes of series not in chronological order and be able to follow along. Different series are also sometimes followed by openings and endings usually with music and some form of introduction so you can pick up it up very quickly. They also are followed by coming out with series seasons usually yearly. Streaming services popularized the series and made it so commercials can be skipped and you can pause. TV shows go through pilots, and getting multiple seasons and are fairly lower budget than movies. This also provided multiple series that are accessible rather than one. This started to create binge watching and marathons finishing it usually in a weeks time.  TV also created formulaic and constant episodes, this also changed the standard for cartoons. These are easier to make and can be on constant. Also changing the production with introducing new inexpensive actors, reusing sets, being cheaper to make, and how easy it can be to get into the business since it's easy and anyone can do it. How easy it is to access and create content nowadays and how subscriptions have become popularized.

The End of The F***ing World

For this week I decided to binge on The End of the F***ing World, a series on Netflex that follows the main character James who thinks of himself as a psychopath. His main goal from episode one is to basically to kill a real human victim rather than countless animals he has murdered, which is a obvious sign of a serial killer in the making. Alyssa unfortunately ends up having what seems to be a teenage crush, mixed with her personality that seems to be extremely bold, and confident. She's immature with dealing with her feelings and reacts like a moody teenager.

As strange at it is, I absolutely adore the relationship dynamics these characters have together. I love how even though James is cunning and quite shy, he becomes a little more bold and and Alyssa helps him come out of his shell and sticks up for him countless times in difficult situations. This pair is up to absolutely no good throughout the series. But like I mentioned earlier, even though Alyssa cares for him and presumably, James still has the urge to kill her but starts to also gain feelings for her. They end up even running away together, in which they defy against the adults in their life that seemed to be so shitty. We know that they are the way they are because of their parents and how abusive and just outright shitty they are. Eventually, theres a scene that James is forced to kill a person because they tried to sexually assault and kill Alyssa. This is a crime that adds more onto the weight of them running away and even more reasoning to go into hiding. They even end up changing their looks and even Alyssa starts to question her relationship with James after he's so willing to murder, even if it was in the defense. Both teens come to stay together and decide to go to Alyssa's fathers house, who helps them go into hiding and ends up spending time with both of the kids. They soon  realize that it was all just fake, and that in actuality the father was going to give them up for money. Of course the police find them, (these police officers have their own story within the series, meeting up to the final "showdown".) 

The season and series ends in a cliff hanger of what happens to Alyssa and James, since Alyssa gets arrested and James either gets away or is shot. I think what this series does successful is to show even children who are cold and ones that are set on the path to be murders can turn out to be able to show compassion and love if given. That these kids have a reason to be the way they are. I think this can be applied to lots of past serial killers with similar pasts and mindsets. We can also see that James is also simply just mentally ill, and really is the way he is because of his mother since he blames himself for his death. His father never helped him cope with the feelings of guilt and frustration. Since his mother was also mentally ill and killed herself infront of James. I think this series is a good discussion on mental illness and the effects it had on others and why its so important to talk about it.