RPGMemes

Oof, I mean, CGI can go a long way, but still... some actors stay young-looking (Johnny Depp did, for a long time), but it's a large cast and not all of them will. And they have to do it for an entire season, which gets expensive.

But, we'll see. My money's on a fast-forward into the 90's, like someone else suggested.

Honestly it’s not that hard, they just use clothing and makeup to disguise their height and age. Works really well for the most part.

That's probably wise. 90's nostalgia seems to be "in" these days.

That's what all of it is. They just started naming everything after D&D monsters because they play D&D.

I liked season 4, but season 1 just can't be topped for me because of how grounded it was. Just normal characters from a small town experiencing supernatural things in a way that's believable. The rest of the show is good as long as you let go of any wishes that it stayed grounded like season 1.

For me it was season 3 that I found the worst, too much slapstick and I disliked how they turned Hopper into a walking bastion of juvenile insecure comic relief. Season 4 on the other hand rocked again, much darker and a better balance between seriousness and humour.

Both season 2 and 3 sucked because they just kept going back to the portal, but without any substance. Felt like running in circles.

I think season 4 should have been the second season with elements from season 2 and 3 added in.

No way, how can you rate 2 higher than 3? I skip the entire third season on rewatch

The show was started with a pair of guys - I forget if they were brothers but they were at least reputedly friends - who had a vision of what they wanted to do. They broke apart as the show was renewed after the first seasons though, hence that immediate drop in quality from this magical wonderland to "grrr, watch beast go smash into goo".

From what I read, they told themselves they would have (at least) two rules: (1) never use CGI - only puppets - for the purity of what seeing them, and more importantly not seeing them, conveys; and (2) do not "sell out" the show merely for reasons of profit. Money is fine but don't continue it unless there is a real story that wants to be told.

After the financial success of the first season, one of the co-creators left, and the second season was literally a different show, yet Netflix lied to us all and heavily pushed it as if it were the same as the first, for profits. It backfired, and revealed all the more how Shitflix just pushes forward purely for profits at the expense of offering much that is actually worth watching.

But if it got better after that, I might push through, one day. :-|

Edit: oops, I meant this in reply to Spider2013@lemmy.world's comment.

Not the guy you're talking to, but my opinion is the only good shows spend time building their world like that. It shows the world is complex and matters. If you blow past that then your world must either be identical to ours or it isn't interesting.

My favorite show I think is Battlestar: Galactica. You have to watch a entire miniseries before it gets into the swing of things; when the episodes start. The viewer needs to be immersed in the world to be able to understand the stakes and actually care about what's happening, for any world anyone creates that isn't our own.

Idk if I have a favorite TV series but I guess some recent picks would be The Midnight Club and Guillermo Del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, both of which are pretty gripping from early on tbh. If both of them took multiple episodes for stuff to start happening and multiple seasons to resolve any plotlines then I would never recommend them to anybody: at that point reading books is more thrilling.

A series serves better as a collection of stories whose whole is more meaningful than their parts.