culture – Page 2

Andor S2 featurette teases canonical tragic event

Andor, culture, Disney Plus, Entertainment, star wars, streaming television / Rejus Almole / March 6, 2025

Most of the main S1 cast is returning for S2, with the exception of Shaw. Forest Whitaker once again reprises his Rogue One role as Clone Wars veteran Saw Gerrera, joined by fellow Rogue One alums Ben Mendelsohn and Alan Tudyk as Orson Krennic and K-2SO, respectively. Benjamin Bratt has also been cast in an as-yet-undisclosed role.

The behind-the-scenes look opens with footage of a desperate emergency broadcast calling for help because Imperial ships were landing, filled with storm troopers intent on quashing any protesters or nascent rebels against the Empire who might be lurking about. “Revolutionary movements are spontaneously happening all over the galaxy,” series creator Tony Gilroy explains. “How those come together is the stuff of our story.” While S1 focused a great deal on political intrigue, Genevieve O’Reilly, who plays Mon Mothma, describes S2 as a “juggernaut,” with a size and scope to match.

The footage shown—some new, some shown in the last week’s teaser—confirms that assessment. There are glimpses of Gerrera, Krennic, and K-2SO, as well as Mothma’s home world, Chandrila. And are all those protesters chanting on the planet of Ghorman? That means we’re likely to see the infamous Ghorman Massacre, a brutal event that resulted in Mothma resigning from the Senate in protest against Emperor Palpatine. The massacre was so horrifying that it eventually served to mobilize and unite rebel forces across the galaxy in the Star Wars canon.

The first three (of 12) episodes of Andor S2 premiere on April 22, 2025, on Disney+. Subsequent three-episode chapters will drop weekly for the next three weeks after that.

poster art for Andor S2 — Credit: LucasFilm/Disney+

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Netflix drops trailer for the Russo brothers’ The Electric State

culture, Entertainment, film trailers, netflix, Russo brothers, Simon Stalenhag, the electric state, Trailers / Kris Guyer / March 4, 2025

Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt star in the Netflix original film The Electric State.

Anthony and Joe Russo have their hands full these days with the Marvel films Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret War, slated for 2026 and 2027 releases, respectively. But we’ll get a chance to see another, smaller film from the directors this month on Netflix: The Electric State, adapted from the graphic novel by Swedish artist/designer Simon Stålenhag.

Stålenhag’s stunningly surreal neofuturistic art—featured in his narrative art books, 2014’s Tales from the Loop and 2016’s Things From the Flood—inspired the 2020 eight-episode series Tales From the Loop, in which residents of a rural town find themselves grappling with strange occurrences thanks to the presence of an underground particle accelerator. That adaptation captured the mood and tone of the art that inspired it and received Emmy nominations for cinematography and special visual effects.

The Electric State was Stålenhag’s third such book, published in 2018 and set in a similar dystopian, ravaged landscape. Paragraphs of text, accompanied by larger artworks, tell the story of a teen girl named Michelle who must travel across the country with her robot companion to find her long-lost brother, while being pursued by a federal agent. The Russo brothers acquired the rights early on and initially intended to make the film with Universal, but when the studio decided it would not be giving the film a theatrical release, Netflix bought the distribution rights.

It’s worth noting that the Russo brothers have made several major plot changes from the source material, a decision that did not please Stålenhag’s many fans, particularly since the first-look images revealed that the directors were also adopting more of a colorful 1990s aesthetic than the haunting art that originally inspired their film. Per the official premise:

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The revolution starts now with Andor S2 teaser

Andor, culture, Disney Plus, Entertainment, streaming television, Trailers, TV trailers / Tim Belzer / February 25, 2025

Diego Luna returns as Cassian in the forthcoming second season of Andor.

The first season of Andor, the Star Wars prequel series to Rogue One and A New Hope, earned critical raves for its gritty aesthetic and multilayered narrative rife with political intrigue. While ratings were a bit sluggish, they were good enough to win the series a second season, and Disney+ just dropped the first action-packed teaser trailer.

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

As previously reported, the story begins five years before the events of Rogue One, with the Empire’s destruction of Cassian Andor’s (Diego Luna) homeworld and follows his transformation from a “revolution-averse” cynic to a major player in the nascent rebellion who is willing to sacrifice himself to save the galaxy. S1 left off with Cassian returning to Ferrix for the funeral of his adoptive mother, Maarva (Fiona Shaw), rescuing a friend from prison, and dodging an assassination attempt. A post-credits scene showed prisoners assembling the firing dish of the now-under-construction Death Star.

According to the official longline, S2 “will see the characters and their relationships intensify as the horizon of war draws near and Cassian becomes a key player in the Rebel Alliance. Everyone will be tested and, as the stakes rise, the betrayals, sacrifices and conflicting agendas will become profound. “

In addition to Luna, most of the main cast from S1 is returning: Genevieve O’Reilly as Mon Mothma, a senator of the Republic who helped found the Rebel Alliance; Adria Arjona as mechanic and black market dealer Bix Caleen; James McArdle as Caleen’s boyfriend, Timm Karlo; Kyle Soller as Syril Karn, deputy inspector for the Preox-Morlana Authority; Stellan Skarsgård as Luthen Rael, an antiques dealer who is secretly part of the Rebel Alliance; Denise Gough as Dedra Meero, supervisor for the Imperial Security Bureau; Faye Marsay as Vel Sartha, a Rebel leader on the planet Aldhani; Varada Sethu as Cinta Kaz, another Aldhani Rebel; Elizabeth Dulau as Luthen’s assistant Kleya; and Muhannad Bhaier as Wilmon, who runs the Repaak Salyard.

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After 50 years, Ars staffers pick their favorite Saturday Night Live sketches

culture, Features, Saturday Night Live / Rejus Almole / February 14, 2025

“Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.”

American musician Stevie Wonder (left) appears on an episode of ‘Saturday Night Live’ with comedian and actor Eddie Murphy, New York, New York, May 6, 1983. Credit: Anthony Barboza/Getty Images

The venerable late-night sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live is celebrating its 50th anniversary season this year. NBC will air a special on Sunday evening featuring current and former cast members.

I’ve long been a big fan of the show, since I was a kid in the late 1980s watching cast members such as Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, and Jan Hooks. By then, the show was more than a decade old. It had already spawned huge Hollywood stars like Chevy Chase and Eddie Murphy and had gone through some near-death experiences as it struggled to find its footing.

The show most definitely does not appeal to some people. When I asked the Ars editorial team to share their favorite sketches, a few writers told me they had never found Saturday Night Live funny, hadn’t watched it in decades, or just did not get the premise of the show. Others, of course, love the show’s ability to poke fun at the cultural and political zeitgeist of the moment.

With the rise of the Internet, Saturday Night Live has become much more accessible. If you don’t care to watch live on Saturday night or record the show, its sketches are available on YouTube within a day or two. Not all of the show’s 10,000-odd sketches from the last five decades are available online, but many of them are.

With that said, here are some of our favorites!

Celebrity Hot Tub Party (Season 9)

Saturday Night Live has a thing for hot tubs, and it starts here, with the greatest of all hot tub parties.

Should you get in the water? Will it make you sweat?

Good god!

Celebrity Hot Tub.

—Ken Fisher

Papyrus (Season 43)

Some of SNL’s best skits satirize cultural touchstones that seem like they’d be way too niche but actually resonate broadly with its audience—like Font Snobs, i.e., those people who sneer at fonts like Comic-Sans (you know who you are) in favor of more serious options like the all-time favorite Helvetica. (Seriously, Helvetica has its own documentary.)

In “Papyrus,” host Ryan Gosling played Steven, a man who becomes obsessed with the fact that the person who designed the Avatar logo chose to use Papyrus. “Was it laziness? Was it cruelty?” Why would any self-respecting graphic designer select the same font one sees all over in “hookah bars, Shakira merch, [and] off-brand teas”? The skit is played straight as a tense psychological thriller and ends with a frustrated Steven screaming, “I know what you did!” in front of the graphic designer’s house while the designer smirks in triumph.

There was even a sequel last year in which Gosling’s Steven is in a support group and seems to have recovered from the trauma of seeing the hated font everywhere—as long as he avoids triggers. Then he learns that the font for Avatar: The Way of Water is just Papyrus in bold.

So begins an elaborate plot to infiltrate a graphic designer awards event to confront his tormentor head-on. The twist: Steven achieves a personal epiphany instead and confronts the root of his trauma: the fact that he was never able to understand his father, Jonathan WingDings. “My dad was so hard to read,” a weeping Steven laments as he finally gets some much-needed closure. Like most sequels, it doesn’t quite capture the magic of the original, but it’s still a charming addition to the archive.

Papyrus.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Washington’s Dream (Season 49)

The only SNL skit known and loved by all my kids. Nate Bargatze is George Washington, who explains his dream of “liberty” to soldiers in his revolutionary army. Washington’s future America is heavy on bizarre weights, measures, and rules, though not quite so concerned about things like slavery.

Washington’s Dream.

—Nate Anderson

Commercial parodies

I’ve always been partial to SNL‘s commercial parodies, probably because I saw way too many similar (but earnest) commercials while watching terrestrial TV growing up.

The other good thing about the commercial format is that it’s hard to make them longer than about two minutes, so they don’t outstay their welcome like some other SNL sketches

It’s hard to pick just one, so I’ll give a trio, along with the bits I think about and/or quote regularly.

Old Glory Insurance: “I don’t even know why the scientists make them!” (Season 21)

Old Glory Insurance.

First Citywide Change Bank: “All the time, our customers ask us, ‘How do you make money doing this?’ The answer is simple: volume.” (Season 14)

First CityWide Change Bank.

Happy Fun Ball: “Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball” (Season 16)

Happy Fun Ball.

—Kyle Orland

Anything with Phil Hartman (Seasons 12 to 20)

Phil Hartman was a regular on Saturday Night Live throughout my high school and college years, and it was nice to know that on the rare Saturday night when I did not have a date or plans, he and the cast would be on television to provide entertainment. He was the “glue” guy during his time on the show, playing a variety of roles and holding the show together.

Here are some of his most memorable sketches, at least to me.

Anal Retentive Chef. Hartman acts as Gene, who is… well, anal retentive. He appeared in five different skits over the years. This is the first one. (Season 14)

The Anal Retentive Chef.

Hartman had incredible range. During his first year on the show, he played President Reagan, who at the time had acquired the reputation of becoming doddering and forgetful. However, as Hartman clearly shows us in this sketch, that is far from reality. (Season 12)

President Reagan, Mastermind.

And here he is a few years later, during the first year of President Clinton’s term in office. This skit also features Chris Farley, who was memorable in almost everything he appeared in. “Do you mind if I wash it down?” (Season 18)

President Bill Clinton at McDonald’s.

Kyle has noted commercial parodies above, and there are many good ones. Hartman often appeared in these because he did such a good job of playing the “straight man” character in comedy, the generally normal person in contrast to all of the wackiness happening in a scene. One of Hartman’s most famous commercials is for Colon Blow cereal. However, my favorite is this zany commercial for Jiffy Pop… Airbags. (Season 17)

Jiffy Pop Airbag.

—Eric Berger

Motherlover (Season 34)

The Lonely Island (an American comedy trio, formed by Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer, which wrote comedy music videos) had bigger, more viral hits, but nothing surpasses the subversiveness of “to me, you’re like a brother, so be my motherlover.”

Motherlover.

—Jacob May

More Cowbell (Season 25)

This classic sketch gets featured on almost all SNL “best of” lists; “more cowbell” even made it into the dictionary. It’s a sendup of VH1’s “Behind the Music,” focused on the recording of Blue Oyster Cult’s 1975 hit “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” which features a distinctive percussive cowbell in the background. Will Ferrell is perfection as fictional cowbell player Gene Frenkel, whose overly enthusiastic playing is a distraction to his bandmates. But Christopher Walken’s “legendary” (and fictional) producer Bruce Dickinson loves the cowbell, encouraging Gene to “really explore the studio space” with each successive take. “I gotta have more cowbell, baby!”

Things escalate as Gene’s playing first becomes too flamboyant, and then passive-aggressive, until the band works through its tensions and decides to embrace the cowbell after all. The comic timing is spot on, and the cast doesn’t let the joke run too long (a common flaw in lesser SNL skits). Ferrell’s physical antics and Walken’s brilliantly deadpan delivery—”I got a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell!”—has the cast on the verge of breaking character throughout. It deserves its place in the pantheon of SNL‘s best.

More Cowbell.

—Jennifer Ouellette

The Californians (Season 37-present day)

I was going to go with Old Glory Insurance as my favorite SNL skit, but since Kyle already grabbed that one, I have to fall back on some of my runners-up. And although the Microsoft Robots and Career Day and even good ol’ Jingleheimer Junction almost topped my list, ultimately, I have to give it up to the recurring SNL skit that has probably given me more joy than anything the show has done since John Belushi’s samurai librarian. I am speaking of The Californians.

This fake soap opera, featuring a cast of perpetually blonde, perpetually unfaithful, perpetually directions-obsessed California stereotypes hits me just right. The elements that get repeated in every skit (including and especially Fred Armisen’s inevitable “WHATAREYUUUUDUUUUUUUINGHERE” or the locally produced furniture that everyone makes a point of using in the second act) are the kind of absurdities that get funnier over time, and it’s awesome to see guest stars try on the hyper-SoCal accent that is mandatory for all characters in the Californians’ universe.

Special props to Kristen Wiig, too—she’s inevitably hilarious, but her incredulous line reading when Mick Jagger shows up as Stuart’s long-absent father (“STUART! You never told me you had a dad!”) can and will fully send me into doubled-over hysterics every single time.

The Californians.

—Lee Hutchinson

What’s the fuss about?

In more than 20 years of living in the United States, few things still remain as far outside my cultural frame of reference as SNL. Whenever someone makes an unintelligible joke in Slack (or IRC before it) and everyone laughs, it invariably turns out to be some SNL thing that anyone who grew up here instinctively understands.

To me, it was always just *crickets*.

—Jonathan Gitlin

Black Jeopardy (Season 42)

Kenan Thompson was the show’s first cast member born after SNL‘s premiere in 1975, and after joining the show in 2003, he has become its longest-running cast member. Whenever he is on screen, you know you’re about to see something hilarious. One of his best roles on SNL has become the “game show host,” with long-running bits on Family Feud and the absurdly hilarious Black Jeopardy. The most famous of these latter skits occurred in 2016, when Tom Hanks appeared. If you haven’t watched it, you really must.

Black Jeopardy.

—Eric Berger

Josh Acid (Season 15)

One of my favorite SNL sketches (and perhaps one of the most underrated) is an Old West send-up featuring a sheriff named “Josh Acid” (played by Mel Gibson during his hosting appearance in 1989), who keeps two bottles of acid in holsters instead of the standard six-shooter revolvers.

The character is a hero in his town, but when he throws acid on people, their skin melts, and they die a horrible, gruesome death. The townspeople witness one such death and say it’s “gross.” In response, the main character cites Jim Bowie using a Bowie knife and says, “I use acid because that’s my name.” At one point, Kevin Nealon, as the bartender, says the town is grateful he’s cleaned up the place, but “it’s just that we’re not sure which is worse: lawlessness, or having to watch people die horribly from acid.”

Later, when a woman asks Josh to choose between her or acid, he says, “Frida, I took a job, and that job’s not done until every criminal in this territory is either behind bars or melted down.”

The sketch is just absurdly ridiculous in a delightful way, and it gleefully subverts the stoic nobility of the stereotypical Western hero, which is a trope baby boomers grew up with on TV. If I were to stretch, I’d also say it works because it lampoons the idea that some methods of legally or rightfully killing someone are more honorable and socially acceptable than others.

It’s not on YouTube that I can find, but I found a copy on TikTok.

—Benj Edwards

Hidden Camera Commercials (Season 17)

For me—and, I suspect, most people—there are several “golden ages” of SNL. But if I had to pick just one, it would be the Chris Farley era. The crown jewel of Farley’s SNL tenure was certainly the Bob Odenkirk- penned “Van Down by the River.” Today, though, I’d like to highlight a deeper cut: a coffee commercial in which Farley’s character is told he is drinking decaf coffee instead of regular. Instead of being delighted that he can’t tell the difference in taste, he gets… ANGRY.

Farley’s incredulous “what?” and dawning rage at being deceived never fail to make me laugh.

Hidden Camera Commercials.

—Aaron Zimmerman

Wake Up and Smile (Season 21)

SNL loves to take a simple idea and repeat it—sometimes without enough progression. But “Wake Up and Smile” stands out by following its simple idea (perky morning show hosts are lost without their teleprompters) into an incredibly dark place. In six minutes, you can watch the polished veneer of civilization collapse into tribal violence, all within the absurdist confines of a vapid TV show. In the end, everyone wakes from their temporary dystopian dreamland. Well, except for the weatherman.

Wake Up and Smile

—Nate Anderson

Thanks, Nate, and everyone who contributed. Indeed, one of the joys of watching the show live is you never know when a sketch is going to dark or very, very dark.

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

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Streaming used to make stuff networks wouldn’t. Now it wants safer bets.

amazon prime video, culture, Disney Plus, netflix, peacock, streaming, Tech / Paul Patrick / February 13, 2025

Opinion: Streaming gets more cable-like with new focus on live events, mainstream content.

A scene from The OA. Credit: Netflix

There was a time when it felt like you needed a streaming subscription in order to contribute to watercooler conversations. Without Netflix, you couldn’t react to House of Cards’ latest twist. Without Hulu, you couldn’t comment on how realistic The Handmaid’s Tale felt, and you needed Prime Video to prefer The Boys over the latest Marvel movies. In the earlier days of streaming, when streaming providers were still tasked with convincing customers that streaming was viable, streaming companies strived to deliver original content that lured customers.

But today, the majority of streaming services are struggling with profitability, and the Peak TV era, a time when TV programming budgets kept exploding and led to iconic original series like Game of Thrones, is over. This year, streaming companies are pinching pennies. This means they’re trying harder to extract more money from current subscribers through ads and changes to programming strategies that put less emphasis on original content.

What does that mean for streaming subscribers, who are increasingly paying more? And what does it mean for watercooler chat and media culture when the future of TV increasingly looks like TV’s past, with a heightened focus on live events, mainstream content, and commercials?

Streaming offered new types of shows and movies—from the wonderfully weird to uniquely diverse stories—to anyone with a web connection and a few dollars a month. However, more conservative approaches to original content may cause subscribers to miss out on more unique, niche programs that speak to diverse audiences and broader viewers’ quirkier interests.

Streaming companies are getting more stingy

To be clear, streaming services are expected to spend more on content this year than last year. Ampere Analysis predicted in January that streaming services’ programming budgets will increase by 0.4 percent in 2025 to $248 billion. That’s slower growth than what occurred in 2024 (2 percent), which was fueled by major events, including the 2024 Summer Olympics and US presidential election. Ampere also expects streaming providers to spend more than linear TV channels will on content for the first time ever this year. But streaming firms are expected to change how they distribute their content budgets, too.

Peter Ingram, research manager at Ampere Analysis, expects that streaming services will spend about 35 percent on original scripted programming in 2025, down from 45 percent in 2022, per Ampere’s calculations.

Amazon Prime Video is reportedly “buying fewer film and TV projects than they have in the past,” according to a January report from The Information citing eight unnamed producers who are either working with or have worked with Amazon in the last two years. The streaming service has made some of the most expensive original series ever and is reportedly under pressure from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to reach profitability by the end of 2025, The Information said, citing two unnamed sources. Prime Video will reportedly focus more on live sports events, which brings revenue from massive viewership and ads (that even subscribers to Prime Video’s ad-free tier will see).

Amazon has denied The Information’s reporting, with a spokesperson claiming that the number of Prime Video projects “grew from 2023 to 2024” and that Prime Video expects “the same level of growth” in 2025. But after expensive moves, like Amazon’s $8.5 billion MGM acquisition and projects with disproportionate initial returns, like Citadel, it’s not hard to see why Prime Video might want to reduce content spending, at least temporarily.

Prime Video joins other streaming services in the push for live sports to reach or improve profitability. Sports rights accounted for 4 percent of streaming services’ content spending in 2021, and Ampere expects that to reach 11 percent in 2025, Ingram told Ars:

These events offer services new sources of content that have pre-built fan followings, (helping to bring in new users to a platform) while also providing existing audiences with a steady stream of weekly content installments to help them remain engaged long-term.

Similarly, Disney, whose content budget includes theatrical releases and content for networks like The Disney Channel in addition to what’s on Disney+, has been decreasing content spending since 2022, when it spent $33 billion. In 2025, Disney plans to spend about $23 billion on content. Discussing the budget cut with investors earlier this month, CFO Hugh Johnston said Disney’s focused “on identifying opportunities where we’re spending money perhaps less efficiently and looking for opportunities to do it more efficiently.”

Further heightening the importance of strategic content spending for streaming businesses is the growing number of services competing for subscription dollars.

“There has been an overall contraction within the industry, including layoffs,” Dan Green, director of the Master of Entertainment Industry Management program at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College & College of Fine Arts, told Ars. “Budgets are looked at more closely and have been reined in.”

Peacock, for example, has seen its biggest differentiator come not from original series (pop quiz: what’s your favorite Peacock original?) but from the Summer Olympics. A smaller streaming service compared to Netflix or Prime Video, Peacock’s spending on content went from tripling from 2021 to 2023 to an expected 12 percent growth rate this year and 3 percent next year, per S&P Global Market Intelligence. The research firm estimated last year that original content will represent less than 25 percent of Peacock’s programming budget over the next five years.

Tyler Aquilina, a media analyst at the Variety Intelligence Platform (VIP+) research firm, told me that smaller services are more likely to reduce original content spending but added:

Legacy media companies like Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery are, to a certain degree, in the same boat as Netflix: the costs of sports rights keep rising, so they will need to spend less on other content in order to keep their content budgets flat or trim them.

Streaming services are getting less original

Data from entertainment research firm Luminate’s 2024 Year-End Film & TV Report found a general decline in the number of drama series ordered by streaming services and linear channels between 2019 (304) and 2024 (285). The report also noted a 27 percent drop in the number of drama series episodes ordered from 2019 (3,393) to 2024 (2,492).

Beyond dramas, comedy series orders have been declining the past two years, per Luminate’s data. From 2019 to 2024, “the number of total series has declined by 39 percent, while the number of episodes/hours is down by 47 percent,” Luminate’s report says.

And animated series “have been pummeled over the past few years to an all-time low” with the volume of cartoons down 31 percent in 2024 compared to 2023, per the report.

The expected number of new series releases this year, per Luminate. Credit: Luminate Film & TV

Aquilina at VIP+, a Luminate sister company, said: “As far as appealing to customers, the reality is that the enormous output of the Peak TV era was not a successful business strategy; Luminate data has shown original series viewership on most platforms (other than Netflix) is often concentrated among a small handful of shows.” While Netflix is slightly increasing content spending from 2024 to 2025, it’s expected that “less money will be going toward scripted originals as the company spends more on sports rights and other live events,” the analyst said.

Streaming services struggle to make money with original content

The streaming industry is still young, meaning companies are still determining the best way to turn streaming subscriptions into successful businesses. The obvious formula of providing great content so that streamers get more subscribers and make more money isn’t as direct as it seems. One need only look at Apple TV+’s critically acclaimed $20 billion library that only earned 0.3 percent of US TV screen viewing time in June 2024, per Nielsen, to understand the complexities of making money off of quality content.

When it comes to what is being viewed on streaming services, the top hits are often things that came out years ago or are old network hits, such as Suits, a USA Network original series that ended in 2019 and was the most-streamed show in 2023, per Nielsen, or The Big Bang Theory, a CBS show that ended in 2019 and was the most binged show in 2024, per Nielsen, or Little House on the Prairie, which ended in 1983 and Nielsen said was streamed for 13.25 billion minutes on Peacock last year.

There’s also an argument for streaming services to make money off low-budget (often old) content streamed idly in the background. Perceived demand for background content is considered a driver for growing adoption of free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels like Tubi and the generative AI movies that TCL’s pushing on its FAST channels.

Meanwhile, TVs aren’t watched the way they used to be. Social media and YouTube have gotten younger audiences accustomed to low-budget, short videos, including videos summarizing events from full-length original series and movies. Viral video culture has impacted streaming and TV viewing, with YouTube consistently dominating streaming viewing time in the US and revealing this week that TVs are the primary device used to watch YouTube. Companies looking to capitalize on these trends may find less interest in original, high-budget scripted productions.

The wonderfully weird at risk

Streaming opened the door for many shows and movies to thrive that would likely not have been made or had much visibility through traditional distribution means. From the wonderfully weird like The OA and Big Mouth, to experimental projects like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, to shows from overseas, like Squid Game, and programs that didn’t survive on network TV, like Futurama, streaming led to more diverse content availability and surprise hits than what many found on broadcast TV.

If streaming services are more particular about original content, the result could be that subscribers miss out on more of the artistic, unique, and outlandish projects that helped make streaming feel so exciting at first. Paramount, for example, said in 2024 that a reduced programming budget would mean less local-language content in foreign markets and more focus on domestic hits with global appeal.

Carnegie Mellon University’s Green agreed that tighter budgets could potentially lead to “less diverse storytelling being available.”

“What will it take for a new, unproven storyteller (writer) to break through without as many opportunities available? Instead, there may be more emphasis on outside licensed content, and perhaps some creators will be drawn to bigger checks from some of the larger streamers,” he added.

Elizabeth Parks, president and CMO at Parks Associates, a research firm focused on IoT, consumer electronics, and entertainment, noted that “many platforms are shifting focus toward content creation rather than new curated, must-watch originals,” which could create a”more fragmented, less compelling viewer experience with diminishing differentiation between platforms.”

As streaming services more aggressively seek live events, like award shows and sporting events, and scripted content with broader appeal, they may increasingly mirror broadcast TV.

“The decision by studios to distribute their own content to competitors… shows how content is being monetized beyond just driving direct subscriptions,” Parks said. “This approach borrows from traditional TV syndication models and signals a shift toward maximizing content value over time, instead of exclusive content.”

Over the next couple of years, we can expect streaming services to be more cautious about content investments. Services will be less interested in providing a bounty of original exclusives and more focused on bottom lines. They will need “to ensure that spend does not outpace revenues, and platforms can maintain attractive profit margins,” Ampere’s Ingram explained. Original hit shows will still be important, but we’ll likely see fewer gambles and more concerted efforts toward safer bets at mainstream appeal.

For streaming customers who are fatigued with the number of services available and dissatisfied with content quality, it’s a critical time for streaming services to prove that they’re an improvement over other traditional TV and not just giving us the same ol’, same ol’.

“The streaming services that most appeal to customers host robust libraries of content that people want to watch, and as long as that’s the case, they’ll continue to do so. That’s why Netflix and Disney are still the top streamers,” Ingram said.

Scharon is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica writing news, reviews, and analysis on consumer gadgets and services. She’s been reporting on technology for over 10 years, with bylines at Tom’s Hardware, Channelnomics, and CRN UK.

Streaming used to make stuff networks wouldn’t. Now it wants safer bets. Read More »

Wheel of Time S3 trailer tees us up for Last Battle

culture, Entertainment, prime video, streaming television, Trailers, TV trailers, wheel of time / Tim Belzer / February 13, 2025

After defeating Ishamael, one of the most powerful of the Forsaken, at the end of Season Two, Rand reunites with his friends in the city of Falme and is declared the Dragon Reborn. But in Season Three, the threats against the Light are multiplying: the White Tower stands divided, the Black Ajah run free, old enemies return to the Two Rivers, and the remaining Forsaken are in hot pursuit of the Dragon… including Lanfear, whose relationship with Rand will mark a crucial choice between Light and Dark for them both.

Prime Video released a one-minute teaser for The Wheel of Time at CCXP24 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in December. That teaser was notable for Moraine’s prediction concerning her and Rand’s intertwined fates: “In every future where I lived, Rand dies. And the only way he lives is if I don’t.”

The full trailer reiterates that prediction and gives us glimpses of a battle breaking out in the White Tower, the port city of Tanchico, and growing tension between Rand and Egwene (Madeleine Madden), who is troubled by Rand’s romantic entanglement with Lanfear (Natasha O’Keeffe), a powerful member of the Forsaken who hopes to seduce Rand to the Shadow. It’s all gearing up for Rand’s destiny to fight in the Last Battle.

The first three episodes of the third season of The Wheel of Time premiere on March 13, 2025, with episodes airing weekly after that through April 17.

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Apple TV+ crosses enemy lines, will be available as an Android app starting today

Apple, Apple TV, culture / Paul Patrick / February 12, 2025

Apple is also adding the ability to subscribe to Apple TV+ through both the Android and Google TV apps using Google’s payment system, whereas the old Google TV app required subscribing on another device.

Apple TV+ is available for $9.99 a month, or $19.95 a month as part of an Apple One subscription that bundles 2TB of iCloud storage, Apple Music, and Apple Arcade support (a seven-day free trial of Apple TV+ is also available). MLS Season Pass is available as a totally separate $14.99 a month or $99 per season subscription, but people who subscribe to both Apple TV+ and MLS Season Pass can save $2 a month or $20 a year on the MLS subscription.

Apple TV+ has had a handful of critically acclaimed shows, including Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, and Severance. But so far, that hasn’t translated to huge subscriber numbers; as of last year, Apple had spent about $20 billion making original TV shows and movies for Apple TV+, but the service has only about 10 percent as many subscribers as Netflix. As Bloomberg put it last July, “Apple TV+ generates less viewing in one month than Netflix does in one day.”

Whether an Android app can help turn that around is anyone’s guess, but offering an Android app brings Apple closer to parity with other streaming services, which have all supported Apple’s devices and Android devices for many years now.

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Drones are now launching drones to attack other drones in Ukraine

culture, Drones, Ukraine, war / Kris Guyer / February 4, 2025

Radio mast

The Ukrainian military is talking up a new ground drone called the Pliushch, which doesn’t carry a weapon but instead features a folded, 10-meter (32-foot) tall radio mast. The drone has a range of 40 km (25 miles), and once in position, it can raise the radio mast, which can be used either as a communications repeater or as a mobile electronic warfare station.

The future of drone combat

These examples are really just a partial list—it doesn’t even touch on the continually updated naval drones that Ukraine continues to deploy in the Black Sea—and for every new innovation, there will shortly be a counter-innovation. Case in point: electronic warfare has now saturated front-line combat areas in Ukraine and Russia and, in some places, is so bad that fiber optic drones are now used to avoid its effects. (These drones unspool miles of ultra-thin fiber-optic cable behind them as they fly, which provides a high-quality, unjammable video and control channel to the drone.)

Because fiber optic drones lack the electromagnetic transmissions that can make drones easy to pinpoint, new methods (including short-range radar systems) are now used to hunt them down, while quick-reaction units will use small attack drones to hit the fiber optic drone before it reaches its target.

Given the many kinds of drone hardware available, you might wonder why more assaults don’t rely on machines rather than humans. Now that ground drones are entering the fight in greater numbers, this does appear to be happening. For instance, local news reports from Ukraine in December described how the Khartia brigade of the Ukrainian National Guard attacked Russian positions using only a mix of machine gun ground drones, aerial attack drones, and mine-laying/clearing drones.

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The Severance writer and cast on corporate cults, sci-fi, and more

Adam Scott, Apple, Apple TV, culture, Features, sci-fi, severance, streaming, TV / Tim Belzer / February 1, 2025

The following story contains light spoilers for season one of Severence but none for season 2.

The first season of Severance walked the line between science-fiction thriller and Office Space-like satire, using a clever conceit (characters can’t remember what happens at work while at home, and vice versa) to open up new storytelling possibilities.

It hinted at additional depths, but it’s really season 2’s expanded worldbuilding that begins to uncover additional themes and ideas.

After watching the first six episodes of season two and speaking with the series’ showrunner and lead writer, Dan Erickson, as well as a couple of members of the cast (Adam Scott and Patricia Arquette), I see a show that’s about more than critiquing corporate life. It’s about all sorts of social mechanisms of control. It’s also a show with a tremendous sense of style and deep influences in science fiction.

Corporation or cult?

When I started watching season 2, I had just finished watching two documentaries about cults—The Vow, about a multi-level marketing and training company that turned out to be a sex cult, and Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God, about a small, Internet-based religious movement that believed its founder was the latest human form of God.

There were hints of cult influences in the Lumon corporate structure in season 1, but without spoiling anything, season 2 goes much deeper into them. As someone who has worked at a couple of very large media corporations, I enjoyed Severance’s send-up of corporate culture. And as someone who has worked in tech startups—both good and dysfunctional ones—and who grew up in a radical religious environment, I now enjoy its send-up of cult social dynamics and power plays.

Employees watch a corporate propaganda video — Lumon controls what information is presented to its employees to keep them in line. Credit: Apple

When I spoke with showrunner Dan Erickson and actor Patricia Arquette, I wasn’t surprised to learn that it wasn’t just me—the influence of stories about cults on season 2 was intentional.

Erickson explained:

I watched all the cult documentaries that I could find, as did the other writers, as did Ben, as did the actors. What we found as we were developing it is that there’s this weird crossover. There’s this weird gray zone between a cult and a company, or any system of power, especially one where there is sort of a charismatic personality at the top of it like Kier Eagan. You see that in companies that have sort of a reverence for their founder.

Arquette also did some research on cults. “Very early on when I got the pilot, I was pretty fascinated at that time with a lot of cult documentaries—Wild Wild Country, and I don’t know if you could call it a cult, but watching things about Scientology, but also different military schools—all kinds of things like that with that kind of structure, even certain religions,” she recalled.

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Buoy meets satellite soulmate in Love Me

culture, film, Love Me, science fiction film / Tim Belzer / January 31, 2025

a postapocalyptic love story about transformation

Ars chats with directors Andy and Sam Zuchero and props department head Roberts Cifersons.

Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun star in Love Me Credit: Bleecker Street

There have been a lot of films and television series exploring sentient AI, consciousness, and identity, but there’s rarely been quite such a unique take on those themes as that provided by Love Me, the first feature film from directors Andy and Sam Zuchero. The film premiered at Sundance last year, where it won the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize, and is now getting a theatrical release.

(Some spoilers below.)

The film is set long after humans and all other life forms have disappeared from the Earth, leaving just remnants of our global civilization behind. Kristen Stewart plays one of those remnants: a little yellow SMART buoy we first see trapped in ice in a desolate landscape. The buoy has achieved a rudimentary sentience, sufficient to respond to the recorded message being beamed out by an orbiting satellite (Steven Yeun) overhead to detect any new lifeforms that might appear. Eager to have a friend—even one that’s basically a sophisticated space chatbot—the buoy studies the vast online database of information about humanity on Earth the satellite provides. It homes in on YouTube influencers Deja and Liam (also played by Stewart and Yeun), presenting itself to the satellite as a lifeform named Me.

Over time—a LOT of time—the buoy and satellite (now going by Iam) “meet” in virtual space and take on humanoid avatars. They become increasingly more advanced in their consciousness, exchanging eccentric inspirational memes, re-enacting the YouTubers’ “date night,” and eventually falling in love. But the course of true love doesn’t always run smoothly, even for the last sentient beings on Earth—especially since Me has not been honest with Iam about her true nature.

At its core, Love Me is less pure sci-fi and more a postapocalyptic love story about transformation. “We really wanted to make a movie that made everyone feel big and small at the same time,” Sam Zuchero told Ars. “So the timescale is gigantic, 13 billion years of the universe. But we wanted to make the love story at its core feel fleeting and explosive, as first love feels so often.”

The film adopts an unusual narrative structure. It’s split into three distinct visual styles: practical animatronics, classical animation augmented with motion capture, and live action, each representing the development of the main characters as they discover themselves and each other, becoming more and more human as the eons pass. At the time, the couple had been watching a lot of Miyazaki films with their young son.

“We were really inspired by how he would take his characters through so many different forms,” Andy Zuchero told Ars. “It’s a different feeling than a lot of Western films. It was exciting to change the medium of the movie as the characters progressed. The medium grows until it’s finally live action.” The 1959 film Pillow Talk was another source of inspiration since a good chunk of that film simply features stars Rock Hudson and Doris Day chatting in a split screen over their shared party line—what Andy calls “the early 20th century’s version of an open Zoom meeting.”

Building the buoy

One can’t help but see shades of WALL-E in the plucky little space buoy’s design, but the basic concept of what Me should look like came from actual nautical buoys, per props department head Roberts Cifersons of Laird FX, who created the animatronic robots for the film. “As far as the general shape and style of both the buoy and our satellite, most of it came from our production designer,” he told Ars. “We just walked around the shop and looked at 1,000 different materials and samples, imagining what could be believable in the future, but still rooted somewhat in reality. What it would look like if it had been floating there for tens of thousands of years, and if it were actually stuck in ice, what parts would be damaged or not working?”

Cifersons and his team also had to figure out how to bring character and life to their robotic buoy. “We knew the eye or the iris would be the key aspect of it, so that was something we started fooling around with well before we even had the whole design—colors, textures, motion,” he said. They ended up building four different versions: the floating “hero buoy,” a dummy version with lighting but limited animatronics, a bisected buoy for scenes where it is sitting in ice, and a “skeleton” buoy for later in the film.

“All of those had a brain system that we could control whatever axes and motors and lights and stuff were in each, and we could just flip between them,” said Cifersons. “There were nine or 10 separate motor controllers. So the waist could rotate in the water, because it would have to be able to be positioned to camera. We could rotate the head, we could tilt the head up and down, or at least the center eye would tilt up and down. The iris would open and close.” They could also control the rotation of the antenna to ensure it was always facing the same way.

It’s always a challenge designing for film because of time and budget constraints. In the case of Love Me, Cifersons and his team only had two months to make their four buoys. In such a case, “We know we can’t get too deep down the custom rabbit hole; we have to stick with materials that we know on some level and just balance it out,” he said. “Because at the end of the day, it has to look like an old rusted buoy floating in the ocean.”

It helped that Cifersons had a long Hollywood history of animatronics to build upon. “That’s the only way it’s possible to do that in the crazy film timelines that we have,” he said. “We can’t start from scratch every single time; we have to build on what we have.” His company had timeline-based software to program the robots’ motions according to the directors’ instructions and play it back in real time. His team also developed hardware to give them the ability to completely pre-record a set of motions and play it back. “Joysticks and RC remotes are really the bread and butter of current animatronics, for film at least,” he said. “So we were able to blend more theme park animatronic software with on-the-day filming style.”

On location

Once the robots had been completed, the directors and crew spent several days shooting on location in February on a frozen Lake Abraham in Alberta, Canada—or rather, several nights, when the temperatures dipped to -20° F. “Some of the crew were refusing to come onto the ice because it was so intense,” Sam Zuchero recalled. They also shot scenes with the buoy floating on water in the Salish Sea off the coast of Vancouver, which Andy Zuchero described as “a queasy experience. Looking at the monitor when you’re on a boat is nauseating.”

Later sequences were shot amid the sand dunes of Death Valley, with the robot surrounded by bentonite clay strewn with 65 million-year-old fossilized sea creatures. The footage of the satellite was shot on a soundstage, using NASA imagery on a black screen.

YouTube influencers Deja and Liam become role models for the buoy and satellite. Bleecker Street

Cifersons had his own challenges with the robot buoys, such as getting batteries to last more than 10 seconds in the cold and withstanding high temperatures for the desert shoot. “We had to figure out a fast way to change batteries that would last long enough to get a decent wide shot,” he said. “We ended up giving each buoy their own power regulators so we could put in any type of battery if we had to get it going. We could hardwire some of them if we had to. And then in the desert, electronics hate hot weather, and there’s little microcontrollers and all sorts of hardware that doesn’t want to play well in the hot sun. You have to design around it knowing that those are the situations it’s going into.”

The animated sequences presented a different challenge. The Zucheros decided to put their stars into motion-capture suits to film those scenes, using video game engines to render avatars similar to what one might find in The Sims. However, “I think we were drinking a little bit of the AI technological Kool-Aid when we started,” Andy Zuchero admitted. That approach produced animated versions of Stewart and Yeun that “felt stilted, robotic, a bit dead,” he said. “The subtlety that Kristen and Steven often bring ended up feeling, in this form, almost lifeless.” So they relied upon human animators to “artfully interpret” the actors’ performances into what we see onscreen.

This approach “also allowed us to base the characters off their choices,” said Sam Zuchero. “Usually an animated character is the animator. It’s very connected to who the animator is and how the animator moves and thinks. There’s a language of animation that we’ve developed over the past 100 years—things like anticipation. If you’re going to run forward, you have to pull back first. These little signals that we’ve all come to understand as the language of animation have to be built into a lot of choices. But when you have the motion capture data of the actors and their intentions, you can truly create a character that is them. It’s not just an animator’s body in motion and an actor’s voice with some tics of the actor. It is truly the actors.”

Love Me opens in select theaters today.

Trailer for Love Me.

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

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There’s not much for anyone to like in the Star Trek: Section 31 movie

culture, Star Trek, Star Trek Section 31 / Mike M. / January 28, 2025

It is, in a word, awful. Which is really a shame!

Putting the “TV” in “TV movie”

Sam Richardson as Quasi, a shape-shifter. Comedy and melodrama coexist uneasily throughout *Section 31*. Credit: Michael Gibson/Paramount+

The movie explains its premise clearly enough, albeit in a clumsy exposition-heavy voiceover section near the beginning: Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) was once the ruler of the bloodthirsty Terran Empire, an evil mirror of Star Trek’s utopian United Federation of Planets. She crossed over into “our” universe and gradually reformed, sort of, before vanishing. Now Section 31—Starfleet’s version of the CIA, more or less—needs to track her down and enlist her to help them save the galaxy from another threat that has crossed over from the evil universe to ours.

Emperor Georgiou originated on Star Trek: Discovery, and she was a consistently fun presence on a very uneven show. Yeoh clearly had a blast playing a sadistic, horny version of the kind and upstanding Captain Georgiou who died in Discovery‘s premiere.

But that fun is mostly absent here. To the extent that anything about Section 31 works, it’s as a sort of brain-off generic sci-fi action movie, Star Trek’s stab at a Suicide Squad-esque antihero story. Things happen in space, sometimes in a spaceship. There is some fighting, though nearly all of it involves punching instead of phasers or photon torpedoes. There is an Important Item that needs to be chased down, for the Fate of the Universe is at stake.

But the movie also feels more like a failed spin-off pilot that never made it to series, and it suffers for it; it’s chopped up into four ~~episodes~~ “chapters” and has to establish an entire crew’s worth of quirky misfits inside a 10-minute montage.

That might work if the script or the performers could make any of the characters endearing, but it isn’t, and they don’t. Performances are almost uniformly bad, ranging from inert to unbearable to “not trying particularly hard” (respectively: Omari Hardwick’s Alok, a humorless genetically augmented human; Sven Ruygrok’s horrifically grating Fuzz, a tiny and inexplicably Irish alien piloting a Vulkan-shaped robot; and Sam Richardson’s Quasi, whose amiable patter is right at home on Detroiters and I Think You Should Leave but is mostly distracting here). Every time one of these characters ends up dead, you feel a sense of relief because there’s one fewer one-note character to have to pay attention to.

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Alien: Earth will bring the horror home

alien franchise, culture, FX/Hulu, Hulu, Ridley Scott, streaming television, Trailers, TV trailers / Paul Patrick / January 27, 2025

Chandler’s character is named Wendy, and apparently she has “the body of an adult and the consciousness of a child.” The eminently watchable Timothy Olyphant plays her synth mentor and trainer, Kirsh, and here’s hoping he brings some space cowboy vibes to the role. The cast also includes Alex Lawther as the soldier named CJ; Samuel Blenkin as a CEO named Boy Kavalier; Essie Davis as Dame Silvia; Adarsh Gourav as Slightly; Kit Young as Tootles; and Sandra Yi Sencindiver as a senior member of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. I think we can expect at least some cast members to end up as xenomorph fodder.

Alien: Romulus was a welcome return to the franchise’s horror roots, and Alien: Earth will bring the horror to our home planet. “There’s something about seeing a Xenomorph in the wilds of Earth with your own eyes,” Hawley told Deadline Hollywood in September. “I can’t tell you under what circumstances you’ll see that, but you’ll see it — and you’re going to lock your door that night.”

As for creature design, “What was really fun for me was to really engage with the creature, bring some of my own thoughts to the design while not touching the silhouette, because that’s sacrosanct,” he said. “But some of the elements as we know, whatever the host is informs what the final creature is. I just wanted to play around a little bit to make it as scary as it should be.”

Alien: Earth premieres on FX/Hulu this summer.

poster art featuring a grinning xenomorph — Credit: FX/Hulu

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