Big Plans For ‘Love, Death & Robots’ Volume 5, But Viewership Drops 50% and Ratings Plummet
Big Plans For ‘Love, Death & Robots’ Volume 5, But Viewership Drops 50% and Ratings Plummet
Love, Death and Robots volume 4 was the most controversial to date - what impact will that have on Netflix's decision to renew or cancel?
I was not impressed. Probably two episodes were up to their established standard. Several barely made sense, were just a showcase for an animation style, or told no story at all. Hopefully they come out swinging with a new season, but this one felt like they phoned it in
I've enjoyed Love, Death & Robots in the past and was looking forward to a new season. But I've recently quit Netflix, along with all other streaming services. So the only way I'm going to see the new content is by sailing the digital seas. Which doesn't help their ratings.
400 Boys was decent, I chuckled at Close Encounters and I did quite enjoy How Zeke Got Religion despite the whole WW2 bombers thing being pretty tired as a trope. The rest of them were pretty unmemorable, alas.
I was especially disappointed at Spider Rose? I don't know how that story didn't hit harder since Sterling is one of my favorite authors.
I think it's because you could see the twist coming from a mile away. It also didn't help that the story was unfocused, there was just too much going on.
It's a bit funny. The short story is only 20 pages, and they allocated 17 minutes to the episode. Most of these short stories are within the 20 page mark with around 17 minutes an episode, but they run into this plot length problem all the time.
Beyond the Aquila Rift was also kind of all over the place with a rather dissonant ending, despite being my favorite episode of the season. The Very Pulse of the Machine cut out some important details. Swarm cut out the factions, but it was a Shaper-focused story, and the core story was still told well enough. Zima Blue actually managed to tell most of the short story in 10 minutes, though.
Don't get me wrong. I really liked these episodes. But, it still boggles the mind that it's so hard to cover a mere 20 pages in 15ish minutes. Some of these are dense concepts to express on a video medium, though.
Opening the season with a RHCP concert probably wasn't the smartest move
I thought the first season was okay, maybe 50/50 on good to bad.
Were the later seasons any better?
I really liked the first season, and they had a lot of episodes in that one. I feel like that was the most explicit season because they were really trying to sell the whole Love, Death, and Robots angles. Kind of wished they didn't temper that down with the rest of the seasons.
The second season was kinda meh, but there were some good ones here and there (Pop Squad, Snow in the Desert). I was disappointed at how few episodes there were. I still plan on doing a video on those two episodes, though.
Third season seemed to ramp back up with good episodes again (Bad Travelling, The Very Pulse of the Machine, Swarm, Jibaro).
All of the studios shifted to the Secret Levels (on Amazon) for video game related animation stories, and most of those were really good. Warhammer episode was fucking epic.
LD+R S4 isn't bad so far. Spider Rose and 400 Boys were pretty good. I had to do a double-take when I recognized the Investor race in Spider Rose, which was another Bruce Sterling short story in the Schismatrix universe (same one as Swarm), and they actually reference the Shaper/Mechanist factions this time.
I think it needed more episodes, though. It feels like S2 again, and they are wasting their time on these goofy episodes (the mini claymation stuff, anything related to Three Robots). Golgotha felt like cheating, considering most of it was real acting and light on animation. And that Red Hot Chili Peppers music video was cringe AF.
Also, including Mr (Pedophile-Enabler) Beast in one of the episodes was not a good move.
For the first three volumes, the one everyone talked about was Jibaro for its style and approach. For me the best one was Bad Traveling, no contest. Both third volume episodes. Also a monologue at the end of Pop Squad lives rent free in my head, from the second volume.
Fourth volume however starts with a red hot chilli peppers music video. I couldn't believe that nothing else happened and they made me listen to a fucking red hot chilli peppers song for no reason that i shut it off and still haven't seen the rest. I'm still angry about it.
This round of episodes were kinda weak. The RHCP episode was interesting though.
I like RHCP but that "episode" was pointless. It was just an animated music video. And the sound was bad, like they recorded it while moving around the space to make it "sound 3D" or something.
We bought a month of Netflix just to support this and black mirror but we were disappointed in this season of LD+R. Upon finishing we sat on the couch and calculated the hit to miss ratio of previous seasons compared to this one and found that for us the average hit to miss was more than half, like 60%. But for this season it was like 25%.
It feels especially bad when you've got multiple episodes that are just "wouldn't celebrity cameos be cool" or literal music vids. The misses felt both like lower lows or more commercialized. I'll continue to support LD+R for one more season but if they continue to slide I don't think we'll go through the hassle of resubscribing past that.
That being said, we need more animation, so if they were able to produce 3x the episodes a year or something, even at the worst hit to miss ratio they've had, I'd pay more for that. I think largely because the misses tend to be very short compared to like a bad episode of TV and the hits tend to be on the medium to long side of their episodes (although rarely ever hitting the 30 min mark). If they'd sell the physical/digital copies I'd also happily pay for that. But my willingness to subscribe to things not almost exclusively applies to FOSS or individual artists.
I liked it and want more but yeah not as good as previous. The biggest thing they could do is double the episodes or double their length but I imagine that would be hugely expensive.