Another season has come and gone leaving fond memories and pangs of disappointment…but did the feelings of glut from the Winter go away? Returning to discuss these matters with me are Brian Threlkeld and Bryan Morton.
GBS: I’d like to start by mentioning a quote that Brian brought to my attention at the beginning of this season:
“…TV is triage these days. While it used to be possible to catch up with every ambitious drama—during that golden era of TV efficiency, when there were only five of them—that’s no longer true. …When people angrily tweet at me that some show is the best thing on TV, I know they’re lying: they haven’t watched most of the other ones, and neither have I.”
—Emily Nussbaum The New Yorker April 13, 2015.
When we started the Spring Season just ended, this thought was very much in my mind: The ever-higher levels of anime production in Japan have posed a challenge for we mere mortals who watch: how can I fit all of this into my limited free time? It was amplified by the Winter which was filled with so much generic debris that it was only the few absolute gems that we did get which stopped me from wanting to give up on the season as a whole. As the Spring began, I was worried that we would get more of the same.
While the situation may not be as bad as domestic television in all its forms, we are certainly awash in anime. My requirements for continued viewing are not actually all that high (liking and tolerating enough to keep watching are two very different things), but I dropped 16 of the shows I tried out for this season.
BCT: You dropped almost as many as I tried to begin with…and I’ve never tried this many. Uncharted territory.
GBS: If this is the future to come, I begin to wonder if the current level of production coming out of Japan can be sustained, both as a matter of commerce and art? Surely, with so many new shows coming out every season, the quality level has to be affected. And there no doubt must be an economic cost. I think it says something when we find ourselves having double digit drop lists. This…this is the true sign of the glut. Nowadays, I am dropping more shows than what I used to try out in an entire season.
BM: Yeah, I think that’s a fair comment. Whereas even 5 years ago you could reasonably watch everything in a season, now it’s a complete no-go – there’s just too much being produced for anyone other than the stereotypical anime shut-in to have a hope. That said, being forced by time limitations to be more selective about what we watch and stick with probably isn’t a bad thing overall.
As an example, I’d point to the number of samey eroge adaptations I’ve watched over the years – shows of the likes of 11eyes or Mashiroiro Symphony. It takes a lot more nowadays for one of these shows to make the cut, purely because the underlying idea tends to be the same from one show to the next, and they do so little to stand out from the crowd.
GBS: I find myself in the same exact position with shows featuring a teenaged protagonist with superpowers. Really? Again?
Selectivity is a good thing. It helps us separate the wheat from the chaff.
BM: Exactly. But has the overall quality of a given season dropped as a result of any perceived glut? That depends on how you look at it, I suppose – there seems to me to be roughly the same number of ‘good’ shows from one season to the next (as far as you can say that, anyway, as quality is subjective), so the number of shows that I want to see is holding steady.
GBS: I think you are on to something there, about the number of shows I want to see, which always seems to hold steady at about 4-5 maximum. In a bad season, it might only be 2, but interestingly, it never seems to go above 5.
BCT: I feel like the overall quality of seasons may be staying relatively stable, but shifting more and more to different strengths depending on what season it is. Spring tends to feel like a time for safe bets, in my experience, a place to launch longer running shows, and more catered material than usual. Bad (and good) writing can seem more apparent—and with more available, and more to be picky about for the reasons made above, there seems almost more of a chance now that the entire season will be one or the other. (Fall/Winter seem to me to be where longer, story-driven two-cour shows tend to be; but no less prone to the quality perception. While the upcoming Summer shows tend to be more experimental, perhaps—which means more variety, but also more variability, again, in quality.)
GBS: I’m not sure it maps exactly like that, though I don’t have any fixed ideas about it myself. But I do feel like there are some seasons that just feel weaker as a whole, even if they may have had some very good shows running during them.
For example, last season there were easily 5 or 6 shows that if not carbon copies of each other at the very least bore strong family resemblances. The family trees have too many lines connecting the same ancestors. So much that you could snip out an episode of one, drop it in another, perhaps just change the hair colors to match the destination show and voilá: you have an episode that fits perfectly. But then with so many new shows every season, it should not come as any surprise that there is greater standardization and mechanization to the whole thing.
BCT: The casualty of that increased selectivity necessary to navigate this increased access to so many shows, and so many similar kinds of shows, is that it may make us more and more reluctant to waste any time on what we think would not interest us…
GBS: There is only so much time in the day…
BCT: …and for thinner reasons than usual: banishing a show because of studio, or gender balance, or because, even if it’s not that genre, it sure looks like that genre. Which only leads to the conundrum Nussbaum presents: how do we even know—how can we argue with each other about what we should be watching—when almost none of us watch everything?
Of course, there are some who do watch it all. But ya’ll nuts.
GBS: That’s a problem, I think, more for us reviewers than for the average watcher. But in the end, I come to the same solution as Nussbaum and the average viewer: I cut where I can in order to keep a sane number of shows on my weekly viewing list. Down the other path lies insanity unless you have unlimited free time. And then I try my best to argue for why I’ve kept some shows and why I’ve dropped others.
Certainly a lot of food for thought here about a potential “glut” of production. But did the Spring offerings do anything to relieve that feeling? Perhaps it’s time to move on to the highlights and lowlights of Spring 2015.
