So it's finally happening

A small piece of news on the face of it but arguably the biggest industry-related news I've bothered to cover on this blog. This has, in fact, been a long time coming and I'm sure I've made several references and predictions along this line across many, many postings in the past.

But anyway, there's an announcement about a pick-up, a straight-to-order pick-up in fact (the last I've heard this happening with Disney was with Jessie, years and years before I even started this blog) with a new series called Diary of a Female President. No no, the "long time coming" thing isn't about a TV show about OOOoooooOOOoooooOOooHHHHHH female president! Virtue Signalling! SJW! #NotAllMen! and blah blah other ultra-right wing, I swear I'm not really a white supremacist neo-Nazi card-carrying member of the KKK I only use my membership on weekends! dreck that unfortunately has made society almost unlivable right now (and here I am contributing to it anyway) and as you know I'm pretty extreme leftist myself anyway. The title actually refers to a 12-year-old going into the 7th or 8th grade whose goal is to become President - by the sounds of it, think more Stuck in the Middle and yes it will be live-action (although I don't know yet if it will be single-cam ala Stuck in the Middle or Multi-Cam). 

No no, the long time coming is - it'll be an exclusive to Disney+. As in, that's the only place you will watch it. Which means you'll have to pay an additional subscription to Disney+ on top of whatever subscriptions you have - cable/satellite subscriptions of course, but even with more and more people cutting the cord they're trading that in only for yet more subscriptions with the rise of Netflix and Hulu competitors, copycats and wannabees. 

That brings in a lot of things that are...unique, shall we say, but things that could turn into problems. The first and most critical is access, and even that has multiple facets. For starters non-traditional TV subscriptions aren't near as universal as everybody wants to think and especially as Netflix and Hulu are trying to make people think with their press releases and news from such. I myself don't have any TV subscription beyond my cable package - although I plan on changing that at least sometime this year. But this has already created in effect a "ghettoization" of haves and have-nots, especially with dependents (i.e. children and teens). This is majorly assumptive on my part but I'm willing to guess white families and households are more likely to have a non-traditional TV subscription, and that white childless adults are the most likely demographic to not only adopt non-traditional subscriptions in the first place but cut the cord while they're at it.

Again, this is an assumption (and I suppose it's easy enough to just look up the facts) but there is basis in this assumption. I wrote in my big post two years ago about the failure of Girl Meets World and why very little of the nostalgia audience Disney was actually hoping to attract would tune in - it was mostly die-hard nostalgists and fans like Christian, Sean, Mike and myself who bothered to tune in supplimenting the most basic core of Disney Channel's basic core audience anyway. But Disney Channel was hoping to bring in more, much more - not only all the people who watched Boy Meets World but most critically their children.

The only problem was, those original fans didn't have children to begin with.

And now you have a large section of children from minority and/or PoC families and households - families where the adults barely have an idea of what even the hell Boy Meets World is because when they were growing up their families were too frickin' poor to even have one goddamned TV. And so Disney Channel failed to bring in that big nostalgia family audience, because by and large that audience never existed in the first place. I mean, in the most literal sense. The demographic itself is basically a work of fiction Disney Channel deluded themselves into thinking was an assumed and assured fact.

Anyway, I hope that illustrates the basic issue right there. Disney is betting a lot on Disney+ - even if they realize it or not. The fact that they've created Disney+ in the first place is a tacit admission traditional TV is dead, keeping extant through life support and cultural inertia if nothing else. But it's not enough to create a streaming service, or any guarantee of anything at all. The guarantee boat set sail a long time ago, as soon as Netflix and Hulu established themselves as firsts, and at this point everybody's just playing copycat correctly assuming that streaming is the way to go, but incorrectly assuming that people will actually give a shit about more than one or two streaming services, let alone dozens or even hundreds, all of which will of course charge monthly fees.

Are you going to pay for Netflix, and Hulu, and CBS All Access, and Disney+, and the other streaming service Viacom recently purchased, and whatever else comes along?

Which is why I'm predicting Netflix and Hulu will effectively become uber-networks in practice, providing shows from studios around the globe (exactly as they do now). But the implications for Nickelodeon and Disney Channel (even potentially the entire CBS and Disney empires) is that they may shrink to basically being "merely" studios - or even just go belly-up and cease to exist altogether. 

UPDATE: Actually more of a "I was in a hurry when I was writing this and I forgot to include these important details": For starters, Diary of a Female President is actually produced by CBS. CBS themselves shopped it to Disney Channel/Disney+ because they felt it more appropriate for there and with Viacom's streaming acquisition still in the works didn't feel like CBS All Access was a great place for kidcoms (that, and as dozens of outlets are reporting CBS All Access is effectively flatlining if not outright dying as I mentioned above). There's also some rumors that part of the deal is CBS stipulating DoaFP must absolutely be a streaming exclusive, for whatever reason.

None of this is necessarily unique, even in combination. Disney Channel's had non-It's A Laugh Productions before (of course the imports, but those imports have been almost universally from foreign kid-centric networks with either close ties to Disney Channel or outright owned by Disney itself - but the biggest thing is the Hotel Transylvania series which is entirely made, produced and distributed by Universal Television Animation, one of Disney's arch-rivals) and there have been streaming exclusives from Disney Channel before - but up to this point they were on what used to be Watch Disney Channel, now DisneyGO. Those "streaming exclusives" were also second-run imports too, mainly some British children's cooking competition thingie (they also had Free Period which was an actual American production from Maker Studios, though that is also owned by Disney, and basically a single-cam version of So Random!! - in either case they were somewhat throwaway). But this is the first major series that will only be viewable with a paid subscription, specifically to Disney, above and outside what you're already paying to your traditional subscription TV provider (or in lieu of if you're cutting the cable although I pointed out the issues with that above).

Also I need to point out I got this news from NickAndMore's twitter, though it doesn't seem he posted it on his website yet so I'm not going to bother to post the article here (because it doesn't exist, weirdly).

Knight Squad Season 1 Reviewed

This competition isn't for the weak of heart, but fortunately my real heart is in a cave guarded by elves!

So spoiler alert: this is probably the best show on Nickelodeon right now, at least as far as multi-cams are concerned (and I'm also just going to arbitrarily lump Spongebob and Loud House in there because the network needs to be more than just 80-freaking-percent Spongebob and Loud House). So of course nobody's watching it.

This is the type of show Nickelodeon's been sorely missing for a long, long, long time. I'd say maybe even as long as I've been watching the network when Victorious and BTR were my fave Nick shows.

Oh I know what you're saying, that there's Thundermans having only recently ended and Henry Danger still going on now, at the very least. Well let me tell you, Thundermans started on pretty shaky ground and ended mixed-to-eh-ok results, and Henry Danger...is Henry Danger. Knight Squad is actually funny and fun to watch and entertaining and all that stuff. It has actual jokes that are funny and something called a freakin' plot. So there.

And another thing...

...I've just lost interest in most of the stuff on Disney Channel and Nickelodeon anyway. Maybe not so much that I can't talk off-the-cuff about it on a video setup (well maybe even that) but certainly to write for an hour or more (much more) about it. Maybe even to talk at length about it for 20+ minutes, let alone with editing/upload time.

The raw numbers and overwhelming preference for nostalgia interest bare this out. Both networks are in freefall and pushing nostalgia properties while, again most other reviewers of this stuff (who are mostly going to be on YouTube anyway like the aforementioned PieGuyRulezand NICKtendo) sway heavily into nostalgia reviews/retrospectives. I really can't blame them at this point.

I think instead of going into a super-detailed analysis of the last two years like I was going to do originally I think I'll just skim point-by-point starting with Disney Channel:

Big City Greens: ...people really like this show? It's certainly gotten better with more episodes and even the early episodes aren't bad by any means, but for me it's never risen above "it's ok." I only ever bothered to DVR two or three episodes - one or two when it first came out to check it out and the post-Moana "special" where their mom comes back. Beyond that I'll certainly watch it when it happens to be on (and in true Disney Channel fashion that's a lot) but I don't feel incentivized to go so far out of my way at all to watch it, unlike Gravity Falls or Duck Tales.

Duck Tales: well, I have all the episodes on my DVR and I'll watch them in whatever order it seems they need to be watched in (if you're familiar with the pre-break debacle you know exactly what this means)

Big Hero 6: ...I saw the first episode and it didn't really wow me enough to bother to watch any others. That's a major falling of many of these amazing-movies-turned-ok-now-we-have-to-do-the-same-thing-but-now-on-a-weekly-basis-with-no-budget

Milo Murphy's Law: ...it's been like 14 months between seasons.

Raven's Home: ...the quality has gotten better since we last looked at it, from "legitimately terrible" to "meh-tastic." It's still not anything like original That's So Raven, especially in quality

Coop and Cami Ask the World: this one is also pretty "meh-tastic." It reminds me of Season 2 of I Didn't Do It or the middle seasons of Austin & Ally with middle school-aged characters, or Girl Meets World without the pretentiousness of trying to be bigger than it ever will be or trying to be profound every single goddamned episode. 

I guess what I'm trying to say is if Girl Meets World wasn't being such a tryhard at being profound every goddamned episode it would only be "meh-tastic" instead of "this pisses me off so fucking much I'm going to flood the writers' Twitter timeline with deeply disparaging insults every time I get."

Bunk'd: yeah this is coming back for a fourth season, go figure. It's been slowly getting better in Season 3 despite getting significantly worse in Season 2, and Season 1 was pretty awful as it was. With Pamela Eells O'Connell and her entire team vacating the Disney Channel business altogether and a new team taking over, I actually have high hopes, because it can only go up from here.

Andi Mack: Like I said before, they've pretty much just lost the plot. Season 2 of Andi Mack might as well be Season 2 of True Friggin' Detective. I mean it.

...and there's a new show premiering soon but it isn't here yet, so there. Still, that's not a lot of TV shows at all and that includes one that's in the middle of a between-seasons production hiatus, not to mention Big Hero 6 which has been MIA for a long while (though not including Tangled which is in the same boat but still "theoretically" a show on Disney Channel). So let's look at Nickelodeon:

Knight Squad: I haven't seen this show but it's on my DVR, that said ratings have been terrible.

Star Falls: again I haven't seen this but it's on my DVR, with ratings being so apparently dismal it had to finish out its run on TeenNick.

The Bureau of Magical Things: this doesn't really count since it's an import like I Am Frankie (another show I have on my DVR) but it nonetheless wasn't just banished to TeenNick very quickly, but wasn't even allowed to finish there.

Henry Danger: the only thing even a remote success in terms of live-action, I can see why they're so desperate to hang onto it from a ratings standpoint. In terms of quality...eh. Honestly Schneider's ejection has resulted in a noticable bump in quality and I'm inclined to think Mike will agree.

Cousins for Life: like I said in my one-paragraph review it's probably the best live-action show on Nickelodeon right now, at least one that as it looks for now has actual renewal prospects. 

So there you go. Five live-action shows, no animated shows (excepting Spongebob and Loud House, which together make up 80% of the network and that is not an exaggeration)
and two if not three of those shows are out of production (or at least not coming back to Nickelodeon) guaranteed. 

What I'm trying to say is, excepting DCOMs and NOMs (and I spaced out on the latest NOM because I forgot it was a thing) there's pretty much nothing at all to keep me coming back to the networks. I've just lost interest.

Back in 2012-2013 when I was really getting into this, there was a lot to keep even this late-20s-something coming back. Austin & Ally, Jessie (G.I. Jessie or no) and even A.N.T. Farm had enough basic quality for me to keep coming back. Hell even Fish Hooks every now and then. Good Luck Charlie, Liv and Maddie and Shake it Up were highly entertaining, high quality, fun shows. Hell even Dog With a Blog down to the likes of I Didn't Do It and Best Friends Whenever. Now it just seems like the network is rife with a bunch of cluelessness and aimless throwing plot items at the wall with nothing really sticking. And it really does seem like it's just going to go downhill from here. Even if, say, Disney Channel were to disappear and everything gets migrated to DisneyNOW/Disney+, that's no guarantee that any of these kidcom shows will improve because they just need better writers and crew desperately.

I'm not kidding, I blame Girl Meets World for this, but that's a different thing I probably won't ever get to anyway.

But regardless, how do you expect for me to talk about any of this now?

So here's a big announcement

I'm pretty sure most of you (Spongey444 certainly did) noticed that I've (Ray) made a grand total of two posts this year, and one is really short and the other one literally ends mid-sentence.

Yeah that's no accident. 

I've talked about whether or not I'll continue this blog for so much I probably sound like a broken record or a Spider-Man reboot cycle, and I'd be willing to bet it'd be a meme if our readership was more than five people. 

But I think the number of updates and posts I've made in the past two years really speaks for itself.

And that's how I know, definitively, that I'm finally beat, at least in the form I've been making this blog into so far.

At the very least, no more long-form posts until at least April. More likely...umm, probably, uh, ever.

There's several reasons for this:

 - it's just not practical. I just don't have the time or personal resources to write long-form posts anymore or post much at all. In fact that's been true the last two years, as the paltry number of posts themselves attest to. Especially with the, let's face it, low readership numbers I have anyway. 

 - I'm not in a good situation right now. If you've been paying attention this has been true...pretty much from day 1 of this blog (in fact arguably I created this blog in the first place because I just haven't been in a good place in a long time, if ever). It's why I decided to outright cancel a collab Spongey and I have been planning for Zombies (er, Z-O-M-B-I-E-S as I keep insisting). I'd like to think the situation will get better April, but I've been saying that so much in the past I think it's just more honest to say, look, it's outright not healthy for me to keep up this blog, I mean it, so in my own best interests I simply won't, because I can't.

 - this wasn't the direction I wanted my blog to take in the first place. The intention was always to copy word-for-word Christian and Sean's style at Girl Meets World Reviewed - that specifically meant a bunch of small updates throughout the week, which is why Mike's contribution to this blog has been so critical. Unfortunately, I forgot about that and instead trying to put everything together into one big lump sum. That completely screwed up the tempo of what I wanted this blog to be. It made every single meaningful post into a three-hour endeavor or more (and I type at 120 WPM!) and it was literally getting to the point where doing posts and updates wasn't healthy - taking away from time I desperately needed for other things, including sleep.

By that I mean, I spent a lot of hours into the night working on this post explaining my ratings system that probably nobody read, and I do blame that consequent lack of sleep for a very serious mental and physical breakdown I had the very next day.

Yeah I'm pretty sure that if I keep doing that for the sake of four or five people, I'm going to very literally end up being dead, I mean it.

So I'm going to quit doing that. Literally, for my own health.

Also, it's very clear to me that traditional blogging is dead anyway.

All the big money (if you want to call it that) is going to YouTube videos, guys with lots of sarcasm and cartoony avatars of themselves (this seems to be mandatory for whatever reason even though I think it's patently stupid). These guys are pretty excellent too - PieGuyRulez, NICKtendo, even the I Hate Everything Guy and our very own (if I can claim ownership of him, which I can't) Spongey444 (stupid avatars included, although I Hate Everything Guy's is, um...downright ugly yeah there's no getting around that).

Especially since I'm too poor to hire someone to make one for me, my stupid

animated avatar for my YouTube videos would probably look like this.

The obvious lead-in would be to say that I'm making my own YouTube channel, which I at least technically have, and I've thought about it plenty of times, but it comes with its own complications:

 - for starters, the same time/resource issues I run into for this blog would def apply to making YouTube videos, probably even moreso since 1.) the expectation would be to upload a video not once a week but several times every week for, well, pretty much the rest of my goddamn life so no, 2.) My equipment is ghetto af, my iPhone barely works (yeah this is pretty much my first and last iPhone, I have to imagine Tesla adopted the Apple consumer model for some reason based on ownership feedback I've been reading on various blogs because it's complete and total garbage) and I'm otherwise stuck with the built-in webcam on my...$100 laptop...which also barely works, probably because I only paid $100 for it and 3.) it also means I have to have regular and immediate access to a guaranteed quiet, uninterrupted space which in this household just doesn't exist (yeah I'm going to outright say it if I haven't already, I pretty much live in a broken-af and miserable family situation that I more or less have to be rescued from).

 - since I want to be a published fiction author I have to tread very carefully with how I do reviews. Give the wrong review to the wrong thing and blammo! your publication prospects just evaporated. This applies doubly so for the type of sarcastic, outright caustic review style that nets the viewership and Patreon support that makes the whole venture financially worthwhile (I'm assuming NICKtendo and PieGuyRulez aren't pursuing the type of young adult author career I am). 

One potential workaround is that I just make an anonymous (or rather, semi-anonymous) separate YouTube channel, but there are hard limits to how "anonymous" you can make that (basically anybody with a functioning brain and Internet connection can figure it out within minutes if not seconds). My first and only practical defense would be relying on my viewership to just simply not care enough to bother and thus bet on their apathy (and indeed I'm taking that same risk on this very blog - which is probably a relatively safe risk to take given, you know, there's about five of you total). I can take further steps like voice disguising/modulation but 1.) there are hard limits to how far you can do that without effecting quality or in this particular case, basic comprehension, 2.) I don't even really know how to do it and 3.) again there are hard limits towards how effective it would even be towards its intended purpose and you start running into diminishing returns almost immediately.

And oh yeah 4.) I just really, really suck as a presenter. I have a really nasally voice (I pretty much sound like Lois Griffin) and I'd bet I'd be obnoxious to listen to anyway.

Actually maybe some voice modulation wouldn't be a bad idea.

That said there are some book reviewers out there that have nabbed their own book deals, but they're not exactly the most caustic ones either. Maybe there's a lesson in that.

So that's basically it. I'm not saying I'm quitting the blog, but if I am going to do updates especially between now and April they're going to be short, minor posts and even the frequency of those would be iffy. But that's how I always envisioned this blog being anyway so who knows maybe it'll work out. I really enjoyed the back-and-forth between Christian and Sean and that's what really inspired the creation of this blog. And I really don't want to say making a YouTube version of this blog is out of the question. Despite the relatively heavy resource investment there are extreme advantages to the video and even YouTube-specific format I cannot ignore, at least if I really want to keep blogging (or vlogging) about Disney Channel, Nickelodeon and tween/teen entertainment in general. Not the least of which (in fact I'll readily admit the biggest factor) being far more lucrative monetization potential, if not from YouTube itself then from Patreon and other third-party monetization vendors. 

Extra Thoughts (yes even on a post like this)

 - Speaking of which that segues into some topics I've always wanted to talk about: it's kind of impossible to ignore the so-called "culture war" going on, a war that (if you don't mind me being political) originated and existed solely on FOX News but has now managed to successfully propagate into the culture-at-large, not coincidentally timing with the rise of a certain President in office right now. That said (and this coming from someone who gleefully self-identifies as a SJW) certain left-wing actors and the left-wing at large isn't exactly innocent of some of the most annoying aspects of this culture war or for that matter helping to propagate it in the first place, either. Again, this was a war started intentionally by FOX News (really decades ago, in the late 90s, as soon as they started this "War on Christmas" nonsense), and like The War on Terror it was a war its instigators very carefully engineered for the other side to lose almost from the mere act of participating in, and whether they realize it or not the Left is indeed losing. 

But I don't really want to talk about that (although I guess I can, but upon request only) but what I do want to talk about is the issue of Patreon now "censoring" certain YouTube channels for political content - and I have to say, again as a self-identifying SJW that not only do I believe this does indeed qualify as a form of censorship, but many channels being effected are outright apolitical. Even if you do believe it's a third-party corporation's right to censor right-wing extremists and Neo-Nazis (and to be fair, I do believe in that right), it's exceedingly clear that handing off those duties to an algorithm is as it stands an outright irresponsible thing to do. At the very least it's troubling implications for any channel looking to monetize their videos, regardless where you stand on the political spectrum or how hard you try to be to be apolitical. If there's one lesson YouTube has taught us over the years that they themselves have ignored, it's that we can't trust algorithms in order to afford us the luxury of just being lazy asses.

I mean, I'm a trans-questioning feminist Liberal who very clearly does not like Trump or FOX News and there's no doubt in my mind that the Patreon algorithm would single me out all the same. And yes you can bet Patreon is using an algorithm in all of this, there's just no way they have actual humans trying to filter this all out (although I could be wrong).

But at the same time, aside from Patreon and YouTube itself (which has its own problems) or PayPal (which not only has its own problems too but are financially/corporately tied in with both Patreon and YouTube anyway) payment/funding alternatives just simply don't exist. So the only thing I can say is, tread carefully and who knows maybe people's behavior will be policed and modified for the better, although I really don't like the idea of people's behavior having to be "policed" in the first place (I advocate people should be outright taught actual behavior habits as part of basic schooling instead, but oh well. The shambles that is the American education system isn't its own topic, it's its own YouTube channel, indeed. Let's just say if I do ever have kids I'm getting the hell out of this country ASAP, I mean it).

One topic that's been very important to me is the idea of cultural arts and expression and the idea of censorship itself, especially with the #MeToo movement. This is only a fraction of what I wanted to talk about but: I mean, Chinatown is to this day one of the most amazing films I've ever seen but...it doesn't take away from the fact that Roman Polanski is, at the very least, accused (and convicted!) of raping a woman. Under circumstances uncannily similar to what my own ex-fiancee had to face. 

I don't know how to balance between the two.

Furthermore, when you do a full boycott of a work based on the actions of a single person, even if that person is the principal player in all that, you're also boycotting the earnings potential of everyone involved. Each movie is effectively a small (or even medium) business onto its own in terms of the people involved and I'm not kidding when I say a boycott puts a lot of those people's livelihoods on the line, even for movies decades old.

I guess what I'm asking is, at what point does a boycott become censorship? At what point does a creative work deserve to be censored? We live in a country where we (allegedly) cherish free speech so much Mein Kampf is readily available and we have entire web communities dedicated to white supremacy. And pedophilia. And how The Handmaid's Tale is actually a brilliant model for society and how we should turn all women and girls into sex slaves and suicide bombers (and no I'm not talking about ISIL/Daesh there are a lot of white dudes in this very country who very seriously think this).

But like I said, I don't know how to balance this. One way might be to let people accused of rape still allow their works to be distributed freely but their personal proceeds go directly to their victims, which is indeed how most modern interpretations of "Son of Sam" laws work now. But, I dunno, maybe the five of you have some thoughts.

 - Now that I've looked at it, Angry Perry looks more like an Angry Ninja Turtle.

Cousins for Live Reviewed

I like this show better than Coop & Cami. Why? I think it just goes back to basic writing - basic, but good writing on the part of Cousins for Life as opposed to...whatever Coop & Cami is trying to do.

Ummm, done?

And now the time has come, uh, again, consecutively: Nickelodeon and Disney Channel Year in Review 2018 (and, uh, 2017)

Happy New Year everyone! And blah blah blah.

So it just occurred to me that we didn't do one of these for 2017. To quote one of my favorite YouTubers, Coop772, Le Whoops.

But anyway, instead of doing a winners and losers and mourning the passing of all the shows that have gone before, let's just combine it all because, well...

...I haven't really been watching much of it.

Hell I haven't even seen a single episode of Knight Squad. The entire show is just gathering dust on my DVR unwatched. Don't worry I resolve to watch that and many more soon.

Of course we all knows what happens to New Year's Resolutions:

Hah, always fun to be topical!

Anyway, for Disney Channel, we quite famously (or even infamously?) lost Girl Meets World way early in 2017, nearly exactly two years ago and