film and television has been basically going through a story of distrusting audiences, and creatives fighting very hard to push for more trust in the audience, and as their gains peaked in their respective industries, visual media became quite good, as more trust was given to audiences to be able to handle complex ideas.

and now it’s swinging back around. The audience is too dumb and inattentive to be trusted. I’m telling you, this “We need Ridiculous Shit Like Obsessively Restating The Plot, Because The Proles are Mouth Breathers With Completely Shot Attention Spans” is a decisive move towards narrowing the range of what long-form content can be, and while I consider pop culture generally an enemy of the people, this absolutely sucks for all kinds of reasons.