A lot of people bash modern TV but what about the rest of modern entertainment also? How would you rate ALL forms of contemporary entertainment combined:TV,music,movies,pop-culture(or whatever it's called) etc. For example do you think it's the worst,poor,fair or good etc.? What is your opinion about all of modern entertainment in general,not just television?

Poor. :mad: :angryfire :cuss: :soapbox:

Nah, I'm not lumping them all together. There's still excellent movies being made if you look outside of mainstream Hollywood. I don't listen to a lot of new music, other than what my daughter has me listen to, and I don't watch many current TV shows.

I wrote about this topic less than a month ago on this site and my opinion hasn't changed since. This is what I said:

Pop Culture: Old vs New (http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showpost.php?p=4810862&postcount=42)

Anyone who thinks all modern entertainment is uniformly horrible or inferior to past entertainment is probably not giving it much of a chance.

After all, entertainment didn't suddenly nosedive just as you happened to be getting older. Pop culture didn't change...your brain did. Nostalgia is a powerful thing.

Just happy that with my thousands of CDs and tens of thousands of DVDs, I can watch or listen to whatever I want and the TV and music from the 90s up can rot for all I care.

10% hit 90% trash.

I've somewhat mentioned my views on modern television before, but it also encompasses other pop-culture media as a whole. There eventually became a point in which the percentage of modern product that viscerally repelled me became so large that I just turned it ALL off. It no longer seemed worth the effort to sift through things in order to find fare I might regard worthwhile. It felt like lowering myself into a sewer to find a few small gems. The gems might be nice, but the whole process left me with a nauseating stench in my nostrils. So, in essence, I "divorced" myself from it entirely.

It's not a question of aesthetics. I've never particularly cared about arguments of good versus bad. A lot of material might ostensibly offer all sorts of artistic merit, but still serve up a host of elements I find pretty unpalatable. Nor does it help when I see so many entertainment figures appear on talk-shows, or post on twitter, who are so blatantly antagonistic towards my values and belief system. It just further installs a desire in me to avoid their work like the plague. There are only so many minutes of leisure time in a day, and I prefer to spend those valuable moments with characters I like and a worldview I respect. In other words, older stuff. From music to movies, it lifts my spirits.

I've somewhat mentioned my views on modern television before, but it also encompasses other pop-culture media as a whole. There eventually became a point in which the percentage of modern product that viscerally repelled me became so large that I just turned it ALL off. It no longer seemed worth the effort to sift through things in order to find fare I might regard worthwhile. It felt like lowering myself into a sewer to find a few small gems. The gems might be nice, but the whole process left me with a nauseating stench in my nostrils. So, in essence, I "divorced" myself from it entirely.

It's not a question of aesthetics. I've never particularly cared about arguments of good versus bad. A lot of material might ostensibly offer all sorts of artistic merit, but still serve up a host of elements I find pretty unpalatable. Nor does it help when I see so many entertainment figures appear on talk-shows, or post on twitter, who are so blatantly antagonistic towards my values and belief system. It just further installs a desire in me to avoid their work like the plague. There are only so many minutes of leisure time in a day, and I prefer to spend those valuable moments with characters I like and a worldview I respect. In other words, older stuff. From music to movies, it lifts my spirits.

SECONDED!

Nah, I'm not lumping them all together. There's still excellent movies being made if you look outside of mainstream Hollywood. I don't listen to a lot of new music, other than what my daughter has me listen to, and I don't watch many current TV shows.

I think that's an important distinction to make and an accurate one.

There are good movies being made, and good music, too. You just have to really seek them out more than before. Mainstream entertainment used to provide more quality, for me, anyway. Now it's very programmed, very cynical, very "done by committee" with over emphasis on focus groups and demographics, etc. And yes, before the regular defenders pipe up, that was always the case to a degree but now it's to the point where it's VERY hard to get an original script or idea made, whereas in the past I'd say it was merely hard.

And another factor to consider; how strongly the products of today are targeted at kids or teens. When I was young, there were tons of R rated horror flicks to choose from, but now the majority of them are PG 13 rated, so as to get that coveted younger market. Thus, you get overly bland and homogenized product, mostly free from creative freedom or much interest from me.

The de emphasis on actual written scripts is another big factor in my disappointment with mainstream entertainment. The rise of reality TV ensures that you don't have to be creative to succeed in television; you just have to be peculiar (whatever that means anymore) vulgar and overconfident.

That is what I liked about the 1930s-70s, we didnt have to go looking for the good stuff it came to us :wave:

And another factor to consider; how strongly the products of today are targeted at kids or teens. When I was young, there were tons of R rated horror flicks to choose from, but now the majority of them are PG 13 rated, so as to get that coveted younger market. Thus, you get overly bland and homogenized product, mostly free from creative freedom or much interest from me.

The de emphasis on actual written scripts is another big factor in my disappointment with mainstream entertainment. The rise of reality TV ensures that you don't have to be creative to succeed in television; you just have to be peculiar (whatever that means anymore) vulgar and overconfident.


I also agree about horror movies and I'm adding books too. I know you have to cater to the young crowd too but it's become so dull and it's always the same premise: young girl or guy falls in love with zombie/werewolf/vampire/alien/fairy/witch or a mixture of one or more. In trying to find some horror novels online, I would say 95% of them are Twilight-like and they are a continuing series, like soap operas. And then the movies are watered-down slashers or ghost stories and not that scary. Even independent horror, which used to be a great place to find original movies, has become stale and apparently seems to focus on four worn-out plots: hillbillies terrorizing rich city dwellers or college kids, psychological freakouts featuring characters who are just as nuts as the bad guy, usually ending with a twist that hardly makes sense, some looney does gross stuff to peoples' bodies and zombies in every location you can possibly think of. Then there are the remakes. It's very hard to be original when the horror market has pretty much tapped everything.

I totally agree that the reality genre has worn out its welcome and has become as old and tired as some of the network shows. How many "unscripted" programs can you make about people who have more money than brains having catfights every twenty seconds, or these competition shows that go on and on for years with the same type of contestants?

Do you guys really think the only shows left on TV today are trashy reality show? I mean, there's a lot of them, but there's also a lot more channels. The amount of scripted content is still large...larger than it's ever been.

Eh.

It's all subjective. I try to be objective, but here's my basic rule that applies well to entertainment.
"Test everything. Hold on to the good. Avoid all appearance of evil." (1 Thessalonians 5:21-22) (Of course, as a Christian, The Bible gives me a lot of other things to consider with this that also shape my views- Philippians 4:8 is a good one too which commands us to think about good things, not bad. [as a very brief summary].)
Ultimately, I want to dwell on things that please God and draw me closer to Christ. It's hard to find much of that sometimes, but I take what I can from the entertainment available today and choose to dwell on the things that align with what God's Word says. (Not to say that I'm perfect on this because I have had some times where I've watched a movie or TV show only to say that I never plan to see it again because then I realize how bad it was and that I never should have watched it to begin with.)
Thankfully, God does give us grace too in Christ even when we do sin, when we ask Him for forgiveness.
That's my experience anyway. I think there are some good things still out there- but you have to be very careful what you let your mind dwell on- just as it's always been. Sin and vulgarity in entertainment is nothing new- it's been around since Genesis 3 and will be around until Revelation 20.
Thankfully, God intervened in the fullness of time with Christ's death and Resurrection to give us salvation for all who believe in Him. (Galatians 4:4-5)
As Ecclesiastes 7:10 says, "Do not say, 'Why were the old days better than these?' For it is not wise to ask such questions."