Neurodivergence as a super power on TV

The worst trend in television

One of the trends on TV that frustrates me is that every investigator now seems to be neurodivergent. It isn’t enough to just have a smart person solving crimes, or a schlubby Rockford-type guy who is a bit street savvy and can stumble their way to finding the killer. No, they need to be on the spectrum and be able to see the world in a different way to everyone else.

It’s neurodivergence as a super power and it is:

a) A bit boring because every show does this; and

b) Surely a bit offensive to neurodivergent people who are now only seen in this context on TV.

I’ve never really heard a good reason for why every detective show now does it, but there is something in this comment I found today in a Washington Post article about the rise of “quirky” female TV sleuths:

“Intelligence is obviously a feature of detective fiction, because you have to have it to solve the problem,” said Susan Ohmer, professor emerita of modern communication at the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television and Theatre. “But intelligence is also suspect in popular culture. It’s also acquainted with being a nerd or being elitist or being condescending.”

In other words, a detective character can’t simply be a genius. “There has to be some little tweak to it,” Ohmer said. “So even though Sherlock Holmes was brilliant, he was eccentric.”

It’s not quite a good reason, but it speaks at least to a reason why we keep seeing this approach in our TV crime fiction.

Kaitlin Olsen in ‘High Potential’

The article itself is actually a pretty good read, examining the changing face of female TV detectives over the decades and what each era represents within what is a tried and tested TV genre.

But, it still doesn’t address my frustration that we can’t simply have people being good at their job anymore.

I’ll make an exception for Elsbeth as that character pre-existed elsewhere (The Good Wife & The Good Fight) and has been retrofitted into her own show as a TV detective (though, real talk… she’s more interesting as a lawyer).

Carrie Preston in ‘Elsbeth’

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TV powering AI datasets

Alex Reisner at The Atlantic writes about how dialogue from 53,000 movies and 85,000 TV episodes has been used in an AI-training data set that has been used by Apple, Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia, Salesforce, Bloomberg, and other companies.

I recently downloaded this data set, which I saw referenced in papers about the development of various large language models (or LLMs). It includes writing from every film nominated for Best Picture from 1950 to 2016, at least 616 episodes of The Simpsons, 170 episodes of Seinfeld, 45 episodes of Twin Peaks, and every episode of The Wire, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad. It even includes prewritten “live” dialogue from Golden Globes and Academy Awards broadcasts. If a chatbot can mimic a crime-show mobster or a sitcom alien—or, more pressingly, if it can piece together whole shows that might otherwise require a room of writers—data like this are part of the reason why.

It isn’t scripts being used for this training. The data is being taken from OpenSubtitles.org, a website commonly used to add subtitles to pirated movies and TV shows that have been downloaded.

The files within this data set are not scripts, exactly. Rather, they are subtitles taken from a website called OpenSubtitles.org. Users of the site typically extract subtitles from DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and internet streams using optical-character-recognition (OCR) software. Then they upload the results to OpenSubtitles.org, which now hosts more than 9 million subtitle files in more than 100 languages and dialects. Though this may seem like a strange source for AI-training data, subtitles are valuable because they’re a raw form of written dialogue. They contain the rhythms and styles of spoken conversation and allow tech companies to expand generative AI’s repertoire beyond academic texts, journalism, and novels, all of which have also been used to train these programs. Well-written speech is a rare commodity in the world of AI-training data, and it may be especially valuable for training chatbots to “speak” naturally.

FYI, this is what I get when I visit OpenSubtitles.org:

But generally, the site carries listings like this:

Here’s TV showrunner Robert King posting on Threads about his shows being used for the data training. The Good Wife was a show very interested in talking about the intersection of emerging technology and the law - if that show was still on the air, this would absolutely be the catalyst for an episode.

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Yup. The full Max experience is en route to Australia

I guess this confirms the future of Max in Australia: A dedicated app experience. Don’t expect Max to operate as a tile within another pre-existing streaming service (like Binge, for example) as it does in markets like New Zealand (via Sky) and Japan (via U-Next).

Here’s WBD streaming chief JB Perrette interviewed by Deadline:

The next market is Australia, which will be next year as a full app launch across the market. It’s one of the first and most important streaming markets in the world, and our content has huge traction there.

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Learn to hold your grudge. For democracy.

It has been interesting seeing the backlash against Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski visiting Donald Trump and kissing the ring after months/years of citing Trump as a threat to democracy.

And fair enough. Jon Stewart had a particularly scathing attack on the pair on The Daily Show (from the 35 second mark in this clip):

Here’s Jeff Jarvis posting on X calling them out for sucking up to Trump for access, before implying that they have been hollow in their criticism of Trump on Morning Joe:

Brian Stelter at CNN suggests that there was a very specific reason these news commentators visited Trump:

If that’s the reason why, these two need to stop fronting anything that purports to be a news show. And sure, it’s only MSNBC, but still - it has the patina of legitimate news.

Meanwhile, you also have major media companies returning to advertise on X, albeit with a smaller spend. Here from The Wrap:

Disney, Comcast, Lionsgate Entertainment and Warner Bros. Discovery have all resumed their ad spend on X, according to new data from MediaRadar.

The market intelligence firm (which tracks feed image, carousel and video ads captured from a panel of over 2 million U.S. users, with the top 96% of impressions tracked) found that the companies have collectively spent less than $3.3 million on the Elon Musk-owned platform between this January and September — a 98% year-over-year drop from the $170 million spent during the same period in 2023.

I seem to remember Elon on stage last year telling advertisers leaving the platform to “go f*ck yourselves”. Yet, here they are back again.

Now Elon is thanking them for returning:

Whatever happened to holding a grudge?

Maybe I’m just a better person than all of these toads, but when I get persnickety about anything, I hold onto my grudges. I hold onto them for years and years beyond what a person may consider healthy.

Back in 2013 I visited a (now defunct) Brumby’s Go bakery in Brisbane’s Myer Centre. I purchased a supposed bagel, which was really just a bread roll with a hole in the middle. Here’s a Mumbrella post from back in the day that picked up on it:

Silly, right? Sure was. But also, I did have sand in my knickers, so I never spent another dollar at that Brumby Go store and reluctantly bought anything from Brumby’s ever again - I’m a Bakers Delight man through and through.

And then was my decade-plus grudge against burger chain Burger Urge.

My point being: People should stick to their guns. Anything less than proper, lengthy, vindictive spite makes you an unserious person.

• Love is Blind: France is one of the shows announced by Netflix in an international slate presentation yesterday. Read: THR

• The Onion’s purchase of InfoWars is being contested. Read: NYT

• Frank Marshall is directing an Apple TV+ documentary about Fleetwood Mac. Read: Radio Times

• The Equalizer (which is somehow up to season 5 already) has plans for a spin-off. Recurring characters will be introduced into the series before being spun-off. RIP the old-school backdoor pilot. Read: Deadline

• While there will be no Paul Lynde, the guest list for the upcoming Hollywood Squares sounds pretty good (for this kind of thing). Read: TV Line

• Jay Leno, an upcoming Hollywood Squares celebrity, is recovering after recently falling down a hill and hitting his head on a rock. Read: THR

• BBC comedy Dinosaur will be back for a second season. Read: World Screen

• Netflix claims 108m people watched the Mike Tyson/Jake Paul weekend fight. Read: THR

• Max & HBO have extended their licensing deal with The Criterion Collection. Read: thefutoncritic

The Agency debuts November 29 on Paramount+.

Seth Rogen’s Apple TV+ show The Studio debuts March 26. By the time the show concludes in May, it will have been two years since his Platonic ended it’s first season on the streamer. Why a 10 episode comedy needs over two years to deliver a second season is a mystery to me…

A Nonsense Christmas with Sabrina Carpenter debuts on Netflix Dec 6.

Netflix game Squid Game: Unleashed debuts Dec 17.

Paris Has Fallen is finally getting a US release, by way of Hulu on Dec 6.

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