The other day, I was feeling somewhat out of sorts, and decided I needed to binge watch something. I thought Avatar: The Last Airbender was out on Netflix, but it wasn’t, so I settled on Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which had recently finished releasing all episodes on Disney+. Yes, this show was way too wide and color graded way too dark, but that’s to be expected these days. I decided to give it a chance. In so doing, I came across some troubling things.

A lot of the CGI in this show looked cool, but it didn’t look even remotely real. What I mean is, for example, even though we know the dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park movies are often CGI, they still look like real things that are actually there. They are believable. Granted, we also know that the dinosaurs in those films are, sometimes, animatronic robots that really are there, in front of the camera, interacting with the cast. This means the VFX artist have something real that they have to match, in order to maintain consistency. Does this mean the same can’t be done for purely fantastical creatures?

Well, as I mentioned when writing about The House that Dragons Built, the behind the scenes show chronicling the making of House of the Dragon on HBO Max, they built fully painted, and textured, models of their creatures, and put them in front of the camera so that the VFX artists would know exactly how the thing should look, in that particular scene, and in that particular lighting. This wasn’t just for the monsters. The same was done for the face of the deteriorating king. They built a full sized, totally realistic model that they could shoot as a reference for the artists. This worked to great effect, as the CGI in House of the Dragon looks absolutely amazing.

Don’t get me wrong. I am in no way implying that the CGI in Percy Jackson and the Olympians looked bad. A lot of it looked great, but it came across as really cool animation, not as something real. None of that, however, was the most troubling thing I encountered in this series,

This show is broken up into segments, like an old school TV series that would have commercial breaks. Now, we all know that Disney either already has, or soon will have, an ad supported tier of their service. Netflix, Max and Hulu already have ad supported tiers. With Amazon Prime Video, it seems, you get the commercials whether you want them or not. They really want to turn streaming into regular TV. Even though I am on the ad free tier, you know that when something bad happens, the music swells, and it cuts to black, that’s where the commercial would be. Even if you don’t see the commercial, it changes how these shows are made.

I recently watched Invasion, season 2, on Apple TV+. This series has a very cinematic flow to it. There are no breaks. There are no tiny cliffhangers, every 12 minutes, that lead into such breaks. It’s possible that streaming shows are not going to be made like this anymore. They’re going to be made like regular TV shows which prioritize the advertisements. If they’re going to do that, then maybe they should also be like regular TV and fill the whole damn screen, and stop making everything so wide and so dark!