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Originally Posted by MolsonExport
Some of my favorite stuff on Netflix are documentaries and historical or nature series, produced by the BBC and PBS.
Network TV has indeed declined. Part of that is due to the dumbing-down of content ("reality" show garbage, attention-whoring pseudo-celebrities, and formulaic sitcoms). The other part is of course due to the shift to specialty channels like HBO and streaming content.
In terms of film, Hollywood has really declined in recent years. Almost everthing is now some stupid reboot of some stupid superhero character, or some mixing of stupid superhero characters. There is the odd superhero film that isn't total garbage (e.g., Logan) but most are just terrible, much like those awful Michael Bay movies of about 15-20 years ago (explosions, EXPLOSIONS, and MORE EXPLOSIONS!).
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There's a lot more to unpack here and I don't think there's been a 'dumbing down' as much as we've reached the limitations of the traditional television.
With traditional television, you have to provide fairly generic entertainment - one that appeals to a wide audience (or wide enough to be profitable in a given time slot), make the story fit in a given timeframe (1/2hr to 1hr), have the story have a certain tempo (gotta fit in those commercials!) and a story arc that lasts enough to make 13 or 26 episodes in a season.
Specialty channels and streaming don't have those limitations. By upending those limitations, you can explore a lot deeper into certain topics and write a story however one sees fit (within reasonable bounds). Netflix doesn't care about number of episodes and how long they are - they just want buzz and people to keep subscribing. Arguably, The Sopranos was the poster child of this in the late 1990s, albeit with HBO.
It's hard to go back to McDonald's as a special treat once you've had a really good gourmet burger.
The film industry has always been the balance between business and creativity. Nobody's going to give me $200m for an art project film - there has to be some reasonable expectation of return. That lends itself to corporate-think - keep churning out the stuff that makes money. That leads itself to a conservative thinking that quickly can grow stale. Then again, sometimes that allows new creativity to flourish (see: Logan, the first Deadpool) within a genre.
Indeed, the bottom of the film market is moving towards streaming, as Netflix and the like gobbles up content that would have gone direct-to-video before.
I'm not sure I want to write the obituary for film yet. Looking at the Best of Films of the 2010s on Google, I see a fair bit of creativity. Sure, they don't dominate the box office, but they're there.