Goodbye to Star Trek: Prodigy

I've talked here before about streaming shows getting eliminated, and this week we had another casualty. Paramount Plus announced that Star Trek: Prodigy, its animated kids' show set in the Trek universe's Delta Quadrant, would be cancelled and removed from the streaming service during the final week of June 2023. Apparently this isn't the first time an exclusive of theirs has disappeared, since they did the same thing with Jordan Peele's Twilight Zone reboot that had aired on CBS All-Access.

The last time I wrote about this, I suggested catching something you've been putting off, because who knew what would happen to it? I suppose I didn't expect it to happen so quickly, with another show that's relevant to my interests. The only problem is, when the news came down a couple of days ago, I knew that I wouldn't have time to watch all of Prodigy's 20 episodes before they disappeared.

It's disappointing because, again, you'd hope that streamers' original shows would be protected from this sort of thing, but it turns out that even hosting your own shows costs a lot of money. Presumably, the execs at Paramount saw that Prodigy (along with the other three shows that are getting axed) wasn't getting enough views, but I'm surprised at that, since I've heard a lot of good stuff about the show from other fans. I'd also watched the first few episodes on a plane last year, and had been looking forward to catching up with the rest of it when I could.

Once again, I have to bemoan the move away from DVD releases of shows in recent years. Apparently, Prodigy only got a DVD release of its first 10 episodes, and there don't seem to be imminent plans to release the others. I've also been watching Fargo on DVD from Netflix (RIP, come September), but as I finish the third season I won't be able to continue with it, since there was never a physical media release of Season 4. It seemed sensible a few years ago, when streaming got pretty good, to abandon physical formats, but now it just means shows and movies are disappearing completely.

One thought that occurs to me is whether this spate of cancellations is related to the ongoing writers' strike in Hollywood. Work has stopped on pretty much all scripted shows, apart from (presumably) the ones that were already written and filmed (since SAG-AFTRA is also joining in), so a lot of shows are probably on the edge of cancellation the longer the strike goes on.

This shouldn't be taken as a complaint about the strike, btw. I'm fully in favor of writers, actors, directors, and all creatives getting paid fairly for their work, and not being supplanted by AI (see the titles of Disney Plus's Secret Invasion, which were created with generative AI and kicked off a bit of a controversy this past week). I suspect that studios are cutting back more and more because the strike doesn't seem close to resolution, which means they'll be expecting worse revenues this year; while on the other hand, and kinda cynically, they've been seeing what happened when HBO/Discovery took the axe to a bunch of originals and since nothing too bad happened, in terms of subscribers, and so now the other streamers and studios are doing it too.

I don't know how Prodigy's production on Season 2 was affected by the strikes, since animation writers aren't covered by the WGA, though presumably its voice actors are all part of SAG-AFTRA. That said, the show didn't need to be doing so badly on its own to get canned, if cutting it meant Paramount could save money elsewhere, on some other executives' pet projects.

My only hope is that its second season does get picked up somewhere, so that, if nothing else, the creators get to finish their story and the fans get to watch it. For my own part, maybe it's time I invest in the DVD box sets of the various older Trek shows...

Champions League: City and Pep Get What They've Been Craving

In the end it didn't come easy for them. After the semifinals were decided and we knew that Manchester City would be facing Inter, the talk was all about, "What can Inter do to beat City?" The Guardian's Nicky Bandini acknowledged, when asked if Inter could win, that of course City's players were all, man for man, better than Inter's.

When the game arrived, Inter played without fear. They kept the possession relatively even - no 81% possession for City this time. But of course it wasn't enough. City's goal came on the 68th minute after over an hour of being frustrated. Inter didn't play the catenaccio that everyone probably expected (I was watching with an English friend, who teased me about that), taking the game to City whenever they could.

As I say, it wasn't enough. City's the champion, for the third time in a row, of Europe's most prominent league, while Inter came in third in a league that hasn't provided a Champions League finalist since 2017, and hasn't provided a Champions League winner since 2010... when Inter won it. When you have stats like that, you have to ignore talk of a hoodoo: City were always going to be too good for Inter, a team whose attack consists of a striker that City long ago deemed surplus to requirements and another striker who endured poor spells playing for City's biggest English rivals.

So City has its treble, becoming only the second English team to do that since one of those rivals, Manchester United, did it in 1999. They made heavy weather of it this season, given that they weren't even top of the Premier League for most of the season, despite Erling Haaland's record-breaking form. Yet they won that with a couple of games to spare, then saw off United in the FA Cup, and now have the one trophy that was missing from the cabinet.

The previous time City got to a Champions League final, they were beaten by Chelsea's street smarts (and by Antonio Rüdiger's shoulder breaking Kevin de Bruyne's orbital bone). The narrative around Pep Guardiola in the Champions League was that he was too given to tinkering, and that he'd created a mental block for himself, after those epochal teams that smashed United in 2009 and 2011. Back then he had Lionel Messi, at the top of his game, but of course Pep was never able to lure Messi to the blue side of Manchester.

Now he can say he didn't need him after all.

So what's next for City, and, y'know, for the rest of English football and European football more widely? The Abu Dhabi purchase in 2008 brought a few trophies, but it took the full reorientation of the club in Pep's image to bring the dominance that they craved. According to the Observer, City have won 17 major trophies since Abu Dhabi took over, but 12 of those have come in the years that Pep's been the coach.

Here's the list of those trophies:

• Five of the last six Premier League titles, including the record-breaking 100-point season of 2017-18
• Two FA cups
• Four consecutive EFL Cups
• And now one Champions League

It's clear that Pep's going nowhere, as long as City can keep paying for the players he wants. With his ability to construct teams consisting not only of the 11 men on the pitch but also the five substitutes, it seems unlikely that there will be serious challenges to City's dominance in the Premier League. It'll be a different story in Europe, as Real Madrid will probably still be able to treat the Champions League as its own fiefdom. At the very least, City and Real are probably the teams that'll dominate the honors for the next few years.

I'll leave it to someone else to talk about whether that's a good or bad thing for the sport more generally. I've been talking for years about their dominance and how it'd be nice to see them get challenged, but it's hard to see how the status quo at City changes for the moment. There's no bigger club that Pep can go to, and he doesn't seem the type to give himself a challenge by (say) going to manage a club with fewer resources. 

I guess the one achievement left to Pep and City is to win all four trophies in a single season, and with the form they're in, you can imagine them achieving that goal sooner rather than later.

UPDATE: Of course, the moment I commit to paper the words "Pep's going nowhere", he announces that he's leaving when his contract ends in 2025. The article says he'd previously thought of coaching in Italy, to complete his set of the top 4 leagues, but "his thinking has changed", and that one option is to coach a national team. I wonder.

A criticism of Guardiola that I've read is that he's never been firmly tested: every club he's gone to has been dominant or set up expressly for him (Man City, for example, brought in his entire recruitment team from Barcelona before they hired him). I can imagine that maybe the glory of dominating Serie A isn't as apparent now, given that the Italian league is a bit of a mess. But also, I wonder if he's really interested in coaching a national side - after all, he won't have an extremely rich club hierarchy there to green light whatever purchase he wants, and he'll be stuck selecting eligible players.

No, my guess (for what it's worth) is that he'll end up at another Gulf petrostate-funded team. If not PSG, which has been held up as the mirror image of Man City, since they have all this cash but still can't win the Champions League, then he'll probably join everybody else and pitch up at one of the top 4 Saudi sides, who've been making some waves by buying Karim Benzema, N'Golo Kante, and pretty much everyone else who's old and out of contract.

Maybe I'm being mean? It just doesn't seem like Pep's style to take on a challenge by starting at a lower-level team and turning them into champions. But as with everything, we'll find out in due time.

Thoughts on the New Max Streaming Service: Discovery's Gotten Harder

I've talked on here about how much I liked HBO Max, so now that it's switched to Max, to accommodate all the Discovery content that came with that merger, I thought I'd do a quick post on first impressions. I've been thinking about this since the switch occurred on 23 May, but I saw a review on CNET today and decided to add my own two cents.

The first thing I noticed was that the menu along the side was stripped down, compared to HBO Max. It currently has only Search, Home and My Stuff, where before you could use that to get to the various content hubs (HBO, DC, Studio Ghibli, Adult Swim, etc). You could also get to the Browse section, where you could select movies, TV shows, and look at all the things that have just been added, as well as everything that was leaving soon.

Although not "everything", because in the lead up to this merger, HBO got rid of a lot of shows without announcing it ahead of time (admittedly, it's because nobody was watching them, but it was annoying to see a couple of things disappear from my list without warning). Still, for the stuff that they did say was leaving, it was nice to be able to check that section and decide if there were any movies I wanted to watch before they went.

That "leaving soon" section has now been moved to New & Notable, for some reason. It's way far down, and it doesn't show the date when each of those movies leaves, so I don't know how long I have to watch them. I guess the issue is that there's so much on Max (as there was on HBO Max), that it's hard to decide on the actual thing I want to watch. When I knew something was leaving, it was easy to prioritize that, even if in most cases it came back a month or two later. Or to put it another way, discovery of new content is more difficult than before, which is ironic for a service part owned by the Discovery Channel. 

(In case you're wondering, I wrote this blog post just so I could use that line)

To illustrate how bad discovery is on Max, I didn't even know about the Last Chance section until I read this Tom's Guide review, midway through writing this post. It's not particularly intuitive to put "Leaving Soon" in the "New & Notable" section, is it? Especially if you put it way down the rows, so that someone who doesn't know it's there doesn't bother to scroll that far down.

Also, as a quick note on the name, it still feels odd that WarnerDiscovery took HBO out of the app's name. HBO is synonymous with good shows and movies, and has been for essentially my whole lifetime, so it seems like an own goal to deliberately weaken your app's branding. But then, part of what makes HBO, the brand, so impressive is that it's continued to have so much good content despite being hamstrung by a series of terrible owners, going back to the AOL-Time Warner days and right through the time when it was owned by AT&T, of all people.

But let's talk about some positives, because they do exist. The first one is that the massive amount of content I actually might want to watch is mostly still there. It still has all the HBO, DC and Adult Swim stuff I've been checking out, plus a few other shows and a lot of standup comedy. This is the thing that makes HBO Max/Max the best streamer overall for me: Disney Plus has a lot of good, Francis-approved content, and Paramount Plus is essentially a way for me to subscribe to Star Trek (plus Champions League), but HBO's diversity of content makes it the king, and the reason why most of the movies I've watched this year have been on there.

I'm not too bothered by the Discovery content, but one positive I've noticed is that now almost all of the CNN shows are back. Where before HBO Max only had season 1 of Parts Unknown, for example, it now has all 12 seasons, minus a couple of episodes that were pulled due to the circumstances surrounding Anthony Bourdain's death. They've also put on Stanley Tucci's Searching for Italy, which is good on the one hand, but sad because CNN cancelled it after season 2.

The other positive is that, compared with HBO Max, the new Max is significantly less buggy. The CNET review claims the user experience is still glitchy, but so far the only thing I've found is that one comedy special I've been watching bit by bit hasn't been added to my "Continue Watching" section. When I watched the second Shazam movie (and I've got thoughts, but I'll address those another time), that showed up in "Continue Watching", so this might be a one-off.

HBO Max, by contrast, had something go wrong literally every day. Whenever I'd start the app, its loading would cause a lag between pressing the action button on my remote and it actually starting the show. This lag meant either that it didn't register the button-push, or it did, but on the wrong show. The other infuriating thing was how I'd finish a movie, and be taken to its page, but when I'd press "back", it would start the movie again. I'm happy to report that these problems have disappeared from Max, as have random freakouts like the time I tried watching Superman II but the audio consisted of a high-pitched, constant beep.

To sum up, the new Max app is still probably the best streamer overall. It has the best selection of movies and TV shows of any streamer, and has been bolstered by all the Discovery shows, if that's your bag. Fingers crossed, it's sorted out the bugs that plagued HBO Max, so that things don't randomly autoplay when you've tried to quit out of them. Finding stuff to watch has gotten a little bit more confusing, but that seems to be more because of how they organize those sections, rather than completely eliminating sections like "Last Chance". Hopefully they'll make that navigation simpler and more in line with the old version, but at least it's all still there in some form.