No, the bare minimum requirement is a good story. That is what makes or breaks a show. The rest is decorations.
There's tons of old sci-fi and fantasy shows and movies that had pretty shitty budgets and had to make do with what they could afford, so they don't look that great - esp. compared to the modern series that we're getting now, that have massive budgets AND modern vfx - but they had good stories and good writing, so they're infinitely more enjoyable to watch.
I promise no one is going to watch period piece media, regardless of how good the writing is, if everyone is wearing t-shirts and jeans.
No one is going to watch a drama about Julius Caesar if everyone is wearing European renaissance outfits.
Good costumes and set design is a bare minimum. If people can't get immersed in the scenario, nothing else matters at all because their immersion has already been broken by the shitty costumes.
Why'd you use such outlandish examples? No-one is saying period pieces should have non-period costumes etc; the assertion is that of the things that can be poor quality, bad writing hurts a show more than whether the effects are top quality or a little less.
As an example within one show; GoT didn't change it's production quality between seasons 1 to 8, hell I'm sure a case could be made that it actually went up! But the shitty writing was so bad it tanked the show forever. If the reverse was true, it would have taken a hit, sure, but not as bad as it got with 'muh queen' etc.
Numbers of times I've seen or heard anyone say "Well the story absolutely sucks donkey balls, but it's still a really good and worth watching because the costumes are like, really good!": Zero. Never. Nill. 0
Number of times I've seen or heard someone say "Well their budget obviously wasn't very high, you can actually see how parts of the set was painted styrofoam at places... but the story is actually really good, so it's worth a watch!": 50+
19
u/acathode Jun 15 '24
No, the bare minimum requirement is a good story. That is what makes or breaks a show. The rest is decorations.
There's tons of old sci-fi and fantasy shows and movies that had pretty shitty budgets and had to make do with what they could afford, so they don't look that great - esp. compared to the modern series that we're getting now, that have massive budgets AND modern vfx - but they had good stories and good writing, so they're infinitely more enjoyable to watch.