For what it’s worth, the book is incredible. I haven’t seen the show (tells you everything about how badly they marketed this that Amazon damn well knows I’ve read the book and yet never heard a peep about the show being a thing… You’d think with all that targeted advertising that this is one thing they could get right), but I can tell you that the novel took my breath away. Gibson has always been a master of his craft, but this is really something else, easily one of his best works.
We’re safer watching anime at this point. Still angry about 1899 getting canceled. Wish it was possible for someone to pick it up other than Netflix or for Netflix to uncancel it.
I am so glad 1899 got cancelled. One of the worst shows I’ve seen in years.
And it’s one of the worst because it clearly had money to look great, and they decided to make the shittiest story, with the biggest plot-holes ever, and then finally finish it off like “yeah, nothing makes sense AND THAT’S THE POINT”… cheapest story ever.
I’m surprised at the amount of love here, I found this show to be fairly boring and didn’t make it last episode 4. I have plenty of time for slower more contemplative sci-fi but this didn’t click for me.
Not super surprised. It looked expensive but wasn’t making much noise. People just didn’t seem to talk about the show. A shame since it was an intriguing and well made show.
It was a great first season but I knew it would get cancelled.
If a show takes even the slightest bit of concentration to follow, and you can’t absorb the plot whilst playing with your phone, then it fails. Not many viewers are looking for a complex, intelligent story…they just want to be double distracted from their lives.
My gripe isn’t really with vapid, simplistic TV shows; you can just choose not to watch that. It’s that the current model of streaming services funding production seems to kill anything that doesn’t fit that mold.
Fair enough, I feel like that’s especially true for Netflix right now, in my opinion. I’m really enjoying some of the Apple TV shows right now, like Silo and Severance, that are a bit “meatier,” intellectually speaking.
1899 suffered from this too, although in really it never really stood a chance against Netflix’s “fuck you” approach to shows.
They KNEW exactly what they were getting with 1899 due to it’s predecessor Dark. Dark was a slow burn that became immensely popular over time, and 1899 followed the same formula. But no. Netflix demands that shows be binged by half of their viewer base in the first week or it’s history.
1899 was written as a trilogy, the same as Dark. A complex story that would unravel over 3 seasons. Now 1899 sits on a shelf as one season with a fuck ton of unanswered questions. The poor writers were heartbroken (as was the fan base)
From the third episode it was already making me think “oh, this is going to be one of those shows where literally everything is a mistery and nothing is ever explained”.
And then, nothing gets explained, and the season ends with the cheapest “GOTYA!!” ever. Like… what?? I’ve spent HOURS watching this and I literally wasted all this time… hmm… of course it was cancelled. It was expensive and didn’t really say anything meaningful.
“B-but because you need more seasons to understand”, this is not how the business works. We can not trust you will deliver if you failed to do anything meaningful in a whole season.
As I said, that’s how Dark worked and Netflix took on 1899 knowing that. They knew it was supposed to be a trilogy, just like Dark. They knew it would be a mystery, just like Dark.
If they didn’t agree with that then they should have either a) not taken the project on, or b) made it absolutely clear to the writers that there was a high chance it would be cancelled after season 1 and to write it accordingly.
The expense part is purely on Netflix’s head. They wanted to invest in new technology and used 1899 as their reason/showcase. The writers couldn’t have cared less if it was a green screened boat or some weird 3D set.
Perhaps things would have been different if they had kept it in German (and in that branch of Netflix) rather than forcing it international, who knows. Let it perform accordingly for their local audience and then any international viewers are a bonus, god knows the majority of the English speaking world has zero interest in subtitles. Different cultures have different expectations from their programmes, and let’s face it, the American one is for the majority one of minimal effort and instant gratification.
The crucial aspect of Dark was very straightforward. Time-travel. And everything happens organically from there.
In 1899, every episode adds a new thing that is completely unrelated to the previous, nothing is consistent, and it turns out nothing is really meaningful at all in the end.
I could start the show watching season 2 and I would be as clueless as anyone.
They added the extra hamstring move of failing to set up the subtitles properly and having the English dub be the default option, which crippled parts of the show that relied on the viewer realizing that certain characters couldn’t understand each other.
That really killed my interest until I found out, and after I ended up really enjoying the show once that was sorted out.
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