Seen it.

This post brought to you by trade wars and book troubles.

There was a devil of a show a while back that I quite enjoyed watching (what can I say, dark hair and long legs are still a draw for me, and the actor's teeth were better than the stereotypical row of cracked tombstones). Since words are still a fascination for me, of course I turned on the captions. I'd only started watching that show during its last season (or series, take your pick) on air - how many long-time fans had pointed out the misspelling of a major character's name in those captions before I came along? One could have used, if not the fictional, then the literally biblical, as a spelling reference.

When it comes to media that I enjoyed before I saw the behind the scenes material (yay big cats that started with K and switched to S, for instance), I've seen Miss Wings and her traveling spinoff come on the air and go, as well as the abovementioned show that turns that idea on its head. Young-people-plus-divine-intervention shows aren't a new thing either - in all cases, it's a matter of switching around a few sets and physical descriptions, adding some new technology and giving a previously-used pattern a few years' break, and maybe it'll seem fresh and new to a modern audience.

There seems to be less of a separation between entertainment and information than there once was. I can understand why - it's fascinating to think of what parts of a fictional world could actually exist in the world out of the pages or off the screen. But with the blurring of those lines comes a question of how much onscreen is an appeal for ratings, revenues, or votes. Whatever the answer is, networks upping their visibility percentage with fresh content, a fleet of contributors, and a lack of a paywall helps when the target audience is into discord and ice cream - which makes worthwhile the risk of diving past opinion and into tabloid.