TV News? I mentioned that HBO aired a little teaser for The Last Of us, but they also aired a snippet of footage to remind you that there is another Game of Thrones series in the works. likely, we will see that one premiere before we see the third season of House Of The Dragon. I’d peg that for a late 2025 debut, maybe as early as a year from now.
TV Shows Watched: House Of The Dragon: S2E8 (MAX) with audio description, Batman: Cpaed Crusader: S1E9 (Amazon) with audio description, Fantasmass: S1E5 (MAX) with audio description, Unstable: S2E2 (Netflix) with audio description, Young Sheldon: S3E6 (MAX) with audio description, Last Week Tonight: Most Recent Episode (MAX) No Audio Description
Podcasts (All Through Apple Podcasts with speed modification): The Official Game Of Thrones Podcast (Recap of S2E8), 538 Politics (Politics), Nationly (Politics), and The NPR Politics Podcast (Politics)
YouTube: None?
Movies: 300 (with audio description), Street Fighter (no audio description)
And Today’s Feature…
The Arc: S2E2 (Peacock)
This SyFy series surprisingly got a second season renewal, and my shock is mirrored by the fact that the audio description on this… well… it’s a science fiction show. I can’t jump back in time and tell you if all these characters had rich audio description for season 1. I just watch too many damn things, and it takes place mostly internally in a ship, so it isn’t even really visually challenging to do. I’m assuming the budget is manageable. They even lack all those Star Trek alien races that require heavy makeup. However, this isn’t so much about tracking characters, and describing basic action in a very cheap science fiction show, it is that the audio description for this show sounds cheap. The audio quality isn’t great, and the narrator’s voice sounds AI adjacent. What I mean by that is, there’s so little offered through her vocal performance, I can’t tell if she’s a robot. I need the real world equivalent of Captcha. Like, vocal Captcha. She wouldn’t be the first narrator to land in this zone, but I would caution audio description companies from doing this. there’s nothing truly exceptional here, or memorable. For a show that is decidedly mediocre it needs all the fans it can get, and this audio description doesn’t cultivate that. sometimes I discuss how audio description can compliment the program, and while they are spending next ton nothing on the show, and I’m sure the audio description as well, there’s nothing about this that suggest the vocal performance can’t be dynamic. If you look at a simple network show like the Rookie, for ABC, one of the reasons that works so well is because the audio description really seems interested in their own product. As action ramps up, our narrator seems invested. If someone is in danger, he seems to care. He mirrors and compliments the program, and while that is just at its core a police procedural, it becomes more of an investment because the audio description company takes their work seriously, and the narrator is giving it his best instead of phoning it in. The Ark feels like someone asked for the cheapest possible package on audio description, and our narrator is depressed about not making more money. As much as a narrator is functional accessibility, they are also storytellers. I think that’s something we don’t talk about enough, because when you are describing these long stretches, you are telling a mini story. if you do this with the flatness of a soda that was opened in 1955, it comes across as boring. I wanted to talk about this show last week, but I had to push this a week. This is not good audio description. sorry.