Sidenote from something I noticed from the rest of these comments: SMS is not the only form of 2FA. It is the most common type, but also one of the most insecure versions of it. You should not be using SMS for 2FA.

All the talk about racial anything, is mostly just noise imo. The only thing that matters at the end of the day is good writing, good acting, good directing, and good cinematography (at least for shows).

It's been showing a lack of the first two so far.

Being aware of... context? In this day and age of reactionary posts and total lack of empathy? What is that?

To be clear, fully agree. If you include a person who doesn't fit the time and style of where they exist, you need to give me a reason or I won't believe it. Reality is very often unbelievable, and good fiction/immersion requires believability, not reality. (Sidenote: this usually has nothing to do with race and more often how they act.)

For music and literature though, I think it's mostly that the mediums are not visual and so defies our culture of memes or quick messages. Hard to point at a screenshot of text and get likes unless it's under a sentence long. Also, good readers know good writing, and reading is dense enough that the general public won't read. So there's no real reason to go after books.

The writing in it is pretty terrible though. Hopefully gets better.

This is like saying Wall-E or Inside Out are dumb movies because they need to hook young audiences.

It's not an either or situation here. Shows can be written to target many, many groups of audiences. They can be "smart" while still appealing to the masses.

Also, it's not so much dumbed down as just terrible acting and terrible writing. Cinematics are great, but cinematics are the only thing that's great.

Not dumb but "dumbed" down to target a certain age group. And I agree that they can try to be "smart" but there's the practical aspect of it - they are competing hard with many streaming platform (and many will fail by the time this industry stabilises) and talent is at a premium, thus the obvious compromise to go for the easy and more assured targets.

Another issue is that whoever they're hiring to write these adaptations either have no clue how to write, or are hamstrung by committee direction. You can make, quite effectively in fact, a story set in the same universe (cue all the Star Wars material that exists as books in the fandom) that has nothing to do with the original story. But it needs skill. Skill that they cannot seem to find.

For Rings of Power, I think the show itself is very confused on who the "actual audience" is. They tried to go after each segment, but the writers lacked the kind of skill and finesse needed to actually perform that miracle. (Which is possible, just really, really difficult.)

Every casual viewer I've spoken to is very meh on the show.