Has anyone else noticed this? More and more TV dramas have long sequences, often slo-mo, where the action stops and there is only music.
To be clear, I'm not talking about background music. I'm talking about when the action and the story and the dialogue stops, and there's a song, accompanied by characters maybe looking soulful and doing something inconsequential, like cooking dinner. In slo-mo.
When it happens over and over again, not only is it boring, but if you don't like the song, it's even worse. It also hugely interrupts the flow of drama. I'm watching for the story, I'm not watching a musical or a concert,
I first noticed it when watching The Morning Show, which has been the worst offender so far. There are four series, and I looked up and counted how many songs, because they seemed endless. I forget exactly how many, but I think it was 110. A hundred and ten songs, where the dialogue stops, in a drama! I just kept fast-forwarding.
I've just tried to watch Meghan Markle's Netflix offering - the cooking show - and it started with a song while two people walked, instead of dialogue. I had to switch it off.
It's a way of having to do less work. Just film characters doing nothing much and throw a song over the top, and you have a few minutes of not having to write any dialogue or the characters having to really work. Throw in multiple songs, and your workload per episode is suddenly much lighter! I think one episode of The Morning Show had nine breaks in the action where songs were inserted.
And I've yet to hear a song in these circs that I actually like.
When did dramas get so musical? I think it's a new American thing. Has anyone else noticed it? I'm finding it highly irritating.