On a tangent, I'm increasingly put off by incessant and obnoxious background music on TV - everything is drenched in emotionally manipulative sound - documentaries, drama series. Stranger Things is the one example that really stuck out to me - in the end I had to stop watching because I got sick of the music accompanying virtually every single scene.
It didn't used to be like this! For the most part I'd prefer to be able to form my own thoughts and feelings based on the content, with music used sparingly and appropriately. Ho hum.
That's news to me! I've been annoyed by obnoxiously melodramatic music in movies for my whole life, even from decades before I was born! Check out this famous scene of Lawrence Olivier's Hamlet soliloquy [1]. The music is so jarring I can hardly stand to watch it at all!
It would be nice to be able to control the volume of background music while watching a show/movie. I wouldn't be surprised to see that sometime in the near future.
I binged Hells kitchen a while back, the episodes aired in the UK were remarkably more pleasant to watch due to a lack of background music. This clip[0] demonstrates the difference between the two nicely.
Agreed, it has been like this for a long time for movies though. That's obvious when you find some types of movies really boring if you reduce the sound / have a way to equalize it so that there can't be any spike of louder background music.
For TV shows I don't think I'm as bothered as you, since like movies, the goal is to be entertaining. But I agree that in recent documentaries it's very obnoxious, in the end those looks more like entertainment posing as documentary. It's hard to find good quality documentaries on platforms like Netflix/Hulu/etc
It didn't used to be like this! For the most part I'd prefer to be able to form my own thoughts and feelings based on the content, with music used sparingly and appropriately. Ho hum.