From a historical show with author's commentary into some fat stupid spectacle. Like early medieval nobles wore as much gold as they can grab and be as fat as they can eat, this new season has actors, cameos, music numbers and ads for alcohol and putin's corporations.
It's not absolutely terrible - there's more uniformity and less video mistakes than in the previous season, but there is so many new irritating things about it. First of all how about adding "no comments" segments into a show which is entirely driven by commentary? The editing is distracting, the voice-over for translations is unfitting and it's terrible by itself. The jingle of sneakers on basketball court every couple of minutes starts to grind the nerves really fast.
The second season didn't fix any of the problems of the first season, and then added some. "No comments" segments in a show that exists exclusively for comments is still a dumb idea. The integrated ads pretending to be topics are really bad. The new jingle contains a "new message" sound from one of the popular messengers. Doing that is the peak of bad taste. There are even more stupid songs. There is a lot of swearing in russian, yet all the translations are completely sanitized and inaccurate. The footage is filled with anachronisms - they can be talking about something that started at the stated year, yet show everything that happened since. Aren't we losing focus?
But the biggest problem is that the second season covers the recent events, like, literally the last year. This IP usually only highlights stuff that passed the test of time. But when they wanted to cover the previous year, they picked up so many things no one ever heard of that they had to have two episodes for it. With no filtre at all the last two episodes were filled with menial garbage no one will remember. No one already remembers it today. No one even heard of it at that time.
The complete atomization of society has already happened. The internet killed TV and radio propaganda, which forced the same experiences on all the people. But some events still happen to everyone. The show's tagline is "things without which you can't imagine or understand us", and then it wastes your time on some fandom garbage you haven't encountered even once in five years. Neither did you encounter anyone who knows a guy that knows a guy that knows about it. I can't care less about games of thrones, but at least i saw people talking about it. Yet this show claims it's impossible to understand me without knowing of some no-name russian government's soap operas no one ever saw that don't even have IMDB pages. Was it just an advertisement? Is this the new standard for the IP - just a series of pro-government ads?
