TW: SATIRE
Fans waited seven years for the critically acclaimed show, “Watching Ants” to release its seventh season, and were shocked to see that it was only twenty minutes long. The beloved show which is a spinoff of a spinoff of a spinoff of the original play from 1919, “Watching Ants”, a story about people who watch ants.
Fathers loved taking their children to see it to ignore his actions as an abusive father and husband. Kids may have forgotten the movie, but they never forgot how their father made them feel like ants, even if they excused his transgressions. Due to this phenomenon, the movie was a success.
It was first adapted into a TV show in 1955 so people could forget and absolve male transgressions right in their own home! Since then, side characters who were fan favorites have been given their own spinoffs. The most recent spinoff starrs a construction worker who had no lines, two seconds of screen time, and the attractiveness and desperation to exploit his fans for money and validation.
His character is a construction worker turned “ethical” billionaire business mogul after betting on Bitcoin. In the show, he runs a business of taking ants off of streets, and placing them in privately owned museums so people can pay to watch them. This street-to-housing program was seen as philanthropic and “hot” by many viewers. The character speaks at conferences and panels telling people it was hard work, when it was absolute luck that his 2010 friends asked him, “Would you rather bet on bitcoin or eat a worm?”.
Fans had to get most of this information from the previous season since the new one was only 20 minutes long. They were outraged.
“It makes binging so hard,” said fan Jacqueisha Watts. “Once I finished the season, I was so bored that I actually did one of my hobbies.”
Despite this tragedy, there are still upwards of 100,000 edits of the show on social media. Fans have edited the characters simply breathing, and commenters are “gagged”.
The show runners don’t seem fazed though. At a press conference, a reporter asked the director, “How do you feel about the length of the new season, or lack of length?”.
“I think it’s great. Everybody in the writing room loved it,” said the director, Adam’s Apple. “For next season we are thinking about doing the episodes syllable-by-syllable, so each episode will be one syllable. It’ll be longer, about 6 episodes.”
A reporter from F News said, “Was the delay because of the strikes?”.
“No, it just took a lot for us to get into our creative process”, Apple responded. “We had to take classes and stuff. After the show got really popular last season, the studio fired everybody that previously worked on the show and hired us to make it appeal to every living creature, even babies. That’s why there is so little talking. Anyways, before the classes, we didn’t even know how to hold a camera!” he laughed and hit his friend.
“Now it only wobbles a little bit. We have made so much progress. We still don’t have our Bachelor’s in Film Studies though. It has taken us 6 years because we don’t have too much passion. We do care about the green from this project though! Do they give out degrees for making money? Because we will gladly take that class!”
This question engendered protests across the country. People have begun to rethink the authority of mass media. Who is playing, literally playing, with our time and our money? Protests for more talented, thoughtful smaller TV producers have occurred.
The directors aren’t the only people being overly paid to produce poor media, the actors have come under scrutiny as well. Usually actors are paid per episode, but due to the shortness of this show, they were paid by time increments. The main set of actors were paid $70,000 per minute for this season. All of the supporting characters who are all gay and/or Black were paid two cents per hour. Meaning they received $0.00033333333 for their work on the show.
The director and other showrunners refused to comment on this. Some believe this is the legacy of the film though: never holding men accountable.