This is a big one for me. I'm not sure if I'm just getting older, but half the stuff on TV looks too dark to me. I'll just turn off movies or shows within a few minutes if everything seems too dark and gritty. My ears already are working harder, leave my eyes alone.

There seems to be an effect where the more visual information something is capable of, the more critical we become of its content.

Go back and watch a VHS on a CRT TV, or even a DVD version of something that has a Blu-ray or HD version available to stream. It's abysmal, and yet we somehow managed to love them.

After struggling to create single a receiver profile for modern streaming content to cover the range from "everyone's mouth is full of socks" to "pure sonic agony", I do agree that audio mixing has become something of a lost art.

> There seems to be an effect where the more visual information something is capable of, the more critical we become of its content.

Maybe because when the creators stop being constrained by the medium, they get "creative"?

> Go back and watch a VHS on a CRT TV, or even a DVD version of something that has a Blu-ray or HD version available to stream. It's abysmal, and yet we somehow managed to love them.

Good or bad, at least the full range of colors was used. For example, I've watched tons of Star Trek shows of home-recorded VHS tapes on CRT TV, and I'd still prefer that to watching new Star Trek live action installments in 1080p streaming on a high-quality computer screen, simply because in the VHS/CRT/old shows case, things had colors, and I could actually see what's going on.

It seems to me like its a similar problem -- the video is shot/edited/approved on high-quality monitors and tvs that can reproduce the full dynamic range of the video, but then compressed down to SDR which kills the contrast.

Well, if we're talking about "House of the Dragon", there were a few episodes where they attempted day-for-night [1] production and did a horrible, horrible job of it. This particular f*ckup has little to do with monitor capability or dynamic range, and everything to do with poor judgment through multiple stages of the production pipeline. I honestly don't know how such a high budget production ends up with these shots.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_for_night

I'm not talking about any specific show -- this problem applies to a lot of shows. I think what you're getting at is a little bit of a different problem; Specifically, the 'we can fix it in post' mentality.

Even in HDR on OLED some shows still look like they're filmed in a closed dark warehouse at night.

Yeah, there are definitely ones that just don't have great lighting, in any dynamic range. But that's a problem as old as film, whereas this trend towards having everything be lit like it's at the bottom of a well seems to be newer.

Fortunately I missed that one, but I’m watching Better Call Saul now and all the law offices are lit like a steam tunnel at midnight during a lunar eclipse.

i am watching 1899 on netflix and it drives me mad how dark every scene is.

All old movies and series had lighted silhouettes in the night or dark scenes. Everyone knew that it means its dark but you could see what is actually going on. Its a movie not a webcam capture. We already fill in the gaps when it comes to the story, we can manage 'unnaturally' lit dark scenes