YouTube tries to carve out some space
ORIGIN YOUTUBE PREMIUM
WE’RE often told that we’re living through a golden age of television and, by and large, that is undoubtedly true.
After all, the days of complaining that there’s nothing on the box now seem a rather distant memory and, if anything, the vast array of options can be its own problem.
A lot of that is down to the fact that there has simply never been as many networks, outlets and streaming services vying for the viewers’ attention.
Apart from the regular networks and the satellite channels, there are now the heavy-hitting streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, while the likes of Hulu work as a handy collection of programmes from American networks that we might not be able to see on any of the other platforms.
Now YouTube is trying to muscle into the action with YouTube Premium, which has started in a rather lowkey fashion and, no doubt, it hopes that will all change with the launch of their first big budget drama, Origin.
It’s difficult to tell whether YouTube Premium will ever catch on or if it will just be another ill-advised failure. But it’s easy to forget that the early years for Netflix were marked by people saying it would never work and, as we now know, that proved to be a rather fanciful and wildly inaccurate prediction.
Sci-fi drama Origin features a multinational, multilingual cast of suitably telegenic young people on a long-distance space ship who are suddenly woken mid way through to their journey to a distant planet.
Starring Tom Fenton (Harry Potter) and Natalia Tena (Game Of Thrones and, as it happens, Harry Potter), Origin hardly wins any gold medals for originality – after all, the idea of waking a bunch of people from cryogenic sleep is a long standing genre trope.
But what makes this one so potentially interesting is that it’s made by the producers ofboth Lost and The Crown, which brings this rather experimental new viewing platform a credibility it has so far lacked...
Tonight is the last episode of the (almost) compellingly awful Finding Joy (RTÉ One, 9.35pm) starring Amy Huberman, who really needs to stop listening to those people who tell her that she’s funny.
Even the blurb ahead of tonight’s finale says that things have gone from bad to worse for Joy, which is the first time a press release has also doubled as a pretty prefect review of a show which is destined to join the ever growing ranks of truly terrible RTÉ sit-coms.
Ah, but will it be brought back for a second season?
Well, Huberman, a likeable sort, is currently the darling of Montrose, so nothing would surprise...