While I liked the show overall, the season 1 plot should've been covered in like 4 episodes max.
It's not the 'slow burn' that Breaking bad and Better Call Saul had. They had a lot more going and had far more interesting characters. I will defend Season 1 of BCS to hell because I like the characters in the show and it's fun seeing them doing relatively normal stuff.
In pluribus, Carol is a dumbass. The hivemind is not interesting at all and the rest of the survivors are props. Manousos is the only sane character in the show and I can get behind my man but he had way fewer scenes.
The plot just goes around in circles until the season just ends with nothing happening. The next season is also like 2 years away at least so the hype will go down because unlike Severance, this is dogshit.
I don't know how vince will make 4 seasons of this slop. Unless they somehow multiply the survivor count by like a thousand it will remain mostly boring.
On the positive note, the actors are amazing. Rhea Seehorn is great and I love how different Carol is from Kim Wexler that I don't even notice it.
if i had to guess, complications associated with all of these things happened in the last 5 years
plus the weird contract encumbrances associated with intellectual property agreements around all of these ownership shakeups:
scripted, episodic TV coming out on a yearly tempo seems to have been the primary casualty of late. the genre of media production that doesn't seem to have suffered at all, and has mostly exploded in content, is fucking reality dog shit and true crime slop, which are both dirt cheap for production and negligible risk compared to a multi-season show with complex set pieces, episodic story arcs, and elaborate/exotic settings.
the gems have been few and far between because i think talented showrunners have figure out where they can shop their ideas without getting pushed by the suits into pandering to an algorithm.