TV series so dark I can't see ?
 

Has anyone else noticed this is getting worse? Back in the day when Walking dead was still decent, there were entire episodes I could not see a damn thing because it took place in the dark... (my kids either, not my eyes)

This week the last Obiwan episode (excellent) was half in the darkness and honestly, it was like watching a black screen half the time... I played with TV modes, Vivid helped a bit but made it look terrible and pixelated...

Is this something productions do more of these days because they can get away with less realistic sets? Is it compression from internet TV? Am I the only one who can't see squat and find it annoying? Do I need a better TV with more black balance ? I tried on our 3 Tvs, it's crap everywhere... (I'm sure I'll be told to go get glasses but whatever)

^ It's way cheaper to film and edit dark sets. My issue is with bad audio, or volume gain on a lot of Disney stuff just being way too low.

Overly dark scenes drive me nuts, so much TV these days you can only see properly in a darkened room. I notice this all the time lately, last few years I would say.

Escape from New York. Entire movie is filmed in darkness. Saw it at a drive in, remember those, couldn't see a thing. So we did other things.

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The Boys is one with dark scenes.

"Darkness was cheap, and Scrooge liked it".
It is the same with shaky camera work rather than making proper action sequences.

That said, some monitors today have much better contrast ratios.
Might be time for new viewing equipment.
I'm not a film/tv watcher so I can't comment on these shows specifically.

Didn't your mom tell you about that?

I'm OK with the dark sets, it's the loud mood music I can't take.

I love those BBC dramas but the mood music has a lot of bass and it's loud, and I just can't hear what's being said.

So last night the wife and i are watching this 'the old man' show (kinda funny given the 'i can't see or hear anything' comments in this thread) and there were some very dark scenes. In our room there is a mirror on the wall to the right and if i'm situated just so i can watch the tv in the mirror. When i did this i could make out WAY more detail than i could looking directly at the tv. it was like a second tv (in reverse) that had the brightness turned way, way up.

i guess it was less light hitting my eyes thus allowing more open pupils. Honestly though it was almost eery just how different it looked.

So many movies love to have the sound engineer lower to voices to whispers, and then have a massive explosion, or fast tempo music blast us out of the chair.

And dark scenes are really annoying. When all I see is a black screen and zero detail I may as well be listening to radio. I have turned off some movies like that. Screw them, life is too short to just listen to TV.

I dont bother watching. If they dont want me to see it then its probably not worth seeing.

Yeah I noticed this as well with the last episode of Obi Wan, too many dark scenes where I couldn't tell what was going on. I noticed it happening in the Book of Boba Fett series as well, very annoying!!!

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Yep, me too

I can deal with the over-the-top darkness,
but what really bugs me are the new crop of foley artists

they're the people who record background noise
to make the scene sound more realistic
it's mostly white noise and hum
at least that's the idea
they rarely get it right

most of the time it's so loud, the sound of
voices speaking get muffled so much it just
sounds like mumbling

it might work in a theatre with the sound
cranked up but I don't like the
idea of having to crank up my sound bar just
to hear the people in the movie speak
my neighbors wouldn't like it either

My guess is that it had more to do with viewing angle. Most flat panel TVs have an image that varies quite a bit as the angle of view changes from perpendicular. My guess is that you could get up and walk to the side and see a similar image.

Out of curiosity, have you guys tried changing the adjustment of the screen for these movies? Crank the brightness, just the contrast, etc....? It seems like most TVs these days have several modes. There's usually some sort of "movie" or "cinema" mode where the screen is darker (for watching with all of the lights out, like in a theater. That's probably why the OP noticed some improvement in vivid. But I think a lot of TVs have one mode that's "custom" that you can set yourself. Set one up for dark shows/movies and then use that setting. Granted, if the movies go from bright to dark, it may look like hell in the bright sections.

I think some of this is related to TVs that don't have a wide range (of nits?) or contrast. For years, more expensive TVs have been pushing their higher range of bright - dark settings, and some modern TVs will even selectively dim and brighten parts of a TV for some scenes to improve the picture.

I have a special Samsung monitor such that all my other monitors are not equal.
Doesn't matter what I try to tweak to get the others to match.
On that monitor I can see in games at night without the need to light a torch or kick on a flashlight.
Unfortunately I didn't buy it to be a gaming monitor, but it does make me want one for the purpose.

Funny you mention Obi-wan, watching the finally both my wife and I looked at each other and said we can’t see anything. I think it’s the compression and optimization for streaming that does it.

A lot of modern TVs are backlit and have pretty poor black levels so that the contrast between the scene and the darkness is nearly impossible to discern--everything just turns to a mush of soft gray.

The one that comes to mind immediately was one of the last battles in Game of Thrones that took place at night. I watched it at home on an old plasma (perfect black levels) and it looked absolutely beautiful and perfect, but then the twitter-verse blew up about how nobody could see the fighting because it was so dark. I watched it again on an LCD TV we had at the time and yeah, it looked like absolute ****.

When we bought a new TV with plasma not being an option we made sure to get something with localized LED backlights so that the black levels could be comparable. It makes a big difference.

While the overly dark sets bother me, what bothers me more are the action scenes that are oversaturated with close ups and jump cuts where you have no idea what is going on, or who is winning or losing. The second Transformers film is a prime example of this. You might as well just fast forward to the end of the fight scene where the antagonist is finally brought down and begs for mercy.

Annoying...