[MUSIC] Welcome to the 3:59, I'm Ben Fox Rubin. I'm David Katzmaier. There was a lot of complaining at the latest Game of Thrones episode with the cinematography of the Battle of Winterfell being incredibly dark. And I don't mean dark as in grim, even though it was a battle. Yeah. I mean The screen was really dark. Folks complained about having a hard time seeing scenes or artifacts appearing on their screens. I want to take a step back here for a second and ask you a really basic question. Which is, can dark TV be good TV? Yeah, absolutely. And there are ways to shoot dark scenes and have them be really visible and there are ways to make them look murky. It's all the decision of cinematographers. One of the big things to take away here is what it boils down to is these are creative decisions made by the people creating the show. The cinematographer Fabian Wagner told Wired that a lot of the problem is people don't know how to tune their TVs properly. People also, unfortunately, watch it on iPads. There's no way to judge, do justice to a show like this anyway. So he's basically taking the high road to say, I did this on purpose, it's your fault, change your TV. Is that true? Do people not know how to tune their TVs properly to something like this because it was really dark. I mean, like I had to turn all the lights off in the room while watching it which granted added to the joy of watching it but at the same time Yes, it was a darker than normal episode for any type of TV that you would watch. Absolutely, and there's a reason why you don't see that much darkness because it's really hard to do well and people complain about it. So You know, with something like this they took a real creative risk by making this entire massively anticipated 85 plus minute episode a completely at night and especially, you know it kind of using only natural light, you know, For example, they were talking about the Lord of the Rings. There's a big battle where Hans deep, where it's actually really easy to see everything, Mm-hm. Because the way that they shot it, the way that they treated it in post. They brought up a lot of highlights. You could see everything you know, Legalis taking the shield down the stairs. You know, all of this stuff is really visible There is very little of that kind of nod to visibility and less reality, I guess, in this episode of Game of Thrones. Gravity is another good example of this, where there's a lot of darkness in that movie. However, I never felt like I was straining to see anything. I would probably argue for me personally, watching the battle of Winterfell, that was entirely intentional. They were trying to add to the chaos. This was an element of cinematography where the battle was It was hard to see the enemy, it was hard to see what was going on but anyway I also wanna give people an opportunity to maybe fix some of the issues or maybe address some of these issues.>> Right.>>If they really had a difficult time. Seeing some of this stuff. And another thing that's totally separate from the darkness is the artifacts, the compression issues. For example, when you transmit bright scenes, they're a lot easier to compress. The algorithm is a lot more better to do with it than if it's dark. I've viewed TVs for a long time, and dark is really hard to do. Do from a source standpoint, so a lot of people are streaming HBO, HBO Now, maybe via Amazon, maybe watching it on their phones. They have a lot less bandwidth to play with. And when you're getting a compressed signal, especially when everybody else is watching it, maybe your ISP is throttling the neighborhood to give you, so there's no buffering, they'll give you Blocks of color instead that look like not very good. Yeah, that sounds like it's gonna look like trash. Right and and darkness really brings that out and I was watching it with a bunch of really high end TVs with a pristine stream you know a couple days after and you could still see those artifacts. [CROSSTALK] This isn't the best-quality source, and you're gonna see these artifacts regardless with streaming. So it's just a matter of how much you see them, how much it bothers you. I personally watched it on a calibrated TV at home, and it looked great. So there's a lot of different ways to experience this, but a lot of people didn't have a great experience. Okay, what can you do about it? Is there some stuff that you can do to tune your TV at least a little bit to improve the viewing experience? If you wanna rewatch the episode or I don't know, any of that. And you named the number one one, which is turn off the lights. Because when you're watching in the dark, ambient light is your worst enemy. And you can't see anything, especially if it's during the day or you have a bunch lights on in the room, turn it off. It increases the enjoyment. I tell that to everybody all the time. And it's so easy, yeah. Yes, exactly. [LAUGH] It doesn't cost any more money. Right. No matter what you're doing Turning off the lights helps when you're watching dark material. The other thing is turn it into cinema mode change go into your TV look for cinema or a movie mode, flip to that mode and you're going to get a better picture than any other modes especially for material like this.>> Is this an excuse to get an old TV or is that kind of a ridiculous question?>> [LAUGH] What better excuse does anybody need to buy the best TV ever? Sure. You know, if you want to drop two grand to watch the next episode of Game of Thrones and see it better, which will probably be a lot brighter. You know, they're moving south to King's Landing. Hopefully, you know, they get some light down there. They do it during the daytime. Right, right. We;ll see. So you heard it here first, folks. Spend $2,000 to watch the next episode of Game of Thrones. That's not the craziest idea I've ever said on this show. You want an excuse, nothing better. Absolutely, if you want to read more about these stories, check them out on CNET. I'm Ben Fox Ruben, thanks for listening.