I skip them. If the film-makers want me to guess what’s going on on-screen, then I refuse to be their audience.

Calibrate well and close the curtains.

The battle episode in the mentioned Game of Thrones example was made to look like that, by choice. Not a good choice but what we can do is just suffer through it and move on.

OLED. It’s not much of a problem anymore.

The show Willow, on Disney+, was like this. We had no idea what was going on in several scenes. The emotional tone was dark too. We abandoned the series.

I hate it… I don’t know if it’s because they made shows thinking it will be seen on a perfect screen, or because they think it’s “realistic”, but it makes lots of things unwatchable.

If you watch the Daredevil serie from 2015, most of the action scenes take place at night or in dark rooms (since main character is blind), but you can still perfectly understand what is happening.

There is really no need to make the person watching feel like they are blind too…

I play with the brightness/contrast/gamma until I can see everything.

It seems like video editors forget that not everyone is using a multi-thousand dollar display specifically tuned for video editing and most people are probably watching whatever on a cheapo Walmart special TV or monitor.

GoT: what if we do too dark and shaky cam.

For some of those battle scenes I felt nothing because I couldn’t tell who was getting killed

I only watch them at night 😋

The big thing for me was disabling HDR in all the apps and devices that support doing so.

My 4K and 8K Samsung sets have, apparently, the WORST implementation of HDR possible. Everything looks dark, muddy, and unwatchable. Calibration does nothing.

The only thing that works is turning off HDR in the apps and devices. The television itself doesn’t have the ability to disable it there.

I watch at night and dark scenes look pretty good to me, lots of detail. Also on OLED (LG evo G3), using Filmmaker mode or ‘Cinema’ in case of DV.

I play with gamma and contrast settings on my device or the contrast and brightness in mphc, or the gamma settings on madVR. I really don’t like leaving settings on auto, but I try to keep it as dark as possible with some detail visible in the shadows, and make sure the bright scenes don’t clip the highlights. Sometimes its a back and forth from scene to scene.

Ah, I thought you meant like dark as far as subject matter. For those, I watch them over and over again.

For darkly lit series, I usually just close the blinds and I’m good!

I watch at night and turn down the lights in the room to match.

I find “HDR” content on streaming services (Netflix in particular) looks far more crushed than SDR content streamed from my Plex server.

I’m unsure if it’s to do with the bitrate limits of streaming services, but it’s not an issue I’ve run into since switching to Plex a couple years ago.

‘Dolby Vision’ content specifically always looks awful on Netflix, whereas the same content looks fine on the same TV when it’s coming via Plex.

I was playing around with my TV settings last night, coincidentally due to a game losing detail for being too bright but its the same problem.

Rather than changing the brightness directly, I instead changed the “display mode”. The options are like, “dynamic, cool, neutral, standard, theatre” etc.

I had dynamic selected which on normal scenes (not too dark or bright) it looked really good, but made dark scenes difficult to see and lost details where its too bright.

Setting it back to “neutral” or similar made a huge difference. It did make the normal scenes appear a little washed out but I’m already used to it and can now see what I was missing before.

I think the dynamic mode was blowing out the contrast like crazy