> If I remember correctly, plots and artistic decisions are made by committee
This is an extremely important point, needs to be backed up with some citation.
It's the exact condemnation of "the suits" making decisions in cable's heyday. FWIW, I've heard the opposite, that Netflix has an almost completely hands-off approach -- the Netflix execs find creators and give them a budget, then move on to finding their next creator. I don't know if that has any more truth, but I'm inclined to think so.
> I think Netflix did pretty well with just hiring some known creative people and telling them „whatever you do, just use your gut feeling and we‘ll buy it“.
Those Netflix decisions about who to hire are extremely data-driven - much moreso than Hollywood. House of Cards was their proof of concept in 2013:
> Sarandos says their wealth of data on user viewing habits proved there's a large audience for Fincher, Spacey and political thrillers.
> "did we allow passionate, talented people to do work they are now proud of?".
That's what independent movie studios used to do like Miramax, It gave us Pulp Fiction, There Will Be Blood, No country for old men, and dozens of gems. Even Miramax failed in their quest.
Anyway, Netflix has produced solid movies regardless of what you think, well rated by critics and public. Not all or most of them, but no way worse than competitors studios.
“Content is King”
We all know this, Netflix knows this. And yet for some reason for years they have been aiming for quantity and not quality.
Money is not enough in this department and baseball metaphors don’t do justice illustrating just how hard it is to put together a team that has that special thing going on. Some would argue it’s impossible - teams like the one behind Better Call Saul are just extremely rare and can’t be rushed. The traditional system has sort of known this for a long time, I think.
Netflix tried rushing. I’ve personally worked on a failed series season made by the company and it was a chaotic clusterfuck. So are their efforts in ordering and buying content haphazardly to stuff their library with something. Now they’re probably going to have to learn the slow quality development and bring back many of the traditional practices they threw out the window.
This is a good thing for audiences though. I think we’re going to be seeing Netflix settle as one of many big content delivery platforms in the long term.
The dark side of the drive to prove one's primacy of vision (colloquially better known as "I'LL SHOW YOU FATHER THAT YOU WERE WRONG TO NOT LOVE ME!") is that inefficient and self-indulgent - and more often than not abusive - senior management is endemic to the television industry. As cable, streaming, and Internet services adopt the television production model to generate content, the problem only gets worse.
For me, this was one of the surprises from Netflix, Amazon, and Apple jumping into funding series production. The observations the author makes are anecdotally confirmed by the various "leaks" in the industry (and yes, this biases the view because people often don't complain about a good thing, I know), and yet rarely is the content produced by the studios working for these new entrants much different than the content produced "en masse" so to speak.
When this started, I expected more "Love Death Robots" kinds of things and less "Game of Thrones wannabes" kinds of things. I'm really curious how it went on the team doing "The Peripheral" (a show that I really liked), vs "Carnival Row" which seems to be "Jane Austen + Steampunk + Fairys" and, again for me at least, not particularly compelling.
As a result I've always wondered if studios did "retros" or look backs to understand how the product evolved, and if the people paying them ever tried to evaluate their process as a means of managing their investments.
I doubt I'll ever know, but I will remain curious about these things.
> "Netflix takes things people already like and doubles down on them, and that's the whole business model."
There's a name for this, it's called "television". Netflix makes television, and they do a good job of it. They're getting better at it too despite having only started doing it for a few years. Compared to the quality standards of the '80s or '90s what netflix produces today is near solid gold. Some of it truly is great, most of it is merely good. Little of it is truly groundbreaking, but that's true of television (and video media) in general. The number of groundbreaking shows that get made every year is pretty close to zero. That's true even at places known for making groundbreaking shows, like HBO.
>A large number of show, like the Netflix Originals, seems to have a good idea for one season.
Think of the first season like a start up. You have a creator/founder that has a passion project/idea/concept, but can't get in front of the right people to make it happen, yet. They keep pitching it, getting feedback, re-working the original concept through many iterations (could be years). Then one day they meet the right investor/producer/etc with a much more fully edited/revised product and plenty of practice pitching. The original product gets made to great fanfare, and suddenly everyone wants version/season 2.0, but like now. Everyone forgets how long v1/s1 took to develop. Some developers/creators can already see past v1 to vX, and just hope they can keep the product viable long enough to get there.
> As far as I can tell they've succeeded at becoming HBO.
Have they? Have they really? As far as I can tell, nothing that Netflix has ever done in-house has ever come close to the best of the cable channels. Like, The Witcher is fine, but Game of Thrones it is not, neither in quality nor buzz/cultural significance. House of Cards is no Succession and Ozark is no Breaking Bad. Nothing they have could even come close to comparing to stuff like The Sopranos or The Wire in terms of cultural impact. The closest they've ever come, in my opinion, is probably with Making a Murderer, and they've spent the last couple of years churning out pale imitations that make Netflix look like "True Crime TV".
You're paraphrasing that quote from the Netflix CEO that goes like "We want to become HBO faster than HBO can become us". To me, HBO has won that race handily.
>Netflix knew that they couldn't remain at the mercy of the content owners. So they leveraged their head start on content delivery by producing their OWN content only available through themselves.
My only concern is they don't seem capable of letting things die. House of Card and Orange is the New Black both went from very good to terrible. If every hit series they make turns into the final season of "Dexter", it will cause issues.
That's the crux of it. There will inevitably be good and bad shows, or even good but unpopular shows. The viewers are fickle and Netflix will need to somehow manage keeping their attention. Netflix's problem is that they don't own the content. But as soon as they enter the content-creation business, they will be the same as Disney (and will face the same challenges).
Sure, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm not claiming that Netflix is doing what would look like "intentionally trying and failing to make good content"—because that would produce qualitatively different content than the kind I'm referring to.
An attempt at rich food that tries and fails isn't bland food; it's bad rich food. A bad lasagna or a bad steak isn't going to suddenly taste like nothing. It'll just taste weird. Whereas a bland food is, say, a cucumber sandwich on white bread. Purposefully nothing-y. It won't ever taste exciting or weird.
Netflix is making "Netflix Original" bland TV, purposefully. Daytime soaps, "ghost investigations", prison documentaries, and other low-budget schlock. The data says people want it, just as much as the data says people want rich TV like Black Mirror or OitNB or whatever-else.
Author here. I don't disagree with you, especially in the second paragraph. To some degree I think it was smart for Netflix to make a big splash this early on. But the perception that they're "paying for quality" is a bit suspect, given that Hollywood itself -- ostensibly "paying for quality" in its entire process -- has a 98% failure rate on developing projects. Quality talent doesn't always yield a quality product in the creative business. Even the best writers, directors, producers, and actors have their failures. I have no reason to suspect Netflix was any smarter in its approach to developing House of Cards than networks would have been -- though I could be wrong (and hope I am).
At the end of the day, the $100M for HoC was a big bet. It was a signaling tactic, a marketing tactic, and a bet on top-tier talent. But it was a bet, nonetheless, and an expensive one. That it seems to have paid off (to an extent? jury is still out) shouldn't fool us into 20/20 hindsight bias. It could just easily have busted.
"So as I understand it, the author is suggesting that NetFlix produce a bunch of low-rent pilots (or half seasons or so) throw them against their wall of subscribers with a bit of recommendation-targeted magic, see what sticks, then spend the money to produce the "grown up" versions."
Not necessarily, and I should clarify here. I think pilots can be shot for a lot less than they are, and I think audiences are proving themselves quite receptive to previews and other short-form "pilot" systems as proofs of concept. A lot of movie trailers are increasingly being made before the movies even start shooting ("teaser" trailers). I think there are ways Netflix can take the guesswork out of the development process, even if production is still an expensive endeavor.
You have to pay for a quality product, but the system right now also pays heavily for the risk in the pre-production process. That process can probably be de-risked considerably.
I would not recommend testing 100 half-baked concepts to see what sticks. But I do think Netflix could test or tease concepts in development to determine which ones to develop, and/or how to present new shows to the right early adopters.
Something I probably wasn't as clear about as I could have been: half the battle in finding a hit is developing an audience, not just a show. Netflix has better audience-development capabilities at all stage of the production equation. It doesn't need to guess quite as much as networks do.
Maybe -- to your point -- Netflix's audience-segmenting capabilities give it the ability to play the big bets game more than networks can. But historically, people have been shockingly bad at predicting what will actually hit and what will miss. Star Wars was laughed out of every major movie studio in town, for instance, and at the script level, it sure didn't look like "quality" to the eyes of the execs reading it. On the other end of the spectrum, a show like Firefly -- which fans (including myself) consider one of the most brilliant things ever made, has repeatedly failed to gain mass appeal beyond its limited niche, despite many attempts at re-marketing home video, a feature film, etc. The operative lesson here is that "quality," as an objective concept, is hard to parse and hard to pin down. "Quality" is more of a function with a lot of variables, and many of the biggest variables are on the production side and the audience side -- not the development side.
Tldr: People are over-investing in development, when they could be investing more heavily in production -- whether at greater scale, or in greater depth per project.
I hadn't heard of that, and if that's true, then I see your point. But I'm sure there were also hard decisions being made at Netflix about how much of their limited resources to devote to developing their own media versus how much to license.
Interesting read, but I tend to disagree with the author on many levels.
I do believe we are still in a golden age for content producers and audiences. The amount of money going into content production, the number of shows being produced and the number of streaming services being launched offer a variety of options for people to finance, distribute and consume video content.
Content creators are looking essentially for 3 things: telling great stories, reaching large audiences and making money. They make an informed decision based on those 3 factors when choosing to work with Netflix, Amazon or other studios/streaming services. If it becomes obvious that Netflix will cancel their show after 2 seasons or will not expose their content to large audiences, content creators will stop pitching their shows to Netflix and turn to other distribution providers such as Amazon, Warner Media, Disney, NBC, Facebook, CBS, YouTube etc. And if audiences like their content, they will follow it and subscribe/spend time on other platforms.
I’m also unsure about Netflix’s “lock-in” power. Netflix is not Spotify where I spend time creating and organizing playlists. I see it only working if Netflix’s recommendation engine is so well trained with my data that moving to another streaming service will force me to spend much more time looking for relevant content to watch. Otherwise, I watch Friends on Netflix. I can easily switch next year to watch it on HBO Max.
It is true that the old days of “Friends” and “Seinfeld”, where a hit show would generate billions of dollars for its creators, are gone. Netflix and other streaming platforms are now acquiring global content rights for shows and production companies are becoming more like “work for hire” studios – where ownership is transferred to the streaming platform and no future residual revenues can be expected from re-runs (syndication deals).
That being said, the median wage of writers dropping seems to be more the result of talent agencies’ “packaging practices” than Netflix.
And by the way, “Where are the great comedies?” the author asks. Blockbuster movies – because of their high production costs – look for global appeal. Car crashes (aka “action movies”) are understood across the world. It’s not necessarily the case for jokes (aka “comedies”) that might not cross oceans as easily.
> They look at spreadsheets all day long, and they see that some money losing piece of culture is preventing the business from creating non-money losing piece of culture ... or making payroll.
In this case they're seeing something that they guess is not making as much money as they like (there's no way of telling how much and individual program actually brings in) and rolling the dice to see if something else would perform better.
The downside of this attempt, however, is that they're creating a large catalogue of abandoned projects that a lot of viewers aren't going to watch because they don't want half a story. If you complete a series like the OA, you have a decently regarded show in your catalog forever, and your large catalog can attract people even if they don't immediately watch any one particular show. The current approach may or may not create more big hits in the short run (it doesn't seem to have a ton of success on that front so far). In the long run, though, it's going to lead to a smaller number of evergreen shows in the Netflix catalog.
> their TV strategy has clearly evolved from at least a supposed "mine data to create great shows" (which always seemed a bit unlikely create all sorts of content, including niche content, throw it at the wall, see what sticks, and plump up the catalog in any case.
Are you sure? I feel like Netflix is making more data-driven decisions now than ever. If they aren't producing a constant crop of "HBO-quality" show, I would guess that that's because the data is telling them not to.
Consider: television networks have been in Malthusian competition for decades. You'd think the quality of the median TV show would increase. Instead, it seems like the quality of the best TV shows (on every network) consistently increases, but the median show stays the same. Why?
I would personally hypothesize that it's down to a not-oft-mentioned part of consumption psychology: people don't actually want to consume an indefinite stream of high-quality content that they need to give their full attention to at all times, any more than they want an indefinite stream of world-class meals or a radio station that consists only of their favourite music. Nobody has the time, or emotional capacity, to devote to consuming it. People want "bland" content just as much (if not more!) than "rich" content.
And, as licensing deals fall through and Netflix loses both bland and rich content from their catalogue, they have to replace both of those with their own offerings to keep viewers satisfied.
(Have you ever looked in the fridge, and seen that you have the ingredients to make several great meals—but those meals, you are planning to have at specific times with your significant other later in the week; and then realized that you have "nothing to eat" because there are no non-great meals you can make? Consider the television equivalent. That's the problem Netflix is trying to avoid here.)
"Holland seemed to focus more on developing fewer shows of higher quality content while Bajaria was more focused on "get all the content, throw it all at the wall and see what sticks" (who saw "Squid Games" coming?)."
I think the root problem is that no studio anywhere is large enough to put out enough high-quality content to keep the people engaged continuously. Not even Disney.
All the studios were looking over at Netflix making all the money and wanted to disintermediate the middleman, but the combination of all of them doing that turn one fairly decent (not perfect, but decent) streaming service into an array of streaming services each individually not worth the subscription. That worked for a bit but it's wearing out.
The solution of just pumping out more is the obvious one to try, but it hasn't been going well.
I'm... actually not convinced that's impossible? The bottleneck on these seems to be quality writing. Generally the actors act, the editors edit, the directors direct, the effects crew broadly succeeds at the effects, etc. But Hollywood in 2023 seems to have negative respect for writing. Take any Writing 101 course, and if you want to write for Hollywood, completely throw it out the window because they do not care in the slightest about any of that. I recognize of course that any 101 course is only the intro and the basics, but current Hollywood writing is not taking the rules, deeply understanding them, and then transcending them by virtue of the deep mastery of their craft... they're just plain writing for crap. They've got a ton of other priorities and "good writing" is so far down the list that it might as well not be on there.
You can't get the best of the best to write for 100% of every season, but a lot of streaming stuff is several cuts below what middle-of-the-line episodic television shows were managing in the 90s in really, really basic stuff. Surely there's enough competent writers to at least get a solid C on the writing front to let all the other factors carry over to "at least worthwhile", if Hollywood would just raise the priority on that quite a bit more.
Tons of high quality content is probably not on the table for anyone, but surely with all these resources we could scrape together some medium quality content more consistently?
This is an extremely important point, needs to be backed up with some citation.
It's the exact condemnation of "the suits" making decisions in cable's heyday. FWIW, I've heard the opposite, that Netflix has an almost completely hands-off approach -- the Netflix execs find creators and give them a budget, then move on to finding their next creator. I don't know if that has any more truth, but I'm inclined to think so.
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