Personally, this year Netflix has renewed shows like Carmen Sandiego for another season (despite the current season being cut short due to COVID) and The Dragon Prince for another four (yes, 4.) after only running for 3 so far.
IMO the first season of Altered Carbon was good - the second one? Not so much... and it seems like the viewing stats reflected that.
I'd read the first book and it was interesting that despite the first season changing so much from the book it still ended up good (even improved in some aspects).
The second season of Altered Carbon felt really rushed. Which seems to be an issue with several shows, like "oh crap it became really popular we need another season ASAP". Which almost invariably leads to a weak followup.
>In 2018, the "Hollywood" creator Ryan Murphy landed a reported $300 million contract with Netflix. And Benioff and Weiss reportedly closed a $200 million deal last year; the news of that contract came two days after "The OA" was canceled. Shonda Rhimes and Kenya Barris are also in the six-figure-Netflix-deal club.
Sure, but those mean "in the top 100" and "in the top 500". I've always heard six-figure to mean exactly six figures, so a nine-figure deal wouldn't be six figures.
But for a non-club example of the same error, see the very next line:
> The way Netflix accounts for these six-figure deals is complicated,
The majority of Hollywood (and to a lesser extent general entertainment/media) accounting for money is “complicated”.
It’s a known issue whereby producers and other people in a position of financial power deliberately shape the deal structures to be deceptively appealing in order to basically keep more of the money for themselves. Google “Hollywood accounting” if you’re curious for more details.
The six figures reference may be a reflection of what the person in question is likely to be walking away from the deal with in terms of “money in their own pockets” as opposed to total money made available to them by Netflix for the purpose of making shows.
>The six figures reference may be a reflection of what the person in question is likely to be walking away from the deal with in terms of “money in their own pockets” as opposed to total money made available to them by Netflix for the purpose of making shows.
When I click the link "also in the six-figure-Netflix-deal club" it takes me to an article[1] titled "$100 MILLION CLUB: 7 Hollywood titans that Netflix, HBO, and others have signed 9-figure deals with during the battle for talent". So that second article correctly matches 9-figure with $100M. This tells me that the first article just has a typo, not that there's some sort of 1/1000 conversion factor for salaries. I have a hard time believing in a 1/1000 conversion factor for salaries without some source clearly explaining that.
Isn't Netflix effectively doing VC, but for TV shows? They seem to be shotgunning money around to people who want to make shows, and if the RoI is not at an arbitrary threshold, they stop feeding money.
Seems like it generates horrible perverse incentives on what kind of (generic) content is created, though.
VC is a bad comparison ... Maybe VC with the intent to sell all ownership to the first person that offers them a 20% ROI...
Netflix wants to bring in NEW customers... Existing customers are unlikely to unsubscribe, but getting new customers is hard at this point.
Best way to get new customers is to throw new shows at people, lots of them, get them hooked. If people join, again, unlikely to leave -- they will find other cool things to watch.
For Netflix, the value if a new hot show is way higher than season 4 of a very hot show... Nothing short of GOT (mid seasons) would be good enough to make it to season 5-6... I'm shocked some if these Netflix original series are making a 3rd season, since 2 is usually all it takes to milk a franchise
Netflix don't seem to want to get to that inflection point any more which is a shame. Santa Clarita Diet was a personal favourite (don't hate me), and it had just hit its stride. And Daredevil too.
There's a big after-market in shows too. I've watched many shows on DVD (and now on Netflix/Amazon) long after they aired because I never saw them the first time round.
I think it's nicer to watch a show that has shot all seasons rather than one that is in the middle. Then if you choose not to watch all seasons it's your choice.
The problem with Netflix is that if a show doesn’t bring new subscribers/retain current ones, the show is worthless.
It doesn’t matter if a lot of people watch a show. It only matters if that show is a deal maker.
So it basically needs to become a cultural phenomenon or attract a hardcore base of fans. Anything else just wastes bandwidth.
I doubt Netflix can predict with any certainty which show that will be in the same way that VCs can’t pick which of 100 companies will IPO for a billion. So they just invest in 20 of the better ones.
The problem is that the more Netflix cancels shows that way, the less people will want to follow a show because of that very policy. The law of diminishing returns. the same thing that has made people wary of using any Google product since Google doesn't think long term. I quit Netflix when they cancelled the excellent Daredevil show.
I guess it looks like a problem because they can afford to throw more spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks than a traditional network, the result being more fallen spaghetti...
However, it is possible they're missing out on potential viewership when they cancel too early based only on one season metrics... I rarely watch a show that's only been on for one season because I'm that much more likely to not get story closure. Not sure how common that is, but how many people are watching shows that were cancelled before getting story closure? And how many might watch the back catalog otherwise? I guess not enough to be worth the investment.
On a side note, I do wish more seasons (streaming or not) would actually come to a real stopping point instead of just ending on a cliffhanger and hoping to be renewed.
This is a really insightful take that I feel most other commenters miss. The intuitive metric of views is not what is good for Netflix's bottom line, quite the opposite. The best customer for Netflix is the one who stays subscribed but never uses it.
I believe the reason most people miss this is that for traditional networks, more viewers are strictly better; more viewers result in more ad revenue, and the marginal cost of an additional viewer is zero. For Netflix however, this is inversed: an additional viewer does not add any revenue (assuming they were already subscribed), but still adds cost.
The economic model of Netflix seems to be at odds with user interests.
"On a side note, I do wish more seasons (streaming or not) would actually come to a real stopping point instead of just ending on a cliffhanger and hoping to be renewed."
I think this is half of the problem, too many shows being made with the hope they get enough traction to stretch out a few seasons. The result being not much of story and/or any hope of a satisfactory ending.
No surprise that viewing figures tail-off as this becomes a predictable path?
I'm starting to get fed up with TV shows (netflix or otherwise) for that same reason. It seems you only have two choices:
- first season doesn't pull enough viewers, it's cancelled.
- first season pulls enough viewers, season 2 onwards take season 1 as a status quo they'll basically never advance from, advancing the story so slowly that it almost feels like a sitcom where most characters end up at the exact point they used to be at the beginning so they can keep getting viewership.
I'm starting to see it with The Boys for example (WARNING slight spoilers next) Season 1 introduced a super dangerous environment where any wrong step could end the characters lives, by the end of season 2 it almost feels like a high school show because the main characters mostly bump into each other without consequences. If they need to kill someone they just introduce a new person a few episodes earlier so they can get rid of that one while the main characters stay healthy.
A lot of the shows they've cancelled just weren't that good, even the ones I watched.
They hold up 3 shows as an example, Stranger Things, Game of Thrones and Schitt's Creek. The first two were smash hits after season 1. Schitt's Creek was a really good show from the start but it wasn't well known until later seasons. It didn't "hit it's stride" it built up it's audience over time. The quality was always there.
The shows Netflix is cancelling aren't even close in quality.
Sad that the Dark Crystal was cancelled - didn't know that. It did look awfully expensive to produce though, and it was not kid friendly at all (all that sucking the soul out of cute little puppets would scare the crap out of my young nieces and nephews!)
I'm the target demographic for Dark Crystal as I read a ton of fantasy, but I watched one episode and had no real desire to continue on. It was just kinda boring. I subscribe to r/fantasy and this is a fairly common opinion there as well.
In comparison, I can't say for sure that The Witcher series is super high quality, but it managed to be pretty exciting and I enjoyed it for that.
That's a very American perspective. In the UK a series is usually only 6 episodes and few shows last more than two or three series.
Compare the original UK version of the Office and its American facsimile and I think you'll see it's much better to go out on a high rather than drag on endlessly. If the Simpsons had ended after a couple of seasons it would have been one of the best shows ever, instead the brain dead drivel they churn out for it now just continually diminishes its early greatness.
Yes, but UK series are normally tied up neatly at the end and not left unresolved. If Netflix did the same, I doubt people would have a problem with it.
edit: it's also purely a matter of opinion, but I got a lot more pure enjoyment from the US version of the Office than the UK one. They had more time to develop the characters and figure out what was truly funny about the show. Sure it devolved into sentimental fan service in the last few seasons, but at it's peak I was laughing way harder at the American version than I ever did for the British one.
But in the UK everyone knows that it's only going to be 3 series at 6 episodes each, and so that's how the show is written. The viewer gets a satisfying arc.
Netflix just pulls the plug. This means you get a weird kludged together final episode to try to pull stuff together or they just leave it and there's no resolution for a lot of stuff.
I do agree that many of these shows would be better if they were written in the UK style. A lot of US shows now just feel woolly as they meander through the plot.
This way of writing, at least the overall arc, really shows. Ideally, writers know when to stop. The Revenge had such an ending, it was Season 3 if I remember well, before it turned into yet another soap opera. Babylon 5 on the other hand was a great example of having the whole 5 seasons basically written before they started production.
Babylon 5 is actually a great example of what happens when you mess with cancellations.
During the production of season 4, JMS (the creator) was given to understand that season 5 was unlikely to happen. So he had to cram most of the rest of his plot into that season.
Having such a powerful, story-packed season 4 meant it did really well. So they put season 5 back on.
But he'd already used up (most of) the story he wanted to tell, because they told him he wasn't getting a season 5. So the season 5 we got ended up being a bit weak and wandering, with only the last few episodes (which were part of what would have been the ending of season 4, if he hadn't found out in time that there would be a season 5) having the same strength and memorability as the season 4 episodes.
It also meant (IIRC) that they lost some important actors, like Claudia Christian, for season 5. If Ivanova had been able to stay on to be B5's captain after Sheridan became President, the final season would have been much stronger.
Thanks for refreshing my memory! Loosing Claudia Christian resembles, for different reasons, loosing Terry Farrel for season 7 of DS9. Which, if you ask me, had quite some impact on Gul Dukats story arch. Whcih wasn't the best in season 7 after he was such a great villain over the whole series before.
> But he'd already used up (most of) the story he wanted to tell, because they told him he wasn't getting a season 5. So the season 5 we got ended up being a bit weak and wandering, with only the last few episodes (which were part of what would have been the ending of season 4, if he hadn't found out in time that there would be a season 5) having the same strength and memorability as the season 4 episodes.
All of season 5 was in the original plan as the side-stories for seasons 4 and 5, not written after the series was renewed. That's mainly why the filmed season 4 was so action-packed - the main plot wasn't really compressed in terms of screen time, instead there were no side plots.
Aside from that, the finale, Sleeping in Light, was filmed during season 4, that's why Claudia Christian was in it. They found out about the renewal just barely in time to use some season 5 budget to film The Deconstruction of Falling Stars, which only then became the season 4 finale. I think that was really the only thing not in the original plan.
This is one reason I really like the "miniseries" format. It's a broad enough label that it can include something a few 1-hr episodes long or 8 of them. I guess at the longer end, they're closer to a "season" of a typical show, but the idea is that it's a complete story arc with a defined beginning and end.
I love how modern formats allow for stories to be told where they otherwise wouldn't fit into a single film or work as a weekly recurring series. I've always felt that a movie is like a short story: you're dropped into the plot and the background is exposed through the course of action. Longer formats like the miniseries can tell a story more on the scale of a full novel.
When you get into stuff like "The Walking Dead" where it theoretically starts off like a novel but keeps renewing and keeps rehashing the same basic plot points for years, it's like one of those novel series where they just keep cranking out new sequels as long as people are buying them, quality be damned.
Another great example. I lost interest when they introduced Neegan. He could have been such a great villain in theory, kind of the evil twin version of Rick Grimes. Instead he turned into that unbeatable-because-authors-want-him-unbeatable kind of comic villain.
Netflix has done similar stuff with Ascension, The Witcher, Altered Carbon and others.
I do prefer quality over quantity, and more episodes per season isn't IMO a good thing. Having tight focus, telling a complete story from beginning to end, is more important than adding a lot of unnecessary filler.
I wasn't the biggest fan of Altered Carbon, but thought Ascension was exemplary. While it finished with an ending that could have set it up for a second series, the story it told was complete, and leaving some mystery is no bad thing. I'm currently reading the Witcher books, and the series was a reasonable adaption of the content of the first two books of short stories. There's plenty more material for the future, but what was done in eight episodes was decent and self-contained. Way better value than a movie ticket.
What I like about these short series is that they are free to take risks and make niche stuff that doesn't cater to the lowest common denominator. There's plenty of stuff on Netflix that doesn't appeal to me, and that's OK. There's also stuff that would appeal were it not poorly-written and produced dross. I would really prefer their "data driven" decision making to bear in mind the lasting appeal of these productions within their niche interest, rather than only using the initial response as an indicator of long-term success. Some of the best productions took years to develop a good following, and yet were successful beyond expectations.
It sounds like you only watched the first season of Altered Carbon. If true, just stop there. They made a second season with a slashed budget and also dialed back the sex and violence, making it overall very lackluster. Then, surprise, they cancelled it.
Good observation the lack of sex and violence in the second one. Could be true. I thought the new "sleeve" actor killed the second. The one in the first season was much much more convincing.
I agree that the new actor wasn’t nearly as strong, but I think a well written season with all the same flash and a full budget to do it would have saved it overall. It is really a shame that they hamstrung it like that. It would have been smarter to either leave it as a miniseries, or commit to a quality second season. As it is now, I’m less likely to recommend it and I add caveats to my recommendation. They eacked out a few more viewers by making a half assed second season, but hurt the brand long term. Which is what I think they are missing in general, that they are not properly counting the people that leave or fail to recommend Netflix because of a culmination of half-baked and abandoned shows that finally break the camel’s back.
They are doing the same thing to their signature series "Stranger Things". The first season was pure genius, they should have just ended it there with a "and they all live happily ever after". Each following season just ruins the series further.
I watched both. I didn't particularly enjoy the first (just not my thing), but the second was boring. I did see it through out of curiosity, but I agree it's no surprise that it was cancelled.
For many of these productions, if the story has been told and it ended on a high note, then I think it would be better to draw a line under it, and move onto a brand new idea and explore new concepts rather than squeeze every last little bit out of something that's not going to advance much upon what's already been done. Better that than jumping the shark.
Yes, the second season was terrible. I stumbled on Altered Carbon on netflix, and enjoyed it in fits and starts. Taken as a whole the first season has some great moments.
The local library had the audiobooks, so I listened to them on a long car trip between the first and second season being released. The writing isn't great but the stories definitely have their moments, even if its smothered in the usual "action flick" mindset.
I think netflix would have done a lot better to just stick to the plot of Broken Angels for the second season. But I think there was some rumbling on the message boards that it would have actually cost real cash to pull that off and netflix apparently wasn't willing to do it. So its the worst kind of serial scifi rubbish.
Its really too bad. The trash they invented as filler, was just that. But you can see their problem, the first book took place on an earth city, so they didn't need a lot of custom sets, and loads of CG.
My wife signed up for the hbo trial for a month and then canceled it. That was just about perfect. I watched the last season of game of thrones and a couple other things, and was getting bored with it just as the trial ended. I actually think that model might be the right one for the entire streaming ecosystem. Just rotate the streaming services every couple months.
Oh, Altered Carbon - great premise, totally failed 2nd part of the season, as for me. I don't know if the books are as bad, but Carbon was total disappointment for me.
>In the UK a series is usually only 6 episodes and few shows last more than two or three series
Inspector Morse (et al) come to mind as one that lasts longer. So many great British detective shows that go on for decades, with around 20 movie-length episodes per season (aka series).
I stand corrected. There was a time when I watched several shows like Morse (ie, Lewis, Frost, Foyle, Gently, Lynley, Marple, Midsomer) and I suppose it became a bit of a blur. It was a lot of long episodes, but not a lot of episodes (per season).
God I hate that program(me). And I was born on the same day, 9 December 1960, and as it gradually becomes known more and more for just being old I am more and more reminded of my own mortality.
The American version of the office had 75+ GREAT episodes (seasons 2,3,4, and most of 5) and the British version had 12 (plus the Christmas Special). The existence of the other 125 episodes doesn’t make those 75 any less great.
Same with The Simpsons — the 8 year peak of seasons 1-8 means at least we got those episodes. I haven’t watched a new episode in over 20 years but revisit the early episodes often.
I like the sandwiches on my favorite restaurant’s menu. Them serving the pasta dish I don’t like doesn’t make the sandwiches worse.
Obviously any assessment of art is going to be subjective. But at the time, those 75 episodes were the either the GREATest thing on television or very close to it. They hold up today and are episodes that are just as GREAT to me on the 20th or 30th viewing as they were on the first.
I've seen Seinfeld so many times that now a days I just tap on the "random" option in VLC when watching it. X-files I've divided to two, MonsterOfTheWeek and "moves plot forward". Then randomly pick from the two buckets.
Don't think there is any "new" series that I've watched over twice, I wonder why that is.
> I think you'll see it's much better to go out on a high rather than drag on endlessly.
I don't. This might be true with dramas where the plot is a big component of it, but certainly not for episodic comedies.
Yeah, the Simpsons isn't something I care to watch anymore, and the Office's final seasons without Michael Scott weren't as good. But I'd still much rather have more episodes of content I enjoy than less for the sake of "the complete package". It sucks when a show gets cancelled without an end, but while we're here, the American Office had a fine ending and I'm much happier with the many seasons of it over the British one.
In Pakistan, TV dramas are usually one season of 10-24 episodes. They are mostly written or sketched in detail by one primary writer, before shooting begins. Stories are fully completed and loose ends tied off by the end of the series.
The Simpsons is actually a pretty good counterexample. The first season is so-so, the show didn’t really hit its stride until seasons 3-8 according to IMDB ratings: https://i.redd.it/p0or3k2rv6dz.jpg
If The Simpsons was British, none of the best episodes would have been made.
The decline of The Simpsons from brilliant American sitcom into mindless consumerist drivel happens at around season 9 and is well documented as “Zombie Simpsons”: https://deadhomersociety.com/zombiesimpsons/
Thing is with a lot of American sitcoms is on a long enough timeline they just become soap operas.
UK Office is a concise and witty comedy idea expressed in the correct amount of time the idea deserves.
If you look at the later seasons of shows like US Office, Parks and Rec and similar shows, what you're watching has more in common with a soap opera than a sitcom. I feel I can almost count the exceptions to this on one hand.
Agreed. IMO the first few seasons of The Office (US) and Parks & Recreation were the best, and they went downhill over time. Very few shows can sustain quality over time. For sitcoms... maybe Seinfeld?
The Office UK vs the Office US is belies your point. Almost everyone agrees the US version was much better. The US 1st season tried to be like the UK original and was universally panned. That biting, British humour can only carry you so far. Also, the US version didn't carry on endlessly. Steve Carrell left after season 6 and the show lost it's momentum. But regained some of that magic before closing.
> The tenth series of the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who premiered on 15 April 2017 and concluded on 1 July 2017, and consisted of twelve episodes, after it was announced in July 2015 that BBC Worldwide had invested in a tenth series of the programme in its annual review. The series is led by head writer and executive producer Steven Moffat, alongside executive producer Brian Minchin. It is the third and final series overseen by the two as executive producers, as well as Moffat's sixth and final series as head writer. This series is the tenth to air following the programme's revival in 2005, and is the thirty-sixth season overall.
I agree; you can really see the writing quality diminish when shows just go on forever. The original 'vision' is completely lost and you can almost hear the discussions between writers as they have to come up with new plot twists to make the story believable for yet another series/season.
That's why I thoroughly enjoyed the German show Dark. They planned 3 series/seasons and that's what we got: a well-thought-out show from start to finish with a single vision of how the whole thing will end. That clue in the first episode? Yep, directly related to the ending in season/series 3 and not some, now inconsequential, detail the writers 'forgot about' or changed course over.
This is a bit of a left-field comment, but... don't episodic TV shows have a lot of the same downsides as SaaS solutions? You want indefinite entertainment that you'll be happy with season after season after season, but the cost is an eternity of risk that the network will cancel the show and you'll never find out how it ends.
The difference is that I want Photoshop to run forever, but I'm not as sure I want Walter White to get an exotic new cancer every twelve months.
I don't watch shows on my own. I know they satisfy the urge to turn on the TV and just have something on, and I think that urge is mind-rotting. If I have to watch something, why not a movie? If I don't have the energy to pay attention for 90 minutes, why idly kill time watching anything at all?
Or what about short films? That's a whole neglected format. They have Oscars and a dedicated video network for them.
> If I don't have the energy to pay attention for 90 minutes, why idly kill time watching anything at all?
I don't even understand the point of this question. Why is 90 minutes more worthy than 48 minutes? At the end of the day, I have a little bit of time to relax. I generally do so by watching one episode of <whatever series the wife and I enjoy atm>. What is it you think about a 90 minute movie makes it more worthy, that anything less than it isn't worth doing at all?
It’s about time invested to find something you’ll like. If I watch a new movie every night, I have to go do the work to find a movie to watch. If I watch short films for 90 mins, I have to do that 5-6x/night. If I watch a series, I find a new one once a month.
Bean counters shit up everything. This started in traditional publishing in the 1990s and it's responsible for the oppressive mediocrity of the "high literature" scene in the US. Money people never, ever know their place. They don't understand that culture is more important than they are, and it shows.
It started with the chain bookstores. Used to be, getting in was the hard part, but once a writer got published, he stayed published. His editor would keep supporting his books until he broke out. Chain bookstores wrecked this. They'd pull an author's numbers, see that the first book was a flop, and pass on the second. They also introduced the 8-week rotation, which meant that reader word of mouth (a slower process) got disenfranchised, forcing publishers to pick winners (lead titles) and losers before the books were even launched.
This changed the incentive structure. Instead of having to get one person, who knew literature, to believe in his work, an author has to convince a whole committee of people. If the editor can't sell the book to the money people, it gets no marketing or publicity and it dies.
Then there are the literary agents, who don't even read 99 percent of the work sent to them. That's done by unpaid college-age interns. So, instead of writing a book readers will love, your focus becomes writing a book that people will think their bosses like. It's a totally different game.
I'm not surprised this is happening to Netflix. We tend to have a pro-data bias in technology. We don't realize that when the money people get their hands on data, that unless we are extremely editorial in the context in which they interpret and use that data, it's going to be a disaster. They don't have altruistic motives and they don't work nearly as hard as we do to understand complexity-- it's best to think of them as a different species.
Yes "data driven" does not always lead to what's best for the consumer.
From what I understand, Netflix' decision model is heavily based on how many users watch the first X minutes of a season in the first few days that it's up. Essentially if the show isn't a hit immediately after release, it won't be renewed, and the threshold required to renew goes up exponentially every season, so essentially a show has to be a runaway hit in order to survive past the second season.
I'm sure this is a data-driven decision, and I guess it shows that novelty is probably what drives people to the platform and gets new subscribers. It makes intuitive sense: with most forms of media the largest number of people will give something a try when it's new, and aside from very rare exceptions the viewer base will settle in to a much lower number of "true fans".
So it makes sense in the short term from a business perspective, and they have way more data than I do from my armchair, but I wonder if they are adequately assessing the risk of this decision model. People get deeply emotionally attached to media, and it's a strong negative when a series you love is cancelled, so this could negatively affect their brand over time. And that's not something which is so easy to design KPI's around as new subscriber numbers.
I suspect Netflix would have to see increased churn due to pressure from competitors to see more serious attention paid to loyalty and retention.
Not sure how much my viewing influences Netflix "Top 10", but this week it showed Star Trek TNG of being part of it. With all the series being out, including opd ones, I just don't have time to get to watch stuff right after release. I also tend to binge watch series before starting a new one. So when finally start to watch a new series, it might well be to late to get more than one season. Great, basically the same shitty situation we had back the day. And I really thought streaming would result in more variety. Turned out it is just a more modern version of cable tv.
That makes two, then! Also binged DS9, started VOY and came to the conclusion that out of all of them, DS9 is my favorite. And I do like, somehow, the naive optimism of TNG. Kind of a blast from the past, if you ask me.
> And I do like, somehow, the naive optimism of TNG.
This so many times. It gives me hope that humanity will eventually rise above what's going right now. There are also a lot more good lessons in TNG than I remembered as a kid. Great show :)
It was great. personally, I was and still am torn regarding the optimism. I love it, but on the other hand I always liekd gritty and dark SF as well. Luckily for me, there is both! Even within Star Trek! And Picard is my favorite SF ship captain anyway, by far!
> And I do like, somehow, the naive optimism of TNG. Kind of a blast from the past, if you ask me
If you like that, you should give The Orville a try. A lot of people dismissed it thinking it was going to be full of crude humor, essentially "Family Guy in Space", because it was from Seth MacFarlane.
But that is not the case at all. What MacFarlane was going for exactly was that naive optimism, although from TOS not TNG. Later science fiction, he has said, has been a lot less optimistic.
Yes, The Orville has some comedy--sometimes quite funny, but it almost all fits in with the serious elements. The crew, at least for a long time, is not full of highly competent natural heroes like TOS or TNG, because The Orville is not the flagship of the fleet that everyone wants to be on and only the very best qualify. It is the opposite of that. It's a minor ship where you put average or below people who you don't expect much from, captained by a man who had problems in his personal life that tanked his career, given The Orville because some friends called in favors to get one more try to turn him around before kicking him out of the service.
The first season was a bit hit or miss for the first few episodes, as they figured out the right balance of comedy and drama, but it did not take long to get good. The second season continued on from that. That's all there was been so far, with a third season coming.
I agree on DS9. My one complaint is that I think they should have went another direction with the ending. It could have ended in a way that served as a launching point for the biggest Star Trek arc yet.
Much of the series involved the conflict between the Federation and the Founders from the gamma quadrant, with the Federation being the good guys. The Founders were perhaps not necessarily evil, but they had a strong distrust of others and a belief that the non-shapeshifters would wipe them out if they got a chance.
The thing about the Founders is that with their shapeshifting abilities they were pretty much the best spies and infiltrators in the galaxy. We know they infiltrated to the highest levels of Klingon government.
I don't remember if it was ever confirmed that they made it to high levels in the Federation, too, but you have to assume they did. But then they should be able to figure out that Federation really are the good guys. The Federation really wants peace between every intelligent species. They really should join the Federation rather than fear it.
So why didn't they?
Perhaps it is because they aren't the only ones who have infiltrated and placed people high in the Federation government? From TOS and TNG we know that others have tried or succeeded at that before.
So maybe the reason the Founders absolutely distrust the Federation is because they know that the people who appear to be in charge and are pushing the peace and unity message are actually not the ones running things. The peace and unity people are just clueless puppets of the real masters.
End DS9 with Sisko discovering the truth, the Federation's masters discovering that Sisko is on to them, and Sisko going on the run.
That sets up at least two more series.
The first one could cover Sisko on the run, working in the shadows to build up secret opposition to the Federation's evil masters, slowly spreading the word to others he can trust, like Picard on the Enterprise, and convincing Federation enemies like the Cardassians that they are better off with a Federation that really is what is claims to be rather than a Federation secretly run by evil aliens and so should help save the Federation.
The second series, "Star Trek: Civil War", could cover when matters get to a head, and open hostilities break out withing The Federation.
You could still have Voyager in there...have the civil war start while Voyager is lost. They can come back into the middle of it.
There's probably even plenty for a third series after Civil War.
Totally agree! And I am convinced that now that I will give the Orville a shot. I am kind os disapointed with season 7 of DS9, the focus on the spiritual aspect was a little bit too much on the nose for me.
I like your theoretical story arcs, it would make for great stories around the federation and the moral superiority, assumed, percieved or actually true, compared to other entities. I guess after having a narowwly avoided a coup by star fleet and having fought an intergalactic war, that alone should have had a deep impact. maybe even a change with regards to the rpime directive. Why would you leave all these new worlds and civilisations upt for grabs for an adversary, right?
It is quite striking, so, how the way tv series told stories changed from the episodic approach from TNG to a more arc driven approach in DS9 and VOY. Both of which sit somewhere between the episodic style of e.g. TNG and things like Breaking Bad and the first seasons of prison break.
Essentially if the show isn't a hit immediately after release, it won't be renewed, and the threshold required to renew goes up exponentially every season, so essentially a show has to be a runaway hit in order to survive past the second season.
I buy it, but that sucks. I know my view is idiosyncratic, but I view making money like a biological process. Most things have to do it if they want to survive, but it doesn't deserve to be the thing that matters. The Silicon Valley focus on explosive growth, as opposed to healthy and reasonable long-term growth, is bad for the world.
I wonder if they are adequately assessing the risk of this decision model. People get deeply emotionally attached to media, and it's a strong negative when a series you love is cancelled, so this could negatively affect their brand over time. And that's not something which is so easy to design KPI's around as new subscriber numbers.
Right. This is especially true of series with defined story arcs. A sitcom can be ended at any time, but if Breaking Bad had ended at Season 4, it would have pissed off everyone.
I'm hoping that this policy leads to much tighter story arcs which aren't designed to take 5 seasons to come to a conclusion. There's far too much TV that basically only has actual new plot elements in the first and last ten minutes, and then pads everything out to a full episode.
A world in which writers know they have, at best, 24 episodes to tell their story will hopefully result in much more focused story telling, and fewer filler episodes looking into the exciting history of what minor character C did 15 years ago.
The problem is that it's not possible to know in advance if a series will be one of the blessed few to last more than two seasons. Designing a 24-episode arc, and then having the show be a smash hit is also a problem for Netflix
I’ve never encountered a well written TV series where I was disappointed at it ending after two seasons, while I’ve encountered a great many which outstayed their welcome and soured me on the entire thing. I know some people love great long things that never seem to end, I just don’t count myself among them.
Netflix not only stops shows before you even got a chance to see it (I'm not among those who look for new content all the time - I try to follow what I'm currently watching), but Netflix also removes movies, some of them classics, after some time. So when my wife says she would like to watch something she's been wanting to watch, and I look it up, I find that it used to be on Netflix but it's not there anymore. It's been like that for every movie she's asked about.
I'm wondering why having Netflix at all. It feels like a pointless waste of money, something my wife now keeps mentioning, and I'm very close to terminate the whole deal.
Netflix, you're wasting my money. I'm not getting what I expected to get from you. I will be spend my money on something else than you.
Netflix is horrible. It's slowly turning back into broadcast TV. And this whole data-driven approach to everything is infuriating. Complain about how something works? Netflix says the data proves you wrong. How long did it take them to add an option to get rid of those automatic video previews that had users enraged? I would have canceled long ago if my wife didn't like watching all the Asian novelas they have on there.
I recall reading something from some Netflix analytics-obsessed pinhead about the automatic previews where they said they wanted it to behave more like regular TV where something is on as soon as you turn it on. Then they have it automatically play the next episode by default. I recently read about some other feature they were testing where it would just continuously play whatever their recommendation engine thinks you would like. Then you've got the more frequent churn of content.
Netflix today resembles a personalized stream of an old school premium cable channel like HBO. It's designed to help you quickly find something to watch and then send you down a rabbit hole with continuous content that autoplays as soon as the last video ends. On the one hand, I admire them for doing something different than every other streaming service that popped up after they invented the category. On the other hand, I just don't like the experience at all.
> Netflix is horrible. It's slowly turning back into broadcast TV
It's amazing how this describes a number of the tech 'industry disruption' companies... Amazon used to have better quality standards than eBay or Wal-mart, Uber used to be cheaper and have cleaner cars and drivers than Taxis, Netflix used to have a larger variety of classics but now largely makes their own content
It's an inevitability of incentivizing growth over all else. So scale per se is not the problem. The problem is incentivising the first derivative of scale.
Increased quality is a good marketing ploy for growth, producing shit is a good way to increase margins. I notice a lot of restaurants have great food opening week, and then a return to median over the following year until they go bust.
So true. It's like they forget what made them popular in the first place.
What was special about Netflix was this large library of on-demand content and things you may not find anywhere else. I think what early adopters liked about it was you could be deliberate about sitting down to watch something. You'd put some thought into creating your list. We were trained to do this going back to the DVD days - probably even more so during the DVD rental days. And remember that Netflix had that massive collection of quality movie reviews. I suspect that early adopters had much different viewing patterns than the people who hung around on cable for longer.
So what does Netflix do? Make it more like a broadcast. Maybe that's what they discovered was necessary to attract the masses. I don't know. All I can say is it's much different than it used to be and, aside from some really good in-house content, I don't like it anymore.
Prior to on-demand content, I was a faithful "red envelope" subscriber because not only was it convenient (and I didn't really have to worry about returning a RedBox DVD), but Netflix kept _all_ my ratings for _all_ the movies I'd seen. They still have that data last I checked, but it's very much hidden in the account settings and they've long since deprecated user reviews. They now say "98% match." Match to what? We pretty much use a single user account across two households; what is that statistic referring to?
Nowadays, I never find anything I want on Netflix and am glad I'm borrowing an account, otherwise I'd drop it. Hulu's trying to catch up, but Netflix is easily the most user-hostile media interface I've ever used, and that includes hotel channel guides.
I'm actually a big fan of Netflix exactly as you articulated you don't like it—if I have an empty head, I sit down and click through to find something to watch. Not currently subscribed, though, and I wish it came at a slightly lower price point as I don't watch the vast majority of netflix content.
I appreciate their attempt to do this. I'd love such a thing. Unfortunately, their algorithm is woefully immature, they lack content, and can't double down on shows that get a slow start. In the short term this helps them grow at the expense of alienating early adopters, die hard fans, and their more flippant subscribers.
My biggest peeve is that Netflix keeps dropping and cancelling shows I'm really enjoying. I'm close to dropping them, and every other service. Months close. The hassle and cost of maintaining 10+ subscriptions is a worse experience than the prenetflix days of broadcast. If the industry could get their act together and go the way of music and pay royalties per stream then Netflix would probably have the biggest advantage with their algorithm. But their ux is still painful and proper discovery is completely lacking. I yearn for a Dewey decimal like video categorisation system, and way more high production value sci-fi shows.
Turning off autoplay on YouTube was the one of the best things I have done for my personal happiness in the last few years. It's amazing how having to take a moment to choose the next the next action after finishing a piece of content has contributed to my mindfulness, and raised the quality bar in terms of what I consume.
Automatic netflix previews are the thing that infuriates me the most about it. (And the reason I'll probably never pay for it.)
Other than opening the settings screen, or playing a video and hitting pause, there is no way to leave netflix alone and not have it make noise/play video.
Three seconds after you stop hitting buttons, whatever's selected on-screen becomes a full-video ad for that thing. (with all of the annoying traits of ads, like loud attention grabbing sounds)
I've idle-mindedly mashed buttons to prevent this on console-netflix while trying to have a conversation about what to watch, with no attention being payed to what was actually on the screen.
> Netflix also removes movies, some of them classics, after some time. So when my wife says she would like to watch something she's been wanting to watch, and I look it up, I find that it used to be on Netflix but it's not there anymore
This is a different matter. Netflix has a finite budget to license content. It's not clear that it would be better for the consumer if they had a policy of never removing films from the library, as this would have to be counterbalanced by fewer new films being added. I suspect this approach would be much worse for the consumer overall.
Also, unlike when a series is cancelled, those films are still available to stream on an à la carte basis from Google/Amazon/iTunes/etc.
I have been giving Netflix a try for a couple of months now and I am really thinking of dropping it because of this. I think I’d rather rent something from one of the on demand services and watch what I want, than being forced to watch whatever Netflix happens to have on offer this week. Especially because I generally prefer to watch a movie over a TV series.
It sounds like your complaint isn't that Netflix has a 'churn' of available content, but that they don't offer much content of interest to you. If that's the case, then sure, it makes good sense to cancel and either go with another subscription streaming service, or buy/rent what you want to watch. There's not much Netflix can do about that, short of just spending far more money on licensing content, which would presumably mean raising prices.
I've found that disc rental (by post) can be a surprisingly good option, even if it's been mostly forgotten with the rise of streaming. The available library is better than any streaming subscription is able to offer.
> I generally prefer to watch a movie over a TV series
Shouldn't this mean you're less inconvenienced by content churn? If you're part way through a series and it gets removed, that's annoying, but this doesn't really apply to movies.
That’s just a streaming rights thing. I don’t think Netflix is taking away any movies just to take them away. It’s because agreements expire and on renegotiation the rights owners want a bigger slice. Netflix’s streaming used to be a free tack on to the disk shipping business because they got a bunch of cheap rights because no rights owners thought anyone wanted to stream.
In fairness, I can't imagine "classics" garnering anywhere near the watch times of a new show. Whilst you'll get some new viewers from the people who've heard it's a classic or those showing their kids a movie from "their time", but the majority of viewers will be those who've seen it before and want to watch it again, and given the age of some of these classics they likely already own it on DVD etc.
For Netflix shows. Netflix is now a network channel producing its own content, in the mold of HBO. If you don't find value in HBO, then you don't subscribe to HBO. Same with Netflix.
Licensing content from turned out to be a terrible business model because a) licensing fees would bleed you dry of all your profits, b) content owners would yank their content anyway to compete with you because it turns out, creating a streaming infrastructure isn't that hard and much cheaper than owning and producing content.
While there's obviously licensed content on Netflix, HBO, and elsewhere, it's increasingly about rounding out their own studio content or other exclusives. I'm not going to subscribe to HBO for whatever non-HBO movies they may have.
If you're not interested with what's on the "channel" at all, you're probably mostly better off with just buying/renting a la carte.
I have a suspicion that the way game of thrones ended may have been an experiment to disrupt consumers attachment to release them onto new objects of desire. It didn't affect the studio or publisher that much, GOT simply vanished from culture.
Past obsessives moved to other newer things after a few days.
It's an incredibly curious thing and the opposite from the never ending marvel material that gets released.
> the never ending marvel material that gets released.
I dunno, now that Endgame completed the movie storyline that had been building for a decade, and their spearhead TV show Agents of SHIELD is over, I've almost completely lost all interest in the MCU. I've seen similar sentiments pretty regularly elsewhere, and wouldn't be surprised if its prominence also fades despite continued releases.
> I have a suspicion that the way game of thrones ended may have been an experiment to disrupt consumers attachment to release them onto new objects of desire.
This is a great theory!
I think the creators of HBO's GOT ended the series because they were rushing to work on:
]] Benioff and Weiss inked a five-year, $250 million partnership with Netflix in August to make film and TV projects exclusively for the streaming service. The move was head-scratching at the time, considering the pair had already committed to producing Star Wars movies for Disney—an undertaking that was likely to take many years and leave little room for anything else.
How long before production companies start paying people to watch (measurable too) the first episodes of a tv series? If you could boost your viewership so much you got to produce multiple seasons, losing out on the first season might not be a bad deal.
It is funny. Originally the value of Netflix was that you could watch 10 seasons of an old TV show in one go. Now you can watch 1/2 season (10-13 episodes) of a new show.
I have started to check if there is more than one season out before I watch a new show, and frequently there isn't.
> I guess it shows that novelty is probably what drives people to the platform and gets new subscribers.
It assumes that novelty is what drives people to the platform and increases/maintains the subscriber base.
However, Netflix's evident model is not capable of falsifying this assumption. By cancelling series as soon as they plateau (not even _decline_, given reporting (https://www.wired.com/story/why-netflix-keeps-canceling-show...) of its production cost escalator), they do not generate a large library of "complete series" for later viewing.
This also puzzles me, since it contradicts Netflix's willingness to pay a pretty penny for established series like Friends. Its current show-commissioning practices seem to be incapable of generating a new generational hit like that.
I agree, and I think it's a problem which can occur in data-driven systems: the system can stabilize at a non-optimal local maximum.
Ideally they should A/B test at least occasionally with different decision models to see if their assumptions are correct, but those are very expensive experiments to run when you're talking about the production of a TV series.
It's also difficult because Friends is also a long-tail phenomenon. There were dozens of 90s sitcoms that failed to become generational hits.
Also, a counter-argument to my proposition above is that broadcast TV through the mid-90s had a captive audience in a way that Netflix doesn't. To a limited extent, broadcast TV could force audiences to become familiar with a show, pushing an originally-marginal show over a threshold of popularity.
I don't know much about the high literature scene and even less so about what it looks like in the US.
Over here in Germany, I always thought it was mostly driven by literary critics, prizes, book fairs, etc. and thus its own sort of niche although I have no idea how well that works. Is that different in the US?
> This started in traditional publishing in the 1990s
I really don't think this started in the 1990s. The tension between commercial needs and artistic purity has existed for as long as there has been art[citation needed].
Some more modern art forms like TV and Film are very expensive and so particularly sensitive to commercial interests but it has always been true - artists have to eat just like everyone else.
Computers changed how quickly companies could collect and analyze data. The quarterly results is one artifact if this as currently companies could be publishing this data monthly or even weekly, but historically that simply wasn’t feasible.
That really did change a great many decision making processes not just in publishing but almost everywhere else.
But I dont think the commercialisation of art these days isn't driven by the hunger for food of the artists. Other forces try to extract as much value from it as they can. Not nice.
Exactly. What happened in the 1990s was a major consolidation of all retailers, including bookstores.
This created limited shelf space, which, in turn, put pressure on publishers to consolidate their authors into a few mega best-sellers, whom they then were completely reliant on. One Stephen King or James Patterson was enough to pay for 9 underperforming titles.
Major publishers also consolidated, from many into the so-called Big Six, which then became the Big Five. Five major publishers own the whole industry. Most publishers you've heard of are an imprint of one of those, or else it's a small press with very limited distribution.
All that consolidation has an effect. It narrows the gates, and gives rise to an industry that grows reliant on gatekeepers.
Why did the great consolidations happen? Why is everything trending towards a multi-national mega-conglomerate? I think I know, but that's a story for another day.
> We don't realize that when the money people get their hands on data, that unless we are extremely editorial in the context in which they interpret and use that data, it's going to be a disaster.
This is an absolutely fantastic point and applies in more contexts than that of publishing. You absolutely must be editorial in what you present to people who are higher up in the decision process and are less able to interpret the data. It often isn't just the money people, it is also your bosses and their bosses. It is a matter of presenting things with an eye towards the best possible outcomes, and understanding where things would get confusing for someone who is only half paying attention.
> We don't realize that when the money people get their hands on data, that unless we are extremely editorial in the context in which they interpret and use that data, it's going to be a disaster. They don't have altruistic motives and they don't work nearly as hard as we do to understand complexity-- it's best to think of them as a different species.
One could argue 'Money people' tend to be the source of many of our resources misuses (water,land,air,etc.) Of course they'll use data to shit everything up.
Given that time = money and that the job of money people is extract most value from shortest amount of time and that they seem to do it quite well, won't it mean that people actually get art worth their time? I think that you are upset that mediocre artists no longer could easily shove their art down people's throats?
Today it is extremely easy to self-publish. If artist believes their art really should reach other people they have means to do it easier than ever. But the fact someone wants to put money behind it is a generally good indicator whether art is good or not.
> won't it mean that people actually get art worth their time?
It optimizes for local maxima, rather than taking the risks associated with finding larger global maxima.
Or, in other words: It creates lots and lots and lots of pretty-good stuff of particular types with broad appeal, rather than allowing diversification into some stuff that appeals very strongly to group A, some other stuff that appeals very strongly to group B, etc.
It makes the publishing/Netflix executives richer, but our culture poorer.
Analysis I have seen of the effect of streaming on programming choices has been the direct opposite of this:
1. Unlike network television, space isn't limited, so you can make a good show which will only appeal to 20% of the audience.
2. The amount people watch doesn't affect revenue, just whether they renew or not. So it's now better to make one show that someone will really love, than seven shows that they will be vaguely into, but see as interchangeable with seven others on a different platform.
If anything, I think Netflix originals are overoptimised for creating cult hits along niche audiences.
I don't know how it plays out in practice, but I agree that it seems as if having the must-have subscription impact of a House of Cards or Game of Thrones when they first came out would trump having a dozen meh middle-of-the-pack mainstream network procedurals or sitcoms.
It's not impossible. The problem is a lack of incentives.
Amazon offers 70% royalties to indie authors.
YouTube offers peanuts to indie film makers. Netflix offers nothing.
Film-making is more expensive than novel writing, and there is a higher barrier to entry. Few indie film-makers are going to stick with it, unpaid, for multiple years. If they can receive funding, then that whole paradigm will change.
Patreon made a few steps in that direction, but I think crowd-funding has limits.
If Google/YouTube were to do what Amazon did, and offer a huge royalty share of profits...? That would turn everything around.
>Money people never, ever know their place. They don't understand that culture is more important than they are, and it shows.
They know their place. 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.
>It started with the chain bookstores. Used to be, getting in was the hard part, but once a writer got published, he stayed published.
It was great for the writer that got published, but not so great for countless others who couldn't get a break and couldn't get into the vaunted 'club' of gatekeeping published writers.
>Then there are the literary agents, who don't even read 99 percent of the work sent to them
Because there are magnitudes more writers, than writers who can generate an income, and always will be. This is the long-tail that everyone was predicating at the advent of the web. Democratization of culture and media means that it will be much harder for most (except for the tiny few) from making any sort of living from it. You see this on Instagram, YouTube, Twitch streaming, and podcasts because the barrier of entry is so low, it means there are hundreds of thousands of people trying all the time (and those that fail at making an income, are replaced by fresh young faces willing to try). But it's also true of more traditional media, like publishing.
>I'm not surprised this is happening to Netflix
Neither am I. Every single series that Netflix invests means they have to pass on countless others. There is no other way to run this business. The funny thing is that early on with Netflix, when they did not have a lot of content, they would keep renewing unpopular series forever. As they ramped up production, they followed the same trajectory as traditional network channels like NBC/ABC/FOX.
>It was great for the writer that got published, but not so great for countless others who couldn't get a break and couldn't get into the vaunted 'club' of gatekeeping published writers.
It was also great for readers, because there was a realistic expectation that if something was in print it was at worst competent and at best outstanding. Not so much now.
>Democratization of culture and media means that it will be much harder for most (except for the tiny few) from making any sort of living from it.
Democratization of culture means that culture becomes confused with entertainment. They're actually not identical.
IG, YT, and the rest are now purely about marketing strategies. The content - which used to have to speak for itself - is now secondary to bikini ass shots and other eyeball acquisition systems.
There is something rather weird and culty about this. It's almost as if everyone who produces content is being forced to participate in a competitive reality TV show where they Market Their Brand Really Hard™ - and the content is increasingly irrelevant.
>Every single series that Netflix invests means they have to pass on countless others.
Then they need to start monitoring their pilots more effectively, and also spend a little more on up-front development so that the shows that make it out of the slush pile have some prospect of getting to the end of a natural arc.
This is the paradox that most people don't seem to understand. NF claims to be data driven, and supposedly it's economically pragmatic to cut off shows early.
It isn't at all. It's actually unbelievably inefficient, economically and also in terms of customer loyalty.
The efficient solution is to produce consistently great content. This pays off over the long-haul - because a successful series can keep generating significant income for decades.
>Then they need to start monitoring their pilots more effectively, and also spend a little more on up-front development so that the shows that make it out of the slush pile have some prospect of getting to the end of a natural arc.
It's an interesting thought. Maybe if you had 3-episode arcs as a pilot and more development time, you'd have a better idea which ones have legs for a few seasons anyway. Though, as I wrote elsewhere, I don't want TV shows that go on for too long.
>Maybe if you had 3-episode arcs as a pilot and more development time
Sure ... but OP was complaining about shows being cancelled mid-narrative. How does releasing 3 episode pilots fix that? Most likely those will not be complete works, but rather end on some sort cliff-hanger, to entice viewership to stay with the show.
>Though, as I wrote elsewhere, I don't want TV shows that go on for too long.
I agree with you. I found 3 to 5 seasons seems to be the sweet spot for most shows. Once it goes past 5 seasons for many shows, the quality seems to degrade, the writers run out of ideas and just do things to fill time. There is a remake of Anne of Green Gables (Anne with an E) - and holy geeze is that true for that one when it comes to time-filler. Whereas the original series was tight with great pacing, this new series invents and explores every pointless side-story. For example, in the original, there would be a reference to Matthew going somewhere, and in the remake, because the writers have so much time to fill, you'll get a deep dive into that trip, which ultimately has no impact on the larger narrative itself.
I think what the parent was suggesting was that if more time were spent up-front to maximize the chance that the chance that a show that makes it on is good, you wouldn't be pulling the plug on as many shows. I'm not sure that would actually work though. I assume they already try to do that in development where it's a lot cheaper to experiment than in production.
I only half-jokingly say that I lose interest in most series after, at most, 5 seasons. And it can be a lot less than that. A series can coast through maybe a season or two in significant part on a fresh concept, original characters, a different style, etc. Sure, the writing needs to be good too but it's not the only thing to engage the viewer. It gets harder after that and so does finding fresh stories.
>IG, YT, and the rest are now purely about marketing strategies.
OBVIOUSLY! Because there are a million others vying for the same eyeballs. The question is, how do you stand out? If you were a YouTuber who wanted to make a living from YouTube content you create, how would you do it?
>Then they need to start monitoring their pilots more effectively, and also spend a little more on up-front development so that the shows that make it out of the slush pile have some prospect of getting to the end of a natural arc.
How do you know they aren't doing that? No matter how good your pre-production process is for finding good shows, ultimately, it's the eyeballs and box-office that decide it. There is no formula to differentiate a hit from a bomb. What complicates things is that season 1 of the show may have been a hit, but subsequent seasons are not. There's no magic here. At some point, you are going to be cutting something to make room for something else.
>NF claims to be data driven
I'm sure it is, but there is no formula that you can use to figure out what is going to be a hit and what will be a bomb and lose you money. If there was, you wouldn't see companies spending hundreds of millions on movies that end up bombing at the box-office.
>The efficient solution is to produce consistently great content.
This is like saying the 'efficient solution' to investing is to invest in companies that give a good return and not invest in companies that lose you money.
Pretty sure everyone wants to produce great content.
> 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.
>there's no way of telling how much and individual program actually brings in
Sure there is. I used money as a metric, but Netflix, being a subscription business, will have it's own internal metric that correlates cost, popularity, and maybe other stuff to come up with some sort of a score that they can then compare to other shows - to figure out which ones should be renewed and which ones should not be.
Even with all their metrics, all they can do is guess. Their revenue comes from subscriptions, and there is no clear correlation between the amount of views an individual show gets and the amount of subscriptions Netflix has. You can't simply say "obviously a show with more immediate viewers brings in more subscriptions."
A show with fewer viewers might attract hardcore fans who will cancel their subscription if the show is cancelled, while one that's much more popular might attract viewers who will stay on the platform either way. Someone might be less likely to continue their subscription because of these kinds of cancellations, even when they didn't get around to watching the shows before they were cancelled. A show might attract fewer viewers at first, but become a cult classic later (Netflix should know this, they purchased shows like Arrested Development), or take a few years to really hit their stride.
>Even with all their metrics, all they can do is guess.
Sure. But you have to come up with something, otherwise you'll never cancel anything, by extension, never have room to invest in shows that could drive your subscriptions.
>A show with fewer viewers might attract hardcore fans who will cancel their subscription if the show is cancelled
Sure - and maybe there is a way to have some fuzzy prediction or metrics that some show has a hardcore fan base that is worth keeping around even if it's not broadly popular.
So I agree with you it isn't perfect, but again, you still have to come up with some objective measure because you need to make decision on which shows and movies you should be investing in. You only have a finite amount of money available to produce content.
> But you have to come up with something, otherwise you'll never cancel anything, by extension, never have room to invest in shows that could drive your subscriptions.
Well, positive reception is probably a good indicator of something at least. Many of the cancelled shows were received positively by both fans and critics. That's hardly a given for television shows, and re-rolling the dice is likely to leave you with a show with worse reception. And you do this while cutting the legs out from under a show that had good reception.
People being unhappy with the amount of cancellations is probably a good indicator of something, as well. And you have to wonder about the long term effects, and whether people will stop getting interested in new Netflix shows in general.
> And you have to wonder about the long term effects, and whether people will stop getting interested in new Netflix shows in general.
Interesting point. Maybe 5 years from now nobody will care about new Netflix shows the way nobody cares about new Google products - because consumers just assume it'll be abandoned in a few years. And then both companies will be unable to create anything new because of the poor reputations they've built for themselves.
There's a lot of judging in this comment that makes me uncomfortable ("think of them as a different species" has a very nasty history in human society).
But what you're talking about is essentially the innovator's dilemma. Following the available data can lead to short-term optimizations, but also getting caught in a local minima. The silver lining is that this creates room for new competitors who can skip around that neighborhood in the business model and find a new kind of success.
So my question is the same whenever this sort of criticism comes up: if the current companies are screwing up so badly, who are the innovators that will go around those mistakes and out-compete them?
Lulu is ancient, and has been outcompeted by Amazon and other platforms. Wattpad has something like 65 million readers.
> If the current companies are screwing up so badly, who are the innovators that will go around those mistakes and out-compete them?
I mentioned this upthread, but in a nutshell: Amazon turned the book industry on its head by offering 70% royalties directly to indie authors, cutting out middlemen (i.e. traditional publishers and literary agencies). That happened in late 2009, and it unleashed a gold rush which is still in full swing. Traditional publishers still exist, and they still dominate the print industry (due to the huge expenses involved in print runs and print retail shelf space), but they have lost a lot of control over ebooks and audiobooks.
70% is more than artists get from art galleries, and it's more than musicians get from record labels. It's unheard of in the arts. And it was a very savvy move by Jeff Bezos. It changed the dynamics of that whole industry.
If Google/YouTube or some other major distributor of film (such as Netflix, or some new start-up) offers a large platform of viewers, plus that royalty rate for an incentive, then we are guaranteed to see a film Renaissance.
I hope it happens.
I think that socioeconomic forces being what they are, it is unlikely to happen any time soon. These days, awesome startups are likely to be bought by mega-conglomerates, and any visionary ideas they have will die beneath the weight of committee thinking.
I wouldn't classify Netflix as a bean culture. Because Netflix is still run by Reed Hastings the founder & CEO. Netflix hired Cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken. From his research came the insight of binge watching series not from Netflix data.
Netflix invests in series by pioneering new narratives for niche markets. When a niche market is smaller or the serie is received not as expected Netflix pulls the plug as every rational agent would do.
The publishing industry in the 90ties was optimizing their business model for maximizing ROI of limited amount of shelve space by producing hits for popularity what 80% people like.
Don't forget that it's not a single instance game.
The more Netflix pulls shows, the more it develops a reputation for pulling shows.
That decreases viewer investment in new shows, as they're incentivized to wait and see if the show lasts, or whether they're going to be left with narrative tension and no payoff after a cancellation.
And with decreased viewer investment in new shows, more shows get cancelled because the numbers don't look good. It's pro-cyclical and it burns goodwill.
> Instead of having to get one person, who knew literature, to believe in his work, an author has to convince a whole committee of people.
I think that the "one person who knew literature" system is largely a myth. People who "know literature" often resort to promoting the same canon and authors of the same background. I'd wager that a random lottery would produce a more interesting, dynamic, and varied list of books than one curated by a single expert.
If you truly want unrestrained creativity, then organizations like NEA need orders of magnitude more funding so they can throw cash at people trying to make something new. That will produce wild, interesting, and experimental works. But it won't produce Mad Men or other kinds of works that promote polish over boundless creativity. It is a trade off.
I think this is pointing the finger in the wrong direction. They do know their place: it's making money. The problem is that in our corporate market-based economy any culture producer that does not relentlessly focus on profit and scale will be outcompeted and destroyed by one that does.
Corporations are incentivized to hand the reins to the money people because the larger market structure means they will die if they don't. The market quite simply does not give a shit about the long-term well-being of a society. That doesn't factor into the fitness function at all.
This is one of those overly simplistic views that doesn't take the underlying laws and incentives into account.
Sure, it's bean counters. So then go a step further, and ask yourself: why are the bean counters afraid to take risks on fresh creative content? What market forces are driving them to bet solely on licensed shlock in the post-2000 world? What changed?
If the publishing industry is overwhelmed with a flood of writers--it very much is--well, please ask "why." Dig into the reasons behind the indie author gold rush.
Amazon opened its floodgates in 2009, when it offered 70% royalties. Traditional publishing gives authors somewhere around 5% royalties, when all is said and done. That is how the gold rush started.
As for publishers betting on tried and true best-sellers... that started earlier, when several laws in the 1980s caused a major consolidation of businesses, including publishers and booksellers. A law got changed, and Barnes & Noble became the arbiter of what got shelf space.
I'm afraid that this behaviour in general, not just related to Netflix, is doing the industry much harm.
My own experience is that recently I just don't want to get into new shows, at all. The story goes - I start to watch a show, I grow to like it, get all emotionally invested, the show gets cancelled halfway and I'm left out in the cold, dick in my hand, no satisfying end to a story arc, nothing. Most recent example is Counterpart which was (imo) phenomenal but got the axe after two seasons.
I'm not expecting the shows to run in perpetuity, just for them to run their course, tell their story. Great shows aren't great because they last a long time.
Yes. I suspect a large part of why so many shows fail according to Netflix is that people have already been bitten once or more by cancelled shows and they'll now wait for a few seasons to see if the show is rolling before watching. It's a downward spiral and either it keeps on until Netflix's demise, or they break out of it by committing on their shows.
And the toothpaste aisle wars, as the link explains well, usually end with consolidation around 2 players.
Given that Netflix has racked up quite a bit of debt to dominate the aisle, and now serious cash rich competitors like Disney, Apple (and lets throw in Amazon) enter the scene, does it really matters what moves Netflix makes? Is Netflix story done? Do Disney and Amazon end up dominating the aisle in a couple years?
But this story feels slightly different than the tooth paste story. There is that scene in GoT where the knight stands protecting a big secret. Challengers arrive. The knight knows this is going to be a fight to the death, as the secret is that important. And he says, "Now it begins".
And the challenger replies "No now it ends".
What matters is neither the knight or the challenger but the secret.
I'm not sure if the analogy lands. Toothpaste is all about branding/packaging because there's essentially no difference in terms of what's inside the tube. Media is almost the opposite: the quality of content actually matters quite a lot to the consumer.
That's not to say Netflix won't be out-competed by bigger players, but media creation is probably more correlated with organizational competence, and less correlated with pure spending power than many other industries.
> because there's essentially no difference in terms of what's inside the tube
At the risk of creating a tangent, but I disagree. I actually pay extra for Sensodyne Some-specific-subbrand-here because I like the taste the best: Barely minty, barely sweet. For me the most important part about toothpaste is the taste.
Have you done a blind taste-test? Research has shown that a lot of our perceptions around the experience of a product can be influenced by presentation and branding.
makes total sense, they will throw things at the wall and see what sticks, quickly replacing them with the next big shiny thing, and drop it quickly as well.
Repeat.
Isn't the problem with shows being so insanely expensive to produce?
Everything lately is very polished with extremely high production values. We have/d this problem with AAA games in the industry. Art and asset budgets slurping the whole available resources.
If creators want to have long term deals they should probably learn to stretch a dollar a bit more.
They canceled "Teenage Bounty Hunters" which didn't look expensive (no idea if it was). It was a bit uneven but had good, witty writing. IMO could have hit its stride in following seasons and become a cult series.
That's why I prefer watch anthologies like Fargo or True Detective. Each season tells a different story but it has common things (setting, vibe, etc.) with previous one and I know more or less what to expect. And if I want to skip let's say S02 I can watch S03 witout any problems.
> Netflix won't release viewership numbers, but it's clear its strategy is prioritizing quantity over quality
That is very subjective. I watch netflix and most shows mentioned in this article seem what he/she calls ‘quantity’ to me: from the first moment clear that there will no ending whatsoever
This is an interesting complaint in contrast to films. The normal complaint with films is that there is never any new IP, it's just sequel after sequel.
Cutting TV shows short so they don't get to conclude is obviously a pain for fans, but continually having new interesting TV is no bad thing.
My understanding is that the current Netflix contract generally includes a clause preventing other streaming services from picking it up, leaving to only allowing network TV to buy rights. That's how One Day at a Time got saved, PopTV which is owned by CBS, so technically network, managed to buy the rights. However they aren't allowed to add it to CBS All Access like they do other Pop shows. Doesn't help that the Netflix demographic, _especially_ for shows with large fandoms, don't generally use network TV.
I don't agree with the article's premise at all. I think it's very rare that shows get better with age. Almost all shows get significantly worse. It cites Game of Thrones as something that got better. Really? Game of Thrones got frustratingly stupid in later seasons. The first few were far superior and the author's comment seems to be around the difficulty of shooting the pilot which is a tangential issue altogether.
I haven't seen many of these cancelled titles. I do recall some complaints around Altered Carbon being killed this year. If that's representative, I'm going to guess that a lot of these shows are just bad...
It said that shows sometimes, do not get traction immediately.
I suspect that might been the case with "The OA" for example.
I watched first season only because my wife wanted it, and to me it was just some weird "mindbending newage" stuff.
But second season the show went into a mix of sci-fi and fantasy, and started to have interesting mysteries, characters, better plot, and give impression that something was going on after all.
SPOILER: first season the show implies the main character maybe, maybe not, is some kind of spiritual entity. second season is clearer in the fact that the main character actually is a person that can travel between dimensions, and the finale make clear the show will be about the protagonists and antagonists chasing each other across dimensions. A "dimension chase" plot sounds much more interesting than "maybe I am an angel" plot. So when the show finally had the chance to bring in a wider audience, it got killed.
Yes, the beginning of GoT is best, but still it took some time to become popular.
That's the point they are trying to make. Not that later seasons are better.
Eh, I don't think that's especially accurate either. GoT grew pretty steadily in popularity over time. The first season was well received. Controversy about incest and sex scene made it fairly newsworthy.
If you want a good analogy you want to pick a show that performed poorly in the initial season.
This is a chart of wikipedia page views which is probably a decent proxy for popularity on netflix.
With regard to Game of Thrones, I don't think the article argues that it necessarily got better in quality season by season but that it took a couple of seasons to find a massive viewership and become a cultural phenomenon. That said, I think the quality did improve between season 1 and 5.
And I vehemently disagree with the notion that "almost all shows get significantly worse". There are definitely many shows that do jump the shark at some point and significantly drop in quality. On the flip side, there are many examples of shows that needed a couple of seasons to find their tone and really hit their stride which they most likely never would have had the chance to do at Netflix. E.g: Parks and Recreation, Community, Justified, even Breaking Bad imho.
Having only seen the first two, Parks and Rec and Community definitely suffered towards their later seasons, although I would say they were still good towards the end.
Parks and Rec season 1 was just six episodes. Yeah it improved a lot in quality, but viewership appears to have actually declined over time according to wikipedia.
People looking at data often ignore that every user uses a specific subset of the total subset of features or content.
Just as a simplistic example, user set A wants content `x` and `y`, user set B wants content `y` and `z` - data shows that `y` is popular, but by removing `x` or `z` they make those users very reluctant to continue using the service.
I've seen it multiple times with services I use where only the common set is kept and then people start loathing and leaving the service.
> I'm sure there are more but they all circle around a common theme. Loss of trust.
Users failing to recommend shows on your platform to possible new users because they were canceled without a resolution. “The OA” is perfect example. Netflix won’t make another dime off that show because anyone that has seen it will adamantly steer people away and anyone that googles it and sees it was canceled on a cliffhanger will have zero interest.
Shows don’t need to run forever, but they need to finish them. If that is 1 season, fine. If that is 6 seasons and a movie, great. But I’m not interested in a show that just stops airing without an ending, just like I’m not interested in reading a book where the publisher just stopped printing chapters at some random point.
I've always found it frustrating that a lot of fantasy has to be in trilogies. I almost always wait for all three books, for the whole story to be finished, before I'll start.
Your comment for some reason compelled me to check up on Patrick Rothfuss, as I occasionally do:
> In July of 2020, Rothfuss's editor and publisher Betsy Wollheim said, "I've never seen a word of book three" and that she doesn't think Rothfuss has written anything since 2014.[10]
Netflix has terrible recommendations and discovery. I watch Netflix almost every day, and I didn’t know about some shows mentioned in the article! I’m constantly surprised when we watch Netflix through my wife’s profile: she gets completely different slice of Netflix, and many shows I would like to see on my profile as well.
Trust is also very difficult and expensive to win back. It should be viewed as a fairly non-renewable resource. Even if you do something big to regain trust, that memory will remain as a cognitive anchor. Any semblance of the prior bad behavior will be met with, "of course, that's what they do." Back to square one.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 334 ms ] threadPersonally, this year Netflix has renewed shows like Carmen Sandiego for another season (despite the current season being cut short due to COVID) and The Dragon Prince for another four (yes, 4.) after only running for 3 so far.
However, there are a ton of good live action shows that were canceled like Hasan Minaj’s, Altered Carbon.
Just too expensive and not worth the money? But in comparison to animation no live action will be.
I'd read the first book and it was interesting that despite the first season changing so much from the book it still ended up good (even improved in some aspects).
Those are nine-figure, not six-figure.
But for a non-club example of the same error, see the very next line:
> The way Netflix accounts for these six-figure deals is complicated,
It’s a known issue whereby producers and other people in a position of financial power deliberately shape the deal structures to be deceptively appealing in order to basically keep more of the money for themselves. Google “Hollywood accounting” if you’re curious for more details.
The six figures reference may be a reflection of what the person in question is likely to be walking away from the deal with in terms of “money in their own pockets” as opposed to total money made available to them by Netflix for the purpose of making shows.
When I click the link "also in the six-figure-Netflix-deal club" it takes me to an article[1] titled "$100 MILLION CLUB: 7 Hollywood titans that Netflix, HBO, and others have signed 9-figure deals with during the battle for talent". So that second article correctly matches 9-figure with $100M. This tells me that the first article just has a typo, not that there's some sort of 1/1000 conversion factor for salaries. I have a hard time believing in a 1/1000 conversion factor for salaries without some source clearly explaining that.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/biggest-deals-netflix-hbo-jj...
Seems like it generates horrible perverse incentives on what kind of (generic) content is created, though.
Netflix wants to bring in NEW customers... Existing customers are unlikely to unsubscribe, but getting new customers is hard at this point.
Best way to get new customers is to throw new shows at people, lots of them, get them hooked. If people join, again, unlikely to leave -- they will find other cool things to watch.
For Netflix, the value if a new hot show is way higher than season 4 of a very hot show... Nothing short of GOT (mid seasons) would be good enough to make it to season 5-6... I'm shocked some if these Netflix original series are making a 3rd season, since 2 is usually all it takes to milk a franchise
Netflix don't seem to want to get to that inflection point any more which is a shame. Santa Clarita Diet was a personal favourite (don't hate me), and it had just hit its stride. And Daredevil too.
There's a big after-market in shows too. I've watched many shows on DVD (and now on Netflix/Amazon) long after they aired because I never saw them the first time round.
I agree that it discourages you from investing time in a show that is likely to be canceled before it finishes any of its story arcs.
It may be more of an issue now that many shows can easily be watched sequentially from episode one independent of the broadcast or release schedule.
It doesn’t matter if a lot of people watch a show. It only matters if that show is a deal maker.
So it basically needs to become a cultural phenomenon or attract a hardcore base of fans. Anything else just wastes bandwidth.
I doubt Netflix can predict with any certainty which show that will be in the same way that VCs can’t pick which of 100 companies will IPO for a billion. So they just invest in 20 of the better ones.
However, it is possible they're missing out on potential viewership when they cancel too early based only on one season metrics... I rarely watch a show that's only been on for one season because I'm that much more likely to not get story closure. Not sure how common that is, but how many people are watching shows that were cancelled before getting story closure? And how many might watch the back catalog otherwise? I guess not enough to be worth the investment.
On a side note, I do wish more seasons (streaming or not) would actually come to a real stopping point instead of just ending on a cliffhanger and hoping to be renewed.
Viewership costs money, so if a show cannot attract new users or retain current ones, you might want to throw away that viewership.
So the goal is too attract new customers.. which is best done by the new hot show, not season 2 of the last hot show.
So little incentive to renew
I believe the reason most people miss this is that for traditional networks, more viewers are strictly better; more viewers result in more ad revenue, and the marginal cost of an additional viewer is zero. For Netflix however, this is inversed: an additional viewer does not add any revenue (assuming they were already subscribed), but still adds cost.
The economic model of Netflix seems to be at odds with user interests.
I think this is half of the problem, too many shows being made with the hope they get enough traction to stretch out a few seasons. The result being not much of story and/or any hope of a satisfactory ending.
No surprise that viewing figures tail-off as this becomes a predictable path?
- first season doesn't pull enough viewers, it's cancelled.
- first season pulls enough viewers, season 2 onwards take season 1 as a status quo they'll basically never advance from, advancing the story so slowly that it almost feels like a sitcom where most characters end up at the exact point they used to be at the beginning so they can keep getting viewership.
I'm starting to see it with The Boys for example (WARNING slight spoilers next) Season 1 introduced a super dangerous environment where any wrong step could end the characters lives, by the end of season 2 it almost feels like a high school show because the main characters mostly bump into each other without consequences. If they need to kill someone they just introduce a new person a few episodes earlier so they can get rid of that one while the main characters stay healthy.
They hold up 3 shows as an example, Stranger Things, Game of Thrones and Schitt's Creek. The first two were smash hits after season 1. Schitt's Creek was a really good show from the start but it wasn't well known until later seasons. It didn't "hit it's stride" it built up it's audience over time. The quality was always there.
The shows Netflix is cancelling aren't even close in quality.
In comparison, I can't say for sure that The Witcher series is super high quality, but it managed to be pretty exciting and I enjoyed it for that.
Compare the original UK version of the Office and its American facsimile and I think you'll see it's much better to go out on a high rather than drag on endlessly. If the Simpsons had ended after a couple of seasons it would have been one of the best shows ever, instead the brain dead drivel they churn out for it now just continually diminishes its early greatness.
edit: it's also purely a matter of opinion, but I got a lot more pure enjoyment from the US version of the Office than the UK one. They had more time to develop the characters and figure out what was truly funny about the show. Sure it devolved into sentimental fan service in the last few seasons, but at it's peak I was laughing way harder at the American version than I ever did for the British one.
Netflix just pulls the plug. This means you get a weird kludged together final episode to try to pull stuff together or they just leave it and there's no resolution for a lot of stuff.
I do agree that many of these shows would be better if they were written in the UK style. A lot of US shows now just feel woolly as they meander through the plot.
During the production of season 4, JMS (the creator) was given to understand that season 5 was unlikely to happen. So he had to cram most of the rest of his plot into that season.
Having such a powerful, story-packed season 4 meant it did really well. So they put season 5 back on.
But he'd already used up (most of) the story he wanted to tell, because they told him he wasn't getting a season 5. So the season 5 we got ended up being a bit weak and wandering, with only the last few episodes (which were part of what would have been the ending of season 4, if he hadn't found out in time that there would be a season 5) having the same strength and memorability as the season 4 episodes.
It also meant (IIRC) that they lost some important actors, like Claudia Christian, for season 5. If Ivanova had been able to stay on to be B5's captain after Sheridan became President, the final season would have been much stronger.
All of season 5 was in the original plan as the side-stories for seasons 4 and 5, not written after the series was renewed. That's mainly why the filmed season 4 was so action-packed - the main plot wasn't really compressed in terms of screen time, instead there were no side plots.
Aside from that, the finale, Sleeping in Light, was filmed during season 4, that's why Claudia Christian was in it. They found out about the renewal just barely in time to use some season 5 budget to film The Deconstruction of Falling Stars, which only then became the season 4 finale. I think that was really the only thing not in the original plan.
I love how modern formats allow for stories to be told where they otherwise wouldn't fit into a single film or work as a weekly recurring series. I've always felt that a movie is like a short story: you're dropped into the plot and the background is exposed through the course of action. Longer formats like the miniseries can tell a story more on the scale of a full novel.
When you get into stuff like "The Walking Dead" where it theoretically starts off like a novel but keeps renewing and keeps rehashing the same basic plot points for years, it's like one of those novel series where they just keep cranking out new sequels as long as people are buying them, quality be damned.
I do prefer quality over quantity, and more episodes per season isn't IMO a good thing. Having tight focus, telling a complete story from beginning to end, is more important than adding a lot of unnecessary filler.
I wasn't the biggest fan of Altered Carbon, but thought Ascension was exemplary. While it finished with an ending that could have set it up for a second series, the story it told was complete, and leaving some mystery is no bad thing. I'm currently reading the Witcher books, and the series was a reasonable adaption of the content of the first two books of short stories. There's plenty more material for the future, but what was done in eight episodes was decent and self-contained. Way better value than a movie ticket.
What I like about these short series is that they are free to take risks and make niche stuff that doesn't cater to the lowest common denominator. There's plenty of stuff on Netflix that doesn't appeal to me, and that's OK. There's also stuff that would appeal were it not poorly-written and produced dross. I would really prefer their "data driven" decision making to bear in mind the lasting appeal of these productions within their niche interest, rather than only using the initial response as an indicator of long-term success. Some of the best productions took years to develop a good following, and yet were successful beyond expectations.
Good observation the lack of sex and violence in the second one. Could be true. I thought the new "sleeve" actor killed the second. The one in the first season was much much more convincing.
For many of these productions, if the story has been told and it ended on a high note, then I think it would be better to draw a line under it, and move onto a brand new idea and explore new concepts rather than squeeze every last little bit out of something that's not going to advance much upon what's already been done. Better that than jumping the shark.
The local library had the audiobooks, so I listened to them on a long car trip between the first and second season being released. The writing isn't great but the stories definitely have their moments, even if its smothered in the usual "action flick" mindset.
I think netflix would have done a lot better to just stick to the plot of Broken Angels for the second season. But I think there was some rumbling on the message boards that it would have actually cost real cash to pull that off and netflix apparently wasn't willing to do it. So its the worst kind of serial scifi rubbish.
Its really too bad. The trash they invented as filler, was just that. But you can see their problem, the first book took place on an earth city, so they didn't need a lot of custom sets, and loads of CG.
My wife signed up for the hbo trial for a month and then canceled it. That was just about perfect. I watched the last season of game of thrones and a couple other things, and was getting bored with it just as the trial ended. I actually think that model might be the right one for the entire streaming ecosystem. Just rotate the streaming services every couple months.
Inspector Morse (et al) come to mind as one that lasts longer. So many great British detective shows that go on for decades, with around 20 movie-length episodes per season (aka series).
Is that a typo? Inspector Morse had a total of 33 episodes across 7 seasons and 5 specials. Seasons averaged about 4 eps each.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Inspector_Morse_episod...
The Bill may have more episodes, but Doctor Who has been running for 20 years longer.
The prototypical "long lasting UK series" is actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronation_Street (nearly 60 years, >10000 episodes)
Same with The Simpsons — the 8 year peak of seasons 1-8 means at least we got those episodes. I haven’t watched a new episode in over 20 years but revisit the early episodes often.
I like the sandwiches on my favorite restaurant’s menu. Them serving the pasta dish I don’t like doesn’t make the sandwiches worse.
What does 'great' mean when you're assigning it to such a huge number of episodes? Are they truly great or just good?
Obviously any assessment of art is going to be subjective. But at the time, those 75 episodes were the either the GREATest thing on television or very close to it. They hold up today and are episodes that are just as GREAT to me on the 20th or 30th viewing as they were on the first.
Don't think there is any "new" series that I've watched over twice, I wonder why that is.
I don't. This might be true with dramas where the plot is a big component of it, but certainly not for episodic comedies.
Yeah, the Simpsons isn't something I care to watch anymore, and the Office's final seasons without Michael Scott weren't as good. But I'd still much rather have more episodes of content I enjoy than less for the sake of "the complete package". It sucks when a show gets cancelled without an end, but while we're here, the American Office had a fine ending and I'm much happier with the many seasons of it over the British one.
If The Simpsons was British, none of the best episodes would have been made.
But neither would any of the 300 worst episodes.
UK Office is a concise and witty comedy idea expressed in the correct amount of time the idea deserves.
If you look at the later seasons of shows like US Office, Parks and Rec and similar shows, what you're watching has more in common with a soap opera than a sitcom. I feel I can almost count the exceptions to this on one hand.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duration_neglect
A Series consists of one or more Seasons. A Season has episodes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_(series_10)
> The tenth series of the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who premiered on 15 April 2017 and concluded on 1 July 2017, and consisted of twelve episodes, after it was announced in July 2015 that BBC Worldwide had invested in a tenth series of the programme in its annual review. The series is led by head writer and executive producer Steven Moffat, alongside executive producer Brian Minchin. It is the third and final series overseen by the two as executive producers, as well as Moffat's sixth and final series as head writer. This series is the tenth to air following the programme's revival in 2005, and is the thirty-sixth season overall.
Points at Top Gear, Dr Who, Sky at Night etc which have gone on for decades
That's why I thoroughly enjoyed the German show Dark. They planned 3 series/seasons and that's what we got: a well-thought-out show from start to finish with a single vision of how the whole thing will end. That clue in the first episode? Yep, directly related to the ending in season/series 3 and not some, now inconsequential, detail the writers 'forgot about' or changed course over.
The difference is that I want Photoshop to run forever, but I'm not as sure I want Walter White to get an exotic new cancer every twelve months.
I don't watch shows on my own. I know they satisfy the urge to turn on the TV and just have something on, and I think that urge is mind-rotting. If I have to watch something, why not a movie? If I don't have the energy to pay attention for 90 minutes, why idly kill time watching anything at all?
Or what about short films? That's a whole neglected format. They have Oscars and a dedicated video network for them.
I don't even understand the point of this question. Why is 90 minutes more worthy than 48 minutes? At the end of the day, I have a little bit of time to relax. I generally do so by watching one episode of <whatever series the wife and I enjoy atm>. What is it you think about a 90 minute movie makes it more worthy, that anything less than it isn't worth doing at all?
It started with the chain bookstores. Used to be, getting in was the hard part, but once a writer got published, he stayed published. His editor would keep supporting his books until he broke out. Chain bookstores wrecked this. They'd pull an author's numbers, see that the first book was a flop, and pass on the second. They also introduced the 8-week rotation, which meant that reader word of mouth (a slower process) got disenfranchised, forcing publishers to pick winners (lead titles) and losers before the books were even launched.
This changed the incentive structure. Instead of having to get one person, who knew literature, to believe in his work, an author has to convince a whole committee of people. If the editor can't sell the book to the money people, it gets no marketing or publicity and it dies.
Then there are the literary agents, who don't even read 99 percent of the work sent to them. That's done by unpaid college-age interns. So, instead of writing a book readers will love, your focus becomes writing a book that people will think their bosses like. It's a totally different game.
I'm not surprised this is happening to Netflix. We tend to have a pro-data bias in technology. We don't realize that when the money people get their hands on data, that unless we are extremely editorial in the context in which they interpret and use that data, it's going to be a disaster. They don't have altruistic motives and they don't work nearly as hard as we do to understand complexity-- it's best to think of them as a different species.
From what I understand, Netflix' decision model is heavily based on how many users watch the first X minutes of a season in the first few days that it's up. Essentially if the show isn't a hit immediately after release, it won't be renewed, and the threshold required to renew goes up exponentially every season, so essentially a show has to be a runaway hit in order to survive past the second season.
I'm sure this is a data-driven decision, and I guess it shows that novelty is probably what drives people to the platform and gets new subscribers. It makes intuitive sense: with most forms of media the largest number of people will give something a try when it's new, and aside from very rare exceptions the viewer base will settle in to a much lower number of "true fans".
So it makes sense in the short term from a business perspective, and they have way more data than I do from my armchair, but I wonder if they are adequately assessing the risk of this decision model. People get deeply emotionally attached to media, and it's a strong negative when a series you love is cancelled, so this could negatively affect their brand over time. And that's not something which is so easy to design KPI's around as new subscriber numbers.
I suspect Netflix would have to see increased churn due to pressure from competitors to see more serious attention paid to loyalty and retention.
This so many times. It gives me hope that humanity will eventually rise above what's going right now. There are also a lot more good lessons in TNG than I remembered as a kid. Great show :)
If you like that, you should give The Orville a try. A lot of people dismissed it thinking it was going to be full of crude humor, essentially "Family Guy in Space", because it was from Seth MacFarlane.
But that is not the case at all. What MacFarlane was going for exactly was that naive optimism, although from TOS not TNG. Later science fiction, he has said, has been a lot less optimistic.
Yes, The Orville has some comedy--sometimes quite funny, but it almost all fits in with the serious elements. The crew, at least for a long time, is not full of highly competent natural heroes like TOS or TNG, because The Orville is not the flagship of the fleet that everyone wants to be on and only the very best qualify. It is the opposite of that. It's a minor ship where you put average or below people who you don't expect much from, captained by a man who had problems in his personal life that tanked his career, given The Orville because some friends called in favors to get one more try to turn him around before kicking him out of the service.
The first season was a bit hit or miss for the first few episodes, as they figured out the right balance of comedy and drama, but it did not take long to get good. The second season continued on from that. That's all there was been so far, with a third season coming.
I agree on DS9. My one complaint is that I think they should have went another direction with the ending. It could have ended in a way that served as a launching point for the biggest Star Trek arc yet.
Much of the series involved the conflict between the Federation and the Founders from the gamma quadrant, with the Federation being the good guys. The Founders were perhaps not necessarily evil, but they had a strong distrust of others and a belief that the non-shapeshifters would wipe them out if they got a chance.
The thing about the Founders is that with their shapeshifting abilities they were pretty much the best spies and infiltrators in the galaxy. We know they infiltrated to the highest levels of Klingon government.
I don't remember if it was ever confirmed that they made it to high levels in the Federation, too, but you have to assume they did. But then they should be able to figure out that Federation really are the good guys. The Federation really wants peace between every intelligent species. They really should join the Federation rather than fear it.
So why didn't they?
Perhaps it is because they aren't the only ones who have infiltrated and placed people high in the Federation government? From TOS and TNG we know that others have tried or succeeded at that before.
So maybe the reason the Founders absolutely distrust the Federation is because they know that the people who appear to be in charge and are pushing the peace and unity message are actually not the ones running things. The peace and unity people are just clueless puppets of the real masters.
End DS9 with Sisko discovering the truth, the Federation's masters discovering that Sisko is on to them, and Sisko going on the run.
That sets up at least two more series.
The first one could cover Sisko on the run, working in the shadows to build up secret opposition to the Federation's evil masters, slowly spreading the word to others he can trust, like Picard on the Enterprise, and convincing Federation enemies like the Cardassians that they are better off with a Federation that really is what is claims to be rather than a Federation secretly run by evil aliens and so should help save the Federation.
The second series, "Star Trek: Civil War", could cover when matters get to a head, and open hostilities break out withing The Federation.
You could still have Voyager in there...have the civil war start while Voyager is lost. They can come back into the middle of it.
There's probably even plenty for a third series after Civil War.
I like your theoretical story arcs, it would make for great stories around the federation and the moral superiority, assumed, percieved or actually true, compared to other entities. I guess after having a narowwly avoided a coup by star fleet and having fought an intergalactic war, that alone should have had a deep impact. maybe even a change with regards to the rpime directive. Why would you leave all these new worlds and civilisations upt for grabs for an adversary, right?
It is quite striking, so, how the way tv series told stories changed from the episodic approach from TNG to a more arc driven approach in DS9 and VOY. Both of which sit somewhere between the episodic style of e.g. TNG and things like Breaking Bad and the first seasons of prison break.
I buy it, but that sucks. I know my view is idiosyncratic, but I view making money like a biological process. Most things have to do it if they want to survive, but it doesn't deserve to be the thing that matters. The Silicon Valley focus on explosive growth, as opposed to healthy and reasonable long-term growth, is bad for the world.
I wonder if they are adequately assessing the risk of this decision model. People get deeply emotionally attached to media, and it's a strong negative when a series you love is cancelled, so this could negatively affect their brand over time. And that's not something which is so easy to design KPI's around as new subscriber numbers.
Right. This is especially true of series with defined story arcs. A sitcom can be ended at any time, but if Breaking Bad had ended at Season 4, it would have pissed off everyone.
A world in which writers know they have, at best, 24 episodes to tell their story will hopefully result in much more focused story telling, and fewer filler episodes looking into the exciting history of what minor character C did 15 years ago.
Netflix, you're wasting my money. I'm not getting what I expected to get from you. I will be spend my money on something else than you.
I recall reading something from some Netflix analytics-obsessed pinhead about the automatic previews where they said they wanted it to behave more like regular TV where something is on as soon as you turn it on. Then they have it automatically play the next episode by default. I recently read about some other feature they were testing where it would just continuously play whatever their recommendation engine thinks you would like. Then you've got the more frequent churn of content.
Netflix today resembles a personalized stream of an old school premium cable channel like HBO. It's designed to help you quickly find something to watch and then send you down a rabbit hole with continuous content that autoplays as soon as the last video ends. On the one hand, I admire them for doing something different than every other streaming service that popped up after they invented the category. On the other hand, I just don't like the experience at all.
It's amazing how this describes a number of the tech 'industry disruption' companies... Amazon used to have better quality standards than eBay or Wal-mart, Uber used to be cheaper and have cleaner cars and drivers than Taxis, Netflix used to have a larger variety of classics but now largely makes their own content
Increased quality is a good marketing ploy for growth, producing shit is a good way to increase margins. I notice a lot of restaurants have great food opening week, and then a return to median over the following year until they go bust.
What was special about Netflix was this large library of on-demand content and things you may not find anywhere else. I think what early adopters liked about it was you could be deliberate about sitting down to watch something. You'd put some thought into creating your list. We were trained to do this going back to the DVD days - probably even more so during the DVD rental days. And remember that Netflix had that massive collection of quality movie reviews. I suspect that early adopters had much different viewing patterns than the people who hung around on cable for longer.
So what does Netflix do? Make it more like a broadcast. Maybe that's what they discovered was necessary to attract the masses. I don't know. All I can say is it's much different than it used to be and, aside from some really good in-house content, I don't like it anymore.
Nowadays, I never find anything I want on Netflix and am glad I'm borrowing an account, otherwise I'd drop it. Hulu's trying to catch up, but Netflix is easily the most user-hostile media interface I've ever used, and that includes hotel channel guides.
My biggest peeve is that Netflix keeps dropping and cancelling shows I'm really enjoying. I'm close to dropping them, and every other service. Months close. The hassle and cost of maintaining 10+ subscriptions is a worse experience than the prenetflix days of broadcast. If the industry could get their act together and go the way of music and pay royalties per stream then Netflix would probably have the biggest advantage with their algorithm. But their ux is still painful and proper discovery is completely lacking. I yearn for a Dewey decimal like video categorisation system, and way more high production value sci-fi shows.
Other than opening the settings screen, or playing a video and hitting pause, there is no way to leave netflix alone and not have it make noise/play video. Three seconds after you stop hitting buttons, whatever's selected on-screen becomes a full-video ad for that thing. (with all of the annoying traits of ads, like loud attention grabbing sounds)
I've idle-mindedly mashed buttons to prevent this on console-netflix while trying to have a conversation about what to watch, with no attention being payed to what was actually on the screen.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/2102
This is a different matter. Netflix has a finite budget to license content. It's not clear that it would be better for the consumer if they had a policy of never removing films from the library, as this would have to be counterbalanced by fewer new films being added. I suspect this approach would be much worse for the consumer overall.
Also, unlike when a series is cancelled, those films are still available to stream on an à la carte basis from Google/Amazon/iTunes/etc.
I've found that disc rental (by post) can be a surprisingly good option, even if it's been mostly forgotten with the rise of streaming. The available library is better than any streaming subscription is able to offer.
> I generally prefer to watch a movie over a TV series
Shouldn't this mean you're less inconvenienced by content churn? If you're part way through a series and it gets removed, that's annoying, but this doesn't really apply to movies.
For Netflix shows. Netflix is now a network channel producing its own content, in the mold of HBO. If you don't find value in HBO, then you don't subscribe to HBO. Same with Netflix.
Licensing content from turned out to be a terrible business model because a) licensing fees would bleed you dry of all your profits, b) content owners would yank their content anyway to compete with you because it turns out, creating a streaming infrastructure isn't that hard and much cheaper than owning and producing content.
If you're not interested with what's on the "channel" at all, you're probably mostly better off with just buying/renting a la carte.
Past obsessives moved to other newer things after a few days.
It's an incredibly curious thing and the opposite from the never ending marvel material that gets released.
I dunno, now that Endgame completed the movie storyline that had been building for a decade, and their spearhead TV show Agents of SHIELD is over, I've almost completely lost all interest in the MCU. I've seen similar sentiments pretty regularly elsewhere, and wouldn't be surprised if its prominence also fades despite continued releases.
GoT died because the writer was replaced by a pair of hacks when the writer couldn't write fast enough to keep up.
This is a great theory!
I think the creators of HBO's GOT ended the series because they were rushing to work on:
]] Benioff and Weiss inked a five-year, $250 million partnership with Netflix in August to make film and TV projects exclusively for the streaming service. The move was head-scratching at the time, considering the pair had already committed to producing Star Wars movies for Disney—an undertaking that was likely to take many years and leave little room for anything else.
https://qz.com/1737729/gots-benioff-and-weiss-picked-netflix...
who said they care about the consumer?
they'll burn down the planet to put a penny in their pocket
Netflix Decision Model Optimization (NDMO). The new SEO.
I have started to check if there is more than one season out before I watch a new show, and frequently there isn't.
It assumes that novelty is what drives people to the platform and increases/maintains the subscriber base.
However, Netflix's evident model is not capable of falsifying this assumption. By cancelling series as soon as they plateau (not even _decline_, given reporting (https://www.wired.com/story/why-netflix-keeps-canceling-show...) of its production cost escalator), they do not generate a large library of "complete series" for later viewing.
This also puzzles me, since it contradicts Netflix's willingness to pay a pretty penny for established series like Friends. Its current show-commissioning practices seem to be incapable of generating a new generational hit like that.
Ideally they should A/B test at least occasionally with different decision models to see if their assumptions are correct, but those are very expensive experiments to run when you're talking about the production of a TV series.
Also, a counter-argument to my proposition above is that broadcast TV through the mid-90s had a captive audience in a way that Netflix doesn't. To a limited extent, broadcast TV could force audiences to become familiar with a show, pushing an originally-marginal show over a threshold of popularity.
One solution might be consumers use more data.
Over here in Germany, I always thought it was mostly driven by literary critics, prizes, book fairs, etc. and thus its own sort of niche although I have no idea how well that works. Is that different in the US?
I really don't think this started in the 1990s. The tension between commercial needs and artistic purity has existed for as long as there has been art[citation needed].
Some more modern art forms like TV and Film are very expensive and so particularly sensitive to commercial interests but it has always been true - artists have to eat just like everyone else.
That really did change a great many decision making processes not just in publishing but almost everywhere else.
This created limited shelf space, which, in turn, put pressure on publishers to consolidate their authors into a few mega best-sellers, whom they then were completely reliant on. One Stephen King or James Patterson was enough to pay for 9 underperforming titles.
Major publishers also consolidated, from many into the so-called Big Six, which then became the Big Five. Five major publishers own the whole industry. Most publishers you've heard of are an imprint of one of those, or else it's a small press with very limited distribution.
All that consolidation has an effect. It narrows the gates, and gives rise to an industry that grows reliant on gatekeepers.
Why did the great consolidations happen? Why is everything trending towards a multi-national mega-conglomerate? I think I know, but that's a story for another day.
This is an absolutely fantastic point and applies in more contexts than that of publishing. You absolutely must be editorial in what you present to people who are higher up in the decision process and are less able to interpret the data. It often isn't just the money people, it is also your bosses and their bosses. It is a matter of presenting things with an eye towards the best possible outcomes, and understanding where things would get confusing for someone who is only half paying attention.
One could argue 'Money people' tend to be the source of many of our resources misuses (water,land,air,etc.) Of course they'll use data to shit everything up.
It optimizes for local maxima, rather than taking the risks associated with finding larger global maxima.
Or, in other words: It creates lots and lots and lots of pretty-good stuff of particular types with broad appeal, rather than allowing diversification into some stuff that appeals very strongly to group A, some other stuff that appeals very strongly to group B, etc.
It makes the publishing/Netflix executives richer, but our culture poorer.
1. Unlike network television, space isn't limited, so you can make a good show which will only appeal to 20% of the audience.
2. The amount people watch doesn't affect revenue, just whether they renew or not. So it's now better to make one show that someone will really love, than seven shows that they will be vaguely into, but see as interchangeable with seven others on a different platform.
If anything, I think Netflix originals are overoptimised for creating cult hits along niche audiences.
Amazon offers 70% royalties to indie authors.
YouTube offers peanuts to indie film makers. Netflix offers nothing.
Film-making is more expensive than novel writing, and there is a higher barrier to entry. Few indie film-makers are going to stick with it, unpaid, for multiple years. If they can receive funding, then that whole paradigm will change.
Patreon made a few steps in that direction, but I think crowd-funding has limits.
If Google/YouTube were to do what Amazon did, and offer a huge royalty share of profits...? That would turn everything around.
They know their place. 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.
>It started with the chain bookstores. Used to be, getting in was the hard part, but once a writer got published, he stayed published.
It was great for the writer that got published, but not so great for countless others who couldn't get a break and couldn't get into the vaunted 'club' of gatekeeping published writers.
>Then there are the literary agents, who don't even read 99 percent of the work sent to them
Because there are magnitudes more writers, than writers who can generate an income, and always will be. This is the long-tail that everyone was predicating at the advent of the web. Democratization of culture and media means that it will be much harder for most (except for the tiny few) from making any sort of living from it. You see this on Instagram, YouTube, Twitch streaming, and podcasts because the barrier of entry is so low, it means there are hundreds of thousands of people trying all the time (and those that fail at making an income, are replaced by fresh young faces willing to try). But it's also true of more traditional media, like publishing.
>I'm not surprised this is happening to Netflix
Neither am I. Every single series that Netflix invests means they have to pass on countless others. There is no other way to run this business. The funny thing is that early on with Netflix, when they did not have a lot of content, they would keep renewing unpopular series forever. As they ramped up production, they followed the same trajectory as traditional network channels like NBC/ABC/FOX.
It was also great for readers, because there was a realistic expectation that if something was in print it was at worst competent and at best outstanding. Not so much now.
>Democratization of culture and media means that it will be much harder for most (except for the tiny few) from making any sort of living from it.
Democratization of culture means that culture becomes confused with entertainment. They're actually not identical.
IG, YT, and the rest are now purely about marketing strategies. The content - which used to have to speak for itself - is now secondary to bikini ass shots and other eyeball acquisition systems.
There is something rather weird and culty about this. It's almost as if everyone who produces content is being forced to participate in a competitive reality TV show where they Market Their Brand Really Hard™ - and the content is increasingly irrelevant.
>Every single series that Netflix invests means they have to pass on countless others.
Then they need to start monitoring their pilots more effectively, and also spend a little more on up-front development so that the shows that make it out of the slush pile have some prospect of getting to the end of a natural arc.
This is the paradox that most people don't seem to understand. NF claims to be data driven, and supposedly it's economically pragmatic to cut off shows early.
It isn't at all. It's actually unbelievably inefficient, economically and also in terms of customer loyalty.
The efficient solution is to produce consistently great content. This pays off over the long-haul - because a successful series can keep generating significant income for decades.
It's an interesting thought. Maybe if you had 3-episode arcs as a pilot and more development time, you'd have a better idea which ones have legs for a few seasons anyway. Though, as I wrote elsewhere, I don't want TV shows that go on for too long.
Sure ... but OP was complaining about shows being cancelled mid-narrative. How does releasing 3 episode pilots fix that? Most likely those will not be complete works, but rather end on some sort cliff-hanger, to entice viewership to stay with the show.
>Though, as I wrote elsewhere, I don't want TV shows that go on for too long.
I agree with you. I found 3 to 5 seasons seems to be the sweet spot for most shows. Once it goes past 5 seasons for many shows, the quality seems to degrade, the writers run out of ideas and just do things to fill time. There is a remake of Anne of Green Gables (Anne with an E) - and holy geeze is that true for that one when it comes to time-filler. Whereas the original series was tight with great pacing, this new series invents and explores every pointless side-story. For example, in the original, there would be a reference to Matthew going somewhere, and in the remake, because the writers have so much time to fill, you'll get a deep dive into that trip, which ultimately has no impact on the larger narrative itself.
I only half-jokingly say that I lose interest in most series after, at most, 5 seasons. And it can be a lot less than that. A series can coast through maybe a season or two in significant part on a fresh concept, original characters, a different style, etc. Sure, the writing needs to be good too but it's not the only thing to engage the viewer. It gets harder after that and so does finding fresh stories.
That person sucked, and I was thoroughly surprised by the oxygen content of their own anus.
OBVIOUSLY! Because there are a million others vying for the same eyeballs. The question is, how do you stand out? If you were a YouTuber who wanted to make a living from YouTube content you create, how would you do it?
>Then they need to start monitoring their pilots more effectively, and also spend a little more on up-front development so that the shows that make it out of the slush pile have some prospect of getting to the end of a natural arc.
How do you know they aren't doing that? No matter how good your pre-production process is for finding good shows, ultimately, it's the eyeballs and box-office that decide it. There is no formula to differentiate a hit from a bomb. What complicates things is that season 1 of the show may have been a hit, but subsequent seasons are not. There's no magic here. At some point, you are going to be cutting something to make room for something else.
>NF claims to be data driven
I'm sure it is, but there is no formula that you can use to figure out what is going to be a hit and what will be a bomb and lose you money. If there was, you wouldn't see companies spending hundreds of millions on movies that end up bombing at the box-office.
>The efficient solution is to produce consistently great content.
This is like saying the 'efficient solution' to investing is to invest in companies that give a good return and not invest in companies that lose you money.
Pretty sure everyone wants to produce great content.
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.
Sure there is. I used money as a metric, but Netflix, being a subscription business, will have it's own internal metric that correlates cost, popularity, and maybe other stuff to come up with some sort of a score that they can then compare to other shows - to figure out which ones should be renewed and which ones should not be.
A show with fewer viewers might attract hardcore fans who will cancel their subscription if the show is cancelled, while one that's much more popular might attract viewers who will stay on the platform either way. Someone might be less likely to continue their subscription because of these kinds of cancellations, even when they didn't get around to watching the shows before they were cancelled. A show might attract fewer viewers at first, but become a cult classic later (Netflix should know this, they purchased shows like Arrested Development), or take a few years to really hit their stride.
Sure. But you have to come up with something, otherwise you'll never cancel anything, by extension, never have room to invest in shows that could drive your subscriptions.
>A show with fewer viewers might attract hardcore fans who will cancel their subscription if the show is cancelled
Sure - and maybe there is a way to have some fuzzy prediction or metrics that some show has a hardcore fan base that is worth keeping around even if it's not broadly popular.
So I agree with you it isn't perfect, but again, you still have to come up with some objective measure because you need to make decision on which shows and movies you should be investing in. You only have a finite amount of money available to produce content.
Well, positive reception is probably a good indicator of something at least. Many of the cancelled shows were received positively by both fans and critics. That's hardly a given for television shows, and re-rolling the dice is likely to leave you with a show with worse reception. And you do this while cutting the legs out from under a show that had good reception.
People being unhappy with the amount of cancellations is probably a good indicator of something, as well. And you have to wonder about the long term effects, and whether people will stop getting interested in new Netflix shows in general.
Interesting point. Maybe 5 years from now nobody will care about new Netflix shows the way nobody cares about new Google products - because consumers just assume it'll be abandoned in a few years. And then both companies will be unable to create anything new because of the poor reputations they've built for themselves.
But what you're talking about is essentially the innovator's dilemma. Following the available data can lead to short-term optimizations, but also getting caught in a local minima. The silver lining is that this creates room for new competitors who can skip around that neighborhood in the business model and find a new kind of success.
So my question is the same whenever this sort of criticism comes up: if the current companies are screwing up so badly, who are the innovators that will go around those mistakes and out-compete them?
> If the current companies are screwing up so badly, who are the innovators that will go around those mistakes and out-compete them?
I mentioned this upthread, but in a nutshell: Amazon turned the book industry on its head by offering 70% royalties directly to indie authors, cutting out middlemen (i.e. traditional publishers and literary agencies). That happened in late 2009, and it unleashed a gold rush which is still in full swing. Traditional publishers still exist, and they still dominate the print industry (due to the huge expenses involved in print runs and print retail shelf space), but they have lost a lot of control over ebooks and audiobooks.
70% is more than artists get from art galleries, and it's more than musicians get from record labels. It's unheard of in the arts. And it was a very savvy move by Jeff Bezos. It changed the dynamics of that whole industry.
If Google/YouTube or some other major distributor of film (such as Netflix, or some new start-up) offers a large platform of viewers, plus that royalty rate for an incentive, then we are guaranteed to see a film Renaissance.
I hope it happens.
I think that socioeconomic forces being what they are, it is unlikely to happen any time soon. These days, awesome startups are likely to be bought by mega-conglomerates, and any visionary ideas they have will die beneath the weight of committee thinking.
I'd say the 1690s, beginning with John Dryden's subscription-only translation of Virgil. Otherwise on point.
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-ha...
Netflix invests in series by pioneering new narratives for niche markets. When a niche market is smaller or the serie is received not as expected Netflix pulls the plug as every rational agent would do.
The publishing industry in the 90ties was optimizing their business model for maximizing ROI of limited amount of shelve space by producing hits for popularity what 80% people like.
https://wistia.com/learn/marketing/science-behind-why-we-bin...
Generalizing people in to a category of money people and expecting to draw a profound conclusion from your arbitrary box is underwhelming.
Capitalism is the most efficient way to allocate capital and produces much more culture than systems driven by altruistic motives.
The more Netflix pulls shows, the more it develops a reputation for pulling shows.
That decreases viewer investment in new shows, as they're incentivized to wait and see if the show lasts, or whether they're going to be left with narrative tension and no payoff after a cancellation.
And with decreased viewer investment in new shows, more shows get cancelled because the numbers don't look good. It's pro-cyclical and it burns goodwill.
I think that the "one person who knew literature" system is largely a myth. People who "know literature" often resort to promoting the same canon and authors of the same background. I'd wager that a random lottery would produce a more interesting, dynamic, and varied list of books than one curated by a single expert.
If you truly want unrestrained creativity, then organizations like NEA need orders of magnitude more funding so they can throw cash at people trying to make something new. That will produce wild, interesting, and experimental works. But it won't produce Mad Men or other kinds of works that promote polish over boundless creativity. It is a trade off.
I think this is pointing the finger in the wrong direction. They do know their place: it's making money. The problem is that in our corporate market-based economy any culture producer that does not relentlessly focus on profit and scale will be outcompeted and destroyed by one that does.
Corporations are incentivized to hand the reins to the money people because the larger market structure means they will die if they don't. The market quite simply does not give a shit about the long-term well-being of a society. That doesn't factor into the fitness function at all.
Sure, it's bean counters. So then go a step further, and ask yourself: why are the bean counters afraid to take risks on fresh creative content? What market forces are driving them to bet solely on licensed shlock in the post-2000 world? What changed?
If the publishing industry is overwhelmed with a flood of writers--it very much is--well, please ask "why." Dig into the reasons behind the indie author gold rush.
There's a great in-depth recent history of the publishing industry here: https://www.wattpad.com/869503247-so-you-want-a-fandom-publi...
Quick and dirty summary:
Amazon opened its floodgates in 2009, when it offered 70% royalties. Traditional publishing gives authors somewhere around 5% royalties, when all is said and done. That is how the gold rush started.
As for publishers betting on tried and true best-sellers... that started earlier, when several laws in the 1980s caused a major consolidation of businesses, including publishers and booksellers. A law got changed, and Barnes & Noble became the arbiter of what got shelf space.
There is a lot to this history.
My own experience is that recently I just don't want to get into new shows, at all. The story goes - I start to watch a show, I grow to like it, get all emotionally invested, the show gets cancelled halfway and I'm left out in the cold, dick in my hand, no satisfying end to a story arc, nothing. Most recent example is Counterpart which was (imo) phenomenal but got the axe after two seasons.
I'm not expecting the shows to run in perpetuity, just for them to run their course, tell their story. Great shows aren't great because they last a long time.
And the toothpaste aisle wars, as the link explains well, usually end with consolidation around 2 players.
Given that Netflix has racked up quite a bit of debt to dominate the aisle, and now serious cash rich competitors like Disney, Apple (and lets throw in Amazon) enter the scene, does it really matters what moves Netflix makes? Is Netflix story done? Do Disney and Amazon end up dominating the aisle in a couple years?
But this story feels slightly different than the tooth paste story. There is that scene in GoT where the knight stands protecting a big secret. Challengers arrive. The knight knows this is going to be a fight to the death, as the secret is that important. And he says, "Now it begins".
And the challenger replies "No now it ends".
What matters is neither the knight or the challenger but the secret.
That's not to say Netflix won't be out-competed by bigger players, but media creation is probably more correlated with organizational competence, and less correlated with pure spending power than many other industries.
At the risk of creating a tangent, but I disagree. I actually pay extra for Sensodyne Some-specific-subbrand-here because I like the taste the best: Barely minty, barely sweet. For me the most important part about toothpaste is the taste.
makes total sense, they will throw things at the wall and see what sticks, quickly replacing them with the next big shiny thing, and drop it quickly as well. Repeat.
I can see why they would have low viewership for OA, its unusual and bit disturbing at times. But Glow??
It was high quality soap opera about low quality wrestling soap opera.
Maybe netflix is not to blame but the people who want Stranger things 3 or 4
If wikipedia page views are a good proxy, glow ranks even worse than OA. Haven't watched either show personally
https://pageviews.toolforge.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&pl...
Everything lately is very polished with extremely high production values. We have/d this problem with AAA games in the industry. Art and asset budgets slurping the whole available resources.
If creators want to have long term deals they should probably learn to stretch a dollar a bit more.
That is very subjective. I watch netflix and most shows mentioned in this article seem what he/she calls ‘quantity’ to me: from the first moment clear that there will no ending whatsoever
Cutting TV shows short so they don't get to conclude is obviously a pain for fans, but continually having new interesting TV is no bad thing.
Uhm, it pretty much was. Season 1 was hugely popular.
If the contract doesn't allow it, show creators should make sure subsequent contracts do.
I haven't seen many of these cancelled titles. I do recall some complaints around Altered Carbon being killed this year. If that's representative, I'm going to guess that a lot of these shows are just bad...
It said that shows sometimes, do not get traction immediately.
I suspect that might been the case with "The OA" for example.
I watched first season only because my wife wanted it, and to me it was just some weird "mindbending newage" stuff.
But second season the show went into a mix of sci-fi and fantasy, and started to have interesting mysteries, characters, better plot, and give impression that something was going on after all.
SPOILER: first season the show implies the main character maybe, maybe not, is some kind of spiritual entity. second season is clearer in the fact that the main character actually is a person that can travel between dimensions, and the finale make clear the show will be about the protagonists and antagonists chasing each other across dimensions. A "dimension chase" plot sounds much more interesting than "maybe I am an angel" plot. So when the show finally had the chance to bring in a wider audience, it got killed.
If you want a good analogy you want to pick a show that performed poorly in the initial season.
This is a chart of wikipedia page views which is probably a decent proxy for popularity on netflix.
https://pageviews.toolforge.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&pl...
And I vehemently disagree with the notion that "almost all shows get significantly worse". There are definitely many shows that do jump the shark at some point and significantly drop in quality. On the flip side, there are many examples of shows that needed a couple of seasons to find their tone and really hit their stride which they most likely never would have had the chance to do at Netflix. E.g: Parks and Recreation, Community, Justified, even Breaking Bad imho.
Parks and Rec season 1 was just six episodes. Yeah it improved a lot in quality, but viewership appears to have actually declined over time according to wikipedia.
Yes - not enough people are watching to justify the cost.
But cancellation has a whole raft of hidden costs:
1. Reluctance of viewers to invest time in the next thing that comes along
2. Users defecting to rivals out of anger
3. A negative effect among those demographics that tend to influence others the most
4. Loss of creative talent - edgy directors and actors won't want to risk your platform
I'm sure there are more but they all circle around a common theme. Loss of trust.
Just as a simplistic example, user set A wants content `x` and `y`, user set B wants content `y` and `z` - data shows that `y` is popular, but by removing `x` or `z` they make those users very reluctant to continue using the service.
I've seen it multiple times with services I use where only the common set is kept and then people start loathing and leaving the service.
Users failing to recommend shows on your platform to possible new users because they were canceled without a resolution. “The OA” is perfect example. Netflix won’t make another dime off that show because anyone that has seen it will adamantly steer people away and anyone that googles it and sees it was canceled on a cliffhanger will have zero interest.
Shows don’t need to run forever, but they need to finish them. If that is 1 season, fine. If that is 6 seasons and a movie, great. But I’m not interested in a show that just stops airing without an ending, just like I’m not interested in reading a book where the publisher just stopped printing chapters at some random point.
> In July of 2020, Rothfuss's editor and publisher Betsy Wollheim said, "I've never seen a word of book three" and that she doesn't think Rothfuss has written anything since 2014.[10]
well, fuck.
Syfy is another source I now avoid, after what they did to Dark Matter (criminal) and The Expanse (saved by AMZN).