93,455,200,000 total hours viewed from January to June 2023. Some quick math says that at any give time, 1 out of every 400 people is actively watching Netflix.
I guess the comment was more tongue in cheek wrt to Netflix and chill meme but tbh I have my tv running all day (though not just Netflix) just as background noise so ranking shows by number of hours watched may have lots of noise added to it.
It’s a critique of the name of their newly released statistics, which apparently assumes “what we watched” is equivalent to “what people watched on Netflix”, which may have been the state of things 5 years ago but isn’t the state of things at all anymore.
"Beef" was pretty great, I'd recommend that. I'm surprised to see no mention of "The Witcher", though, I figured that would've ranked relatively highly despite the many creative shortcomings of the show.
One interesting difference is that in the TV show Luffy has a friendly smile on most of the time. In the anime Luffy runs around with a wide eyed unblinking psychopathic stare.
That's a big caveat. Haha. I made it through almost the entirety of the season before I realized there were dual timelines. Nothing made sense. Maybe that's on me.. but I feel like enough people had similar issues that it's more likely a major shortcoming of the show.
I think that’s supposed to be intentional though. It didn’t click with me either even though in retrospect characters in the future are reflecting on their pasts that were shown in the very same episode.
I thought it was a really good execution tbh. It’s rare to see fantasy play out the effect of different lifespans
I'm the same, something as simple as `$year` at the bottom of the screen when switching about would have helped me immensely. It was disorienting enough that it put me off watching any of the further seasons.
It does not help that main character only grunts in the show instead of talking. The book version of Geralt is the most talkative swordsman ever, so you learn a lot from dialogs or his thoughts. When you replace dialogs by grunts, you loose a lot of information.
The Witcher was pretty bad in its last season. I know multiple people who just stopped to watch it, because the show was too annoying for millions of reasons. I mean, I myself could not handle last series. Not just because of "faithfulness to source" issues, but because pacing, insufferable dialogs, characters that done makes sense etc.
And the series before that would be fine if it was not called the Witcher, but as it was it made any reasonable progress impossible.
I've heard of plenty of them, but only watched a few, and only watched maybe two of them more than once. But I watch weird back catalog documentaries and such that I wouldn't expect to be crowd pleasers.
Stephen Fry described TV as the nation’s fireplace, with the implication that shared viewing of a common canon strengthens cultural connections with other people.
It’s like how millennials can drop a Simpsons quote into a conversation with their peers and everybody gets the reference.
Peak TV has annihilated this. Nobody watches the same stuff anymore.
Did you catch the latest season of Current Thing? No, because there’s no Current Thing any more, there’s a thousand of them.
Less pessimistically, we now have content for a broader diversity of tastes - greater than ever before. As a result, people can choose to watch shows socially with friends, as well as have content just for themselves. And consuming that content can lead to finding new social groups based on shared interests, if they do desire.
I find the diatribe of "things got better, we got worse" so... boring and antisocial? You never magically made friends, you have always had to make them. There are now tools specifically to help you do this, and your pool has become unrestricted to the geographical region of your job. It's easier than ever, it's more likely you're just overwhelmed by the change.
But even that's fine - I made a new friend today while out and about. Just from talkin' like "the good ole days".
What We Do In The Shadows is extremely queer and has managed to develop significant reach, and that makes me happy. I thought some of the jokey bi stuff in the first season would be throwaway like usual, but they keep dialing it up.
The writers are very well-versed in the vampire meta, and it shows.
Idk. On one hand all the main characters are gay or bi (I think Collin is?). On the other it’s almost entirely a non issue. The vampires have no concept of gay culture at all. As a straight guy with no particular connection to in group lgbt culture this seems preferable. It’s often culturally alienating. What we do in the shadows is comfortably normative
I thought about this recently. Ideas is what in theory kept American society going. For a while, as the society started to lose track of what it wants to be ( and people in charge not exactly keen on educated populace ), it was the idea of American destiny and uniqueness and freedom and so on.
Shared TV space replaced those 'shared values' state tried to indoctrinate people with 'shared current thing', which had to indoctrinate people to state propaganda AND sell stuff for companies.
Those shared values have to replaced with something.
I want to say something pithy like 'but now its memes or tiktok shorts', but I can't get sufficiently worked up.
Stuff that comes out weekly seems to do better on cultural impact. ~Everyone's seen the Invincible memes.[0][1] I see What We Do In The Shadows references all the time.[2] There are a few shows I've never watched, but know bits and pieces about through stuff like this.
Given that I subscribe to meme groups, participate in #meme slack groups - and am bombarded by memes incessantly in twitter - I was surprised to see that I didn't recognize any of your memes.
And it's still one of the best pieces of television ever made. My own personal canon would be that, _Ozymandias_ (Breaking Bad), _The Pine Barrens_ (The Sopranos), and honorable mention to the finale of _Blackadder_. What's anyone else's nominations?
Are you saying that viewing number is dubious because the panel is small?
~2000 is a pretty decent sample size. The viewing numbers you should be skeptical about are the very small ones which will have huge error bars, not the huge ones.
There are definitely still Current Thing's though - Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, Squid Games. They'll come and go. There's also the 'in-joke' kind of references from more niche shows that can form a stronger connection than the big thing of the day.
No, it's just that one discusses these media in different venues than the public square. For example, if I watch something, I will inevitably find people talking about it on various fora, such as its subreddit. In that way, one is still able to latch onto the common canon. And this is even before saying anything about cultural phenomena like Game of Thrones.
In the top 50, I've see Night Agent (give it a 7), Luther (6-7), Extraction 2 (6).
I've heard good things about Beef, and maybe Kaleidoscope. Kaleidoscope is novel because it's an 8 episode heist show that, in theory, can be watched in any order and be cogent. Arguably, this is one reason I have not watched it. Not a big fan of gimmicky things.
Of course there's also the bit of the "how can there be 18,000 shows and nothing to watch?"
I don't watch any TV, with a few exception for prestige shows that everyone else is watching - and I recognized a lot on that list - Walking Dead, Suits, Grey's Anatony, Gilmore Girls, Breaking Bad (which I've watched), Friends, Lucifer, Big Bang Theory.
Based on the synopsis, I expected to NOT like Breaking Bad, but Bryan Cranston's performance was superb. I will never be able to see another Los Pollos Hermanos with a straight face again.
Sub numbers? How would you exactly relate sub numbers vs shows? Try and graph how many people only watched 1 show, or watched that show right after joining?
Keep in mind 'view hours' != 'view count'. A show that is twice as many hours will have twice the views hours with the same view count. people also rewatch certain stuff, so popularity might be inflated. and I assume longer shows correlate to higher budget (because the production expects more viewership).
I wonder if this data dump is a consequence of the recent SAG and WGA agreements. A large part of their fight was about Netflix opening up the numbers. I was under the impression that it was to be done privately, but maybe they have to release this publicly and a lot more data privately to the Guilds.
Funny, I was going to comment how refreshing it is to see a raw Excel data dump instead of insights tortured to whatever agenda by a data science team. Regions and genres would be nice though.
The only thing I'd really like to see them add is just a column for how many hours each thing is, so you could tell how many "watches" this vaguely converts to. Of course you could look that up but, a lot of looking up to do there.
If they did put it into a slick data visualization, people would say "this is marketing, just give me the raw numbers". This is better because if we wait 2 minutes, someone will make a visualization of it anyway.
Based on my experience, I would imagine some management type grabbed the reins and claimed that the engineers just don't know how to present information! And then of course he proceeded to make the message worse and less clear.
They published the data. You are free to use whatever JS library of your choice to do that. Then you can come back and post a Show HN, then someone else can comeback with their Show HN of how it was rewritten in Rust/Go/Lisp just for the lulz.
Hell, it's tuesday, so by monday, I expect a "did it in a weekend" SaaS allowing uploads of boring raw excel data and receive a nice UI for the mere exchange of them a permanent and irrevocable license to use the data for any purpose commercial or not.
Very interesting but not unexpected to see Korean shows doing very well, seems in line with film and music. The country's really becoming a pop culture powerhouse.
Kinda sad that Netflix opted for quantity over quality. It shows with all the inane sequels like Murder mystery 2, Extraction 2 and with the idea of just filling an uninteresting script with some stars to make the numbers like Red Notice. And many of the top 50 shows reflect just that. The last Netflix original I watched and liked was The Queen's Gambit.
Although, technically, the most profitable customer is the one that has low view time, but still subscribes. The most stable customer is probably one with high view time, but they're also probably the least profitable, unless they're naturally helping promote the service.
> but in reality they just couldn’t handle the data
If you mean from a "critique" standpoint then no. If you meant from a "data wrangling standpoint then yes, as binary like/dislike data is just a lot easier to work with for recommendation algorithms.
There are many good reasons to move from a five star rating system to a binary rating system, and yeah, I think many of those fall into the "people lied to themselves" category:
- People tend to note use five or ten star systems on a continuous scale with certain points on the scale being biased
- People tend to go into "movie critic"-mode when they see a 5/10-star scale, as those are usually used on sites like IMDB. That drives them to try and rate the movie "objectively" and in accordance with an intellectual image they want to portray, rather than what they actually like/dislike consuming and spend their time watching
- Netflix also displayed the ratings as 5-star "adjusted ratings for the viewer", which already took your preferences into account. Not a single person I've talked to back then was aware of that, so everyone tried to do the same mental gymnastics they do when trying to project global IMDB ratings to their personal preferences. Moving to a "XX% match for you" together with the like/dislikes is something that people understand a lot better
All-in-all, I don't think the rating system really has been an issue in the recent years. The catalog has been a much bigger issue during that time. I'm pretty sure that Netflix's rating and recommendation system has been good enough that it has served me everything that I'd like to watch on their platform and now I'm out of content.
> So to summarize, customers are dumb & recommendation algorithms are hard.
Or to not throw away all the points I argued for: There were a lot of good reasons for moving away from the five star systems, and the main motivation was providing a better less confusing UX
> I loved Netflix stuff when they started out, banger after banger was delivered. Something changed.
The main thing that changed was that media companies woke up to streaming and stopped giving away the rights to properties that many people enjoy (mainly nostalgia shows + blockbusters) for cheap. That forced Netflix much more into media production of their own, which has it's up- and downsides, and gave Netflix the same warts that media companies always had (e.g. having to make hard decisions around canceling shows). It's a very clear case of a first-mover losing its advantage over time.
Netflix, famously, had a public contents to try to improve the recommendation system, with very little success. [1] That system was a demonstrably good system, that maximizes preference, but only if you rate a bunch of content. I'm not aware if it's still in use.
But, I've rated many hundreds of shows/movies, and the rating is very accurate, for me. Very biased and scaled, but completely predictable/reliable.
In my case, the rating can be corrected with Netflix 7 being my 0, and Netflix 10 being my 10, mostly linear. For a Netflix show, 8 is my 0, since those are biased a bit more.
But they are not giving people what they want. Netflix recommendations are notoriously bad and Netflix is not all that successful lately with its own shows. Even when they have actually good shows you would like, you rarely find them through Netflix recommendations - you need someone to tell you about the show.
You should try "Obliterated", its hilarious, it doesn't take itself aerious, it plays with almost all TV tropes we know (in a good way), references everything from Rambo to Die Hard and has an eye for detail (every scene hints at something or is important in some regard). Also, episodes 2-8, each roughly an hour, cover an in-series time frame of 7 hours, which is a bice touch. Throw in good acting, good dialogs and liekable characters and you uave a great show.
I noticed that the watchtime of `You` was split half-and-half between the new season 4 and the prior seasons 1-3. I was curious about the total results by show, including all seasons. Here's the top 25:
TITLE TOTAL HRS WATCHED
----- -----------------
Ginny & Georgia 967,200,000
The Night Agent 812,100,000
You 766,300,000
Outer Banks 740,400,000
The Walking Dead 738,600,000
The Glory 622,800,000
La Reina del Sur 616,800,000
CoComelon 601,200,000
Suits (2011) 599,100,000
The Blacklist 596,900,000
Manifest 581,900,000
Grey's Anatomy 560,300,000
Wednesday 507,700,000
Gilmore Girls 505,800,000
Breaking Bad 505,000,000
Queen Charlotte 503,000,000
Friends (1994) 448,500,000
Love Is Blind 439,300,000
Lucifer 434,300,000
The Big Bang Theory 420,400,000
Shameless (U.S.) 392,600,000
PAW Patrol 392,300,000
New Amsterdam (2018) 375,500,000
Brooklyn Nine-Nine 358,900,000
Firefly Lane 342,700,000
Not if people stop watching. Remember that older network TV shows declined overtime. The first 2-4 seasons were really good. The next 2-4 seasons were good or OK. After that, quality tended to really decline.
I really love the show, I think it's a combination of likable characters and feeling special when you understand a physics/chemistry/scifi etc reference. It makes you feel smart because you are in on the references that the smart people are making.
Tropes, Caricature, Mocking, Sterotypes... These things have been the tools of comedy for a LONG time. For good or bad they will remain that.
The problem is context, it's Lenny Bruce mocking the cop who is reading back his skit in court. It's Dave Chapel pointing out how people quoting him on twitter without the context miss the point...
These are made up people in a make believe world doing made up things. They aren't meant to be taken seriously on any level.
I'm not supporting the parent comment. But don't you think we as humans have a penchant for conflating the reel and the real and ending up reinforcing the stereotypes present in the world?
If anything, we need less stereotypes. A caricature is fine, But after a certain point it just feels tiresomely pigeonholing into an idea.
Love the sneaky word play! Does art imitate life or does life imitate art?
> ... reinforcing the stereotypes present in the world
The whole point of comedy is to take away the teeth behind these things. The act is meant to reshape culture and conversation. Stereotype, beauty, the perception of color, were very fungible and its just another tool!
In reference to the first video: did the definition of 'misogyny' change while I wasn't looking? These guys don't seem to exhibit 'dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women'. They simply want to have sex.
Also, one of the main features of the show seems to be to point out the fact that, with respect to women: That's Not How To Do It. So, to claim that the show's writers are "doing it wrong" seems to be missing the point. It'd be like criticizing the writers of All in the Family for imbuing Archie Bunker with working-class conservative values. The whole point of the show was to illustrate how wrong he was.
For the first two guys, the video's point is that their sexual harassment, spying, and dehumanizing comments towards women are played for laughs without it being obviously wrong. The humor is in them being bad at socializing; their behaviors aren't addressed, and are portrayed as pathetic, socially repellent, but ultimately harmless.
The comments Sheldon makes are misogynist in the literal sense of the definition you gave, too, self-evidently so, IMO. The first video starts listing examples at 10:45. Again, the humor is just in the juxtaposition of average people's attitudes with his open contempt for women, with his bigotry acknowledged but never really addressed.
If all entertainment must conform to an idealistic view of society then it's just going to be really boring isn't it? I think a lot of people are not going to watch TV shows if they only portray the world in this highly moralized way.
I probably wouldn't like the characters or watch the show if they didn't make the jokes or have the quirks and shortcomings that they do.
The point is whether the artistic output is prosocial or antisocial. Different aspects can be different levels of one or the other: art, commentary, critique, education are all important. Reproducing awful antisocial behaviors without the attendant critique on those behaviors leads people to normalize and ultimately adopt those behaviors. We are social animals and time and time again it's proven that it doesn't matter if we're "socializing" with real people or fictional characters, we want to be part of a perceived in-group and so will act in ways that make us think we'll be liked by those whose gaze matters to us. Sitcoms are especially capable of stirring up these feelings since there is immediate social feedback (laughtrack) to the behaviors seen on screen.
Sometimes I sit and think about how one of the highest paying companies in the world sells unproductivity as a service. There's free options for entertainment like YouTube too.
There's nothing wrong with being unproductive. We should totally rest and enjoy life once we've covered our needs for the day. This thing about productivity being a goal of society is stupid. Who says being productive leads to happiness?
I actually like to be productive, and I suspect you do too. But if people don't, that's fine too. I do wonder if we might be addicted to productivity, though.
HN is a site where you hear people unironically talk about how they listen to audiobooks and podcasts at higher speed to optimize how many they can take in.
Thinking about what that implies about how these people engage with art is kind of wild. It's like speedwalking through an art gallery to see more paintings per hour. There's something about that optimization/productivity mindset that seems strangely pathological. Like insisting on eating exclusively vitamin gruel because it's optimized for nutrition per minutes.
I don't know where this compulsion starts, but it's a little disturbing.
> Like insisting on eating exclusively vitamin gruel because it's optimized for nutrition per minutes.
That is actually a thing and perhaps a growing industry called "meal replacements".
It's not surprising given that meals for many people are already just plastic wrapped matter heated in a microwave and slurped up from their laps on the couch.
Part of it is politicians who seem insistent on treating productivity as a primary goal. If we were struggling to produce enough food then, sure, productivity would be a big problem. But we produce an excess of food. So much so that obesity and diabetes are a problem now. This goes for everything: I can't think of a single thing in life where I think "if only we were more productive I'd be happier". At some point we really have to learn to just be happy.
The other part is the tendency of people to focus on simple metrics and neglect anything with nuance. Things like number of books you've read this year, how many people you manage, how much money you earn. All simple numbers, all essentially meaningless outside of a much broader context, but all pursued with laser focus for no particular reason.
At this point in my life I earn more money than ever, I have more stuff and, yes, I'm more productive. But am I happier now than when I got my first cheap car (that I could now buy every month without even sacrificing anything)? Am I happier than when I first had sex? Am I happier than that day I cooked a splendid boeuf bourguignon for my student house? Of course not.
The "meal replacement" industry is exactly what I am thinking about. I know some of them are marketed as essentially premade low-caloric meals, that theoretically make it easy to do calorie-counting. At least that has some kind of niche application that I get the use-case for.
But those other ones, are freaky - the ones that are designed to be allround [food] for humans, in the same way that a dog can eat exclusively a specific type of dogfood indefinitely. Why the need/desire to do this? It's like something out of classic dystopian sci-fi, only it's chosen voluntarily by people with access to real(ish) food, and they pay a premium for it.
I think you're correct about this effort to cram more 'stuff' into life instead of taking our time to engage with less in a deeper way, being counterproductive to the things that make us happy. Maybe some internalized mindset of productivity for its own sake, completely unmoored from the managerial context? Some kind of cargo-cult type performance to attract what - prosperity? Happiness?
I don't really have a good answer for why this happens, but it's certainly interesting.
I'm definitely a niche, but as someone who has never been a super big eater and has lost most of my sense of taste, this kind of product seems great.
That said, for me it has nothing to do with productivity. I just want a single meal I could repeatably consume to maintain a healthy diet. (Ideally, with as little effort as possible on my part because it all taste the same to me)
It had an interesting characters at first, but then it quickly devolved into relationship show with all the character adjustments necessary to make it happen.
I enjoyed it, but I enjoyed it the same way I enjoy Seinfeld. It is an equivalent of chips and icecream. Filling, but ultimately bad for you.
Putting Seinfeld and Big Bang in the same bucket hurts my soul. Not sure how either are bad for you though. People need a way to decompress and a 22min sitcom is a great way to transition from one mood to another.
I will admit it is not a perfect match, but both have a laugh track and both remain very popular. I think I may have been trying to get an agreement from several generations of sitcom enthusiasts.
How about Big Bang and Scrubs? Both are kinda silly and both kinda got bad the same way.
Seinfeld was recorded in front of a studio audience, so the laughs are real. The thing is though that they often did multiple takes of each scene, and the laughs are sometimes the ones from different takes.
To be fair, it's a definite truth that shows get more chance of funding based on what is popular and how it fits into that perceived potential popularity.
So TBBT is a part of the overall zeitgeist, an example of a show of its type that was very successful.
You bet if a sci-fi show was number 1, than other sci-fi shows would be being made and better funded.
Uk is going through a comedy golden age last decades. I attribute it to bbc doing an excellent job giving chances to younger comedians on gameshows like mock the week, qi, 9 out of 10 cats, im sorry i havent a clue etc... as well as the prominence of edinburgh fringe
I think this sort of talent development really is just about giving chances to new folks, its the risk averse large networks only re-hiring the same older folks that stifles an artistic sector, be it movies, shows, music, games, comedy etc
I don't see anything on Netflix that is trying to compete with TBBT, which is a CBS show firmly targeted at Middle America.
If anything, Netflix comedies are the opposite of TBBT, there's no audience laughter, it's all single-camera like Arrested Development, The Office and other 2000s-era neo-sitcoms.
The more people watch TBBT, the more Netflix is motivated to maintain the license to keep it in the library (and while I'm not positive about this, I thiiiiink the more they have to pay to maintain that license).
Money they take out of their budget to keep TBBT in their library is money they can no longer spend to keep shows that I, personally, care for alive.
It's the same thing as cable: by paying for a Netflix subscription, I'm partially paying for them to keep TBBT on their network, and I don't think it's a stretch to say if they didn't have TBBT they'd have a (or more than one) different show instead, that I might be more interested in.
TBBT isn't specifically the problem. But it's pretty emblematic of the lowest-common-denominator chaff that's currently clogging up streaming services. I don't even think it's a bad show, necessarily, in of that people do get joy from it. But I think broad-appeal, low risk, low effort content is horrendously overvalued in our society compared to more interesting, creative work, which is honestly not that hot of a take.
Tl;dr I want more people to like the sorts of things I like so that they get more financial support and become more prevalent compared to the sorts of things I care for less. This is not an unusual take.
> Money they take out of their budget to keep TBBT in their library is money they can no longer spend to keep shows that I, personally, care for alive.
On the same token, money spent keeping TBBT on the network reduces customer churn and increases earnings, which can be invested in other shows.
TBBT is the symptom, not the problem. Netflix would be delighted to not pay CBS a fortune every year. The problem is that Netflix doesn't have enough customers whose tastes skew towards your own.
Well some might argue that every episode is the same formula. Watching season 2 or 10, you’re like watching the same thing over and over.
Not really thinking it’s a big problem personally, lots of shows follow very similar formula, but I did end up stopping to watch after a few seasons as I did get tired of it.
It's a warm show about people who care about each other where the drama comes from social misunderstandings.
The initial pilot featured a more conniving Penny played by a different actress. The focus group feedback was "Someone keep that mean girl away from those sweet boys".
Think of it as a show for moms / grandmothers / aunts of nerdy men. They want to see them get up so some shenanigans but generally be OK.
It's also a low effort show to watch so you can throw it on in the background while you're doing other things.
Dude. It blows my mind there are over 25 episodes per season of most of the older series. I know most of the series had rough starts, but they really get good in the later seasons. I tried to tell someone to just watch it, and tell them how in Season 3 or 4 it gets really good. That means, you just gotta watch 50-75 episodes to get to the good stuff. LOL. That doesn't seem to convince anybody.
I mean, personally I love the early episodes just as much. But trying to get other people into it hasn't been successful for me.
Also I love starting on a long binge. There are hundreds and hundreds of episodes to watch! Peak Star Trek for me is DS9 when they start to get heavy into the Dominion war. Sisko is such a badass. He's my favorite Captain.
Dude. You realize you can skip the earlier seasons, right? Like just jump to season 3 or 4. So don't watch the first three or four seasons of MAS*H. Just jump to the seasons when Sherman Potter is ther.e
What a rude reply. I was just sharing something I thought was funny, since most shows today only have like 8-10 episodes per season. To get through 2 seasons of TNG is like going through 10 seasons of a modern show.
Warm show? I admittedly haven’t watched many episodes, but they all seem somewhat casually cruel to one another, and not in a loving way you may tease a friend.
I always felt the stereotypes were truly making fun of geek/nerds, and somehow fooled folks into thinking they were in on the joke.
> they all seem somewhat casually cruel to one another
So you're saying it's the same as just about any other sitcom?
Besides joking at one another's expense, a super common trope in US sitcoms is the lie to avoid embarrassment which builds up tension throughout the show, inevitably leads to exposure/confrontation and then resolution (forgiveness) near the end.
So many situations would be resolved quickly if the characters just 'fessed up immediately instead of trying to deceive the others to save face.
The first and only episode I watched revolved around one of the male leads training the female lead like a dog, by giving her food treats when she completed tasks for him.
I don't know if that was representative but I decided it was not for me.
I don't know how to mesh that with Wil Wheaton speaking so fondly of his time on the show in his book. Even the updated one where he talks about his past views and behavior with exceptional self-awareness.
My wife will put Friends on as a background to the day. So it might not be engaged watchers just people who want the noise and like the familiarity of the characters talking in the same way that radio fills the audio space.
In the spreadsheet the total of ALL the hours is 93,455,200,000 or ninety-three billion, four hundred fifty-five million, two hundred thousand hours.
And that's between January and June 2023.
If we say the typical working day is 8 hours and the week is 5 days and a typical full time worker works 42 weeks a year (factoring in holidays and sick leave), based on this report 55,628,095 or about 56 million years of human productivity spent staring at Netflix in the 1st half of 2023
Looking at it another way right now we have almost 8.1 billion people on the planet. The total hours reported in this spreadsheet averages to about 12 hours per person on the planet for the 1st 6 months of 2023.
Pretty mind boggling, especially when you consider this is only part of the story, compared to all the other entertainment media we spend time on (TikTok, Instagram etc.)
I never understood it either. My parents used to watch it together at top volume. My theory was that it was easy to watch, you knew exactly what was going on, it was familiar. When my mum died my dad would watch it alone at top volume, I guess it reminded him of her and a bit of comfort in a world that had suddenly gone unrecognisable, crazy and scary. I could never stand the grotesque yelling voices and hysterical laughter and I would ask him to mute it or switch it off when I came visiting with my son. I can't imagine I will ever watch an episode but I derive a weird sort of mild comfort knowing that it's there.
Night agent came out this year and is 10 episodes. I didn’t check but assuming it’s 1hr/ep that’s 80million viewers. Wow
Ps. Checking a popular torrent site and roughly adding up the download count for all the season rips and adding a representative number from some of the individual episodes. Then multiplying that by 10 because there are other public torrent sites and many private ones we get 60k x 10. Even if you do x 20 it’s roughly 1 million. Out out 80 million that’s just 1-2%
Just think of all the amazing content from decades past, even movies from not long ago in the 90s, that many gen z will never see and experience and enjoy in their whole lives because they can’t buy or rent or play dvds any more, don’t use torrents, and streaming providers have very little content from years or decades past. It a loss.
But then you still need to get the DVDs from somewhere and most people don't want to buy a movie just to watch it, and renting DVDs is a thing (mostly) of the past.
I think that’s highly regional, and probably limited lifespan. Enjoy it while it lasts. Here in Europe, I haven’t seen a DVD or a CD in a library in many years.
They might not know torrents per se, but I think most at least know that stremio and popcorn time exist - I have no sources, but I'd expect most torrents nowadays to be consumed that way.
The Night Agent was not good enough that you would want to go through the effort to pirate it, but it was slightly good enough to watch if you had nothing else to do after a hard day of work. I had no idea it was that successful, now I feel sort of bad for contributing to it.
I guess the lesson to take away from all this is there are a lot of people who are tired after a long day at work and are willing to waste their time on something acceptable instead of trying to choose something better.
Incredible that old shows have gone on to enormous success after streaming on Netflix - Suits, Breaking Bad, Friends, The Big Bang Theory, Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I wonder how much these streaming hours compare to the original network viewerships. It would also be interesting to understand the licensing deals that go onto extending these shows onto Netflix, seems like a no-brainer for any older show to get a second life, especially after seeing Suits and others doing 600M hours.
Us Boomers call that Syndication. It would be interesting to see the contracts written for these shows. The old broadcast days, shows tried to get to 100 episodes as quickly as possible as that was the qualifier for becoming syndicated. Becoming syndicated is where people really started earning with those points on the back end.
I have a Netflix subscription. I have watched exactly 0 hours total of the items called out in TFA; am I out of touch? Am I missing something of particular cultural value?
Why would that be the logical conclusion ? Not everyone listens to pop music for example that doesn't mean we are out of touch, not seeing pop shows just means we have different tastes than the most common denominator.
There are a large variety of tastes and streaming companies cater to the segments which make enough financial returns, not just only pop culture, as long as enough people are there in the segments we like - it shouldn't matter what pop culture is doing.
You may want to give "Breaking Bad" a try - watch the first season to see if you enjoy it.
I'm not sure if it qualifies as "cultural value" but many critics like it. I liked it too, even though I hate almost everything. It has some good acting and writing, and a compelling storyline.
Same. I feel Netflix is a really shitty version of HBO. I rarely, if ever, watch it.
The original House of Cards was great. Mindhunter was alright. Neither reached the pinnacle of most HBO programming.
It's a shame that David Zaslav believes prestige television must take a backseat to cheap, "comfort" viewing. And the fact that they ditched such a prestigious brand to rename themselves "Max".
> It's a shame that David Zaslav believes prestige television must take a backseat to cheap, "comfort" viewing.
While Zaslav will obviously make things worse, note that it was AT&T that fired all the HBO bosses that curated HBO’s offerings quite a few years ago now. HBO was killed before Zaslav got to it.
I was fairly disappointed in 1899, after coming from Dark (same creators). Dark was incredibly dense, by comparison. Dark is easily my top show on Netflix, so far.
Concur regarding Dark - it's kind of amazing that Netflix can, when it wishes to, produce "HBO Caliber" content - but so much of the time it's just time-filler drek.
I don't regret a single minute of the time I spent watching Dark 3-4 years ago, nor the time I spent in the office discussing it, or even the time I tried to graph it all (with varying degrees of success)...
These results must be heavily influenced by canceled series but the word is not mentioned (probably verbotten) on the posting.
If I've watched a dozen series and had them cancelled before their conclusion over recent years -- not an exaggeration -- I will be much less likely to watch a new series. Instead I will tend towards movies or a limited duration series, usually sixish episodes with a premeditated conclusion, posted and safe.
In other words, their cancel lust drives the viewing, maybe more than the material itself, and it's not being accounted for here.
I wondered if The Night Agent was a show from years ago they're licensing from the BBC, but I'm confusing it with The Night Manager: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-ZcaKdvML8
Neat, I noticed it gave me wrong data though, and when I asked for the top 3 rows it provided the wrong value, due to not using UTF8 - Asking ChatGPT to use utf8 support fixed it, perhaps update it's prompt.
This is a wonderful gold mine for data geeks. The real question to me is why Netflix is releasing this. It's a massive boon for their competitors. My instinct is they either were hacked/people were able to game the recommendations enough to get at it that they decided to just share it. Unexpected.
Netflix wants to licence more content and sees value in demonstrating to the stock market that it has the best economics to do so.
If Netflix can get ten million viewers for a tier 2 general entertainment series, the IP holders should pick Netflix as a partner over a Paramount+ type service that can only get a few hundred thousand viewers.
It’s no coincidence this announcement is coming at a time when everyone is trying to reduce first party content spend.
Just goes to show how much people make things up and couldn’t be further from the truth (see other comments for why this information was released, this one is flat out wrong).
There was a major transparency ask from both writers and other creative community members as part of demands during the recent SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, perhaps publishing the data was part of the settlement in those disputes.
> Streaming data transparency: Companies agree to provide the Guild the total number of hours streamed, both domestically and internationally, of self-produced high budget streaming programs (e.g., a Netflix original series). Aggregated information can be shared.
They've gotten a reputation for canceling shows. Creatives feel that it's unjustified, and I'm assuming they feel that it's justified based on the numbers the shows are pulling in and the cost.
And they feel that transparency about this is the best way to demonstrate their case. That the data backs up their decisions.
Most network show cancelations come with low rating that everyone can see. This is their equivalent of releasing ratings so people can see the reasons for their cancelations.
This is a result of the union negotiations with the WGA, which demanded and won that all streamers disclose exactly this. Expect to see this for every other streaming service imminently.
> Streaming data transparency: Companies agree to provide the Guild the total number of hours streamed, both domestically and internationally, of self-produced high budget streaming programs (e.g., a Netflix original series). Aggregated information can be shared.
This is just about the worst "yearly report" by a major company I've seen. A mass of text, a link to an xlsx file and a youtube video with audio quality remniscent of a telephone earnings call. Where are the pretty charts and interactivity all in glorious HTML5?
Slightly related. Netflix is that company that doesn't provide English subtitles in Australia (unless the movie/show's original language is not English), and possibly other native English countries as well.
They do provide closed captions however, so that we get helpful captions such as "loud urinating sounds".
Is that really so problematic, though? It's the same as ABC iView and SBS OnDemand, from what I can tell... Perhaps this is just to comply with local law, then?
It is very problematic because modern actors mumble to the point you can't understand much unless the volume is high enough for your entire neighbourhood to hear. Having closed captions instead of subtitles harms immersion.
Netflix can provide both English subtitles and closed captions (as seen in some Korean shows).
They simply choose not to offer them for most English-language titles.
Possibly unrelated but similar idea at least: in Japan a lot of the Japanese TV shows I watch don't have English subtitles available, but in the US the same shows on Netflix do have English subtitles. I don't fully understand the reasoning for this on Netflix's side.
They may not have the license for English subtitles in Japan similar to how outside of Japan you can't get Japanese subtitles on Japanese TV shows because of licensing.
What's really annoying is when you turn on the CC subtitles and someone speaks a foreign language. The on screen subtitle gets covered with an unhelpful "[speaking Japanese]"
That's an artistic choice: the POV character in that scene doesn't speak Japanese, so viewers receive information limited to their perception.
Languages are handled differently in truly multi-lingual media. Watch _Invasion_ for a good example (the first season is amazing, but we didn't care for the second). There, the audience gets subtitles for everything, so viewers often know more than the characters do. There's a beautiful sequence in the desert where two men, unable to understand each other's language, pour out their hearts to each other, and - unwittingly, and across a cultural chasm - share the same hopes and fears.
There's a third way of handling language, which I hardly ever see: the characters on-screen understand each other, but the audience doesn't. The _Star Wars_ by-play between R2-D2 and C3PO is the most accessible example. This is engaging because viewers have to fill in the blanks to infer what one or more of the characters have said.
You might prefer that everything be of the second type, but keep an open mind! The creators probably had a reason for making the choice that they did.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but I'm afraid you badly misunderstood the comment you replied to.
They aren't complaining about closed captions failing to translate foreign speech.
They're complaining about the specific instance where the show/movie has English subtitles for that foreign speech already built in and showing on the screen, and when the closed captions show "[speaking Japanese]" it overlays the translation that the filmmakers intended the viewers to receive, preventing them from experiencing the filmmaker's artistic choice.
The POV character might not speak Japanese, but some viewers without hearing difficulties might, so Japanese-speaking viewers using CC shouldn't be discriminated against. Or the Japanese phrase might be "konnichiwa", which most people would understand. Or it might be a commonly used term, like "Cinco de Mayo". The subtitles shouldn't cop out with [speaking foreign language], but instead put the foreign phrase in the subtitles if it isn't meant to be translated.
I'd argue that if the director decided that the characters should not understand what's being said, then its better if the audience doesn't know either.
For a particular example, it is my understanding that the movie "The Thing" is thoroughly spoiled right at the beginning if you speak Norwegian.
"Subtitles assume the viewer can hear but cannot understand the language or accent, or the speech is not entirely clear, so they transcribe only dialogue and some on-screen text.
Captions aim to describe to the deaf and hard of hearing all significant audio content—spoken dialogue and non-speech information such as the identity of speakers and, occasionally, their manner of speaking—along with any significant music or sound effects using words or symbols."
Closed captions also provide hints as to non-dialog audio; song lyrics, musical tones, important noises in the background etc.
Personally I always use subtitles, and closed captions if it's available; there are quite a lot of audio clues that I wouldn't otherwise know are even interesting, that get highlighted - mostly extra detail rather than plot important, but it does key you up to things happening or about to happen in the background.
Yes, that is annoying. I live somewhere that isn't natively English speaking and so I mostly only have the option to get subtitles in that language even though I read English much better than the local language. I can follow subtitles in a second language, but it's a fair bit more effort (and many people who live here can't do that at all.)
Why is this funny? Netflix is not a video hosting website? It's a subscription-based on-demand streaming service. You can't host my videos on Netflix, can you?
* depending on another, rival company
* mysterious bugs you have no control over
* loss of your own data
* giving your customers data to a company for free that maybe even would have paid for the same data
* not your users having a conversation about your product on a media that you don't control (which is not necessarily bad, but is definitely a side effect)
* it is illegal to embed youtube in Europe, without asking consent first, and immoral in the rest of the world too*
and such. 'Funny' as in 'ridiculously bad decision'. If I were at Netflix I'd just put the videos on a netflix server in a standard media format, embedded with html video tag. Simple way to ensure that as long as the website is up the video is also up, users are not redirected from your website, the video is fast, good quality, and so on.
*Not the act, but how they do it currently. When you open the article, it tells google that you have opened the article for no reason. They should avoid this if they can (and they can), also they should put google in their privacy statement which they didn't do.
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[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 325 ms ] threadMy 14 year old boy loves One Piece anime, so we watched it together so I could see what it was all about.
It’s a surprising substantial TV show in its own right, and for once a fantasy TV is just good fun without trying to hard to be serious drama.
Witcher S2 at row 233
Witcher S3 at row 556
But I have no idea what the story is about or what anybody is talking about. It's just all way too complicated.
The games are fairly easy to get I’d say.
That's a big caveat. Haha. I made it through almost the entirety of the season before I realized there were dual timelines. Nothing made sense. Maybe that's on me.. but I feel like enough people had similar issues that it's more likely a major shortcoming of the show.
I thought it was a really good execution tbh. It’s rare to see fantasy play out the effect of different lifespans
As with some shows the description doesn’t really do it justice.
It has a lot more going for it than the premise suggests!
And the series before that would be fine if it was not called the Witcher, but as it was it made any reasonable progress impossible.
I ask because as a Netflix user, these titles are constantly being pushed to me when I open up the app.
It’s like how millennials can drop a Simpsons quote into a conversation with their peers and everybody gets the reference.
Peak TV has annihilated this. Nobody watches the same stuff anymore.
Did you catch the latest season of Current Thing? No, because there’s no Current Thing any more, there’s a thousand of them.
The more we watch, the more isolated we become.
I find the diatribe of "things got better, we got worse" so... boring and antisocial? You never magically made friends, you have always had to make them. There are now tools specifically to help you do this, and your pool has become unrestricted to the geographical region of your job. It's easier than ever, it's more likely you're just overwhelmed by the change.
But even that's fine - I made a new friend today while out and about. Just from talkin' like "the good ole days".
The writers are very well-versed in the vampire meta, and it shows.
Out of curiosity, not disagreeableness, which tools are those?
Shared TV space replaced those 'shared values' state tried to indoctrinate people with 'shared current thing', which had to indoctrinate people to state propaganda AND sell stuff for companies.
Those shared values have to replaced with something.
I want to say something pithy like 'but now its memes or tiktok shorts', but I can't get sufficiently worked up.
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thats-the-neat-part-you-dont
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/look-what-they-need-to-mimic-...
[2] https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2470104-sheher-theythem-cool...
Many of us haven’t seen those shows or memes your bubble is your bubble only. That is the entire point and thrust of this comment thread.
Then this comment comes in and is all ‘actually we’ve all seen these’ and we are all like…… nah?
To this day it's still in the top 10 of most viewed television events with the other being primarily sports events (e.g. Super Bowl etc)
~2000 is a pretty decent sample size. The viewing numbers you should be skeptical about are the very small ones which will have huge error bars, not the huge ones.
I've heard good things about Beef, and maybe Kaleidoscope. Kaleidoscope is novel because it's an 8 episode heist show that, in theory, can be watched in any order and be cogent. Arguably, this is one reason I have not watched it. Not a big fan of gimmicky things.
Of course there's also the bit of the "how can there be 18,000 shows and nothing to watch?"
Top show has twice the view count of show number 8.
Would love to map that against budgets and sub numbers - without ads the viewcounts matter zilch.
1 - How much minimal time does a consumer watch Netflix to re-subscribe? 2 - How much content spend is necessary to achieve that minimal viewing time?
Everything else is waste and lost margin.
Though maybe there is some core who just doesn't bother cancelling and resubscribing because it's become a hassle.
All we get is an Excel sheet dump with a huge list, not even grouped by series? Not to mention regions, languages, genres, some graphs, etc.
I'm a bit surprised to be honest.
Would have been nice to have a few more columns though. Country of origin, number of episodes and play time. etc.
Hell, it's tuesday, so by monday, I expect a "did it in a weekend" SaaS allowing uploads of boring raw excel data and receive a nice UI for the mere exchange of them a permanent and irrevocable license to use the data for any purpose commercial or not.
https://datasette.io/
It is clear Netflix don't want me as a paying customer, and that makes sense. At least in the short term.
Although, technically, the most profitable customer is the one that has low view time, but still subscribes. The most stable customer is probably one with high view time, but they're also probably the least profitable, unless they're naturally helping promote the service.
What they will give you is what I call the lowest common denominator of shows.
If you mean from a "critique" standpoint then no. If you meant from a "data wrangling standpoint then yes, as binary like/dislike data is just a lot easier to work with for recommendation algorithms.
There are many good reasons to move from a five star rating system to a binary rating system, and yeah, I think many of those fall into the "people lied to themselves" category:
- People tend to note use five or ten star systems on a continuous scale with certain points on the scale being biased
- People tend to go into "movie critic"-mode when they see a 5/10-star scale, as those are usually used on sites like IMDB. That drives them to try and rate the movie "objectively" and in accordance with an intellectual image they want to portray, rather than what they actually like/dislike consuming and spend their time watching
- Netflix also displayed the ratings as 5-star "adjusted ratings for the viewer", which already took your preferences into account. Not a single person I've talked to back then was aware of that, so everyone tried to do the same mental gymnastics they do when trying to project global IMDB ratings to their personal preferences. Moving to a "XX% match for you" together with the like/dislikes is something that people understand a lot better
All-in-all, I don't think the rating system really has been an issue in the recent years. The catalog has been a much bigger issue during that time. I'm pretty sure that Netflix's rating and recommendation system has been good enough that it has served me everything that I'd like to watch on their platform and now I'm out of content.
Sounds pretty similar to all mediocre companies out there.
I loved Netflix stuff when they started out, banger after banger was delivered. Something changed.
Or to not throw away all the points I argued for: There were a lot of good reasons for moving away from the five star systems, and the main motivation was providing a better less confusing UX
> I loved Netflix stuff when they started out, banger after banger was delivered. Something changed.
The main thing that changed was that media companies woke up to streaming and stopped giving away the rights to properties that many people enjoy (mainly nostalgia shows + blockbusters) for cheap. That forced Netflix much more into media production of their own, which has it's up- and downsides, and gave Netflix the same warts that media companies always had (e.g. having to make hard decisions around canceling shows). It's a very clear case of a first-mover losing its advantage over time.
It was not adjusted to your preferences. It was adjusted by algorithm to ... something that has nothing to do with my enjoyment.
But, I've rated many hundreds of shows/movies, and the rating is very accurate, for me. Very biased and scaled, but completely predictable/reliable.
In my case, the rating can be corrected with Netflix 7 being my 0, and Netflix 10 being my 10, mostly linear. For a Netflix show, 8 is my 0, since those are biased a bit more.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize
I guess it's sadly what brings most viewers. I think there's some truth in the overall dumbing down of society.
Bonus: No brand name stars in it neither.
So would you recommend watching it?
You are baslessly guessing
Just making conversation :-)
Overall, I believe the show is a terrible role model for how men who are in STEM fields should behave to others who do not fit the stereotype.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3-hOigoxHs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L7NRONADJ4
The problem is context, it's Lenny Bruce mocking the cop who is reading back his skit in court. It's Dave Chapel pointing out how people quoting him on twitter without the context miss the point...
These are made up people in a make believe world doing made up things. They aren't meant to be taken seriously on any level.
Love the sneaky word play! Does art imitate life or does life imitate art?
> ... reinforcing the stereotypes present in the world
The whole point of comedy is to take away the teeth behind these things. The act is meant to reshape culture and conversation. Stereotype, beauty, the perception of color, were very fungible and its just another tool!
Also, one of the main features of the show seems to be to point out the fact that, with respect to women: That's Not How To Do It. So, to claim that the show's writers are "doing it wrong" seems to be missing the point. It'd be like criticizing the writers of All in the Family for imbuing Archie Bunker with working-class conservative values. The whole point of the show was to illustrate how wrong he was.
The comments Sheldon makes are misogynist in the literal sense of the definition you gave, too, self-evidently so, IMO. The first video starts listing examples at 10:45. Again, the humor is just in the juxtaposition of average people's attitudes with his open contempt for women, with his bigotry acknowledged but never really addressed.
I probably wouldn't like the characters or watch the show if they didn't make the jokes or have the quirks and shortcomings that they do.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is not an educational show about how to manage a pub.
Big Bang does nothing like that, you’re supposed to like the characters.
I actually like to be productive, and I suspect you do too. But if people don't, that's fine too. I do wonder if we might be addicted to productivity, though.
Thinking about what that implies about how these people engage with art is kind of wild. It's like speedwalking through an art gallery to see more paintings per hour. There's something about that optimization/productivity mindset that seems strangely pathological. Like insisting on eating exclusively vitamin gruel because it's optimized for nutrition per minutes.
I don't know where this compulsion starts, but it's a little disturbing.
That is actually a thing and perhaps a growing industry called "meal replacements".
It's not surprising given that meals for many people are already just plastic wrapped matter heated in a microwave and slurped up from their laps on the couch.
Part of it is politicians who seem insistent on treating productivity as a primary goal. If we were struggling to produce enough food then, sure, productivity would be a big problem. But we produce an excess of food. So much so that obesity and diabetes are a problem now. This goes for everything: I can't think of a single thing in life where I think "if only we were more productive I'd be happier". At some point we really have to learn to just be happy.
The other part is the tendency of people to focus on simple metrics and neglect anything with nuance. Things like number of books you've read this year, how many people you manage, how much money you earn. All simple numbers, all essentially meaningless outside of a much broader context, but all pursued with laser focus for no particular reason.
At this point in my life I earn more money than ever, I have more stuff and, yes, I'm more productive. But am I happier now than when I got my first cheap car (that I could now buy every month without even sacrificing anything)? Am I happier than when I first had sex? Am I happier than that day I cooked a splendid boeuf bourguignon for my student house? Of course not.
But those other ones, are freaky - the ones that are designed to be allround [food] for humans, in the same way that a dog can eat exclusively a specific type of dogfood indefinitely. Why the need/desire to do this? It's like something out of classic dystopian sci-fi, only it's chosen voluntarily by people with access to real(ish) food, and they pay a premium for it.
I think you're correct about this effort to cram more 'stuff' into life instead of taking our time to engage with less in a deeper way, being counterproductive to the things that make us happy. Maybe some internalized mindset of productivity for its own sake, completely unmoored from the managerial context? Some kind of cargo-cult type performance to attract what - prosperity? Happiness?
I don't really have a good answer for why this happens, but it's certainly interesting.
That said, for me it has nothing to do with productivity. I just want a single meal I could repeatably consume to maintain a healthy diet. (Ideally, with as little effort as possible on my part because it all taste the same to me)
I enjoyed it, but I enjoyed it the same way I enjoy Seinfeld. It is an equivalent of chips and icecream. Filling, but ultimately bad for you.
How about Big Bang and Scrubs? Both are kinda silly and both kinda got bad the same way.
So TBBT is a part of the overall zeitgeist, an example of a show of its type that was very successful.
You bet if a sci-fi show was number 1, than other sci-fi shows would be being made and better funded.
America doesn't know how to make comedy anymore. I blame Twitter.
I think this sort of talent development really is just about giving chances to new folks, its the risk averse large networks only re-hiring the same older folks that stifles an artistic sector, be it movies, shows, music, games, comedy etc
If anything, Netflix comedies are the opposite of TBBT, there's no audience laughter, it's all single-camera like Arrested Development, The Office and other 2000s-era neo-sitcoms.
Money they take out of their budget to keep TBBT in their library is money they can no longer spend to keep shows that I, personally, care for alive.
It's the same thing as cable: by paying for a Netflix subscription, I'm partially paying for them to keep TBBT on their network, and I don't think it's a stretch to say if they didn't have TBBT they'd have a (or more than one) different show instead, that I might be more interested in.
TBBT isn't specifically the problem. But it's pretty emblematic of the lowest-common-denominator chaff that's currently clogging up streaming services. I don't even think it's a bad show, necessarily, in of that people do get joy from it. But I think broad-appeal, low risk, low effort content is horrendously overvalued in our society compared to more interesting, creative work, which is honestly not that hot of a take.
Tl;dr I want more people to like the sorts of things I like so that they get more financial support and become more prevalent compared to the sorts of things I care for less. This is not an unusual take.
On the same token, money spent keeping TBBT on the network reduces customer churn and increases earnings, which can be invested in other shows.
TBBT is the symptom, not the problem. Netflix would be delighted to not pay CBS a fortune every year. The problem is that Netflix doesn't have enough customers whose tastes skew towards your own.
And another way of putting that is "I find it depressing how many people watch TBBT (compared to shows I prefer)"
However Suits is insufferable to watch.
Not really thinking it’s a big problem personally, lots of shows follow very similar formula, but I did end up stopping to watch after a few seasons as I did get tired of it.
Suddenly I found them relatable and amusing, the exact kind of escape I needed
then other things I valued became accessible again and took up my time again and I don't find shows like that appealing
Its really just to say to consider revisiting it in a different phase of your life
The initial pilot featured a more conniving Penny played by a different actress. The focus group feedback was "Someone keep that mean girl away from those sweet boys".
Think of it as a show for moms / grandmothers / aunts of nerdy men. They want to see them get up so some shenanigans but generally be OK.
It's also a low effort show to watch so you can throw it on in the background while you're doing other things.
Nobody asked, but my thing to watch like this is everything-Star-Trek (TOS, TNG, V, Ent, etc. including the movies)
I mean, personally I love the early episodes just as much. But trying to get other people into it hasn't been successful for me.
Also I love starting on a long binge. There are hundreds and hundreds of episodes to watch! Peak Star Trek for me is DS9 when they start to get heavy into the Dominion war. Sisko is such a badass. He's my favorite Captain.
I always felt the stereotypes were truly making fun of geek/nerds, and somehow fooled folks into thinking they were in on the joke.
Warm is a word I have a hard time using.
So you're saying it's the same as just about any other sitcom?
Besides joking at one another's expense, a super common trope in US sitcoms is the lie to avoid embarrassment which builds up tension throughout the show, inevitably leads to exposure/confrontation and then resolution (forgiveness) near the end.
So many situations would be resolved quickly if the characters just 'fessed up immediately instead of trying to deceive the others to save face.
But then, there'd be no show with cheap laughs.
I don't know if that was representative but I decided it was not for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3-hOigoxHs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L7NRONADJ4
I don't know how to mesh that with Wil Wheaton speaking so fondly of his time on the show in his book. Even the updated one where he talks about his past views and behavior with exceptional self-awareness.
I like that show, but no, it is not warm show about caring. It is fun show about mutual abuse. Like I said, fun and all, but in kinda cruel way.
And that's between January and June 2023.
If we say the typical working day is 8 hours and the week is 5 days and a typical full time worker works 42 weeks a year (factoring in holidays and sick leave), based on this report 55,628,095 or about 56 million years of human productivity spent staring at Netflix in the 1st half of 2023
Looking at it another way right now we have almost 8.1 billion people on the planet. The total hours reported in this spreadsheet averages to about 12 hours per person on the planet for the 1st 6 months of 2023.
Pretty mind boggling, especially when you consider this is only part of the story, compared to all the other entertainment media we spend time on (TikTok, Instagram etc.)
Ps. Checking a popular torrent site and roughly adding up the download count for all the season rips and adding a representative number from some of the individual episodes. Then multiplying that by 10 because there are other public torrent sites and many private ones we get 60k x 10. Even if you do x 20 it’s roughly 1 million. Out out 80 million that’s just 1-2%
I wanted to check out a couple of titles when browsing this list.
Seems like the Korean entertainment industry is big for Netflix, seems like it might be second to Hollywood.
There are a large variety of tastes and streaming companies cater to the segments which make enough financial returns, not just only pop culture, as long as enough people are there in the segments we like - it shouldn't matter what pop culture is doing.
I'm not sure if it qualifies as "cultural value" but many critics like it. I liked it too, even though I hate almost everything. It has some good acting and writing, and a compelling storyline.
I don't watch the shows that the bulk of Netflix viewers watch!
The original House of Cards was great. Mindhunter was alright. Neither reached the pinnacle of most HBO programming.
It's a shame that David Zaslav believes prestige television must take a backseat to cheap, "comfort" viewing. And the fact that they ditched such a prestigious brand to rename themselves "Max".
[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098825/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2
/pedant
While Zaslav will obviously make things worse, note that it was AT&T that fired all the HBO bosses that curated HBO’s offerings quite a few years ago now. HBO was killed before Zaslav got to it.
I don't regret a single minute of the time I spent watching Dark 3-4 years ago, nor the time I spent in the office discussing it, or even the time I tried to graph it all (with varying degrees of success)...
Netflix greenlights the projects and provides the money but it doesn't really produce the shows.
For Jan-Jun 2023, it was 278th most viewed on the platform with 51,800,000 hours of view. It was released in 2022-11-17.
It just makes me wonder what sort of views it would have had to get to get continued for another season.
Definitely a shame - it was a fun show.
S2 is at position 32 with 192M hours viewed.
If I've watched a dozen series and had them cancelled before their conclusion over recent years -- not an exaggeration -- I will be much less likely to watch a new series. Instead I will tend towards movies or a limited duration series, usually sixish episodes with a premeditated conclusion, posted and safe.
In other words, their cancel lust drives the viewing, maybe more than the material itself, and it's not being accounted for here.
Btw it gave me wrong answer to most watched tv show in 2023.
Check out https://chat.openai.com/share/34091576-036a-4e82-b4e3-a8798d...
Netflix wants to licence more content and sees value in demonstrating to the stock market that it has the best economics to do so.
If Netflix can get ten million viewers for a tier 2 general entertainment series, the IP holders should pick Netflix as a partner over a Paramount+ type service that can only get a few hundred thousand viewers.
It’s no coincidence this announcement is coming at a time when everyone is trying to reduce first party content spend.
Now writers (and actors, and anyone else) can use this information to better negotiate their worth with studios, rather than it being 1-sided.
https://www.wgacontract2023.org/the-campaign/what-we-won
> Streaming data transparency: Companies agree to provide the Guild the total number of hours streamed, both domestically and internationally, of self-produced high budget streaming programs (e.g., a Netflix original series). Aggregated information can be shared.
They've gotten a reputation for canceling shows. Creatives feel that it's unjustified, and I'm assuming they feel that it's justified based on the numbers the shows are pulling in and the cost.
And they feel that transparency about this is the best way to demonstrate their case. That the data backs up their decisions.
Most network show cancelations come with low rating that everyone can see. This is their equivalent of releasing ratings so people can see the reasons for their cancelations.
https://www.wgacontract2023.org/the-campaign/what-we-won
> Streaming data transparency: Companies agree to provide the Guild the total number of hours streamed, both domestically and internationally, of self-produced high budget streaming programs (e.g., a Netflix original series). Aggregated information can be shared.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/netflix-release...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-12/netflix-r...
https://www.ft.com/content/87f3dcec-ec8b-4c6c-9555-8d350e962...
They do provide closed captions however, so that we get helpful captions such as "loud urinating sounds".
Netflix can provide both English subtitles and closed captions (as seen in some Korean shows). They simply choose not to offer them for most English-language titles.
I honestly thing that they’re created by third parties who just run the audio through an AI and call it a day.
Languages are handled differently in truly multi-lingual media. Watch _Invasion_ for a good example (the first season is amazing, but we didn't care for the second). There, the audience gets subtitles for everything, so viewers often know more than the characters do. There's a beautiful sequence in the desert where two men, unable to understand each other's language, pour out their hearts to each other, and - unwittingly, and across a cultural chasm - share the same hopes and fears.
There's a third way of handling language, which I hardly ever see: the characters on-screen understand each other, but the audience doesn't. The _Star Wars_ by-play between R2-D2 and C3PO is the most accessible example. This is engaging because viewers have to fill in the blanks to infer what one or more of the characters have said.
You might prefer that everything be of the second type, but keep an open mind! The creators probably had a reason for making the choice that they did.
They aren't complaining about closed captions failing to translate foreign speech.
They're complaining about the specific instance where the show/movie has English subtitles for that foreign speech already built in and showing on the screen, and when the closed captions show "[speaking Japanese]" it overlays the translation that the filmmakers intended the viewers to receive, preventing them from experiencing the filmmaker's artistic choice.
For a particular example, it is my understanding that the movie "The Thing" is thoroughly spoiled right at the beginning if you speak Norwegian.
Captions aim to describe to the deaf and hard of hearing all significant audio content—spoken dialogue and non-speech information such as the identity of speakers and, occasionally, their manner of speaking—along with any significant music or sound effects using words or symbols."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_captioning#Terminology
Personally I always use subtitles, and closed captions if it's available; there are quite a lot of audio clues that I wouldn't otherwise know are even interesting, that get highlighted - mostly extra detail rather than plot important, but it does key you up to things happening or about to happen in the background.
The S3 of Narcos Mexico was released in 2021 and it wasn't very good compared to the S1 and S2.
Just like regular ads by TV channels on youtube.
*Not the act, but how they do it currently. When you open the article, it tells google that you have opened the article for no reason. They should avoid this if they can (and they can), also they should put google in their privacy statement which they didn't do.