Pandora's Box, page 24
The Netflix frenzy, even then, had to be tempered by the wonky ways it measured success. In 2014, Netflix beat out HBO for Bloodline, from the Kessler brothers and Daniel Zelman, by offering a full season off a pitch; HBO, as usual, offered them only a pilot. Bloodline is a powerful but unaccountably neglected gem.
Recalls Todd Kessler, “At some point, Netflix told us that Bloodline had, and this was the quote, ‘the highest intent-to-watch of any series that they had had on their service.’ We asked what does ‘intent-to-watch’ mean, and they said that it was in the most queues. As long as it stayed in their queues, then members wouldn’t cancel their subscriptions. It was like, ‘What world are we in right now? You don’t even have to watch the show for it to be a success?’”36
Moreover, Bloodline was not a great experience for the creatives. The humble We don’t know anything so show us attitude that so impressed Kohan was nowhere to be seen. Says Kessler, “Netflix didn’t really understand what the show was. And we got notes from them that it was moving too slow, so we speeded it up, and then they said it was moving too fast. It was just like a moving target all the way through.” He adds bitterly, “This was in the first wave of Netflix canceling shows for no reason. They always needed new product.”37 Indeed, canceling shows after two or three seasons became the Netflix Way.
When Hastings, myopically gazing at his own navel, once declared his only competition was sleep, he repeated the mistake made by Bewkes when he myopically declared that Netflix posed no more of a threat than the Albanian army. Sleep may have seemed to Hastings like his company’s only threat, but solely because potential competitors had not yet awakened to the fact that streaming could grow their bottom line, even be a business of its own. Amazon was the first Big Tech company to take him on.
Amazon executive Roy Price was Hollywood royalty. One of his grandfathers, Roy Huggins, created TV hits like Maverick and The Fugitive, and hired David Chase to write for The Rockford Files. His father, Frank, headed up Columbia Pictures and then Universal Studios.
Price the Younger had a gilt-edged pedigree that included Phillips Andover Academy, Harvard, and USC law school, as well as a stint at McKinsey & Company and Disney Animation, impressing Princeton-educated Jeff Bezos so much that he hired him to create a new streaming division for Amazon—from scratch.
Price accessorized his pixie-ish good looks and brash manner with spiky hair, a black leather biker jacket worn over a white T-shirt, and a tattoo replicating the logo of the band Black Flag: four blocky parallel dark stripes. It worked to his advantage, distinguishing him from the studio suits on the one hand, and the Silicon Valley T-shirt-and-sandal crowd on the other. He might have had fun with his personal style, but the job with which he was tasked was no joke.
In 2010, under the rubric of what would become known as Amazon Studios, no one in Hollywood would take the newbie seriously. Indeed, its primary purpose was to lure consumers into Amazon’s retail space, turning viewers into shoppers. Their membership was sweetened by a free month of Amazon Prime, in the hopes that they would convert to full Prime members at $79 per year. The thinking was, “Lock up their eyeballs, and their wallets will follow.” As Bezos put it, “When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes.”38 Price recalls, “It was as if Walmart had set up Walmart Studios.”39 (Price thought he was joking, but in 2022, Walmart’s shopping service bundled Paramount+ in its Walmart+ membership package.)
Amazon Studios borrowed space from IMDb, one of Bezos’s numerous acquisitions. It was located far from the action in the Sherman Oaks Galleria, a shopping center in the Valley, mocked in Weeds for its “little boxes.” Indeed, Amazon Studios was no HBO. As HBO’s Bloys put it, “If we’re talking about the golden age of television, why bother with Amazon Prime? That’ll be a short chapter!”40
Although Netflix had made no secret of its intention to destroy theatrical distribution, Price realized that the only chance he had of attracting talent was to go the other way. He added a feature film division and hired two highly regarded indie veterans, Ted Hope and Bob Berney, to run it. Price hoped they would reassure skeptical filmmakers that Amazon Prime Video was for real.
Price and Hope discussed how to create an Amazon brand that would distinguish it from the Netflix gusher. By way of contrast, Amazon would privilege quality over quantity. Explained Hope, “Roy’s big thing for the first year was, ‘We don’t have to make things for everybody. We just have to make things that are somebody’s favorite shows.’ And as long as people are deeply passionate about them, they would start to ripple outwards and resonate with wider audiences.”41
Like HBO and Netflix in their infancies, Amazon was network averse. “We hired no one from the broadcast networks,” Price continues. “Game-changing shows are rule-breaking shows. If they’re too safe, nobody’s going to care. They had to be different. They had to be new. If there’s no fear of failure, then you should not be ordering the show because it’s going to be a down-the-middle series that would work on NBC.”42 Says Hope, “Roy really wanted bold movies. What pulled me in was the promise of mid-budget films where excellence is the goal.”43
Leaning on quality instead of quantity, originality rather than the tried and true, might have sounded like a death wish, but it had worked for HBO, and the Amazon mothership up north was so flush with dollars—it would generate $321.8 billion in net sales in 2020—that it had a distinct advantage over Netflix. Its new streamer was a hobby, like stamp collecting, whereas streaming was the be-all and end-all for Netflix.
Hope observes, “Amazon was happy to have Roy come out as a punk rocker.”44 It counteracted the company’s tech image. He signed deals with all the usual suspects, gold-plated indie stalwarts like Todd Haynes, Richard Linklater, Jim Jarmusch, and Spike Lee. Amazon’s movie division did have some striking successes, like Manchester by the Sea, which won two Oscars, making it the first streamer to do so, and later released much-awarded films like Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman, and moneymakers like The Big Sick, starring Kumail Nanjiani.
Still, Amazon couldn’t decide on a strategy. “They’d move in one direction, change tactics, move in another direction, change tactics,” Hope recalls. “It created a lot of distrust with our creative and business partners.”45 Price made Jason Ropell, a money guy, head of Amazon Studios, in hopes of making the trains run on time. “Still,” says an Amazon Studios executive, “you had factions and cabals.”46
Hope was desperate to make Marriage Story, which would be directed by Noah Baumbach, with Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver attached. But Ropell looked at the numbers on Baumbach’s previous films and said no. Hope argued that with Johansson and Driver, this would be his breakout film. Berney explains, “In a data-driven company, when you make an emotional, creative argument without the data to back it up, you’re not going to win.”47 To add insult to injury, Netflix made the film with the same cast. It was nominated for six Oscars, and Laura Dern won for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.
This was too much for Hope. He resigned. Berney followed, later explaining, “I felt like there wasn’t a future for film at Amazon, and I wanted to escape the Hunger Games–style politics there. I could see that it was going to be much more corporate, much more about quantity. ‘Let’s make fifty films for streaming.’”48
Like Netflix, Amazon was not about to depend on anyone’s gut. “We have all these customers. We have all this data,” says Price. “There had to be a way to use customer feedback to make our results better than those of a normal studio.”49 Sifting through book sales yielded a pretty good idea of what buyers were interested in, and several of its successful series would be based on them, like Michael Connolly’s Bosch saga, softened and sentimentalized as it was, as well as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Tom Clancy’s Bosch-with-a-passport Jack Ryan series, and, later, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, as well as The Lord of the Rings, which Amazon customers named their favorite book of 1999.
Drawing on books, however, was problematic. As Price discovered, the studios and agencies with years of experience were so adept at tracking them that by the time Amazon’s sales figures came in, the hot books were already optioned.
Price deserves credit for starting a streaming service, as well as an animation and a live action movie division—ex nihilo—hiring talented executives to run them and (mostly) backing their choices, no matter how wild and crazy they appeared to be. One of these executives was Joe Lewis, whom he hired to run his comedy division. Price was hands-off, still up in Seattle until August 2014, while Lewis was on the ground in Sherman Oaks Galleria for the first three years the service was up and running. One NDA-gagged former Amazon executive says, “Roy had little to do with series selection,” and credited Lewis with choosing the shows.50 Tig Notaro, whose series, One Mississippi, premiered in 2016, says she only met Price “once or twice briefly.”51 Lewis was the company’s Cindy Holland.
Amazon quickly went to series with an extraordinary string of scripted originals, starting with Mozart in the Jungle in 2014, about the drama that roiled an unfamiliar milieu: a symphony orchestra. Who knew?
Meanwhile, Joey Soloway—or Jill, as they were then known—was coming off Six Feet Under. As a young, broke wannabe with two kids, Soloway was shocked to hear, “‘Oh, Shonda wants Jill!’ I was like, ‘Holy shit, Grey’s Anatomy. ABC. Twenty-four episodes a season. Wow.’ Not really knowing anything or caring much about medical stuff, I probably shouldn’t have taken it, but I just wanted that big network credit.”52
On Six Feet Under, “every word was kind of sacred,” whereas on Grey’s Anatomy, Soloway discovered, “the writers would write an outline, then it would get rewritten, then another outline, rewritten—a script could get written literally twenty times.” Marti Noxon, who was a writer and executive producer on Six Feet Under, remembers being impressed by Soloway’s fuck-you attitude. She recalls, “There are kids in school who if they were told to jump, they’d say, ‘How high?’ That was me. Then there were the kids who were like, ‘School is dumb.’ That was Jill. She realized quickly that Grey’s wasn’t the place for her.”53 Soloway adds, “Shonda called me into her office and fired me—between the time we ordered lunch and the time the lunch came. I was thinking, Should I leave now, which would be sad, or wait for my lunch, which might be sadder?”54
Over the course of a decade, Soloway had written about thirty-odd scripts. “I couldn’t get my shows on the air. I was like, ‘Where’s my show?’”55 The deals were going to male directors whose films had made a splash at Sundance. Then Soloway, too, made a splash at Sundance with Afternoon Delight, which won the Best Dramatic Director Award in 2013. But that still wasn’t enough.
One day, Soloway goes on, “My dad phoned me and told me he was a woman named Carrie . . . I was overwhelmed by emotion, and I knew—this was my story. Being a woman meant being watched. I wanted to be a watcher.”56 Jill became Joey, who wanted to write a show that allowed “women to feel like they’re the subject in the story instead of the object . . . that’s my vision as an artist.”57
The result was Transparent, as far as possible from a safe bet as you could get. Seemingly an innocuous half-hour comedy about the ups and downs of a spoiled Jewish family in LA, Transparent exploded gender conventions so thoroughly and cleverly that they would never be the same.
At HBO, Soloway met with Sue Naegle, whom they knew from the Six Feet Under days. Soloway recalls, “My agent got the word that ‘Yes, of course they’ll buy a pilot, but this is not a slam dunk to go to series.’ The implication was that it’s not necessarily Mike Lombardo’s taste. [They] weren’t looking for female gays.”58
Soloway pitched the script to seven other services, including Showtime and FX: “I went everywhere assuming that, honestly, everybody was going to want to make it, but you could not get a show on the air without a likable male protagonist at the center.’” It was pass, pass, pass.
Finally, they ended up at Amazon, the end of the line; few people even knew it existed. “I wasn’t sure what it meant to have a show on Amazon,” says Soloway. “My agent, Larry Salz, said, ‘They’re doing a great show about cooking.’ I was like, ‘So, when you watch the show, you buy the recipes? Buy the spices?’”
Amazon Prime Video had outgrown its offices at the Sherman Oaks Galleria and moved into the Water Garden in Santa Monica, a seventeen-acre office “campus” where visitors were screened as if they were potential terrorists by a computer-generated voice that announced “Enter now!” after their badges had been scanned. This reminded the talent Amazon was at heart a tech company with an ethos very different from their own. As Soloway puts it, “It wasn’t like going to CBS or NBC. It was this feeling that I was in a different industry.”59
After meeting with Lewis and his two assistants, Soloway was in a state of shock. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God. These are college students I’m pitching to!’ It felt humiliating.”60 College students or not, it turned out that Lewis loved the script. Critical of the services that turned it down, he recalls, “The consensus view was, ‘America’s not ready.’” He thought, on the contrary, America’s totally ready, which proved to be the case. Lewis flew up to Seattle, and pitched Price and Bezos. Like the leader of a cult, Bezos had distilled his success into fourteen Principles of Leadership, one of them being, “Bias for Action.” He said, “I guess we have to pick up Transparent.”61
As the other deep-pocketed players watched Netflix explode in the aftermath of House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, the question marks that surrounded the streamer evaporated. Albrecht was proved right. Netflix might have made hits out of shows like Breaking Bad, but it was an enemy, not a friend, and a dangerous one at that. As other players started their own streamers, they would begin bringing their shows back home, settling them safely in their own nests. NBCUniversal paid Netflix $500 million to regain the streaming rights to The Office, reputed to be the most watched show on the streamer, and Time Warner paid $425 million plus to do the same with Friends.
Flaunting its success, Netflix leased its new home in 2015, a fourteen-story Icon office tower on the corner of Sunset and Van Ness in the “media corridor,” just west of the 101 freeway. Resembling ill-fitting slabs of cream and blue Legos, visitors didn’t just enter a lobby so much as a nearly five-thousand-square foot “experience,” featuring an eighty-by-twelve-foot LCD screen playing Netflix images spanning one wall that would put IMAX to shame; another wall was jammed with serried rows of plants, more than 3,500 of them, with their own irrigation system. Plus, a thirteen-story atrium.
Despite some evidence to the contrary, rivals claimed to be unimpressed by Netflix’s algorithms, and the fact that it refused to release numbers muddied the waters. AMC’s Josh Sapan called data mining a “goddamn disaster,” useful for marketing and promotion but useless on the creative side. “You can’t number your way to greenlighting a show and you can’t get data that shows you how to fix a story.”62
Netflix executives downplayed the role of Big Data in their original programming, trying to sound human, lest all the chatter about algorithms was making them come off like quants, bots, or worse, “surveillance capitalists,” off-putting to creatives.63 Nevertheless, says Reilly, “Netflix set the bar with a fire hose of new offerings that became the consumers’ baseline expectation, that for fourteen bucks, they’d get a never-ending array of originals. It didn’t do that because it just loved programming; its data told it the more originals it offered, the more certain cohorts would re-up every month. It was like a rat attacking a sugar cube.”64 In 2016, Netflix announced that half its shows would be originals. The other streamers had to chase it or look like lesser values.
In its quest for world domination, Netflix tried to destroy theatrical exhibition, refusing to show its films in theaters, which provoked the Cannes Film Festival to ban them for several years. Prominent American filmmakers protested when Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma was given the Motion Picture Academy seal of approval with an Oscar nomination in the Best Picture category in 2019. For some time, the biggest theater chains, AMC and Regal, declined to screen Netflix films even when available, because the streamer won’t agree to traditional windowing and financial terms.
Netflix found itself in an unenviable position, paying a heavy price for its success. Not only did it now have to spend astronomical sums for networks shows like Seinfeld, for which it forked over a reported $500 million, but it also had to sign celebrity showrunners to those rich overall deals it had always shunned. In early August 2017, it stole Shonda Rhimes away from Disney-owned ABC—which had been her home for fifteen years and for which she had created Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal—giving her a four-year overall deal said to be worth $100 million to $150 million. The Rhimes deal finally paid off when she hit the PBS viewers-like-you button with Bridgerton in 2020, followed by the delightful prequel Queen Charlotte in 2023 that, with its head-snapping repartee, and focus on racial issues, is much superior to its predecessor. After ABC shelved an episode of Black-ish that contained a bedtime story its executives deemed too critical of then President Trump, Kenya Barris followed suit for a $100 million, multiyear deal.
Netflix also signed up Kohan, and two years after signing Rhimes, it made off with Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, giving them an exclusive overall deal reportedly worth $250 million. Netflix spent $17 billion on original content in 2022, including a phenomenal $30 million per episode price tag for Stranger Things 4, and another several billion marketing its overall content.
Then there was Ryan Murphy. He had been a fixture at Fox ever since he made Nip/Tuck for FX, and then Glee, American Horror Story, American Crime Story, Pose, and 9-1-1. Netflix lured him away from Fox after Disney bought it. His reaction? “I thought I would literally be buried on the Fox lot.”65 Murphy asked Disney CEO Bob Iger, “Am I going to have to put Mickey Mouse in American Horror Story?” The answer was obvious, and when Netflix waved a check for $300 million in his face in 2018, he jumped.
