Pandora's Box, page 25
FX’s Landgraf, whose cabler was partly built on Murphy’s shows, compared Netflix’s predations to being shot in the face with a water cannon, except “it’s money coming at you.”66 Murphy, needless to say, was thrilled. He is the outsider who always wanted to become an insider, and he confessed, “My whole life has been in search of that brass ring, and now somebody actually thinks I’m worthy as opposed to being an aberration? People are astounded that I still want that. But everyone wants to be seen. Everyone wants to be loved.”67
Murphy’s deal looked like money thrown away until he made Dahmer—Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, wherein the notorious gormandizer of human parts is played by Evan Peters of American Horror Story fame. (Fans of Sarah Paulson’s wonderfully creepy impersonation of Linda Tripp from Impeachment were disappointed that she didn’t get the role.)
At the time, Netflix ranked Dahmer its third most watched show, after Squid Game and Stranger Things. It couldn’t be franchised because, unfortunately for Netflix, the real-life eponymous anti-hero was bludgeoned to death in prison. Undaunted, Netflix morphed Dahmer into a monster-of-the month anthology series along the lines of American Horror Story, dramatizing the lives of John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, and others. If AMC became the Living Dead Network, there was no reason why Netflix couldn’t become the Serial Killer Network.
Holland oversaw most of those rich deals. but it’s hard to imagine that she was allowed to dip into the honey pot on her own, without input from her bosses. As another source told The Hollywood Reporter, “The buck stops with Ted,” but if they don’t pay off, “I’m sure he will try to blame Cindy.”68
Most of these payouts, however, were not as costly as they looked. Netflix pioneered the so-called cost-plus front-end deals that were sweetened by the “plus,” generally a 10 or 20 percent bonus. But the talent was excluded from the lucrative downstream profits that shows traditionally rack up in DVD sales and syndication—licensing and relicensing fees from other services—that could bring in income for years, because its streaming model eliminated such “long tail” opportunities. Residuals amounted to a fraction of the income creatives received under the old broadcast system.
These front-end deals have cost creatives an estimated $1.5 billion in lost income. Jeff Sagansky, a former top network executive, nailed the streamers for “backend theft,” and “predatory behavior.”69 He went on to say, “We are in a golden age of content production and the dark age of creative profit sharing.”70 Sagansky’s outrage is shared by the entire creative community, which feels, with ample justification, that it is working harder for less money.
“Without syndication, you can’t monetize your monster hits and turn their success into cash,” says Steven Soderbergh. “Netflix has moved us, in economic terms, out of a Newtonian world and into a quantum world where it becomes very difficult to quantify whether or not it is quote, unquote worth making something.”71
In 2021, Netflix hit the 200-million-subscriber mark, which enabled it to announce that it no longer needed to borrow for “day-to-day operations.” Although it reportedly was still $10 to $15 billion in debt, it was optimistic that it could pay off this debt without jeopardizing its content budget, and 2022 was the first year it was supposed to have a positive free cash flow. It aired seventy new movies in 2021, more than one a week, featuring the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, and Idris Elba.
With an assist from Covid that accelerated home viewing, Netflix was humming, but as the entertainment newsletter The Ankler ominously reminds us, “No one has ever made money selling just content. Theater owners sell Milk Duds and Diet Coke for $4. Broadcast networks sell ad time . . . [But] Netflix only sells you content.”72 Not quite true. It had merchandised Stranger Things with tie-in books aimed at children, teens, and adults, including sticker albums, coloring books, novels, graphic novels, Tarot cards, and comics. And, of course, video games, podcasts, theme park mazes, at least one dedicated store, and so on.
Netflix is also well on its way to capitalizing on the anti-capitalist Squid Game by selling trademark tracksuits, and has added a reality show called Squid Game: The Challenge, wherein 456 people will compete for an actual door prize of $456 million. Also, look for Squid Game sequels as well as an English-language version. Netflix also developed mobile games based on some of its other hits, like The Queen’s Gambit and Money Heist—altogether thirty-five games and fifty-five more in development—while signing a contract with Mattel.
Jumping from popular shows to events, Netflix has launched “The Queen’s Ball: A Bridgerton Experience,” first staged at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in LA, which targeted the underserved-no-more eighteen to forty-five female fan base. Eight hundred balls like it traveled around the country, hooped skirts and all, to cities like Atlanta, San Francisco, and Montreal, attracting more than 150,000 fans downing Whistledown & Dirty cocktails. No longer will a Bridgerton season, say, be a here-today, gone-tomorrow one-week binge indulgence, but an enveloping world of events and products. As someone put it, “It’s Harry Potter for adults.”73
At the Grove shopping center in LA, Netflix has also erected a ten-thousand-square-foot pop-up store featuring Vecna from Stranger Things, as well as Queen Charlotte’s throne from Bridgerton, touted as the “first-ever multi-title immersive shopping experience.”74 It also held a so-called Poguelandia fest in Huntington Beach for the teenage demographic that lives and dies for shows like Outer Banks and Wednesday.
The arrogant attitude of Hastings and Sarandos has made “Netflix” a dirty word in the business. The Ankler shared a story about a producer who ran into the two men at an event and confronted them, saying, “You guys are being really difficult making a decent deal.”
“Yeah! We know!”
“Why would you treat people like us, who are bringing you projects, like that?”
“You’ll be back.”
In other words, it wasn’t because they were “pricks,” it was about power. They were being difficult because they could. As another producer explained, “It used to be the town ran on fear and greed. [Now] it runs on, ‘You’ll be back.’” And another, “It used to be a handshake business, and sometimes contracts weren’t signed until a show was delivered.” Now, “everything has . . . [to go] through business affairs . . . Netflix and the streamers destroyed the relationship side of the business. There’s no trust and no relationship anymore. It’s now just commerce.”75
10
Amazon’s Women in the High Castle
Amazon hit a roadblock called #MeToo, while Apple, its bigger tech cousin, started its own streamer.
Ever since dad dropped the trans bomb, Joey Soloway had been mulling over a show in which “the father of three adult children transitions to mother, in this case, from Mort to Maura, Papa to Moppa. I was thinking about Lena Dunham in Girls, where the parents make it hard for Hannah to be Hannah. I wanted to take that idea and really bring in the family unit of Six Feet Under.”1
Soloway doesn’t sentimentalize the characters in Transparent because they’re nonbinary members of the transverse. Far from it. They’re a rogue’s gallery of self-absorbed, neglectful parents, heedless children, and faithless mates. Imagine your parents were Nancy Botwin and Walter White. They behave badly like everyone else, but Soloway makes them entertainingly politically incorrect, and indulges them, because they’re human.
“Roy Price wasn’t working creatively with me,” says Soloway. “I feel very lucky that I met Joe [Lewis], that he could love these unlikable Jewish women. To get on TV, women could be just Jewish or unlikable, but they couldn’t be both. It was the old ‘Speak Yiddish, write British.’ We want writers to be Jewish, but you don’t want anybody who looks Jewish.”2
The pilot began conventionally enough with the credit sequence—a montage of Pfefferman family photographs picturing a boy at his bar mitzvah, prepubescent girls in period bathing suits, women cutting cake—and then bang: naked women hungrily devouring one another, remarks like, “Why don’t you clean up the barbecue sauce inside your vagina”; cunnilingus salted by self-pleasuring; intimations of interracial “sexercise,” aka “twerkouts”; a tasteless riff Nazifying Jewish surnames into Marcy “Kristallnacht” or Barbara “Belsenberger”—funny if you have a certain, pre-Ye sense of humor. It was all topped off by the cherry on the sundae—the patriarch of the Pfefferman family appearing as a shapeless woman with long, stringy gray hair badly in need of volumizing, looking, from a conventional point of view, altogether grotesque. And that was the point. Calling it “blowing up the binary,” Soloway tossed the genders in a blender and took them for a spin, and you never knew what was going to come out. But, the showrunner goes on, “I’m not saying destroy the category of male and female, or the category of straight and gay. I’m just saying that there is a third category. There is a place in between.”3
Soloway moved ahead, casting the members of the Pfefferman family with actors who shared in Soloway’s vision, although one choice turned out to be ill-fated: Jeffrey Tambor, best known for The Larry Sanders Show and Arrested Development, to play the dad-to-mom. The trans community attacked him and the series for using a cis male in the role, comparing it to Black people watching a white actor in blackface—in this case, “transface”—even though Soloway made a real effort to hire trans talent and make them comfortable. All the restrooms on the set were gender neutral. Soloway established a “Transfirmative Action” program that pulled in trans people to work in various departments even if they were underqualified. In meetings dubbed Trans 101, actors and crew were taught the differences between drag queens, female impersonators, cross-dressers, and so on.
The succeeding seasons continued in the same vein as the first, with Episode 9 of Season 2 creating mind-blowing scenes at a lesbian Woodstock comprised of all colors and shapes of women cavorting in a body-shameless space in various degrees of undress while the Indigo Girls sing a rousing song with lyrics like, “We’re lesbians in the forest/nymphs, fairies, witches/not a cock in sight/’Cause sisters are doing themselves all night . . .”
On some level, Transparent was too good to be true, which is to say, the early episodes are pure pleasure, but they were hard acts to follow, although even the less than electrifying seasons that followed are strewn with hilarious nuggets and/or startling moments. In Season 4, there’s a funny bit where Maura, who is pre-op, is stopped by security at the airport when the X-ray reveals a “groin anomaly,” while flummoxed TSA officers try to figure out whether she should be patted down by a male or female agent.
One of Soloway’s strengths is their instinct for puncturing the most overblown, sentimental scenes with deflationary low comedy. “That’s one of the things I got from David Chase: the proximity of great tragedy and great food.”4 Whether or not you go all the way with Transparent, with the Jewish thing, the trans thing, the thing thing, the influence of it is hard to deny.
Amazon dropped all ten episodes at once on September 26, 2014. The first season of the show scored an impressive 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. As a reviewer for The Guardian put it, it was “the reason Amazon needs to be taken seriously as more than just people who send you stuff in oversized packaging.”5 In 2015, after its second season, it won five Emmys—including Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series for Soloway—to Netflix’s four. Although it didn’t draw huge numbers, it made noise, lots of it, which was what Price was after, and it instantly transformed Amazon Prime Video into a real, if distant, competitor to Netflix. While accurate numbers are hard to come by, in 2017 the streaming service had about 45 million domestic subscribers. By 2020 that number had ballooned to 56 million plus.
Then the roof fell in.
Amazon wasn’t the only company to compete with Netflix for Hastings’s nighttime sleep. Apple TV+ was another, although it was hardly poised to give him nightmares. It got off to a slow start with indifferent programming and zero breakout hits, and few took it seriously. In one significant way, however, it was and remains one of the most dangerous. When the streaming space became less a sandbox for Netflix and more like Jurassic Park, that meant the survival of the fittest, and in the streaming business, the fittest is the richest, and the richest is Apple. As of 2022, it was valued somewhere between $2 and $3 trillion, with approximately $195.57 billion petty cash in its piggy bank as of the previous year, and revenue of $366 billion in 2021. It’s richer than Google, Amazon, and Meta combined. Apple spent an estimated $6 billion on content to start its streamer. There’s apparently no ceiling on the price it will pay for scripted shows, but at the beginning, it was most interesting as examples of what money couldn’t buy, which in Apple TV+’s case was apparently consistently good TV, although with the passage of time, its programming has blossomed.
Apple chief Tim Cook reportedly challenged Eddy Cue, senior VP of internet software and services, to spearhead the effort to start its new streamer. Unlike Cook, who looks like he stepped out of a Grant Wood painting, Cue was the walking embodiment of the clash between the tech companies and Hollywood. As an ambassador of Silicon Valley royalty, he had attitude to spare, embodied in a take-it-or-leave-it negotiating style that has been described as “We’re Apple, and you’re not.” He reportedly raised hackles wherever he went.
Moreover, Apple is known for fetishizing secrecy. Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast, the most extensive network of cable stations in the country, as well as NBCUniversal and eventually the streamer Peacock, complained that it “had had trouble getting Apple to share important details about a planned streaming-TV service.” In further negotiations with Roberts, Apple refused to show him its user interface, saying only that it was “better than anything you’ve ever had.”6
Apple TV+ is one of the streaming services that don’t release viewer figures. Here is a partial list of further security directives distributed to creatives:
Don’t share or discuss any aspect of the project with anyone who is not NDA’d and does not have a “business related need-to-know.”
Do not blog, tweet or post any social media regarding your work on this project or the project itself.
Your home office must be a fully enclosed private workspace with solid floors, ceilings, and floor-to-ceiling walls.
Any doors and windows must be closed and locked at any time when you are not in the space or when you have sensitive materials out in the open.
All windows must be obscured by frosting, tinting, or covered with closed blinds any time project information is visible.
All device screens must be oriented away from door and window openings (i.e., only the back of the device is visible from outside the room).
All pre-release materials and revelatory documentation such as scripts, etc. must be stored in a locking file cabinet, safe, or similar secure container when not actively in use.
Pre-release materials and revelatory documentation must be within your positive control (i.e., direct visual observation). At no time will pre-release materials or revelatory documentation be left unattended outside a secure, lockable container. This includes meal and bathroom breaks.
Undisclosed people (including family and friends) must not be allowed within your workspace any time revelatory information is exposed.
Janitorial, maintenance personnel, or family members must not be allowed in your workspace unless and only when all device screens are locked and all sensitive material is secured within lockable containers.
You must take responsibility for ensuring you do not dispose of materials in a way that exposes your work to the world. All documentation must be securely shredded using a crosscut paper shredder.7
When it did approach other companies, Apple reportedly would make demands that were deemed unreasonable by their executives, who would say some version of, “Do you have any idea how this industry works?” For its part, Apple appeared not to care how the industry worked. It saw itself as a disrupter. In 2014, Cue was quoted as saying that the TV experience “sucked.”8 This might explain why Apple decided to go it alone instead of buying, say, Netflix.
On June 16, 2017, Cue hired two veterans of Sony Pictures Television, Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, to run the streaming service. The duo will forever be remembered for the shows they made for FX, and for greenlighting Breaking Bad when the smart money thought gambling on a nerdy chemistry teacher turned meth chef was a good way to go bankrupt.
Of course, Van Amburg and Erlicht had their detractors, as almost everyone in the entertainment business does. Says Vlad Wolynetz, formerly of AMC and the BBC, “Zack and Jamie are terrific widget factory guys. If you need someone to go to Bergdorf’s and shop for you, they’re your guys. Classic say-whatever-is-necessary-to-get-out-of-the-room guys, never take any responsibility, and always end up on the right side of things.”9 Adds another source, a bit more gently, “Zack and Jamie have a good reputation as nice guys. I see them as political and careful. ‘Oh, Jennifer Aniston? Of course, we’re in.’ I don’t yet see them as visionary executives. They’re suave preppies.”10
Erlicht and Van Amburg had a problem, however. They had successfully run a TV studio, but neither of them had ever run a streaming service, and there’s a big difference. As Amazon Prime Video’s Joe Lewis puts it, “Your job at a studio is to sell shows to networks. You’re a schmoozy type of person, a salesman. Running a network is the exact opposite. You’re a buyer, not a seller, and you’re in a consumer-facing business, so you have to have a brand, a vision for what you want to buy.”11 But what was the Apple brand?
Ah, the $64,000 question! Van Amburg told Variety, “The guiding word is ‘humanity.’ All of our shows have something to say about the relationships we have with each other and with the world.”12 It’s good to know that the guiding word is “humanity,” and not, say, “citrus fruits,” but in October 2019, Erlicht couldn’t help but admit that he and his partner were in over their heads. “Zack and I knew how to create a premium, high-quality, great show—that wasn’t a problem,” he said. “What we didn’t know was how to create, from scratch, a premium service at Apple.”13
