Pandora's Box, page 33
Coel was born of Ghanian parents and grew up in a council estate intended for homeless people that was ironically nestled in the heart of London’s financial district. Briefcases in hand, fat cats preoccupied with the stock market rushed past it every day with, as she put it, “no idea this council estate existed.”60 She has more than her share of demons, including an absent father.
Without mincing words, she poured out an uncensored account of her personal history—the good, the bad, and the ugly—to a startled audience of industry professionals—mostly white and male—in a prestigious MacTaggart Lecture delivered in August 2018. “We were one of four black families there,” she remembered. “Not something I thought anyone gave a damn about, until someone left a pile of shit on our doorstep.”
Growing up, she was part of a brutal adolescent web culture, and was once called a “big lipped coconut” (Black on the outside, white on the inside) “who gave three blowjobs last week,” insults she returned in kind.61
Eventually Coel was admitted to a drama school, where she was called the N-word twice, once by a teacher, and described as the “elephant in the room” by the head of the school. She recalled “rummaging through a gift bag for my first big mainstream award. It contained dry shampoo, tanning lotion, and a foundation even Kim Kardashian was too dark for. A reminder: This isn’t your house.”62 Whatever she is—outsider, misfit—she’s definitely an original.
Coel would never say she broke into the inner sanctum of the industry, because she knew that somebody like her couldn’t, but after she breached the outer walls, she was unsurprised to discover that it, too, was rife with racism and sexism. She went on to describe an encounter she had at a film industry party. Approached by a producer, she said, “Oh yes, nice to meet you.” He replied, “Do you know how much I want to fuck you right now?”63
It was not Coel’s style to blend into the woodwork, even if she could. The phrase “good trouble,” while not invented by her, fits her perfectly. While making her 2015 breakthrough sitcom Chewing Gum, she discovered five actors of color crowded into one-third of a trailer, while a white actress, “looking like a privileged piggy,” had one entirely to herself. She burst into the production office, yelling, “You know what that looks like, doncha? Like a fackin’ slave ship.” They bought more trailers.64
Netflix twice refused to give her executive producer credit on Chewing Gum, and she had to fight off the streamer’s attempt to create a writers’ room. She later said, “[It is] important that the voices used to interruption get the experience of writing something without interference, at least once.”65 Netflix subsequently offered her a million dollars for I May Destroy You, but Coel declined because it entailed losing control of her show. “The first thing I asked was: ‘Why do you want to take all the copyright?’” she recalls. There was just silence on the other end of the phone. She asked for 5 percent, then 2 percent, then 0.5 percent. “And when the answer was ‘That’s just the way it is,’ then I’m out because that doesn’t sound like a good answer to me. It sounds cloudy. I don’t trust that.”66 Instead, she made a deal with the BBC, which did grant her ownership rights, and brought in HBO to co-produce. She was the sole writer on I May Destroy You (she wrote 191 drafts), directed nine of twelve episodes, and got executive producer credit.
I May Destroy You is a portrait of the artist as a young rape victim, a raw exploration of denial and consent, hurt and healing, sex and drugs—you name it—thrown or, better, knit together into one narrative. It was based on an experience of her own that occurred while she was working on Chewing Gum.
Coel’s character, Arabella, is a writer whose publisher is excitedly awaiting the last chapter of her book, which is expected to be a bestseller. But she’s too undisciplined, self-sabotaging, and blocked to sit down and finish. Instead, she goes bar hopping, is given spiked drinks by strangers, and wakes up the next day with a bleeding gash over her eye, and vague, dreamlike images of a white man plunging his member into her in a toilet stall. She soon realizes that it isn’t a dream at all, but a fractured memory. The series is, among other things, a racial and feminist detective story presented as a tortured account of her search for the man who spiked her drink and violated her.
Buried within the narrative are spiky observations on race, gender, and class, with Arabella asking rhetorical questions like, “Why can’t we have a White History month? What if we had a Straight Pride day? We get a day. You get a lifetime knowing that you are likely to walk free from rape. This is why I be hating straight white guys.” Hashtag: IHSWG.
Accentuated by percussive editing and a cacophony of sounds and images hurtling at her and the viewers from every direction, it is also an anatomy of her attempts to understand the nature of rape and the multiple shapes it assumes, in order to recognize and come to terms with the aftermath of the particular variety she experienced.
Although it drags in places, I May Destroy You is one of the most unusual series HBO has ever aired, which is going some. The New Yorker called it “mesmerizing.”67 In 2021, Coel became the first Black woman to win a Primetime Emmy.
Aside from its World War II miniseries, to its credit, HBO was one of the last holdouts against franchising, IP, and spin-offs, the practices that ruined other streamers. When The Sopranos ended, it didn’t reincarnate as The Contraltos, nor did HBO launch reboots, prequels, or follow-ups of its other hits: Seven Feet Under, Truer Blood, Bigger Love? (Not so fanciful. See Netflix’s reboot of Full House, entitled Fuller House.) It liked to think that each of its offerings was a new and unique experience. Under the aegis of WBD, no longer.
HBO couldn’t just walk away from Game of Thrones and leave it blowing in the wind. Despite its fiasco of a finale the question of sequel or prequel was a no-brainer. Prequel it was. George R. R. Martin assumed that the one he was writing, called Dance of the Dragon, was next in line, until he discovered there were three others in development. (HBO disputes his account, arguing that Martin is such an important asset that it would never commission another pilot without informing him.)
HBO spent just under $30 million on one of them, a prequel that was discarded by Greenblatt and Bloys. Asset or not, the one that was eventually selected was not Martin’s, but House of the Dragon, written and run by Miguel Sapochnik, a veteran director of Game of Thrones, although Martin has been given creative and executive producer credit on it.
House of the Dragon seemed to sweep the board, with a server-crashing 10 million US viewers on the night of its premiere, and an another 10 million catching up later on HBO’s other platforms. Moreover, HBO bettered Amazon in the bang-for-your-buck department, with House of the Dragon costing about $200 million to produce, against its near billion-dollar competitor.
In every respect the antithesis of Amazon’s airy, kingdom-hopping entry into the fantasy genre, House of the Dragon nearly suffocates in its relentless focus on the battle over the Targaryen succession centuries before Daenerys Targaryen incinerates King’s Landing at the end of Game of Thrones. It opens with a painful delivery scene wherein the king must decide between the life of the queen (Sian Brooke) giving birth to his heir, in breech. Of course he chooses the heir, but in the course of the grisly C-section, both mother and infant die in a gusher of blood. The queen, of course, is never considered or consulted—“A father gets to choose,” explains an elder.
Even though the scene was written and shot long before Roe v. Wade was overturned, the contemporary resonance is too obvious to ignore. “This woman [is] at the mercy of a man’s decision,” explains Brooke, adding, “You think you’ve made this huge leap forward, with women being able to make decisions about their own bodies . . . It’s quite shocking, that, sadly, there is some similarity between that and centuries ago.”68
House of the Dragon was immediately renewed for another season, without Sapochnik, reportedly because of a row with HBO Max over the inclusion of his wife. That other season won’t air until sometime in 2024. After this lapse of time, few will be able to remember who’s who in the densely populated Dragon universe, their confusion compounded by characters with nearly identical names—Rhaenyra? Rhaena? Rhaenys?—who also look alike.
Reportedly, there are a minimum of seven new Game of Thrones series in development, including three animated prequels, plus a stage play, enough to make us wish that the White Walkers, with an assist from Daenerys, had destroyed every living thing in Westeros.
Game of Thrones seemed to have changed HBO’s aversion to spin-offs (why wouldn’t it, when its final season drew a estimated 46 million viewers per episode?), proving that what HBO could do best, it could also do worst, airing a sequel to Sex and the City called And Just Like That . . . , wherein three of the four women (Kim Cattrall wisely absented herself), apparently comatose for eighteen years, awakened to navigate the maze of today’s wokeness. The Los Angeles Times greeted the show with the headline, “How Terrible Is the Sex and the City Reboot?” and went on to call it a “franchise extinction event,” which, in this case, is an understatement.69
The best thing about the sequel is that the show’s most entitled character, the preening Mr. Big, is the victim of his Peloton, dropping dead at the end of the first episode, his aorta clotted by self-regard. Bad as the series was, it was renewed for a second season. In other words, once bitten by the IP bug, and responding to the growing competition from new streamers as well as pressure from above to mind its money, even it will begin to feed on itself. True Blood is also slated for sequeldom, apparently at the behest of one of its stars, Alexander Skarsgård; True Detective, Season 4, is upcoming, minus Pizzolatto, plus Fukunaga.
For now, HBO’s playing it safe, more frequently going back to the well. Its 2023 lineup is full of sequels to its hits and almost hits, including not only House of the Dragon, but Euphoria, My Brilliant Friend, The Gilded Age, and The Last of Us. Reportedly in the works is a spin-off of Big Bang Theory even though Max is already airing twelve seasons of the original.
Programming to one side, what’s most intriguing is the prospect being bruited about that Comcast/NBCUniversal, run by Brian Roberts, who is probably still smarting from losing Fox to Disney, might eventually find happiness with Zaslandia. This scenario envisions Roberts, nearing sixty-five, retiring, succeeded by Mike Cavanagh as Comcast president, with Zaz presiding over the combined NBCU/WBD, creating an entertainment Godzilla ready and more than willing to take on not only Disney, but Netflix, as well as tech giants Apple and Amazon.
Part IV
Back to the Future
13
Cash Is King
With the streamers in crisis, will they spend more or less, choking quality with dollars or starving quality with pennies? Will we be winners or losers?
Nobody expects this golden age of television to last forever; some have already pronounced 2022 the peak of Peak TV. As FX’s John Landgraf—who, we remember, coined the term—ominously puts it, “TV is analogous to some of the golden ages in cinema,” because the golden ages of cinema didn’t last that long.1 The most recent one, the explosion of independent filmmaking in the 1990s, was done and dusted by the middle of that decade when Pulp Fiction broke the $100 million ceiling for indies and Miramax, which produced it, became an attractive acquisitions target for Disney.
The era of Peak TV has already exceeded that flicker of creativity by decades, thanks to the streamers that dominate today’s entertainment space, but their future is the subject of a raging debate: Will they succeed or fail?
To make things even more confusing, it has become increasingly difficult to know which way is up. Streamers have become studios, producing their own big-budget movies, and studios have created streamers, airing movies and series, even as traditional measures of success or failure have vanished.
Accurate numbers are hard to come by, but as of July 2022, according to Nielsen, streaming viewership exceeded network and cable each for the first time. With the broadcast networks continuing to trend downward, some of them seem to have just given up. Instead of developing new scripted shows, they’re resorting to “bubble shows”—that is, shows “on the bubble” that in more prosperous times would have been canceled.
As of this writing, NBC is even debating turning its primetime 10:00 p.m. slot, when it aired signature shows like Law & Order and ER, over to its affiliates to program. Its owner, Comcast, wants to cut $1 billion from its broadcast division to trim its debt. At the 2022 Upfronts, where the TV poobahs parade their wares before advertisers like Big Pharma, Big Auto, Big Pizza, Big Big, and so on, Jimmy Kimmel, providing the laughs, dismissed network as “a fax machine five years after they invented email.”2
Meanwhile, The Los Angeles Times pounded a nail in the lid of the network coffin in May 2022 by discontinuing its primetime grid of TV listings, explaining that “even the broadcast networks . . . have acknowledged that streaming is the future, and with it the option to watch most TV whenever and wherever one likes.”3
Still, despite this epitaph, the viewership picture is confusing. In the winter quarter of 2022, Netflix took a big hit. It predicted it would add two million users but in fact lost 200,000, the first time it shed subscribers since 2011. Its rainbow target of a billion subscribers was downgraded by some analysts to a mere 400 million. Moreover, it still had that $14.5 billion debt. Hastings, not known for pessimism, was quoted as saying, “It’s a bitch.”
Netflix was moving too fast and breaking too many toys. Its stock fell 35 percent, erasing $54 billion–plus of the company’s value in one day, and then another 35 percent over the course of the following six months. When Maureen Dowd in a lengthy interview with Ted Sarandos, whose 2022 SEC filing revealed an income of $50.3 million, asked him whether he could pass the Keeper Test, he answered, plaintively, “I hope so.”4 Paradise gained was turning into paradise lost. The irony is that the risky business practices that made Netflix Netflix looked like they might end up unmaking it.
As it turned out, however, Netflix projected that it would lose another two million users in the spring quarter of 2022, but it lost only half that, thanks to Stranger Things 4. Still, in mid-2023, its market capitalization was down $150 billion from its high in November 2021. Losses of this magnitude created a sky-is-falling hysteria among the I-told-you-so’s, who predicted, with some reason, that Netflix’s Wall Street honeymoon was over—in turn meaning that Netflix itself was over, or at the very least it had become a takeover target.
There were several reasons for Netflix’s downturn. For many years, it had been the only streamer on the block, with zero competition. Thriving under Wall Street’s umbrella, it was so successful in convincing corporate America that streaming, evaluated by subscriber growth, was the wave of the future that it seemed like every company on the Big Board wanted part of the action. The streaming landscape was suddenly littered with pluses, like Apple TV+, Disney+, and Paramount+, as well as Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, and HBO Max. All of them took bites out of Hastings’s universe of subscribers while bulking up on content themselves. Upstart Paramount+ ordered 150 international originals through 2025. Wounded by these upstart rivals, Sarandos’s free-spending, high-volume strategy suddenly seemed unsustainable.
Since Netflix invented streaming, it had become synonymous with it, and when it sneezed, the other streamers went on ventilators. For the moment, it looked like the whole sector might be in trouble, with stocks down and streamers ridding themselves of employees like fleas. Save for Netflix, the dilemma, especially for young sprouts like Comcast-NBCU’s Peacock, is that they have to reach profitability before their own pay TV linear cable channels, which are still throwing off profits that the infant streamers needed to grow, are chewed up and spat out. They resemble the ouroboros, a serpent eating on its own tail, but instead of a symbol of infinity, it is a symbol of nullity.
Another factor is deglobalization, meaning instability in big markets like India, Russia, and China—although after four years, China lifted its ban on Marvel, allowing Black Panther 2 and Ant-Man 3 to play in its theaters.
Streaming, however, is a business that goes from gold to dross and back in the flick of an eye, and the clouds parted in the summer of that year, thanks to shows like Wednesday, Dahmer, Bridgerton, Squid Game, Glass Onion, The Gray Man, Stranger Things 4, Red Notice, and The Diplomat. Altogether, they added up a lot of new subscribers. Netflix boasted 232.5 million worldwide. (Most of these gains, however, came from Asia, not maturing markets like the United States.) Additionally, Netflix, which had fed on subscriber growth, tried to shift Wall Street’s focus away from it to profits, claiming that its 2022 revenue was up 6 percent from the previous year and predicted an impressive $3 billion in free cash flow for 2023, while alleging that the other streamers combined lost $10 billion.
Almost obscured in the hullabaloo around the Netflix roller coaster was the entry of Big Tech into the fray. Size and consolidation have their advantages, but they are a mixed blessing, to say the least. When companies consolidate, they take on debt that translates into cost cutting. Moreover, when entertainment companies are owned by bigger companies that are in turn owned by even bigger companies, and over them towers Wall Street with its demands for increased quarterly earnings, salaries that depend on stock options stagnate, yet with more takeovers looming in the future, morale plunges, and creativity is crushed. The “business” becomes just a business, like any other. It’s all about money.
If Netflix had been the big spender, it was a pauper compared to deep-pocketed Amazon and Apple, which flooded the streaming space with money. This should have been welcomed by consumers. On the one hand, money can enhance, if not guarantee, quality. It can finance more shows, which means more jobs and opportunity for everyone. It can pay to tie up the best writers, showrunners, and actors in exclusive overall deals. It can provide lavish production values, including spectacular special effects, pay for saturation marketing campaigns, and help buy Emmys and Oscars that secure even more viewers, creating Sarandos’s self-perpetuating loop of profit. What could go wrong? As things turned out, plenty.
