Pandora's Box, page 35
Churn was never an issue for Netflix in its infancy because its network-hating, cord-cutting audience had no place to churn to. But as the fresh crop of streamers popped up, its new shows had to be able to attract viewers and retain them. “There’s millions of people who don’t watch Netflix, who do not pay for Netflix, because there is not enough content on the platform that is engaging to them,” said former Netflix program manager B. Pagels-Minor.29
Bloys convincingly argues that social media has taken the place of the water cooler conversation on a vastly bigger scale, and in this environment, the old strategy of drip, drip, dripping new episodes makes more sense than drowning viewers in an entire season all at once. He explains, “There’s an entire ecosystem of people who write about television, and want to talk about it, and get on social media and criticize it or praise it, or whatever. The effect of all of it together is to keep the show in the cultural conversation”—in other words, free publicity.30
In the most dramatic divergence from its old ways, Netflix introduced an ad-supported tier for the ad-immune, charging $6.99 a month versus its ad-free price of $9.99 a month, on November 3, 2022. Although viewers say they hate commercials, their viewing habits suggest otherwise. They like them more than paying higher prices for ad-free subscriptions. Amazon has even experimented with its so-called FAST service, Freevee, a free ad-supported streamer to which it has moved Bosch, one of its most popular shows. Other streamers like Disney+, as well as what was formerly known as HBO Max, are following suit. Disney’s streaming service lost money in 2022, but the company expects that its new ad-supported tier will restore it to health. Trends indicate, however, that streamers may never be as profitable as the networks of the past, and even if Netflix is successful in carving out the biggest piece of the pie, it will be a smaller pie.
Moreover, the overriding irony in all this is that the map Netflix has drawn to escape from the corner into which it has painted itself diverges, nay, negates everything that made Netflix Netflix. It has its executives doing somersaults, reading from different scripts, saying one thing and doing another. Just when it seems like Hastings is standing fast, defending binge-watching as an accelerant for engagement for shows like Squid Game, Netflix backs away from it by dividing new seasons of shows like Stranger Things 4 into two chunks released weeks apart, proving that it’s hard to teach a new dog old tricks.
When a streamer known for originals remakes itself in the image of a studio or a network, it is indeed on its way to becoming a studio or network, producing studio and network content: bland, bloated, and inoffensive. All in all, there are too many streamers making too many shows, a lot of them of questionable quality, leaving consumers oversubscribed and underwhelmed.
Meanwhile, producers and writers feel shortchanged, watching their cost-plus deals shrink to cost-minus. Reflecting the cost of cost cutting, anemic advertising, and fear of a recession and a strike, scripted shows for adults are falling off. Predicting “a world of hurt,” Bob Iger said in September 2022 of his industry, “[This is a time of] great anxiety, because this is an era of great transformation.”31
At a time when the studios and streamers are cutting back, the long-feared picket lines finally materialized on May 2, 2023, when 11,500 writers laid down their pencils as if say, “No wages, no pages,” ending a decade and a half of relative tranquility between them and their employers. Said Tony Kushner (Angels in America, The Fabelmans) from the picket line of the so-called Netflix strike in New York, “These companies are absolutely destroying our industry.”32 Craig Mazin thinks even the studios know they’ve “fucked up,” as if they finally understood, “You’ve just blown out the foundation of your own house and now the whole thing’s crumbling down around you.”33
The shrinkage of the networks’ twenty-two-episode orders to the streamers’ eight- to twelve-episode orders, in addition to the increasing prevalence of “mini rooms,” where fewer writers work longer hours for shows that may never be produced, adds insult to injury, forcing many writers, unable to pay their mortgages, to supplement their incomes by, say, driving for Uber.
One strike sign read: “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me, ‘It’s streaming.’” As writers picketed, David Zaslav was booed during his commencement address at Boston University (“Pay your writers!”), but if he really aspires to shrug off the pimple poppers of the world and become Bob Evans, he achieved it at the expense of poor optics in 2023 at Cannes, where he cohosted a one-hundredth anniversary for Warner Bros. at the Hotel du Cap, and rubbed shoulders with Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, among others, as well as a puppy named “Maxi.”34
Financial transparency is also a fighting issue, since many streamers refuse to release numbers of views and/or viewers, making it difficult for writers to assess the few residuals they do get. “It’s not right,” says Graham Yost. “What they always say about streaming is, ‘Hey, we don’t even know if this works.’ And it’s like, ‘Well, then don’t do it.’ Don’t do it and put it on our backs. Don’t suddenly change the deals with writers. People get hired for a certain number of episodes, but then they stretch them out over so many months and now we’re getting peanuts compared to what writers used to get.”35
The studios, meanwhile, are pleading poverty, to which their across-the-boards cutbacks attest, but with those at the top like Sarandos pulling in his $50.3 million salary, that’s a hard one for writers at the bottom to swallow.
The streamers and studios probably have enough shows banked to withstand a long strike, not to mention the ability of, say, Netflix to use new work from writers overseas, especially South Korea. A lengthy strike may knock out smaller companies, leaving only the behemoths intact. Some of them may even benefit from the strike, as ceasing production saves money that can go to reducing their debt. And, of course, they can always call on assists from AI, another target of the strikers, as if anyone would notice on movies like Top Gun: Maverick.
The real issue, however, isn’t so much whether entertainment can survive in its new streaming guise—because it always has and always will—or who will win the streaming wars, but what the landscape will look like when the dust settles.
Historically, of course, the networks were straitjacketed by their sponsors. Cablers and streamers allowed creative freedom that the networks could not, putting the networks at a severe disadvantage. Says Greenblatt, “Every broadcaster is grappling with how to compete with the streaming experience when broadcast television with commercials is the last thing anybody wants to watch.”36 While the going is slow, some network shows have acknowledged that streaming presents an existential threat and have given creatives more room.
Like Robert and Michelle King, David E. Kelley has written for all three formats: network, cable, and streamers. The reviewers dismissed two of his streamer series as flat and flavorless. The Los Angeles Times scorned his Netflix show, Anatomy of a Scandal, saying we are given “familiar archetypes, paint-by-numbers plot elements, recognizable beats . . .”37 CNN’s Brian Lowry dissed The Undoing, Kelley’s HBO show, as “Big Little Lies Lite,”38 while Time called it “blander and grayer and more predictable.”39
Paradoxically, however, Time praised his network show, Big Sky on ABC, for “boundary-pushing.” Among other things, it features the first nonbinary actor—Jesse James Keitel—to play a gender-fluid role as a series regular on a primetime network. It’s considerably more violent than your normal broadcast show, presenting several repellent torture scenes verging on outright S&M. It’s also more loosely plotted than a network series. The point here is that Kelley’s network shows may be more innovative than his streaming shows.
Big Sky is no anomaly. After producing seven seasons of The Good Wife, starring Julianna Margulies, for CBS, Robert and Michelle King produced Evil on the same network. The premise: A Black Catholic priest in training (Mike Colter) and a white forensic psychologist (Katja Herbers) investigate cases of ostensible diabolic possession. In one shocking episode, especially for network, parents kill their child because they think he/she is possessed by the devil. Michelle King said of the show, “We’re sort of doing a streaming show on the network. Isn’t that peculiar?”40
When Abbott Elementary premiered on ABC, The New Yorker said it “feels fresher than a lot of the buzzy streaming comedies.”41 Another network cop show, CBS’s East New York was favorably compared to NYPD Blue, high praise indeed from CNN’s Brian Lowry, and presents “cops and policing as flawed tools in need of rethinking,”42 according to Variety. It acknowledges the chasm between the police and the policed, the way the wealthy are treated with kid gloves while the poor are shot or shackled. True, the shady cops are dismissed as a few bad apples, and the show is a far cry from the acidic portrayal of police as an occupying army in We Own This City from HBO, but it’s progress of a kind. Or was, because it was canceled after one season, probably because the network didn’t own it.
Meanwhile, the streamers still offer talent a lot more freedom than network, but that may be changing. When Season 2 of Evil moved to a streamer (Paramount+), Robert King was delighted. “We had footage that was a little like, ‘Oh fuck, we’ll never get this past Standards and Practices,’” he says. “Creatively, it’s a godsend . . . They can curse, give the devil his due, the sexual subtext can become text, and the Catholic Church can be put on the hot seat.”43 Contemplating a scene in which a character throws a Bible, one of the writers asked, “Will we get canceled?” Robert King replied, “Not on streaming.” Perhaps.
When the Kings spun off The Good Fight to the same streamer, Paramount+, Michelle explains that streaming gives her “freedom in terms of format,” but found, however, that the freedom streaming confers is by no means unlimited, and is even diminishing. “I think [now] there might be a little bit closer oversight in terms of content that might be potentially offensive,”44 she says, citing as an example a musical short included in The Good Fight attacking American entertainment companies for toadying to China for access to its market. CBS killed it.
Ed Burns, who wrote and produced HBO’s The Wire with David Simon, says HBO’s series are “not cutting new paths,” 45 adding that The Wire could never be made by HBO today, when everything has “to be disconnected from stepping on anybody’s toes.” And we recall what Terry Winter said about the notes he received on Vinyl.
Poker Face on Peacock has been praised for refusing the advantages of streaming by abandoning the season-long story arc, in favor of enabling its star, Natasha Lyonne, to solve a new mystery every week. “What if TV felt like, well, TV again?” asked The Washington Post reviewers, approvingly.46 Creator Rian Johnson fashioned it as an intentional throwback to shows like Murder, She Wrote, and Magnum P.I. that he grew up on. Johnson says, “It was typically hourlong, star-driven, case-of-the-week shows.”47 Speaking about Columbo, he says, “It really is all about watching Falk be Falk every single week. You’re tuning in to see Columbo and the guest star interact with each other and hang out.” Same with Natasha Lyonne. Says Craig Erwich, president of both ABC Entertainment and Hulu Originals, “The idea of a binary choice, that one show is a network show and one is a streaming show, is just not true.”48
In other words, the creative and structural differences between streamers and network may be breaking down, evident in the degree to which the old narrowcasting cable and streaming services, taken in aggregate, share commonalities with the networks. Taken as a whole, niche + niche + niche adds up to more than a lot of niches; it’s a new monoculture, the equivalent of those four-quadrant broadcast shows. As the entertainment news guru Janice Min put it in Time magazine, “plurality is the new mass.”49
Moreover, squeezed by the economics of the business, some streamers are actively in the process of turning from narrowcasting to broadcasting. Nevins, speaking of Netflix, observes, “As it’s gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, it has broadened out its programming and is racing to the mainstream. It’s taken the place of the broadcasters.”50 Adds Greenblatt, “For all intents and purposes, streamers are already broadcast television because they are infinitely broader than broadcast.”51
To some degree, streamers and networks are trading places. While Netflix in its infancy licensed network shows, Netflix is now licensing its shows to the networks. Many of its recent releases, both movies and series, like The Crown and Bridgerton, could have been produced by a network. In fact, some of them were produced by a network. The former disrupter managed to collect most of the old cast of That ’70s Show (Ashton Kutcher, Topher Grace, Mila Kunis, et al.) which diverted fans on Fox for eight seasons from 1998 to 2006, and rerun it as That ’90s Show with the addition of some new faces. Manifest, a show NBC canceled, and Lucifer, a show Fox canceled, are now on Netflix.
Streamers are aging up as programmers are eager to add bald pates to their shaggy-haired youth audience. Disney moved the hoary Dancing with the Stars from ABC to Disney+ in 2022. (Disney wasn’t worried that it was diluting Disney+—that seems impossible—but that it was weakening ABC. It moved back the following year and now it airs on both ABC and Disney+.)
Kenya Barris, who had left ABC for the freedom of Netflix in 2018, left Netflix for Paramount Global in 2021 despite his multiyear deal, explaining, “I want to do in-your-face shit,” but “Netflix wants down the middle.” He added, “Netflix became CBS.”52 He may be disappointed, because Paramount+’s predecessor, as we have seen, was CBS (aka CBS All Access), and the streamer is saturated with CBS content, like the fledglings of Star Trek. Criminal Minds ran for fifteen seasons on CBS and did well on Netflix, and now has been revived for, guess where? Paramount+! CBS’s hit Fire Country is also available on Paramount+, as is its 2023 show Ghosts.
Paramount+ is not only airing fresh CBS shows, it is injecting new life into other networks’ golden oldies. It has given a series order for Frasier, the Cheers spin-off that ran on NBC for eleven seasons. Ditto The Brady Bunch, which premiered on ABC in 1969. Law & Order, the venerable network procedural, is available on several different streamers.
Nor is CBS the only network to revive zombie shows and share them with its streamer. NBC’s six-season comedy Community will be reincarnated as a movie on Peacock, with six of its nine stars resurrecting their roles from the original. And at the end of November 2022, Peacock began to stream NBC’s entire programming content live, as well as live content from NBC’s affiliates. According to Channing Dungey, head of Warner TV, shows like Friends are comfort food, but she’s trying to imagine what that might look like on a streamer.
Today, crossover is becoming the name of the game, as a plague of old network shows infects streamers of every stripe, with the distinctions between streaming and network continuing to break down, as network becomes marginally more daring, while streamers, to use Nevins’s words, “race to the mainstream.”
As the streamers become more heavily dependent on ads, expect that the sponsors will want to exercise control over content, just as they do on the networks. Also expect the streamers to jealously defend their prerogatives. But now that they’re run by former network and studio executives who are facing saturated markets as well as kill-or-be-killed competition, they very well may be more receptive.
The mainstreaming of the streaming audience entails a change in values. Ted Lasso may be less an outlier as an augury of things to come, the end of discomfort viewing. In the old network shows, morality was simple: virtue was rewarded and evil was punished. Comfort viewing, with heroes who do the right thing, valorizes the American Dream (everything’s A-OK), is the revenge of the center, or what is left of it, against the discomfort viewing that has privileged extremist anti-heroes of the left and right. These are the vigilantes and revenge figures whose appeal lies in doing the wrong thing, refusing to play by the rules because their bullshit detectors tell them the American Dream is a fraud, constructed by the powerful to benefit themselves.
What will happen when the moral ambiguity of the streamers collides with the ad-supported network moralism? What will happen to the tweeners, the good-bad guys and dolls whom cable and streaming taught us to love? What will happen to the Tony Sopranos, Al Swearengens, Vic Mackeys, Raylan Givenses, Don Drapers, Bobby Axelrods, Ray Donovans, Logan Roys, Deborah Vances, and Beth Duttons? They were all James Bonds, with licenses to kill. Will they all be turned into bad-bad guys and dolls? Vince Gilligan has already told us not to expect Walter White in his show on Apple TV+. As he put it, “After fifteen years, I figured it was time to take a break from writing anti-heroes.”53
As networks continue to dump their shows onto the streamers, while streamers race to the mainstream, the discomfort shows that defined Peak TV are already beginning to get a lot of flak. Netflix’s Ozark took some heat because the Byrds get away with their crimes. Laura Linney, who played Wendy Byrd, retorted, “Don’t come at me with this fairy-tale thing about right and wrong, and that those who cheat get punished. Are you kidding? Watch the news.”54 In other words, don’t call it “cynicism,” call it “realism.”
Look too at the universal opprobrium that greeted the last episode of Game of Thrones. There were no ads, of course, but it didn’t need any when it turned its good-bad girl Daenerys Targaryen into a bad-good girl, and punished her, while designating Ted Lasso wannabe Bran the Broken the ruler of the future, justifiably eliciting a yawn from the audience.
Once the sponsors of the ad-supported tiers start to complain, what will happen to shows like HBO Max’s White Lotus? In Season 2, Tanya, the dumb-good-girl, shoots the baddies, who are trying to steal her fortune but, klutz that she is, she comes to a “derpy” (writer Mike White’s word) end, accidentally falling between two boats and drowning. Meanwhile, her husband, the worst of the worst who has orchestrated the whole plot against her, walks away with her money, thanks to a clause in their prenup. As in Ozark, crime pays.
In the back to the future environment, the good news is that streaming might retain some degree of freedom denied the networks, but it’s more difficult than ever to predict that future. The bad news is that the post-network streaming world could turn out to look very much like the pre-streaming broadcast world. Instead of the Big Four networks, we might see Big Five streamers—say, Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Apple+, and Max. Says J. B. Perrette, president of global streaming at WBD, “In many ways, we are seeing reincarnation of the last half a century of television for the streaming age.”55 He also added that consumers are in a period era of “peak confusion,” to say the least.56
