Nowadays, whenever I browse Netflix, I feel like that Bruce Springsteen song, "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)."[a] Sure, there are lots of choices, but they all kinda suck. I find myself wondering, why? The OP weaves an insightful, opinionated narrative that explains how we got here. Much of it rings true. This passage, in particular struck a chord with me:
> Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” [...] One tag among Netflix’s thirty-six thousand microgenres offers a suitable name for this kind of dreck: “casual viewing.” Usually reserved for breezy network sitcoms, reality television, and nature documentaries, the category describes much of Netflix’s film catalog — movies that go down best when you’re not paying attention, or as the Hollywood Reporter recently described Atlas, a 2024 sci-fi film starring Jennifer Lopez, “another Netflix movie made to half-watch while doing laundry.”
In other words, people like me, who want to focus on and experience a great film or series, are no longer the target audience.
Apparently, there's no money in targeting people who want to pay attention.
TV was also like this though. It's one of the first things you learn in a 20th century media class. Early TV shows were adapted from radio play scripts, and later written by radio play scriptwriters moving into the new format. That structure and its conventions stayed strongly influential right up until the end of prominent network TV shows.
TV show creators understood and planned for people watching their shows in a variety of environments, with varying degrees and kinds of attention. A lot of what made for example X-files and Sopranos compelling was a willingness to break this convention, so it was still firmly in place by the late 90s.
You could also maybe reasonably claim that all TV shows before those were bad as well. But then you need to view netflix as reverting to the norm rather than being a novel travesty. We are simply exiting a 20 year anomaly where TV was good.
I'm not quite making that argument here though. I think there was good TV before the 90s, so I think this is a constraint on the form that good creators can work through and still make compelling art. Why netflix can't is an interesting question but I think this avenue is a dead end for understanding it.
My completely unscientific impression is that other services are making the effort to produce high-quality films and series, including Apple TV+ (Slow Horses, Silo, For All Mankind, Foundation, etc.), Max/HBO (Barry, Curb Your Enthusiasm, GoT, The Last of Us, etc.), FX (Shogun, The Bear, The Old Man, Fargo, etc.), and AMC (Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Night Manager, etc.). Whatever you think of the quality of shows in those services, they at least show genuine effort to make things that don't suck.
Well, people that want to half-watch TV deserve stuff made for them too.
Netflix has shows made for really watching too. I don't know if they are rebellious acts from their makers, brought without an option, or actual choices, but Netflix does have them.
My impression is that Netflix cornered themselves into the same AAA race to death that the major movie studios are in. Everything is too expensive, so they can't accept risks, so nothing is really good (nor really bad). Micromanaging is just one more visible consequence of that, between lots and lots that stay hidden but are as important to the final result.
> Well, people that want to half-watch TV deserve stuff made for them too.
What? No they don't. Film and television are visual art forms that are meant to be viewed and given the appropriate attention. There's already plenty of mediocre television out there you can use as background noise; we don't need to intentionally lower the bar for the media that's being made. As the article mentions, Netflix has already played its part in ruining the job landscape for writers and actors. I guess they see a need to play their part in devaluing the work that remains.
The reality is the average person's time to watch TV/unwind is also going to be spent doing chores. This was always the case. When I was a kid, we watched shows that could be followed along by whoever was cooking dinner/doing dishes as well as the people sitting in front of the set. People don't have all that much extra free time.
Movies were an experience because... they were an experience. They weren't constantly on. They were a rare treat, not something consumed nightly.
There is money in that, it just fundamentally doesn't make sense to build a subscription service for it. There are still good movies being made, but they cost money to make, and someone needs to pay for them. They cannot exist if they get thrown on a streaming service where they'll earn a pittance. HN seems to believe they have a fundamental right to watch all the movies and tv ever made for $8/month, but that was only possible due to very special circumstances that have since evaporated.
Netflix is slowly succumbing to it's inevitable fate of turning into daytime tv. That's the only space where it makes sense economically to pay a fixed subscription fee regardless of how much you consume. If you want an all you can eat buffet, don't act surprised when it isn't michelin starred.
"MUBI IS TERRIBLE!
*---- 6y ago • Nick2866
MUBI is terrible there's no good action or horror films it's crazy because almost all of the movies on the app I haven't even heard of and I'm a big movie buff. So just don't waste your time with MUBI just get Netflix or amazon prime."
I mean it is also somewhat dependent on how much bandwidth you have free while doing laundry, some people can handle watching the complicated stuff while doing their daily tasks and I guess those people also hate these half-assed shows.
I think it depends on which kind of bandwidth we're talking about. I can follow a talk-show no problem while doing laundry / the dishes / vacuum / iron. Keyword being "talk". But I can't look at the screen too often.
So, watching a sitcom or similar where the characters' body language or facial expressions are important is an exercise in frustration.
If I'm sitting down to watch something new, I'm going to give it my full attention and therefore want it to be awesome. If I just want background noise then I can just put on anything that I've already seen for its mood. I can't fathom wanting to be only half paying attention to new things. It feels like living very indeliberately. Is the point just to be able to say you've seen such and such new show, or what?
Netflix thought they could take on Hollywood and beat them at their own film game. But in the process they realized that it’s not actually a game worth winning, and more importantly, that YouTube and TikTok are their real competition, not Hollywood.
The future of most media is video-based, and I think Netflix probably understands this and is trying to get away from the historical model as movies you watch online and closer to the optimized video ecosystem of YouTube. The latter is more relevant in a world with video-playing devices everywhere.
Even in real-time... My wife will literally watch Facebook Reels on her phone while we sit on the couch at night to watch something on Netflix together.
Anyway, I was thinking about this too when the article talked about the data from Amazon showing that viewers preferred stuff from the 90s and 00s over their newly produced content: How are Netflix, Amazon, etc. doing with young adults? If the audience is all Millennials and Gen-X folks, because Gen-Z folks are exclusively watching short-form video instead, it would make sense that stuff from the 90s and 00s would be the most popular. Like I think this is a well-established phenomenon with music, where a person's lifelong preferences will be fixed on whatever they first heard during their high school or college years. I will absolutely pay for a streaming service that gives me access to all the movies and TV series from, say, 1990-2015 and never adds any new content.
> My wife will literally watch Facebook Reels on her phone while we sit on the couch at night to watch something on Netflix together.
HN spans this incredible gamut from “Turing-award winner chimes in on their field of expertise” to stuff like this that just puts you in awe how pozzed some people are.
Can you please explain what this optimized video ecosystem of youtube is actually optimized for other than clickbait? Maybe it works for others but i fell into this for a while and now i look at it in disgust.
Clickbait is a part of it, sure. But there are also many other content types that I wouldn’t characterize that way: 3+ hour long video podcasts, ambient music channels, niche indie musicians, short entertaining videos like Mr. Beast, etc. YouTube is increasingly a huge tent that includes tons of different kinds of content.
My point was more that YouTube is increasingly designed for a world in which people have their devices everywhere and jump in and out of watching videos.
Netflix isn’t, because it is still using the “old” model of sitting down for 30-200 minutes to watch a movie.
I’m not saying that the film model is bad or somehow worth getting rid of - I love films myself - just that it’s probably not the future of video content for most people.
Youtube still has massive variety and quality of production. I've largely been able to avoid the clickbait-optimized videos by curating my subscriptions. I've found about a dozen creators who's content I regularly watch. Many of them create YouTube videos as secondary to some other hobby or profession. Most are trending towards the clickbait thumbnail, but few are actually changing their content in that direction.
>A signature characteristic of Netflix’s strategy over the years has been to define genres into microscopic sub-genres and develop content on very specific customer likes — for example “Urban teen geniuses who invent time travel”
>There is an unfortunate issue with making things bad and to somebody’s taste — the person whose taste you are courting may be happy to be courted but if all they ever get of things to their taste are things that are bad representations of that taste they may come to sour on what they once loved.
and that is I think what happens a lot with Netflix, they produce approximations of the thing you love, and by doing this bad half-assed version with the wires sticking out and everything, in the end you don't love that thing anymore.
Netflix in the hunt for quick engagement eats the seed corn of fandom, and are left with nothing to build on.
Oof. What's next? Announcing what they see? What items are around them and how they could interact with them (or not)?
Like "Protagonist: I walked north and I entered a mysterious room, full of different bottles. They don't look like I could use them, but maybe I should take one with me?"
I think because people are 'watching' in a situation where twenty years ago they'd've put the radio on but now they default to 'fire something up on Netflix' and so Netflix wants to make things amenable to those customers.
I'm not sure how I feel about this, but it does at least make sense in terms of why Netflix are doing so.
Audio works on the subway, on the bike, while riding a bike, cleaning the house and the big one, driving a car. To get into a situation where you can both watch and listen is much rarer.
One of my favourite films is called Upstream Color.
Below is not a spoiler, but I like to avoid reading anything about a good film before watching it, and I recommend to do the same here. You like it or you don’t.
This film has no staged speech that tries to explain anything. The little dialogue that it has is what would naturally arise given the situation. For the same reason, most characters have no names or no full names. No situation in which they would formally introduce themselves takes place.
Do I fully understand it immediately, or even after watching it once? No. Does it mean I dislike it? Rather the opposite. Actually, I enjoy being treated as an adult who can make conclusions without having given any pre-digested explanation.
If you enjoyed Upstream Color, I highly recommend checking out Carruth's previous project, Primer, if you haven't already. It's a movie that takes a dozen rewatches to make full sense of. Natural dialogue, organic cinematography, and no hand-holding.
Upstream Color was a great movie as well, it's a shame what happened between Carruth and Amy Seimetz.
Stanley Kubrick did something similar in `2001: A Space Odyssey`. In a scene where staff were being transported in a taxi... on the moon... 100% of the dialog is meaningless. They're discussing the merits of this or that sandwich, not how wonderful the Earth looks from space, or overcoming technical challenges.
It's so refreshing to be living in an environment vs being spoon fed.
Even better is very old or even silent movies ("M" is fantastic: modern-ish thriller from 1931 where sound is a character; Metropolis)
Also dialog-less movies: `Koyaanisqatsi` is incredibly beautiful and has a specific plot, even if there's no understandable dialog nor words.
In theaters _right now_ is `Flow`. No dialog, and no _human_ characters! It's all animated cats and dogs and other animals. It's startling how directly the characters transmit their goals and agenda and emotions.
I enjoyed Upstream Color a lot as well, but yeah it's certainly not for everyone.
And agreed on not being spoon fed.
A prime example to the contrary was when in the Joker, spoiler alert, they had a recap showing his delusion. The movie would have been so much better if they had cut that entire segment, and just have the neighbor female act all surprised and weirded out like she did when he entered the apartment.
The opening lines to The Magic Flute (which continues in a similarly expository tone for the duration). Seems like there have always been scripts which were easy to understand while also staring at your phone, though that doesn't stop the ushers at English National Opera getting narky at you if you try!
Man. I like that you’re bringing opera into the conversation, but I don’t think comparing two different mediums that way is useful.
Die Zauberflote is easy to understand because it’s a fairly light work, and you’re meant to be staring at the lavish staging and costumes. The performers narrate the action because that’s the convention for the genre - it’s a sung story. They break into more conventional dialogue for the recitative sections (a tradition that went out of style with Verdi.)
> They break into more conventional dialogue for the recitative sections (a tradition that went out of style with Verdi.)
The comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan were contemporary to Verdi's work and still feature lots of dialogue, so they are very approachable. You still won't be able to use your phone, though - you'll be too busy laughing!
My recommendation for an introduction would be the 1982 Canadian production of The Mikado by the Stratford Festival. It is currently available in its entirety on YouTube:
In Mozart's time what was happening on the stage was a footnote to eating, talking, flirting, seeing, and being seen. Opera was a social event with background music.
Treating art with reverence and rapt attention didn't get to be a thing until the late Enlightenment. Before that the kind of art you took seriously was religious, and the idea that you were supposed to reverent about it could be considered a carry-over from religion.
Talking over things and not paying attention is almost the default. Sitting still and concentrating on a performance of any kind is a relatively recent idea.
None of this makes the crapification of Netflix (and related trends in other media touched by streaming and tech) any less annoying.
Really enjoy this curveball you threw, casts this whole conversation in a new light doesn't it?
It is true that a lot of old plays, operas etc do exactly what Netflix is accused of here. What is a monologue? Was Shakespeare guilty of creating casual viewing content when he wrote Hamlet's monologue? Shouldn't he have just showed Hamlet's ambivalence???
Those lines are from a song, and a significant part of the audience at the time wouldn't be listening in their native language; it's not really a fair comparison.
I was just wondering a bit about this. I read some of your comments here and, as I sometimes do, writing and discarding before submitting my response.
But it just occurred to me... Maybe Netflix should do half-movies next. The movie is designed to be appealing on the menu, to have a good but not too engrossing first 30 minutes, and then start ramping down the budget drastically for the remaining of the film, which -it seems- people aren't watching any more. Like don't bother with FX, then just don't bother with actors, then just insert shots of the storyboard or don't even bother with the story at all and just insert stock video, etc. Maybe at the end add a narrated summary of what happened (or didn't happen).
This was actually pioneered by Bruce Willis. He would get paid a lot to show up in a couple of introductory scenes for really low budget films. They'd put his face on the movie poster, they'd pay him like half the budget of the film, then he'd move on to the next one.
(Unfortunately, it turns out he was struggling with dementia and it seems he was trying to cash out before he couldn't act at all)
I watched some of those movies - my god they were terrible. I'm pretty sure Willis filmed his parts in front of a green screen because he was never in shot with other actors.
Knowing the reason why though, I don't blame or fault him for doing it.
This article is a fascinating explication of the core reason that, without any respect paid to my millennial nostalgia at all, we need to preserve the physical cinema. The digital "attention economy" introduces such immense layers of abstraction between the audience and the business that none of us should feel confident that it will allow us to express our tastes for entertainment with anything close to intentionality. If we want to keep getting any modicum of entertainment that we actually like -- what a high bar! -- then we need to maintain our right to vote audibly with our dollars.
In my experience, when technology advances, and the original thing to be replaced still holds some value, it doesn't continue existing as such, it may survive binging on momentum, habits or nostalgia.
But then it splits, the useless aspect discarded and the useful merged with other old and new fragments, in combinations tried by the experimental startup ecosystem.
In the end we may have for example entertainment venues for both playing arcades and watching movies and theater plays, perhaps with dinner for example. (We already have this actually.)
One nice thing about the movie theater, is that nobody can pull up her phone in the middle and start scrolling through stuff. And then we have to rewind later. Not pointing fingers here. :)
I remember going to the physical cinema one day to see "Air". I didn't think the movie was that great, and I wonder if the "Amazon Studios" logo at the beginning made me more critical.
It’s just slop par excellence. I’ve been watching a number of movies with my wife over Christmas. Everything is so bland, repetitive and ‘design by committee’. It goes further than merely announcing what the characters are doing (in that new wannabe Die Hard movie we hear that they are expecting a baby three times in 5 minutes), you just know there are certain metrics used for every genre of movie accounting for every minute: “if it’s an action film with no action scene in the first 10 minutes then the audience loses interest”. They are all so soulless.
And this is fine when you realise that Netflix replaces direct-to-video movies and not that of cinema, as much as they refuse to admit.
It’s amazing the checkboxes that stick out: having a dog for no reason for dog lovers; the relationship slop that appeals to women; the violence and sex slop to appeal to men.
I think the best modern productions are now the series rather than the films as there's so much more time to tell the story and have room for characters to breathe etc.
Just look at the artistry and story-telling skill displayed in both seasons of Arcane - there's so many brilliant examples of "showing, not telling" on display there.
As a counter-example, I enjoyed watching the "Flow" film the other day - an animated film about a cat (and other animals) trying to survive a flood and there's not even a single word in the entire film.
Maybe 5 years ago but can't say I agree any more. Netflix in particular stretches 2-hour scripts into 10-hour limited series. I'm trying to watch Black Doves right now and continually get bored at how much exposition and background there is. There was clearly a tight, fun script in there somewhere before the committee performed surgery on it. I don't need everything explored and explained to death, give me something with rhythm instead.
Couldn't disagree more about Arcane, I thought it was the usual pedestrian writing and mish-mash of tired tropes we've come to expect from mainstream productions.
A friend was pushing me to give it a try, a friend who likes Marvel, and the Miles Morales spiderman film, who plays League, who was excited by Baldur's Gate, etc etc. I tried to say "no, there is no chance of me enjoying that, it'll be the usual drivel", but they insisted it was really good.
And I watched, against my better judgment, saying to myself: "come on now, give it a serious try, be open-minded". To no avail!
I recall the scene where they'd the punk or alternative or "underground" live music in the bar in the underworld place, in the 3rd or 4th episode, and that being the final straw for me. A viler and more disharmonious appropriation of dissident culture I've never had the displeasure of sitting through.
This is precisely the tepid, data-driven "future of entertainment" that the genAI boosters are desperately trying to sell. Remember the hubbub about that ridiculous AI Seinfeld stream? Turgid LLM nonsense, but hyped to the skies by people who presumably haven't watched Seinfeld and have no clue what makes it a funny and iconic sitcom.
What I hate is that the slop killed the netflix DVD service, where I used to get the "real" movies to watch.
It sort of feels like living in a town that is getting crowded and the infrastructure isn't being maintained. Then one day they decide to change all the traffic lights to stop signs and everyone goes the same slow speed.
Honestly I can't blame them if current audiences have the attention span of a puppy golden retriever
The one use case I wanted to see for AI is "tunable" contexts for videos. If this is your first time, watch the whole thing but if you need less context just edit it so it skips over the obvious parts
Highbrow and soulless are different axes. Disney may be a giant soulless company, but they do employ actual artists who sometimes make decent movies which in general do vastly better at the box office.
Handing a talented team enough time, freedom, and budget doesn’t guarantee success but it’s definitely a prerequisite for success.
I'm more interested in movies that make money through the long tail of DVD sales. Box office numbers have always favoured blockbusters. The long tail content tends to be better, less one-size-fits-all, and allows room for multiple films trying different things, across different genres. That era appears to be over however.
You can't do 100% "show, don't tell" unless your movie is 15 hours long. It's always about balance, and it's probably one of the hardest challenges in scriptwriting and directing. Netflix movies have always leaned more toward the "tell" side, and this feels like an open acknowledgment of it.
Small digression: Turkish series have been doing an extreme version of "telling" for ages. I've been watching the cheesiest ones with my wife as she uses them to unwind (I do the same with YouTube videos). In these shows, characters don't just say what they're doing, they also explain how they feel, what they plan to do, and how they'll feel afterward. It's oddly addictive, like watching a bad movie on purpose, and somehow, you end up completely hooked.
>Small digression: Turkish series have been doing an extreme version of "telling" for ages.
From a european perspective that is what US TV series and movies have been doing for 4 decades already as well as following the very same mechanics. In most shows you can tell in advance what is about to happen next at any point in time this is embarassing. I used to think US people had to be super dumb for that reason then realized they gradually started doing it on euro stuff. I guess we just use the lowest baseline possible because the people who spend the most time passively i front of a screen happen to also be the dumbest ones.
It also probably depends on having a generally undistracted audience which you probably don't have a lot of the time especially outside of a movie theater.
I know precisely what you mean. I randomly stumbled upon the anime Solo Leveling, which also follows the 100% tell style. The main character reads out everything, narrates every scene, and explains his own thought processes and emotions at every step.
It is weirdly addicting, perhaps only because I'm bored of the show-don't-tell style and it's refreshing to see something going contrary to that.
Streaming with a subscription is fundamentally a bad thing for cinema, especially when combined with the streamer also producing content. That's because it shifts the optimized variable from quality of individual movie/show to maximum time spent on platform. But the latter can accept the lowering of the quality of individual movies, so you get a regression towards average instead of a striving for excellence.
Never paid for a subscription and never will, precisely because I want to pay for individual movies to reward them for being good movies.
This is less of a streaming subscription issue as much as a Netflix issue. Netflix doesn't have to use the metric of "time spent on platform". Their goal seems to want to be the everything-streaming-app and are willing to produce mountains of swill to get there.
For example with their TV-style content, Netflix starting churning out tons of cheaply produced baking and cooking competition shows during the pandemic -- probably due to the popularity of "The Great British Bake-off". Whatever they were going for, they didn't capture the magic of it, nor did their cooking competition shows capture the magic of "Iron Chef" despite the blatant struggle to do so.
Compare this to HBO. HBO has been subscription far before streaming was a thing and they have an excellent track record of regularly producing quality series with a subscription model.
In HBO's TV era post-2000, you have The Wire, Sopranos, Entourage, Boardwalk Empire, among many others. As things moved to streaming (2012-), there's Game of Thrones, Succession, Barry, Chernobyl, Last of Us, Veep, etc. It seems, on average, every year there's a new must-watch series that ranks well with both critics and viewers.
While there's skepticism about HBO maintaining it's legacy after the Discovery-Warner merger, Apple TV seems to be filling HBO's shoes.
Perhaps Netflix ought to consider cutting back the number of series it's churning out.
Not even that, they optimize for acquiring and keeping subscribers. They gain nothing from you watching movies, it is just costing them bandwidth, at least on their ad-free plan, which was the only option until recently. It is completely different from YouTube and TikTok, or even oldschool TV, which get most of their revenue from ads.
They need a few good ones to attract new subscribers, and they do. Stranger Things and Squid Games are really good. For the rest, they just need enough content for people not to cancel their subscriptions.
If you want to encourage quality production, just subscribe for the month they are doing something good, ad-free of course, then unsubscribe. Many people are doing that, and maybe that's what it takes to get them to change their strategy. Maybe not for the better though.
>If you want to encourage quality production, just subscribe for the month they are doing something good, ad-free of course, then unsubscribe.
Most people are probably lazier and less organized than you give them credit for. If subscribe/unsubscribe cycles were really that prevalent I think you'd see a lot more incentives to sign up for, say, annual subscriptions.
A lot of people basically use TV as background and, especially if they don't have live TV, that means a lot of streaming content.
It’s supposedly ragebait but it’s not actually bad.
- Netflix produces the casual viewing content next to other niches, and just serves this as well. The other stuff doesn’t go away, this is in addition.
- This is something you can put on during long car trips, no need to focus on the screen, just focus on the audio, and it’s easier to listen to than an audiobook (which is just a narrated actual book).
- It has nothing to do with “endumbification”, even it it appears to be framed that way. People are still smart.
This is likely being blown way out of proportion. I'm not defending this behavior but the article listed exactly one example: Irish Wish. I'm sure it appeals to a certain audience but it's not what I, personally, would call peak cinema.
My guess is that this guidance was given to a specific writer or person in charge of a specific genre.
Exactly. The one example they use gets a 5.2 on IMDB and 42% on rotten tomatoes.
Not all movies are high art, nor should they be. It’s for a certain audience. We’ve had crappy made-for-TV movies since long before streaming and it hasn’t been the death of cinema.
The article listed lots of examples... It's an exceptionally long article so you'd be forgiven for missing them, but there are definitely many examples given.
In fact that's actually what my main complaint is about this article - the point it's making is a good one but the article is probably 5x longer than it needs to be.
The original link was https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2024/12/27/netflix-tells-wr... which is probably what your parent is commenting on. Some people complained that that's basically a blogspam article that recycles n+1's article, others disagreed and argued there's value in a focused short article - it seems like mods agree with the complainers and changed the link silently to the current one.
I think this shift towards "casual viewing" speaks volumes about where mainstream streaming is headed, but it also highlights an opportunity for something new. Platforms like Netflix focusing on easily digestible, multitask-friendly content might work for maintaining subscribers, but it feels like a step away from respecting storytelling as an art form.
This is exactly why I founded IZSIT, a streaming platform designed to do the opposite. Instead of pumping out content to fill the background, we’re championing stories that demand your full attention and actually entertain you. IZSIT is all about giving independent creators the tools to tell powerful, boundary-pushing stories using AI.
Streaming doesn’t have to be a race to the bottom. Platforms like Apple TV+ and HBO are showing that high-quality content still has a place, and IZSIT is joining that fight by putting AI artistry and storytelling first.
We won't settle for "endumbification." Film and TV should inspire, challenge, and resonate—not just fill silence while we do chores. If you’re tired of scrolling through mediocrity, keep an eye out for what we’re building at IZSIT
I find it very stressful when watching Netflix because I don't know what is going to happen. Maybe they could include the full story line at the start of the series, so I can read it ahead of time and remove all suspense and surprise.
Don't worry, they have got the perfect solution for you. That cool series you just heard about but haven't had time to watch yet? It's cancelled. That's it. That's the story. Now you don't even need to watch it!
I sort of unironically agree with this. Time is limited and most tv and films don’t fit my criteria for “worth watching”, so I will read the plot synopsis for media that I think may be terrible, so I don’t have to find out later.
I do constantly have to tap out with the stress in many programs, takes me ages to pick up and finish programs. Many people need tension to drive a narrative forwards, but for me it often gets too much.
I remember 80 Days Around the world where peril of missing a connection gave it tension; ever since documentaries seem to have used this more and more.
The BBC Horizon episode on Voyager passing Jupiter was so inspirational to me, but now we just being ridden by TV personalities.
The irony of your comment is that Horizon famously went through a phase of making programmes that were all about doom a while ago. Asteroids hitting the Earth, Global warming, food supply collapse, tsunamis, volcanos, etc - and all with portentious narration.
True, but plots are only half the story. I'd be very grateful if they could give me some sample scenes (ideally automatically, so I don't have to go through the trouble of starting them every single time). I mean, how do people even decide whether a movie might be for them without having first inspected a good portion of it?
It's weird to me how the first two replies to this comment completely missed the sarcasm.
Do we need to start using the "/s" tag here like became necessary on reddit? I don't like the thought, but maybe it's a different issue in this case-- more of a non-native-English or on-the-spectrum thing than an inexperienced teenager thing? I hope so.
> I mean, how do people even decide whether a movie might be for them without having first inspected a good portion of it?
You can read review of journalists you usually agree with, ask for advice from your friends, check if you liked other movies from the same filmmaker, check if the movie has been displayed in your favorite movie theater or in the movie theater you dislike (but okay, won't work for netflix movies).
> I mean, how do people even decide whether a movie might be for them without having first inspected a good portion of it?
You’re describing watching the movie. Which is what most people do. If the movie is terrible then you just stop watching it, or if you finish it you can then decide if you liked it or not.
I just wish they wouldn‘t so disproportionally often drift off into extreme sillyness (That, I can take.) or extreme brutality and gore (That, I find revolting. When did showing so much splatter on a regular basis start being considered good film making outside of the occasional Tarantino?).
I often wonder about how much electricity is wasted (recording, encoding, transmitting, decoding) on videos where the video itself seems to add no actual value, and it would be just as effective as audio-only (or text-only) content instead. A study of YouTube videos in 2022 found that more than 15% of "videos" (i.e. billions of videos) contained only still images[1]. My wife watches a ton of short-form video (and in turn shows me the ones that she likes) and I'm baffled by how many are just scrolling text with people dancing in the background, or people holding up signs, or someone just talking into the camera (often sitting in the driver's seat of a car).
Any video streaming application worth its salt will stop downloading the video track if the user backgrounds the application, turns off the screen or otherwise makes the video surface not visible, so there's no bandwidth wasted in that particular scenario. This is of course somewhat diminished by people not actually turning the video off in many scenarios - and I'm not even sure Netflix supports backgrounded playback, for that matter.
Additionally, videos of still images compress remarkably well, to the point where the image itself is largely the same size as the video track.
This is such a weird article. It reads like a 3000 word lament for the death of video stores, down to a coda about how Reed Hastings fabricated the story about the Apollo 13 late fee that triggered him to start Netflix in the first place. Why would I care if that story was false? Video stores were bad. Multi-month theatrical release windows are bad. The studio system was bad. Things are better now.
In all these kinds of stories that revolve around how much crap there is on Netflix, there are two things you have to keep in mind:
* Netflix didn't invent shlock and probably didn't even accelerate it; if anything, Netflix probably reversed the trend away from scripted and towards "reality".
* What distinguishes Netflix more than anything else is its efficiency getting content to viewers, which means that there's more of everything on Netflix, and in its catalog of originals. There's more schlock, which is very noticeable, and, compared to pre-Netflix-streaming outputs of places like HBO, also more solid original films. But 99% of everything is crap, so if the only way you have to engage with the Netflix catalog is browsing their interface, that's most of what you're going to see.
I didn't read it that way at all. It felt to me like the author thought video stores were terrible too, just in a different way, and the main point of the article was the different incentive structures for the pre-streaming movie companies (high ticket sales and people watching the entire movie without distractions) vs Netflix (recurring monthly revenue from people who are just satisifed enough not to cancel their subscription). They're both focused on numbers, but the meanings of those numbers are very different. (I'm not sure I entirely agree with that - I think the pre-streaming movie companies were hyper-focused on the bottom line too - but I think that's what the article was trying to say).
See I'm not even saying all video stores are without value, just that there is virtually nobody who would prefer to have to schlep to a retail outlet every time they want to see a different movie, which was literally how things worked until streaming happened.
I am convinced that if we design media to be consumed while doing something else it will ultimately be to the detriment of the media itself. What will happen next is netflix shifting even more towards reality-tv and then end up just like MTV.
I suspect this appeals to two types of audiences. The first being people who play on their phones instead of watching the show. You can blame phone addiction and ADHD type behaviors for this but it feels like a slippery slope of stupidity in the face of good writing/acting as opposed to constant cartoon like action. (the wife and I do it too).
The second set of audience this would appeal to are people with autism. Sitcoms have always done this. Some people really need to be told when to laugh and what people are thinking because they have no ability to read body language, zero empathy, and cannot read the room. Once you encounter it regularly it’s mind blowing and that a significant portion of the population commonly lives with this sort of mental blindness.
A common misconception. Autistic people have emotions and empathy- perhaps more than other people. They just keep it inside.
Also no Seinfeld is not funny.
So, autism is a spectrum of common disorders that vary from person to person. Therefore people are not diagnosed on the basis of noted disorders but instead on their performance in a battery of common performance tests.
As for empathy, it too varies from person to person. It is possible, though unlikely, to score high in empathy and yet utterly fail all the rest of the performance criteria. One of my coworkers with autistic children may or may not have autism themselves but does demonstrate high empathy.
In my experience people with autism tend to score remarkably low in empathy with some people even having absolutely no empathy at all. That is why many people with autism seem socially weird or have trouble reading a room. For people with high empathy these observations of low empathy in others is most obvious potential indicator of autism.
While very few people score high in empathy it’s equally rare to absolutely have no empathy at all. It is such a striking disadvantage as to be a major disorder. It is severe enough that it looks like sociopathy minus an informed intent. It’s a processing void. That void is further obviated by an equally diminished introspective capability in that reading one’s self is the same skill as reading others.
Also, empathy is not in any way related the quantity of emotions people display. A person can be both selfish and highly emotional.
I watch/listen to stuff when I do chores at home. If I am going to iron 30 things or knead a dough for 15 minutes, then it's nice to have some entertainment while doing it, even if I can't focus on it all the time. Not sure I fit into any of the two audiences you mention.
By the downvote I suspect you find this description of inattention, or chores, offensive. How is that, the complete inability to focus and the emotional hostility you imagine about it, not a form of ADHD?
Definitely not surprising. The quality of Netflix originals is on a decline for years. I see this label as a warning nowadays.
There are enough good quality movies and shows. My life is too short to spend it with mediocre entertainment that leaves no lasting impression or thoughts. I don't need to pass time I want to make most out of it.
I feel like the "Netflix original" label started to decline around the time they started disingenuously applying it to things that they merely distributed, not created. That was a sign that the company was willing to water down its brand quality to get people to watch stuff.
I don’t remember the program but in the years of broadcast TV there was a writer on a nightly talk show explaining why all TV episodes were so bland. He said that he wrote an intricate plot for TV which was rejected because the show had to be watchable by someone doing this dishes. So this isn’t a phenomenon new to the Netflix era.
Many years ago when I was in college, one of my professors wrote a Star Trek Next Generation script, and she talked about how the producers pretty much destroyed her story by insisting she stick to the formula such as "between X and Y minutes, the Enterprise or one of the main characters must be in danger. That danger must be resolved by minute Z." Sigh.
Since not every episode follows that formula, I wonder if that's a requirement specifically of spec script writers because they'd want to keep the more important/interesting episodes written by staff.
As a young film student I was once going to a film industry meeting on behalf of my professor who was fed up with TV executives at that point. It was essentially a fancy dinner with all kinds of people from the German TV industry explaining why the stuff they do is so bad and why it has to be. It was incredibly fatalistic.
Money quote of the evening: "Our average viewer is between 60 and 65 and they are not 100% there mentally when viewing, so it needs to be so simple that you can still follow along while you are ironing your shirts."
Nobody there believed they were making good entertainment, everbody in fact hated it and yet they all said it has to be that way. Theh knew they are losing the young audiences, but didn't know what to do.
Valentine to Harry Hart, “You know what this is like? It’s like those old movies we both love. Now, I’m going to tell you my whole plan, and then I’m going to come up with some absurd and convoluted way to kill you, and you’ll find an equally convoluted way to escape.”
Netflix is going to kill their golden goose. It's already dying slowly, but they really should be just taking more risks.
It's a streaming company run by people who seem to hate movies or tv.
Netflix’s own produced content is the poison that’s killing Netflix’s value proposition, not its golden goose.
It’s the reason I, and others I know, unsubscribed. Over time it edged out all the movies I actually wanted to watch simply because it makes them more money. But making them more money doesn’t entertain me so I unsubscribed.
I don't think their first-party content ever was a golden goose, I feel like it has always been their way to pad space between the good shows they bought from others.
Their golden goose was being the first to do streaming well. They just need to fund films and TV shows and then back them for longer than a season. The SV style thinking is what's killing potentially good shows.
I believe this, feels like streaming platforms shows are made to be watched while you browse your phone. Even if I like a show I often feel like it could've been a 2h movie instead of 8h show and nothing would be lost.
There is still so much good stuff (especially films) being created still, but nowdays if it is Produced-by-streaming-corp, I'll just assume its going to have a inflated length to keep people from unsubscribing.
The main feeling you'll get out of a Streaming show is being sedated
I don’t get it. The whole point of asking the actors to say something is to have it end up in the script. I’m suggesting that whatever they want them to say is relevant to training some AI. Just a theory but in its hypothetical context it does make sense.
Aha that's a really interesting tinfoil hat theory! I doubt it's true but reminds me of the recent YouTube drama about Google using the transcript to train their AI. Seeing Spotify generate ai music to bloat their library it is a nice harmless conspiracy theory for fun if nothing else.
I'm not going to bother with any new Netflix originals since they rug-pulled Inside Job, but I don't think this is the end of the world if it's done well. Rocky & Bullwinkle is like this and it only enhances it. Put this on in the background and see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ7fbc9gMiE
I watched the Netflix series Black Doves recently, nine episodes of fairly entertaining stuff, followed by a final episode of full-on Basil Exposition with characters literally explaining what happened in the previous episodes like the reveal at the end of Scooby-Doo. I've mostly given up on Netflix for exactly this kind of dumbing down.
Could Netflix create Friends or The Office? Has there even be a single Netflix show with more than 100 episodes? I did a quick search but found none.
I admit that I too was once enamored with Netflix and streamers in general, but now I think that distribution should be separated from creation.
>Netflix execs have been telling their screenwriters to have characters “announce what they’re doing” so that viewers who have a program on in the background can follow along without having to miss plot strands.
That's the critical bit of context, this is essentially radio you have on in the background while you do whatever.
There is very little good or "main" content these days on Netflix. Every single time without fail whenever I have an urge to watch a specific show or movie, sometimes an old one, it's never available on Netflix. And even if they did have it, they "licensed" it for a year and no longer have it. What good is that for me?
So most of our usage these days of Netflix is just having something playing on the side or background while we go about daily tasks like working or whatever. It's glorified filler that you don't need to pay attention to.
I'm giving it a year maybe and I'm canceling our sub to Netflix. There are better alternatives, and life is too precious to spend worrying about copyright when all copyright holders just want to make me a criminal instead of letting be give them money.
Sometimes, I like watching the narrated movies meant for the visually impaired. It feels almost like an audiobook. Changing the content to make it more radio-like -- that's not something I'm a fan of. It's the whole "abstraction layers vs. tight coupling", except this time it's content.
Wes Anderson recently did a few short films from Roald Dahl stories that feel very strangely "wrong" in their almost 100% simply reading the stories out loud to actors miming along. It is so broken that it's fascinating and entirely works.
Does anyone have recommendations for reliable TV or movie critics whose opinion is based on writing quality in the movie or show rather than the social message it's trying to force on you? Something like the critical drinker but in print form and that covers a wider sample?
I'm thinking about unsubscribing from Netflix, only my wife discovered they have Friends. So I'm not.
It's not the new stuff that pulls me into Netflix. Instead I go to Paramount+. As it turns out, these guys actually know how to tell a compelling story. Nobody is more surprised than me!
I'd call that "endumbification". Netflix already lost giant chunks of its catalog as everyone and their dog now wants/has their own streaming shop (a worse situation than with cable TV now...), and it seems like they're going completely off the rails...
> Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
Maybe they could start by having actors enunciate properly.
I have an easier time understanding Japanese movies than English ones, because at least in the former they're speaking to the audience. English actors have a habit of mumbling everything.
Holy moly. I don’t think I’ve ever read an article so angry. Every paragraph has a sensational opinion or put down posing as fact.
There’s some fascinating industry trends here but the analysis in the article is overwhelmed by the cacophony of anecdotes about b movies and bland tv shows all encouraged by the corrupt and evil parent company. Not helpful.
My take on the quality of shows— there’s a huge volume of mediocre stuff but that’s always been the case with TV. (There’s literally hundreds of forgotten sitcoms on broadcast tv from the 70s to 90s). But there have been many gems in the past decade.
A random list of fantastic or innovative shows I saw first on NetFlix.
- House of Cards, season 1 and 2
- Russian Doll
- Squid Game
- Queens Gambit
- Ballad of Buster Scruggs
- Arcane
- Kaos
Only the first was mentioned in the article, and with negative comment.
Overall, a poorly written article and a waste of time to read it.
Whilst I do like having shows and movies on to the side as I code... it's on the condition they're actually interesting and have good writing. Otherwise I just can't bring myself to be interested.
Great to see Netflix being derided, I instantly feel soothed.
One other curious and quite insufferable thing which exists now is when a show/movie/game will give an unmistakeable and unsubtle nod to some other bit of media or information, either from the show/movie/game itself, or some other show/movie/game/cultural artefact.
And the learned and informed modern-media-gooner who is "in-the-know" will go: "aaaaaaha!" and "oooooh, clever!"
How has this happened? How is it considered so substantive and sophisticated for a show to make surface-level nods to other media? Please, someone explain this phenomenon to me.
I think Rick and Morty do a good job ridiculing this trope, but it doesn't seem to have been effective at slowing the tide. When a movie or a rap song alludes to something outside of itself or makes a meta-comment about itself, or breaks the fourth wall in some way, people are titillated beyond belief, I find.
I thought that was for visually impaired people to help them get a better sense of what's on the screen. Makes sense it can be used for "casual viewing" though.
Netflix has been fine for me. My wife and I watch maybe 3h of TV a week and across all the streaming channels I usually find something. Arcane was the last show we saw and it's a Netflix original and it's quite good.
As I cannot read the article without tapping 'Accept' on the monstrously big cookie pop-up (tapping "Manage Settings" leads to an even bigger pop-up whose presumed buttons are outside of the (non-scrollable) viewport), I'm going to comment without having read TFA, only the comments on here.
I am surprised that no one mentions these extra narrations as providing very valuable audio descriptions for visually impaired users. This in my opinion is a much more important use case, as long as it remains optional, selectable as a separate audio channel for example.
But it is hilarious in a meta kind of way that a bottom feeder "summarize real writing done by others, and slap on a clickbait headline" website pretends to have the moral high ground on this issue. I wonder what the guidance they give t to their writers is, and what metrics they're pushed to improve.
That article has a lot of quality but it also has a lot of telling the history of Netflix. Of the eight sections, I'd only really recommend the first plus a paragraph, then 6-8, maybe 5-8.
I wouldn't call the OP clickbait, it's a reasonable title for the focus of the article. And I appreciate it having focus.
This article is very informative article, but it is funny that it seems to imply that Netflix is somehow essentially evil, compared to the artsy heros of the 90s, such as Harvey Weinstein's Miramax.
Nowadays, whenever I browse Netflix, I feel like that Bruce Springsteen song, "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)."[a] Sure, there are lots of choices, but they all kinda suck. I find myself wondering, why? The OP weaves an insightful, opinionated narrative that explains how we got here. Much of it rings true. This passage, in particular struck a chord with me:
> Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” [...] One tag among Netflix’s thirty-six thousand microgenres offers a suitable name for this kind of dreck: “casual viewing.” Usually reserved for breezy network sitcoms, reality television, and nature documentaries, the category describes much of Netflix’s film catalog — movies that go down best when you’re not paying attention, or as the Hollywood Reporter recently described Atlas, a 2024 sci-fi film starring Jennifer Lopez, “another Netflix movie made to half-watch while doing laundry.”
In other words, people like me, who want to focus on and experience a great film or series, are no longer the target audience.
Apparently, there's no money in targeting people who want to pay attention.
---
[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/57_Channels_(And_Nothin'_On)
TV was also like this though. It's one of the first things you learn in a 20th century media class. Early TV shows were adapted from radio play scripts, and later written by radio play scriptwriters moving into the new format. That structure and its conventions stayed strongly influential right up until the end of prominent network TV shows.
TV show creators understood and planned for people watching their shows in a variety of environments, with varying degrees and kinds of attention. A lot of what made for example X-files and Sopranos compelling was a willingness to break this convention, so it was still firmly in place by the late 90s.
You could also maybe reasonably claim that all TV shows before those were bad as well. But then you need to view netflix as reverting to the norm rather than being a novel travesty. We are simply exiting a 20 year anomaly where TV was good.
I'm not quite making that argument here though. I think there was good TV before the 90s, so I think this is a constraint on the form that good creators can work through and still make compelling art. Why netflix can't is an interesting question but I think this avenue is a dead end for understanding it.
My completely unscientific impression is that other services are making the effort to produce high-quality films and series, including Apple TV+ (Slow Horses, Silo, For All Mankind, Foundation, etc.), Max/HBO (Barry, Curb Your Enthusiasm, GoT, The Last of Us, etc.), FX (Shogun, The Bear, The Old Man, Fargo, etc.), and AMC (Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Night Manager, etc.). Whatever you think of the quality of shows in those services, they at least show genuine effort to make things that don't suck.
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Well, people that want to half-watch TV deserve stuff made for them too.
Netflix has shows made for really watching too. I don't know if they are rebellious acts from their makers, brought without an option, or actual choices, but Netflix does have them.
My impression is that Netflix cornered themselves into the same AAA race to death that the major movie studios are in. Everything is too expensive, so they can't accept risks, so nothing is really good (nor really bad). Micromanaging is just one more visible consequence of that, between lots and lots that stay hidden but are as important to the final result.
> Well, people that want to half-watch TV deserve stuff made for them too.
The Muzak-ification of film?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzak
> Well, people that want to half-watch TV deserve stuff made for them too.
What? No they don't. Film and television are visual art forms that are meant to be viewed and given the appropriate attention. There's already plenty of mediocre television out there you can use as background noise; we don't need to intentionally lower the bar for the media that's being made. As the article mentions, Netflix has already played its part in ruining the job landscape for writers and actors. I guess they see a need to play their part in devaluing the work that remains.
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No. No they don't.
The reality is the average person's time to watch TV/unwind is also going to be spent doing chores. This was always the case. When I was a kid, we watched shows that could be followed along by whoever was cooking dinner/doing dishes as well as the people sitting in front of the set. People don't have all that much extra free time.
Movies were an experience because... they were an experience. They weren't constantly on. They were a rare treat, not something consumed nightly.
It’s very true this drives watch time, but I doubt it drives subscriptions.
My guess is some internal metrics favor watch time over quality and is just quietly killing their business.
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There is money in that, it just fundamentally doesn't make sense to build a subscription service for it. There are still good movies being made, but they cost money to make, and someone needs to pay for them. They cannot exist if they get thrown on a streaming service where they'll earn a pittance. HN seems to believe they have a fundamental right to watch all the movies and tv ever made for $8/month, but that was only possible due to very special circumstances that have since evaporated.
Netflix is slowly succumbing to it's inevitable fate of turning into daytime tv. That's the only space where it makes sense economically to pay a fixed subscription fee regardless of how much you consume. If you want an all you can eat buffet, don't act surprised when it isn't michelin starred.
There is still good cinema and television, it's just shockingly difficult to find.
The first person who figures out how to sort the wheat from the chaff and does so with no interior motive could be a millionaire immediately.
This App Store review makes Mubi sound promising:
"MUBI IS TERRIBLE! *---- 6y ago • Nick2866 MUBI is terrible there's no good action or horror films it's crazy because almost all of the movies on the app I haven't even heard of and I'm a big movie buff. So just don't waste your time with MUBI just get Netflix or amazon prime."
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"could be a millionnaire immediately" is precisely the kind of techbro ulterior motive that creates these situations in the first place.
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You mean like the $ million given for the Netflix Prize ?
https://m.slashdot.org/story/122585
*ulterior motive
I mean it is also somewhat dependent on how much bandwidth you have free while doing laundry, some people can handle watching the complicated stuff while doing their daily tasks and I guess those people also hate these half-assed shows.
I think it depends on which kind of bandwidth we're talking about. I can follow a talk-show no problem while doing laundry / the dishes / vacuum / iron. Keyword being "talk". But I can't look at the screen too often.
So, watching a sitcom or similar where the characters' body language or facial expressions are important is an exercise in frustration.
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If I'm sitting down to watch something new, I'm going to give it my full attention and therefore want it to be awesome. If I just want background noise then I can just put on anything that I've already seen for its mood. I can't fathom wanting to be only half paying attention to new things. It feels like living very indeliberately. Is the point just to be able to say you've seen such and such new show, or what?
Netflix thought they could take on Hollywood and beat them at their own film game. But in the process they realized that it’s not actually a game worth winning, and more importantly, that YouTube and TikTok are their real competition, not Hollywood.
The future of most media is video-based, and I think Netflix probably understands this and is trying to get away from the historical model as movies you watch online and closer to the optimized video ecosystem of YouTube. The latter is more relevant in a world with video-playing devices everywhere.
> YouTube and TikTok are their real competition
Even in real-time... My wife will literally watch Facebook Reels on her phone while we sit on the couch at night to watch something on Netflix together.
Anyway, I was thinking about this too when the article talked about the data from Amazon showing that viewers preferred stuff from the 90s and 00s over their newly produced content: How are Netflix, Amazon, etc. doing with young adults? If the audience is all Millennials and Gen-X folks, because Gen-Z folks are exclusively watching short-form video instead, it would make sense that stuff from the 90s and 00s would be the most popular. Like I think this is a well-established phenomenon with music, where a person's lifelong preferences will be fixed on whatever they first heard during their high school or college years. I will absolutely pay for a streaming service that gives me access to all the movies and TV series from, say, 1990-2015 and never adds any new content.
> My wife will literally watch Facebook Reels on her phone while we sit on the couch at night to watch something on Netflix together.
HN spans this incredible gamut from “Turing-award winner chimes in on their field of expertise” to stuff like this that just puts you in awe how pozzed some people are.
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> Netflix thought they could take on Hollywood and beat them at their own film game.
Inadvertently an Inglorious Basterds paraphrase?
_Brief him._
Can you please explain what this optimized video ecosystem of youtube is actually optimized for other than clickbait? Maybe it works for others but i fell into this for a while and now i look at it in disgust.
Clickbait is a part of it, sure. But there are also many other content types that I wouldn’t characterize that way: 3+ hour long video podcasts, ambient music channels, niche indie musicians, short entertaining videos like Mr. Beast, etc. YouTube is increasingly a huge tent that includes tons of different kinds of content.
My point was more that YouTube is increasingly designed for a world in which people have their devices everywhere and jump in and out of watching videos.
Netflix isn’t, because it is still using the “old” model of sitting down for 30-200 minutes to watch a movie.
I’m not saying that the film model is bad or somehow worth getting rid of - I love films myself - just that it’s probably not the future of video content for most people.
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Youtube still has massive variety and quality of production. I've largely been able to avoid the clickbait-optimized videos by curating my subscriptions. I've found about a dozen creators who's content I regularly watch. Many of them create YouTube videos as secondary to some other hobby or profession. Most are trending towards the clickbait thumbnail, but few are actually changing their content in that direction.
YouTube is optimized for unattended children.
I think this also applies: https://medium.com/luminasticity/netflix-the-crap-you-put-up...
>A signature characteristic of Netflix’s strategy over the years has been to define genres into microscopic sub-genres and develop content on very specific customer likes — for example “Urban teen geniuses who invent time travel”
>There is an unfortunate issue with making things bad and to somebody’s taste — the person whose taste you are courting may be happy to be courted but if all they ever get of things to their taste are things that are bad representations of that taste they may come to sour on what they once loved.
and that is I think what happens a lot with Netflix, they produce approximations of the thing you love, and by doing this bad half-assed version with the wires sticking out and everything, in the end you don't love that thing anymore.
Netflix in the hunt for quick engagement eats the seed corn of fandom, and are left with nothing to build on.
I love apocalyptic movies (even ones that are not considered great) but the few I started watching on Netflix were really bad.
Can you name a good apocalyptic movie? I'm really struggling to come up with one. Twister, sort of, and that's neither good nor apocalyptic really.
Edit: Twelve Monkeys. I think that counts.
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Jokes on them, my thing is bad movies.
most bad movies will be unintentionally hilarious, Netflix' bad movies will be intentionally worth a chuckle or two.
Oof. What's next? Announcing what they see? What items are around them and how they could interact with them (or not)?
Like "Protagonist: I walked north and I entered a mysterious room, full of different bottles. They don't look like I could use them, but maybe I should take one with me?"
The Mandalorian, oh my lawd, the dialogue was just narrative explanation. Just terrible.
Terribly terrible.
Covering the main character's face in a helmet isn't great for drama.
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If people aren’t watching the show why not just make it a radio play?
I think because people are 'watching' in a situation where twenty years ago they'd've put the radio on but now they default to 'fire something up on Netflix' and so Netflix wants to make things amenable to those customers.
I'm not sure how I feel about this, but it does at least make sense in terms of why Netflix are doing so.
That's not how (good) radio plays work either. Through good use of dialog and foley, they could avoid such ham-handed writing.
LOOK BOTTLES
THE WIZARD WENT WEST THROUGH THE DOOR AND INTO THE GARDEN
We're converging on audiobooks
Podcasts, brrrrr
Audio works on the subway, on the bike, while riding a bike, cleaning the house and the big one, driving a car. To get into a situation where you can both watch and listen is much rarer.
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Kill Jester!
"I see you have Chekhov's gun hanging on your wall"
Or The Young Ones equivalent, "I'd best conceal this sticky bun by placing it precariously on the edge of this box. [Dun dun duuun]"
"Let me show you my beautiful MacGuffin suitcase, it's the latest trend. "
"I see you have the words 'Kaiser' and 'Soasay' on the wall... what a coincidence, that was the name of the boss!"
My wife considers “show, don’t tell” shows confusing and just bad. More dialogue, better the show.
She chooses to watch shows in which characters address each other with full names and say their intentions out loud. My brain hurts.
One of my favourite films is called Upstream Color.
Below is not a spoiler, but I like to avoid reading anything about a good film before watching it, and I recommend to do the same here. You like it or you don’t.
This film has no staged speech that tries to explain anything. The little dialogue that it has is what would naturally arise given the situation. For the same reason, most characters have no names or no full names. No situation in which they would formally introduce themselves takes place.
Do I fully understand it immediately, or even after watching it once? No. Does it mean I dislike it? Rather the opposite. Actually, I enjoy being treated as an adult who can make conclusions without having given any pre-digested explanation.
If you enjoyed Upstream Color, I highly recommend checking out Carruth's previous project, Primer, if you haven't already. It's a movie that takes a dozen rewatches to make full sense of. Natural dialogue, organic cinematography, and no hand-holding.
Upstream Color was a great movie as well, it's a shame what happened between Carruth and Amy Seimetz.
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Strong agree: Upstream Color is poetry
Stanley Kubrick did something similar in `2001: A Space Odyssey`. In a scene where staff were being transported in a taxi... on the moon... 100% of the dialog is meaningless. They're discussing the merits of this or that sandwich, not how wonderful the Earth looks from space, or overcoming technical challenges.
It's so refreshing to be living in an environment vs being spoon fed.
Even better is very old or even silent movies ("M" is fantastic: modern-ish thriller from 1931 where sound is a character; Metropolis)
Also dialog-less movies: `Koyaanisqatsi` is incredibly beautiful and has a specific plot, even if there's no understandable dialog nor words.
In theaters _right now_ is `Flow`. No dialog, and no _human_ characters! It's all animated cats and dogs and other animals. It's startling how directly the characters transmit their goals and agenda and emotions.
I enjoyed Upstream Color a lot as well, but yeah it's certainly not for everyone.
And agreed on not being spoon fed.
A prime example to the contrary was when in the Joker, spoiler alert, they had a recap showing his delusion. The movie would have been so much better if they had cut that entire segment, and just have the neighbor female act all surprised and weirded out like she did when he entered the apartment.
> Oh help me! Oh, help me! My life is in danger!
> Oh help me! Oh, help me! My life is in danger!
> The venomous monster is drawing upon me
> And I can’t escape him.
> How near is his bite,
> With teeth sharp and white!
> Oh gods above!
> Why can’t you hear my mortal cry?
> Destroy the beast or I will die!
> Or surely, I will die!
The opening lines to The Magic Flute (which continues in a similarly expository tone for the duration). Seems like there have always been scripts which were easy to understand while also staring at your phone, though that doesn't stop the ushers at English National Opera getting narky at you if you try!
Man. I like that you’re bringing opera into the conversation, but I don’t think comparing two different mediums that way is useful.
Die Zauberflote is easy to understand because it’s a fairly light work, and you’re meant to be staring at the lavish staging and costumes. The performers narrate the action because that’s the convention for the genre - it’s a sung story. They break into more conventional dialogue for the recitative sections (a tradition that went out of style with Verdi.)
> They break into more conventional dialogue for the recitative sections (a tradition that went out of style with Verdi.)
The comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan were contemporary to Verdi's work and still feature lots of dialogue, so they are very approachable. You still won't be able to use your phone, though - you'll be too busy laughing!
My recommendation for an introduction would be the 1982 Canadian production of The Mikado by the Stratford Festival. It is currently available in its entirety on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbpUzCFCy_8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK6y6n98O00
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In Mozart's time what was happening on the stage was a footnote to eating, talking, flirting, seeing, and being seen. Opera was a social event with background music.
Treating art with reverence and rapt attention didn't get to be a thing until the late Enlightenment. Before that the kind of art you took seriously was religious, and the idea that you were supposed to reverent about it could be considered a carry-over from religion.
Talking over things and not paying attention is almost the default. Sitting still and concentrating on a performance of any kind is a relatively recent idea.
None of this makes the crapification of Netflix (and related trends in other media touched by streaming and tech) any less annoying.
Really enjoy this curveball you threw, casts this whole conversation in a new light doesn't it?
It is true that a lot of old plays, operas etc do exactly what Netflix is accused of here. What is a monologue? Was Shakespeare guilty of creating casual viewing content when he wrote Hamlet's monologue? Shouldn't he have just showed Hamlet's ambivalence???
Enough of this and you get a Wagner reinventing the medium altogether.
Those lines are from a song, and a significant part of the audience at the time wouldn't be listening in their native language; it's not really a fair comparison.
? It was written in German for the German-speaking audience in Vienna.
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I was just wondering a bit about this. I read some of your comments here and, as I sometimes do, writing and discarding before submitting my response.
But it just occurred to me... Maybe Netflix should do half-movies next. The movie is designed to be appealing on the menu, to have a good but not too engrossing first 30 minutes, and then start ramping down the budget drastically for the remaining of the film, which -it seems- people aren't watching any more. Like don't bother with FX, then just don't bother with actors, then just insert shots of the storyboard or don't even bother with the story at all and just insert stock video, etc. Maybe at the end add a narrated summary of what happened (or didn't happen).
This was actually pioneered by Bruce Willis. He would get paid a lot to show up in a couple of introductory scenes for really low budget films. They'd put his face on the movie poster, they'd pay him like half the budget of the film, then he'd move on to the next one.
(Unfortunately, it turns out he was struggling with dementia and it seems he was trying to cash out before he couldn't act at all)
I watched some of those movies - my god they were terrible. I'm pretty sure Willis filmed his parts in front of a green screen because he was never in shot with other actors.
Knowing the reason why though, I don't blame or fault him for doing it.
sounds like the nonsense at the end of 2001.
This article is a fascinating explication of the core reason that, without any respect paid to my millennial nostalgia at all, we need to preserve the physical cinema. The digital "attention economy" introduces such immense layers of abstraction between the audience and the business that none of us should feel confident that it will allow us to express our tastes for entertainment with anything close to intentionality. If we want to keep getting any modicum of entertainment that we actually like -- what a high bar! -- then we need to maintain our right to vote audibly with our dollars.
In my experience, when technology advances, and the original thing to be replaced still holds some value, it doesn't continue existing as such, it may survive binging on momentum, habits or nostalgia.
But then it splits, the useless aspect discarded and the useful merged with other old and new fragments, in combinations tried by the experimental startup ecosystem.
In the end we may have for example entertainment venues for both playing arcades and watching movies and theater plays, perhaps with dinner for example. (We already have this actually.)
One nice thing about the movie theater, is that nobody can pull up her phone in the middle and start scrolling through stuff. And then we have to rewind later. Not pointing fingers here. :)
I remember going to the physical cinema one day to see "Air". I didn't think the movie was that great, and I wonder if the "Amazon Studios" logo at the beginning made me more critical.
It’s just slop par excellence. I’ve been watching a number of movies with my wife over Christmas. Everything is so bland, repetitive and ‘design by committee’. It goes further than merely announcing what the characters are doing (in that new wannabe Die Hard movie we hear that they are expecting a baby three times in 5 minutes), you just know there are certain metrics used for every genre of movie accounting for every minute: “if it’s an action film with no action scene in the first 10 minutes then the audience loses interest”. They are all so soulless.
And this is fine when you realise that Netflix replaces direct-to-video movies and not that of cinema, as much as they refuse to admit.
> And this is fine when you realise that Netflix replaces direct-to-video movies and not that of cinema, as much as they refuse to admit.
This.
Netflix does have good productions. But they are often surrounded by the sea of mediocracy.
Stopped subscribing to N over a year ago and haven't missed it a single bit.
> Netflix does have good productions. But they are often surrounded by the sea of mediocracy.
Isn't it true for the whole film industry? Among the highest grossing movies from recent years, how many follow a different approach?
It’s amazing the checkboxes that stick out: having a dog for no reason for dog lovers; the relationship slop that appeals to women; the violence and sex slop to appeal to men.
I'm curious if heavy pornography consumption has become so prevalent that men care less about getting that thrill from feature films.
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The new Superman movie seems to be built on such checkboxes.
McDonaldization - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwvL6XDq0BQ
I think the best modern productions are now the series rather than the films as there's so much more time to tell the story and have room for characters to breathe etc.
Just look at the artistry and story-telling skill displayed in both seasons of Arcane - there's so many brilliant examples of "showing, not telling" on display there.
As a counter-example, I enjoyed watching the "Flow" film the other day - an animated film about a cat (and other animals) trying to survive a flood and there's not even a single word in the entire film.
Maybe 5 years ago but can't say I agree any more. Netflix in particular stretches 2-hour scripts into 10-hour limited series. I'm trying to watch Black Doves right now and continually get bored at how much exposition and background there is. There was clearly a tight, fun script in there somewhere before the committee performed surgery on it. I don't need everything explored and explained to death, give me something with rhythm instead.
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I don't doubt that, but from what I've been reading Arcane is notorious for having songs in the background exactly describing the action onscreen.
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Couldn't disagree more about Arcane, I thought it was the usual pedestrian writing and mish-mash of tired tropes we've come to expect from mainstream productions.
A friend was pushing me to give it a try, a friend who likes Marvel, and the Miles Morales spiderman film, who plays League, who was excited by Baldur's Gate, etc etc. I tried to say "no, there is no chance of me enjoying that, it'll be the usual drivel", but they insisted it was really good.
And I watched, against my better judgment, saying to myself: "come on now, give it a serious try, be open-minded". To no avail!
I recall the scene where they'd the punk or alternative or "underground" live music in the bar in the underworld place, in the 3rd or 4th episode, and that being the final straw for me. A viler and more disharmonious appropriation of dissident culture I've never had the displeasure of sitting through.
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If you’re curious to try arthouse/international cinema, give Mubi a try. There is less to choose from, but the selection rotates.
Mubi has some great cinema! Definitely more of the sort of cinema you’d see at a film festival than mainstream.
I wish they'd fix their Chromecast support (they apparently only support recent versions).
This is precisely the tepid, data-driven "future of entertainment" that the genAI boosters are desperately trying to sell. Remember the hubbub about that ridiculous AI Seinfeld stream? Turgid LLM nonsense, but hyped to the skies by people who presumably haven't watched Seinfeld and have no clue what makes it a funny and iconic sitcom.
What I hate is that the slop killed the netflix DVD service, where I used to get the "real" movies to watch.
It sort of feels like living in a town that is getting crowded and the infrastructure isn't being maintained. Then one day they decide to change all the traffic lights to stop signs and everyone goes the same slow speed.
Honestly I can't blame them if current audiences have the attention span of a puppy golden retriever
The one use case I wanted to see for AI is "tunable" contexts for videos. If this is your first time, watch the whole thing but if you need less context just edit it so it skips over the obvious parts
I would love to see movies come in many different flavours. Long, short, dial up the violence, or down, etc etc.
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That is actually an idea for AI in movie making that I could get behind.
I don't think it's possible yet by a very very very long shot but if it were it would be a better idea than "write your own movies".
My stories probably suck outside a captive, very young and related "audience" which is fine because I'm not script writer.
But I would pay quite a lot of money for a "get to the point" button.
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Let's be real here look at the movies that make a billion at the box office. It's never the highbrow stuff.
Highbrow and soulless are different axes. Disney may be a giant soulless company, but they do employ actual artists who sometimes make decent movies which in general do vastly better at the box office.
Handing a talented team enough time, freedom, and budget doesn’t guarantee success but it’s definitely a prerequisite for success.
I'm more interested in movies that make money through the long tail of DVD sales. Box office numbers have always favoured blockbusters. The long tail content tends to be better, less one-size-fits-all, and allows room for multiple films trying different things, across different genres. That era appears to be over however.
Yet you watch these instead of the ones with "soul".
Seems to me they provide what the market wants.
My wife chooses the Netflix ones unfortunately. What ones are good?
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You can't do 100% "show, don't tell" unless your movie is 15 hours long. It's always about balance, and it's probably one of the hardest challenges in scriptwriting and directing. Netflix movies have always leaned more toward the "tell" side, and this feels like an open acknowledgment of it.
Small digression: Turkish series have been doing an extreme version of "telling" for ages. I've been watching the cheesiest ones with my wife as she uses them to unwind (I do the same with YouTube videos). In these shows, characters don't just say what they're doing, they also explain how they feel, what they plan to do, and how they'll feel afterward. It's oddly addictive, like watching a bad movie on purpose, and somehow, you end up completely hooked.
>Small digression: Turkish series have been doing an extreme version of "telling" for ages.
From a european perspective that is what US TV series and movies have been doing for 4 decades already as well as following the very same mechanics. In most shows you can tell in advance what is about to happen next at any point in time this is embarassing. I used to think US people had to be super dumb for that reason then realized they gradually started doing it on euro stuff. I guess we just use the lowest baseline possible because the people who spend the most time passively i front of a screen happen to also be the dumbest ones.
> You can't do 100% "show, don't tell" unless your movie is 15 hours long
You most certainly can, though it relies on trusting the audience.
Flow (2024)
Sasquatch Sunset (2024)
Hundreds of Beavers (2022)
> Hundreds of Beavers (2022)
Hundreds of Beavers! So pleased that someone else here has seen this awesome film
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It also probably depends on having a generally undistracted audience which you probably don't have a lot of the time especially outside of a movie theater.
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I know precisely what you mean. I randomly stumbled upon the anime Solo Leveling, which also follows the 100% tell style. The main character reads out everything, narrates every scene, and explains his own thought processes and emotions at every step.
It is weirdly addicting, perhaps only because I'm bored of the show-don't-tell style and it's refreshing to see something going contrary to that.
Just to note, Solo Leveling is Korean.
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Some Turkish TV soap operas have 3 hour long episodes which cost $1 mil each. And are really well acted, with very good drama, humor, etc
Honestly, the more I read, the less I appreciate the "show, don't tell" rule/guideline/mantra.
Streaming with a subscription is fundamentally a bad thing for cinema, especially when combined with the streamer also producing content. That's because it shifts the optimized variable from quality of individual movie/show to maximum time spent on platform. But the latter can accept the lowering of the quality of individual movies, so you get a regression towards average instead of a striving for excellence.
Never paid for a subscription and never will, precisely because I want to pay for individual movies to reward them for being good movies.
This is less of a streaming subscription issue as much as a Netflix issue. Netflix doesn't have to use the metric of "time spent on platform". Their goal seems to want to be the everything-streaming-app and are willing to produce mountains of swill to get there.
For example with their TV-style content, Netflix starting churning out tons of cheaply produced baking and cooking competition shows during the pandemic -- probably due to the popularity of "The Great British Bake-off". Whatever they were going for, they didn't capture the magic of it, nor did their cooking competition shows capture the magic of "Iron Chef" despite the blatant struggle to do so.
Compare this to HBO. HBO has been subscription far before streaming was a thing and they have an excellent track record of regularly producing quality series with a subscription model.
In HBO's TV era post-2000, you have The Wire, Sopranos, Entourage, Boardwalk Empire, among many others. As things moved to streaming (2012-), there's Game of Thrones, Succession, Barry, Chernobyl, Last of Us, Veep, etc. It seems, on average, every year there's a new must-watch series that ranks well with both critics and viewers.
While there's skepticism about HBO maintaining it's legacy after the Discovery-Warner merger, Apple TV seems to be filling HBO's shoes.
Perhaps Netflix ought to consider cutting back the number of series it's churning out.
> maximum time spent on platform
Not even that, they optimize for acquiring and keeping subscribers. They gain nothing from you watching movies, it is just costing them bandwidth, at least on their ad-free plan, which was the only option until recently. It is completely different from YouTube and TikTok, or even oldschool TV, which get most of their revenue from ads.
They need a few good ones to attract new subscribers, and they do. Stranger Things and Squid Games are really good. For the rest, they just need enough content for people not to cancel their subscriptions.
If you want to encourage quality production, just subscribe for the month they are doing something good, ad-free of course, then unsubscribe. Many people are doing that, and maybe that's what it takes to get them to change their strategy. Maybe not for the better though.
>If you want to encourage quality production, just subscribe for the month they are doing something good, ad-free of course, then unsubscribe.
Most people are probably lazier and less organized than you give them credit for. If subscribe/unsubscribe cycles were really that prevalent I think you'd see a lot more incentives to sign up for, say, annual subscriptions.
A lot of people basically use TV as background and, especially if they don't have live TV, that means a lot of streaming content.
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It’s supposedly ragebait but it’s not actually bad.
- Netflix produces the casual viewing content next to other niches, and just serves this as well. The other stuff doesn’t go away, this is in addition.
- This is something you can put on during long car trips, no need to focus on the screen, just focus on the audio, and it’s easier to listen to than an audiobook (which is just a narrated actual book).
- It has nothing to do with “endumbification”, even it it appears to be framed that way. People are still smart.
> The other stuff doesn’t go away, this is in addition.
They could add a tag saying if you need to pay attention to the show or not. Currently it isn't very different from the other stuff just disappearing.
This is likely being blown way out of proportion. I'm not defending this behavior but the article listed exactly one example: Irish Wish. I'm sure it appeals to a certain audience but it's not what I, personally, would call peak cinema.
My guess is that this guidance was given to a specific writer or person in charge of a specific genre.
Exactly. The one example they use gets a 5.2 on IMDB and 42% on rotten tomatoes.
Not all movies are high art, nor should they be. It’s for a certain audience. We’ve had crappy made-for-TV movies since long before streaming and it hasn’t been the death of cinema.
42% means that some professional critics considered it “fresh.” That’s scary to me.
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The article listed lots of examples... It's an exceptionally long article so you'd be forgiven for missing them, but there are definitely many examples given.
In fact that's actually what my main complaint is about this article - the point it's making is a good one but the article is probably 5x longer than it needs to be.
The original link was https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2024/12/27/netflix-tells-wr... which is probably what your parent is commenting on. Some people complained that that's basically a blogspam article that recycles n+1's article, others disagreed and argued there's value in a focused short article - it seems like mods agree with the complainers and changed the link silently to the current one.
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I didn’t and never will watch that fillum. But jaysus did the trailer make me laugh so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.
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At least we know Netflix first party content is not for anyone who wants a good watch. But rather for background noise and moving pictures.
I think this shift towards "casual viewing" speaks volumes about where mainstream streaming is headed, but it also highlights an opportunity for something new. Platforms like Netflix focusing on easily digestible, multitask-friendly content might work for maintaining subscribers, but it feels like a step away from respecting storytelling as an art form.
This is exactly why I founded IZSIT, a streaming platform designed to do the opposite. Instead of pumping out content to fill the background, we’re championing stories that demand your full attention and actually entertain you. IZSIT is all about giving independent creators the tools to tell powerful, boundary-pushing stories using AI.
Streaming doesn’t have to be a race to the bottom. Platforms like Apple TV+ and HBO are showing that high-quality content still has a place, and IZSIT is joining that fight by putting AI artistry and storytelling first.
We won't settle for "endumbification." Film and TV should inspire, challenge, and resonate—not just fill silence while we do chores. If you’re tired of scrolling through mediocrity, keep an eye out for what we’re building at IZSIT
www.izsit.com for AI film and series
I find it very stressful when watching Netflix because I don't know what is going to happen. Maybe they could include the full story line at the start of the series, so I can read it ahead of time and remove all suspense and surprise.
A number is enough. You just need know which of the 5 movie templates they used.
Five? I thought there was eight.
Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, Mystery, and Rebirth.
Don't worry, they have got the perfect solution for you. That cool series you just heard about but haven't had time to watch yet? It's cancelled. That's it. That's the story. Now you don't even need to watch it!
I sort of unironically agree with this. Time is limited and most tv and films don’t fit my criteria for “worth watching”, so I will read the plot synopsis for media that I think may be terrible, so I don’t have to find out later.
I do constantly have to tap out with the stress in many programs, takes me ages to pick up and finish programs. Many people need tension to drive a narrative forwards, but for me it often gets too much.
I remember 80 Days Around the world where peril of missing a connection gave it tension; ever since documentaries seem to have used this more and more.
The BBC Horizon episode on Voyager passing Jupiter was so inspirational to me, but now we just being ridden by TV personalities.
The irony of your comment is that Horizon famously went through a phase of making programmes that were all about doom a while ago. Asteroids hitting the Earth, Global warming, food supply collapse, tsunamis, volcanos, etc - and all with portentious narration.
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They should bring back the prologue and the chorus.
And the intermission! They should call it "popcorn time"
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True, but plots are only half the story. I'd be very grateful if they could give me some sample scenes (ideally automatically, so I don't have to go through the trouble of starting them every single time). I mean, how do people even decide whether a movie might be for them without having first inspected a good portion of it?
It's weird to me how the first two replies to this comment completely missed the sarcasm.
Do we need to start using the "/s" tag here like became necessary on reddit? I don't like the thought, but maybe it's a different issue in this case-- more of a non-native-English or on-the-spectrum thing than an inexperienced teenager thing? I hope so.
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> I mean, how do people even decide whether a movie might be for them without having first inspected a good portion of it?
You can read review of journalists you usually agree with, ask for advice from your friends, check if you liked other movies from the same filmmaker, check if the movie has been displayed in your favorite movie theater or in the movie theater you dislike (but okay, won't work for netflix movies).
> I mean, how do people even decide whether a movie might be for them without having first inspected a good portion of it?
You’re describing watching the movie. Which is what most people do. If the movie is terrible then you just stop watching it, or if you finish it you can then decide if you liked it or not.
That's where piracy shines. You can scrub freely. You can watch 2 seasons in an afternoon just skimming.
You can award the content exactly as much time as it deserves according to you.
You should ask an AI to watch it for you
You kid, but I find myself doing this often for long-form videos on YouTube with Gemini / NotebookLM. Works nicely.
Now you're really on to something - someone give this person some VC money, please!
I just wish they wouldn‘t so disproportionally often drift off into extreme sillyness (That, I can take.) or extreme brutality and gore (That, I find revolting. When did showing so much splatter on a regular basis start being considered good film making outside of the occasional Tarantino?).
Can you quickly elaborate on the media sources where you do know what is going to happen?
The GP was being sarcastic.
Wait. They’re turning movies into audio books. That’s a good first step.
Next to save bandwidth they’ll drop video and just display text on screen.
I often wonder about how much electricity is wasted (recording, encoding, transmitting, decoding) on videos where the video itself seems to add no actual value, and it would be just as effective as audio-only (or text-only) content instead. A study of YouTube videos in 2022 found that more than 15% of "videos" (i.e. billions of videos) contained only still images[1]. My wife watches a ton of short-form video (and in turn shows me the ones that she likes) and I'm baffled by how many are just scrolling text with people dancing in the background, or people holding up signs, or someone just talking into the camera (often sitting in the driver's seat of a car).
[1] https://journalqd.org/article/view/4066
Any video streaming application worth its salt will stop downloading the video track if the user backgrounds the application, turns off the screen or otherwise makes the video surface not visible, so there's no bandwidth wasted in that particular scenario. This is of course somewhat diminished by people not actually turning the video off in many scenarios - and I'm not even sure Netflix supports backgrounded playback, for that matter.
Additionally, videos of still images compress remarkably well, to the point where the image itself is largely the same size as the video track.
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> A study of YouTube videos in 2022 found that more than 15% of "videos" (i.e. billions of videos) contained only still images
Talking heads are equivalent to (badly written) text only content too.
This is such a weird article. It reads like a 3000 word lament for the death of video stores, down to a coda about how Reed Hastings fabricated the story about the Apollo 13 late fee that triggered him to start Netflix in the first place. Why would I care if that story was false? Video stores were bad. Multi-month theatrical release windows are bad. The studio system was bad. Things are better now.
In all these kinds of stories that revolve around how much crap there is on Netflix, there are two things you have to keep in mind:
* Netflix didn't invent shlock and probably didn't even accelerate it; if anything, Netflix probably reversed the trend away from scripted and towards "reality".
* What distinguishes Netflix more than anything else is its efficiency getting content to viewers, which means that there's more of everything on Netflix, and in its catalog of originals. There's more schlock, which is very noticeable, and, compared to pre-Netflix-streaming outputs of places like HBO, also more solid original films. But 99% of everything is crap, so if the only way you have to engage with the Netflix catalog is browsing their interface, that's most of what you're going to see.
I didn't read it that way at all. It felt to me like the author thought video stores were terrible too, just in a different way, and the main point of the article was the different incentive structures for the pre-streaming movie companies (high ticket sales and people watching the entire movie without distractions) vs Netflix (recurring monthly revenue from people who are just satisifed enough not to cancel their subscription). They're both focused on numbers, but the meanings of those numbers are very different. (I'm not sure I entirely agree with that - I think the pre-streaming movie companies were hyper-focused on the bottom line too - but I think that's what the article was trying to say).
I think you just wandered into today's HN "Good Old Days" article. It's just nostalgia vibes, not really a space meant for critical thinking.
I remember very fondly 2 video stores from my youth, mostly because of the knowledge (and frankly very nerdy) employees.
My breadth of viewing and thus my subsequent taste was extremely impacted by them. And I e yet to find an algorithmic equivalent (nor music or books).
But this is just a bias. Most of the video stores I ever used were garbage.
I presume soda fountains were the same but that didn’t stop my grandfather from bemoaning the loss of the soda jerk.
See I'm not even saying all video stores are without value, just that there is virtually nobody who would prefer to have to schlep to a retail outlet every time they want to see a different movie, which was literally how things worked until streaming happened.
I am convinced that if we design media to be consumed while doing something else it will ultimately be to the detriment of the media itself. What will happen next is netflix shifting even more towards reality-tv and then end up just like MTV.
So the day, Netflix became the villain they were trying to fight, finally came.
I do like trading stocks but it does seem like it's the #1 reason for companies to turn into shit.
I suspect this appeals to two types of audiences. The first being people who play on their phones instead of watching the show. You can blame phone addiction and ADHD type behaviors for this but it feels like a slippery slope of stupidity in the face of good writing/acting as opposed to constant cartoon like action. (the wife and I do it too).
The second set of audience this would appeal to are people with autism. Sitcoms have always done this. Some people really need to be told when to laugh and what people are thinking because they have no ability to read body language, zero empathy, and cannot read the room. Once you encounter it regularly it’s mind blowing and that a significant portion of the population commonly lives with this sort of mental blindness.
A common misconception. Autistic people have emotions and empathy- perhaps more than other people. They just keep it inside. Also no Seinfeld is not funny.
So, autism is a spectrum of common disorders that vary from person to person. Therefore people are not diagnosed on the basis of noted disorders but instead on their performance in a battery of common performance tests.
As for empathy, it too varies from person to person. It is possible, though unlikely, to score high in empathy and yet utterly fail all the rest of the performance criteria. One of my coworkers with autistic children may or may not have autism themselves but does demonstrate high empathy.
In my experience people with autism tend to score remarkably low in empathy with some people even having absolutely no empathy at all. That is why many people with autism seem socially weird or have trouble reading a room. For people with high empathy these observations of low empathy in others is most obvious potential indicator of autism.
While very few people score high in empathy it’s equally rare to absolutely have no empathy at all. It is such a striking disadvantage as to be a major disorder. It is severe enough that it looks like sociopathy minus an informed intent. It’s a processing void. That void is further obviated by an equally diminished introspective capability in that reading one’s self is the same skill as reading others.
Also, empathy is not in any way related the quantity of emotions people display. A person can be both selfish and highly emotional.
As someone with autism, the second paragraph is entirely incorrect.
I have a child with autism and coworkers with autistic children and in-laws with autism. That second paragraph was the polite and mild description.
Entirely?
They're using the word empathy wrong but trouble reading emotion sounds accurate enough.
I watch/listen to stuff when I do chores at home. If I am going to iron 30 things or knead a dough for 15 minutes, then it's nice to have some entertainment while doing it, even if I can't focus on it all the time. Not sure I fit into any of the two audiences you mention.
By the downvote I suspect you find this description of inattention, or chores, offensive. How is that, the complete inability to focus and the emotional hostility you imagine about it, not a form of ADHD?
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I just hope they don't butcher 5th season of Stranger Things, after that they can rot in piss.
Definitely not surprising. The quality of Netflix originals is on a decline for years. I see this label as a warning nowadays. There are enough good quality movies and shows. My life is too short to spend it with mediocre entertainment that leaves no lasting impression or thoughts. I don't need to pass time I want to make most out of it.
Agreed, previously, seeing Netflix Original would be like seeing a Lexus in a sea of Toyotas. Now I just think "store brand".
I feel like the "Netflix original" label started to decline around the time they started disingenuously applying it to things that they merely distributed, not created. That was a sign that the company was willing to water down its brand quality to get people to watch stuff.
I don’t remember the program but in the years of broadcast TV there was a writer on a nightly talk show explaining why all TV episodes were so bland. He said that he wrote an intricate plot for TV which was rejected because the show had to be watchable by someone doing this dishes. So this isn’t a phenomenon new to the Netflix era.
Many years ago when I was in college, one of my professors wrote a Star Trek Next Generation script, and she talked about how the producers pretty much destroyed her story by insisting she stick to the formula such as "between X and Y minutes, the Enterprise or one of the main characters must be in danger. That danger must be resolved by minute Z." Sigh.
Since not every episode follows that formula, I wonder if that's a requirement specifically of spec script writers because they'd want to keep the more important/interesting episodes written by staff.
That sounds like something Harlan Ellison would grouch about.
As a young film student I was once going to a film industry meeting on behalf of my professor who was fed up with TV executives at that point. It was essentially a fancy dinner with all kinds of people from the German TV industry explaining why the stuff they do is so bad and why it has to be. It was incredibly fatalistic.
Money quote of the evening: "Our average viewer is between 60 and 65 and they are not 100% there mentally when viewing, so it needs to be so simple that you can still follow along while you are ironing your shirts."
Nobody there believed they were making good entertainment, everbody in fact hated it and yet they all said it has to be that way. Theh knew they are losing the young audiences, but didn't know what to do.
Valentine to Harry Hart, “You know what this is like? It’s like those old movies we both love. Now, I’m going to tell you my whole plan, and then I’m going to come up with some absurd and convoluted way to kill you, and you’ll find an equally convoluted way to escape.”
Netflix is going to kill their golden goose. It's already dying slowly, but they really should be just taking more risks. It's a streaming company run by people who seem to hate movies or tv.
Netflix’s own produced content is the poison that’s killing Netflix’s value proposition, not its golden goose.
It’s the reason I, and others I know, unsubscribed. Over time it edged out all the movies I actually wanted to watch simply because it makes them more money. But making them more money doesn’t entertain me so I unsubscribed.
I don't think their first-party content ever was a golden goose, I feel like it has always been their way to pad space between the good shows they bought from others.
Their golden goose was being the first to do streaming well. They just need to fund films and TV shows and then back them for longer than a season. The SV style thinking is what's killing potentially good shows.
People have predicted that for years, but so far it looks like Netflix is still one of the few that manage to do streaming profitably.
Turns out that catering to dumb consumer zombies is still a safe bet.
I believe this, feels like streaming platforms shows are made to be watched while you browse your phone. Even if I like a show I often feel like it could've been a 2h movie instead of 8h show and nothing would be lost.
There is still so much good stuff (especially films) being created still, but nowdays if it is Produced-by-streaming-corp, I'll just assume its going to have a inflated length to keep people from unsubscribing.
The main feeling you'll get out of a Streaming show is being sedated
it's for training AI.... easier done that way, I think
That doesn't make sense. Netflix has access to the scripts.
I don’t get it. The whole point of asking the actors to say something is to have it end up in the script. I’m suggesting that whatever they want them to say is relevant to training some AI. Just a theory but in its hypothetical context it does make sense.
Aha that's a really interesting tinfoil hat theory! I doubt it's true but reminds me of the recent YouTube drama about Google using the transcript to train their AI. Seeing Spotify generate ai music to bloat their library it is a nice harmless conspiracy theory for fun if nothing else.
Yeah we specialise in nice harmless conspiracy theories that are fun and delicate
I'm not going to bother with any new Netflix originals since they rug-pulled Inside Job, but I don't think this is the end of the world if it's done well. Rocky & Bullwinkle is like this and it only enhances it. Put this on in the background and see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ7fbc9gMiE
I watched the Netflix series Black Doves recently, nine episodes of fairly entertaining stuff, followed by a final episode of full-on Basil Exposition with characters literally explaining what happened in the previous episodes like the reveal at the end of Scooby-Doo. I've mostly given up on Netflix for exactly this kind of dumbing down.
This seems to be more of a feature of British TV in this case. Black Doves faithfully follows all the recent cliches.
Could Netflix create Friends or The Office? Has there even be a single Netflix show with more than 100 episodes? I did a quick search but found none. I admit that I too was once enamored with Netflix and streamers in general, but now I think that distribution should be separated from creation.
>Netflix execs have been telling their screenwriters to have characters “announce what they’re doing” so that viewers who have a program on in the background can follow along without having to miss plot strands.
That's the critical bit of context, this is essentially radio you have on in the background while you do whatever.
Exactly the opposite of the experience I am looking for, with a video projector, in the dark.
I guess netflix is really competing against youtube and twitch here.
There is very little good or "main" content these days on Netflix. Every single time without fail whenever I have an urge to watch a specific show or movie, sometimes an old one, it's never available on Netflix. And even if they did have it, they "licensed" it for a year and no longer have it. What good is that for me?
So most of our usage these days of Netflix is just having something playing on the side or background while we go about daily tasks like working or whatever. It's glorified filler that you don't need to pay attention to.
I'm giving it a year maybe and I'm canceling our sub to Netflix. There are better alternatives, and life is too precious to spend worrying about copyright when all copyright holders just want to make me a criminal instead of letting be give them money.
Why do you need something on in the background?
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Sometimes, I like watching the narrated movies meant for the visually impaired. It feels almost like an audiobook. Changing the content to make it more radio-like -- that's not something I'm a fan of. It's the whole "abstraction layers vs. tight coupling", except this time it's content.
Wes Anderson recently did a few short films from Roald Dahl stories that feel very strangely "wrong" in their almost 100% simply reading the stories out loud to actors miming along. It is so broken that it's fascinating and entirely works.
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Does anyone have recommendations for reliable TV or movie critics whose opinion is based on writing quality in the movie or show rather than the social message it's trying to force on you? Something like the critical drinker but in print form and that covers a wider sample?
If you like him, try nerdrotic. Be mindful of their weird antiwoke MAGA bent though.
>reliable TV or movie critics
>critical drinker
What, is critical drinker not high brow enough or something? Feel free to make a better suggestion.
I'm thinking about unsubscribing from Netflix, only my wife discovered they have Friends. So I'm not.
It's not the new stuff that pulls me into Netflix. Instead I go to Paramount+. As it turns out, these guys actually know how to tell a compelling story. Nobody is more surprised than me!
I'd call that "endumbification". Netflix already lost giant chunks of its catalog as everyone and their dog now wants/has their own streaming shop (a worse situation than with cable TV now...), and it seems like they're going completely off the rails...
enshittification is an established term
> Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
IMO that only applies to sites like Facebook or other "platforms" that have a lot of lock-in.
and before that the term "quality fade" was well established and could be used in all contexts... damn you Cory Doctorow!!!
Maybe they could start by having actors enunciate properly.
I have an easier time understanding Japanese movies than English ones, because at least in the former they're speaking to the audience. English actors have a habit of mumbling everything.
Holy moly. I don’t think I’ve ever read an article so angry. Every paragraph has a sensational opinion or put down posing as fact.
There’s some fascinating industry trends here but the analysis in the article is overwhelmed by the cacophony of anecdotes about b movies and bland tv shows all encouraged by the corrupt and evil parent company. Not helpful.
My take on the quality of shows— there’s a huge volume of mediocre stuff but that’s always been the case with TV. (There’s literally hundreds of forgotten sitcoms on broadcast tv from the 70s to 90s). But there have been many gems in the past decade.
A random list of fantastic or innovative shows I saw first on NetFlix. - House of Cards, season 1 and 2 - Russian Doll - Squid Game - Queens Gambit - Ballad of Buster Scruggs - Arcane - Kaos
Only the first was mentioned in the article, and with negative comment.
Overall, a poorly written article and a waste of time to read it.
Inadvertently, this will also help AI training a ton! But some Execs didn’t even see that
> For a century, the business of running a Hollywood studio was straightforward. The more people watched films, the more money the studios made.
I thought Hollywood (Disney) long before Netflix tapped into other revenue such as merchandise.
Whilst I do like having shows and movies on to the side as I code... it's on the condition they're actually interesting and have good writing. Otherwise I just can't bring myself to be interested.
The opposite of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show,_don%27t_tell
Why must all content turn to crap?
So basically Indian TV serial where instead of facial expressions and other action, actors/actress think out loud. Good for low IQ and average people.
Great to see Netflix being derided, I instantly feel soothed.
One other curious and quite insufferable thing which exists now is when a show/movie/game will give an unmistakeable and unsubtle nod to some other bit of media or information, either from the show/movie/game itself, or some other show/movie/game/cultural artefact.
And the learned and informed modern-media-gooner who is "in-the-know" will go: "aaaaaaha!" and "oooooh, clever!"
How has this happened? How is it considered so substantive and sophisticated for a show to make surface-level nods to other media? Please, someone explain this phenomenon to me.
I think Rick and Morty do a good job ridiculing this trope, but it doesn't seem to have been effective at slowing the tide. When a movie or a rap song alludes to something outside of itself or makes a meta-comment about itself, or breaks the fourth wall in some way, people are titillated beyond belief, I find.
What exactly is tickling them so hard?
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42525340
I started the movie Twisters. The exposition and acting in the first five minutes was so jarring that I stopped it to leave it for another day
Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for Netflix and we can go back to having good films again.
But gestures at the approaching tsunami of AI-generated video content
I almost believed it was a trick to generate labelled data to train AI systems down the line
This is definitely because people are looking at their phone while "watching".
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Content made for disengaged viewers is disengaging.
The nice thing about casual viewers like me is I can rewatch and catch something new.
We gave up on Netflix last year. The price kept going up and the value going down.
Amazon already has this but as a 2nd audio track
noticed this when watching Stargate SG1 the other day
I thought that was for visually impaired people to help them get a better sense of what's on the screen. Makes sense it can be used for "casual viewing" though.
The elevation of the present and the demotion of the past and memory.
> the box office has always been viewed as the gold standard of metrics in Hollywood
It seems hard to accept for movie fans, but the audience wants mindless drivel. The big screen is the second screen.
Netflix has competition and has to produce what the audience wants. The audience just wants something different than what critics like.
Netflix has been fine for me. My wife and I watch maybe 3h of TV a week and across all the streaming channels I usually find something. Arcane was the last show we saw and it's a Netflix original and it's quite good.
Plus Netflix has a lot of anime and I like that.
As I cannot read the article without tapping 'Accept' on the monstrously big cookie pop-up (tapping "Manage Settings" leads to an even bigger pop-up whose presumed buttons are outside of the (non-scrollable) viewport), I'm going to comment without having read TFA, only the comments on here.
I am surprised that no one mentions these extra narrations as providing very valuable audio descriptions for visually impaired users. This in my opinion is a much more important use case, as long as it remains optional, selectable as a separate audio channel for example.
> A high-gloss product that dissolves into air. Tide Pod cinema.
Wait, what's wrong with Tide Pods?
Enshittification - they switched to artificial sweetener.
The source, https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/essays/casual-viewing/, seems like a much better article.
But it is hilarious in a meta kind of way that a bottom feeder "summarize real writing done by others, and slap on a clickbait headline" website pretends to have the moral high ground on this issue. I wonder what the guidance they give t to their writers is, and what metrics they're pushed to improve.
That article has a lot of quality but it also has a lot of telling the history of Netflix. Of the eight sections, I'd only really recommend the first plus a paragraph, then 6-8, maybe 5-8.
I wouldn't call the OP clickbait, it's a reasonable title for the focus of the article. And I appreciate it having focus.
belated note: we changed the URL from https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2024/12/27/netflix-tells-wr... to the article it is reporting on. Thanks!
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This article is very informative article, but it is funny that it seems to imply that Netflix is somehow essentially evil, compared to the artsy heros of the 90s, such as Harvey Weinstein's Miramax.
Thanks, this is a much better article!
The shorter article is better.
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