Comment by cs702
1 year ago
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.
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[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.
Yeah most of those services aren't as popular as Netflix so they have to compete for eyeballs. Also for Apple/Amazon TV is a minor side business. The show you listed for HBO are largely HBO shows developed for HBO some arguably back when watching HBO under a cable subscription was the norm. Breaking Bad was made for tv first.
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.
> no they don’t. … > meant to be viewed and given the appropriate attention
I think the person choosing to spend a few hours of their one life with some audio/visual media, whether they’re doing their laundry or not, is the one who gets to decide whether or not it’s art, and how much attention it deserves. Anything else leads to some uncomfortable places.
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“ Film and television are visual art forms that are meant to be viewed and given the appropriate attention.”
According to who…?
There’s not even a universally agreed upon definition of ‘art’ last time I checked.
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Don't worry, very, very soon the crappy shows that people half-watch will no longer be produced. By humans.
We'll still need people to create actually good content, but that crappy filler stuff will be generated.
It will be a special kind of hell, but there will probably be some way to find out what to actually spend your time watching.
6.5/10 movies only deserve 65% attention, and 6.5/10 is the target imdb rating for all streamers. Not bad, not great, but good enough to avoid controversy and maintain subs.
> Film and television are visual art forms that are meant to be viewed and given the appropriate attention
Some of it, yes. But the majority of it is just circus, designed, together with bread, to keep the masses quiet.
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.
As most of their revenue becomes advertising revenue instead of subscriptions then watch time is all they care about. It’s what happened with cable TV.
> I doubt it drives subscriptions.
We would not have as many streaming subscriptions as we do if had to sit in front of the TV to watch shows, if we couldn't have shows in the background while doing laundry and other chores.
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."
Mubi has a truly fantastic art house selection along with a few more accessible films like the recent critically acclaimed horror, The Substance.
It’s worth checking out on trial, or at least browsing the catalog, but the collection was too esoteric for me to keep a subscription. If you like art house, though, and especially if you’re cool with diving into unknown titles, it’s pretty impressive.
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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.
Exactly. Value extraction posing as value creation :)
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.
Yeah, so that's what radio is for (including in recorded form, aka podcasts).
Making video (more complicated than "talking heads") so nobody watches it is such a waste... (so is non peer to peer mass streaming, come to think of it).
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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?