How Everyone Got Lost in Netflix's Endless Library - The New York Times - 0 views
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TV once had the single, oppressive goal of amusing as many people as possible at the same time, which is also what made it so stupid: “Television is the way it is,” David Foster Wallace wrote in 1993, “simply because people tend to be really similar in their vulgar and prurient and stupid interests and wildly different in their refined and moral and intelligent interests
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The SVOD model (streaming video on demand) liberated TV from the law of averages and the prison of time and made it seem as if our refined, moral and intelligent interests might now be found on the other side of the screen.
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Lotz argues that by freeing itself from the core goal of linear television — selling an assembled audience to advertisers — the streaming model “completely changes the calculus of programming.” That’s because “instead of building an audience,” Lotz writes, “on-demand delivery allows SVODs to build audiences.”
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In December of last year, Netflix provided an unprecedented map of its library by releasing a comprehensive look at its viewer data for the very first time. It comes as an Excel file, less than a megabyte, and ranks 18,214 pieces of content in Netflix’s gargantuan library by the number of hours viewed during the first six months of 2023, rounded to the nearest 100,000
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Netflix excluded titles with fewer than 50,000 viewer hours. At the top was “The Night Agent,” a sub-Clancy-quality thriller about an F.B.I. guy, with more than 812 million hours viewed. At the bottom was “선생 김봉두 (My Teacher, Mr. Kim),” a South Korean comedy from 2003 with 100,000 hours, though this placement is an artifact of Excel’s sorting through the vastness of the catalog. Roughly the last four thousand entries all have 100,000 hours viewed — this is as low as the scale goes — and are arranged alphabetically
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Outside the very top, which is dominated by Netflix Originals and kids’ movies, it’s not totally clear why anything winds up anywhere.
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to scan through it is to appreciate how the library’s sheer size has heightened the importance of chance in our consumption habits.
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Your view into the catalog may feel like a grand vista, but in actuality you are peering through a keyhole. When I open up Netflix on my TV, I am immediately met with a carousel of 75 shows and movies New on Netflix; then the Top 10 TV Shows in the U.S. Today; beneath that a carousel of another 75 suggestions Because You Watched “Rebel Ridge”; beyond that, an algorithmic selection of 33 Today’s Top Picks for You; then Bingeworthy TV Dramas, 75 of them. Then there’s Your Next Watch, a combination of stuff my kid watches and stuff I might, 75 more. Next: The last 10 things we didn’t finish; then, a list of 75 more titles because I watched “Shot Caller.” Beyond that, no fewer than 30 more carousels of about 75 titles each. That’s a whole lot of TV, but it’s still just a small slice of the catalog.
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What we’re paying for, in the end, is not any one show, or any three or 10 or 50 shows, but rather this fathomless sense of abundance.
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Matt Stoller, the anti-monopolist writer, cited this same story in a blog post about Hollywood’s travails. His theory was that Hollywood has gotten so big that it can’t even discover what people really want anymore
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As a contrast, he cites the success of “Back to the Future,” an odd movie that became an enormous hit, eventually earning hundreds of millions. But as Stoller points out, in 1985, this happened slowly: It opened small in July, in about 1,400 theaters, and crept up to 1,550 theaters by the end of August, staying in at least 1,000 theaters until the Christmas season. (A big-budget Hollywood movie released today typically opens in about 4,000 theaters and is gone in a few weeks.
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The movie, Stoller writes, “was put into a market, where information circulated among buyers and sellers.” There was a constant interplay between the art and the audience (and the middlemen) that determined its reach and legitimacy. Now, in Stoller’s eyes, the public is instead subject to something like content gavage, delivered 4,000 theaters at a time.
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Which isn’t to say that the streamers don’t make hits and that people don’t watch and enjoy a lot of streaming television, as Netflix’s 183 billion viewer hours in 2023 can attest.
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The producer and writer James Schamus has lamented what he calls the “Uberfication” of Hollywood under the streamers: Netflix and the others have demoted the creative talent from sharing in profits to working for hire, like Uber drivers
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he leash has been off for a decade now, and eventually you face the same problem Richie Rich did: When you’re drowning in cash, it’s always tempting to say yes.
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to look at these Netflix numbers is to realize that high-quality television is not the necessary outcome of the streaming model but possibly the happy byproduct of an industry in transition — and at this point maybe something like a small subculture.
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It was practically a rounding error in comparison to “FUBAR,” an Arnold Schwarzenegger series I’d never heard of, and the first season of a show called “Ginny & Georgia,” which came out in 2021 and is apparently one of the most popular shows on Netflix, with both seasons appearing in the Top 10, together accounting for nearly a billion viewer hours. Never heard of it. Don’t know anyone who has. Maybe that’s my problem, because I’m an out-of-touch magazine editor. But maybe it’s yours too.
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the fact of the matter is that we all spent years basically having no idea what was going on in there and taking guidance from friends, social media, newspapers, magazines and websites — all similarly blinded
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it makes you wonder about the Talmudic discourse that surrounds every episode of buzzy television shows, trying to use them to make sense of the zeitgeist. What if the geist of our zeit mostly involves bingeing some British murder mystery based on a Harlan Coben (?!) novel called “Fool Me Once”? That was the most-watched show on Netflix in the first half of this year.
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There are some economists who fretted about ZIRP because it can enable so-called “zombie businesses”: companies that survive only because of the availability of cheap capital, who stagger along, refinancing debt, never failing — artificial, undead things. And I think about this concept when I look back at the tech world’s takeover of culture
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these business strategies, and this river of money diverted to bring them to fruition, created a sort of zombie discourse in our culture, one that appeared vital and real, and then — coincidentally or not, over the last few years — started to dissolve before our eyes.
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just as the old market signals had become obsolete, an entire meaning-making apparatus arose to take its place
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New, synthetic replacements were conjured, with a constantly expanding supply of televised content to direct them at. And social media feeds made up of highly nonrepresentative samples of the public to put all of this back into, spraying the messages around this new ecosystem like light from a disco ball.
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It’s hard not to wonder, looking back at it all, if this situation created a pack of zombies, and they started to follow one another down a strange course, one paved with a whole lot of, you know, “Nanette” — titles that implicate the viewer in ways that are more interesting to write about than they are to watch
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All we can say for sure is that the gulf between elite and popular discourse that so famously opened up during this era was helped along by the intrusion of the tech world into pop culture.
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But it can certainly account for the rise of so-called Mid TV: shows that look expensive, are reasonably smart and packed with talent and somehow manage to be, in the Times TV critic James Poniewozik’s words, “. . . fine?”
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Uber, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the ZIRP era, has similarly ushered in a world that is obviously superior in many ways and subtly, almost imperceptibly worse in others — less distinct, less interesting and sometimes even less useful.
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According to the latest data, there are now more than 100,000 ride-share vehicles in New York City, and Manhattan’s streets have never been harder to traverse
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more than half the cars on the road are for-hire: the city’s iconic yellow cabs now engulfed by an anonymous fleet of sedans and S.U.V.s summoned seamlessly through apps, serving the market so well that the streets have nearly ceased to function.
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perhaps that is what will become of our entertainment landscape too: There’s always something available. More of it than ever before. More than you could have dreamed of. And it’s available to you at the tap of a button, like magic. The way you always hoped it would be. Whether it can always get you where you want to go is another question