Hacker Cinema
Derek
2013 · TV series · 24 min episodes · 2 seasons
Created by Ricky Gervais
Derek is a loyal nursing home caretaker who sees only the good in his quirky co-workers as they struggle against prejudice and shrinking budgets to care for their elderly residents.
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2 comments on Hacker News
That author on Slough,
> Ricky Gervais encapsulated its brutalist new town grim with ‘The Office’ before giving up and writing lame punching-down anti-woke “gags” for the educationally subnormal
That's a very strange reading on Gervais' post-The Office career. After The Office he did things like Extras, a sitcom about extras on TV and film sets, Derek, an emotional series about a well-meaning care worker who thinks it's more important to be kind than popular, and After Life, a series about a man who loses his wife young and how he deals with grief.
The argument of the article is that Netflix's dataset doesn't really help them make decisions like what the content of their next documentary should be. It argues that what happens instead is that Netflix's programming honcho, Ted Sarandos, picks projects based on the person who's putting them together, looking for creators with a solid creative track record and an existing cult following:
> I began to sense that their biggest bets always seemed ultimately driven by faith in a particular cult creator, like David Fincher (“House of Cards”), Jenji Leslie Kohan (“Orange is the New Black”), Ricky Gervais (“Derek”), John Fusco (“Marco Polo”), or Mitchell Hurwitz (“Arrested Development”)... I do think that there is a sophisticated algorithm at work here—but I think his name is Ted Sarandos.
So take the case of the Nina Simone doc. It was directed by Liz Garbus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Garbus), whose previous films have been Sundance- and Oscar- fare for a few years now. So it could just be that Sarandos looked at her track record and decided that Garbus was an up-and-coming talent, and that mattered more than the specific content of whatever her next project was going to be. He was just betting that a Liz Garbus documentary was going to be great, no matter what story it told.