Hacker Cinema
Grace and Frankie
2015 · TV series · 32 min episodes · 7 seasons
Created by Howard J. Morris, Marta Kauffman
Elegant, proper Grace and freewheeling, eccentric Frankie are a pair of frenemies whose lives are turned upside down - and permanently intertwined - when their husbands leave them for each other. Together, they must face starting over in their 70s in a 21st century world.
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7 comments on Hacker News
Grace and Frankie (tv show) deals with some of this, don't think I'm the target audience but I enjoyed it as 20-30 year old.
Ozark, Stranger Things, Grace and Frankie are all wrapping up. Archive 51 was great and very well received and cancelled immediately.
Right now there's kind of a shortage of Netflix-unique good shows. I'm not spending money that I worked for in exchange for... a nature documentary narrated by Obama.
Derry Girls is great but you can watch it months in advance on All4 with a dirt cheap VPN. There is a similar situation for Bodyguard.
They are expecting people to actually sign up (instead of sharing passwords lmao) and watch ads for the off chance that in a year or two maybe Squid Game season 2 is as good as season 1, or that they need to not miss out on Red Notice 2 and 3. It feels like they are literally betting that people need forgettable Gal Gadot movies in the same way that they need cigarettes.
They have "Grace and Frankie", which is their longest running show at 7 seasons.
Netflix IMO tries to make shows that are very zeitgeist-y, instead of evergreen, like Friends and The Office. I think that will come back to bite them in the future because I don't see anybody wanting to license one-offs like Tiger King or Squid Game for syndication down the line.
Meanwhile, decades-old shows like Law and Order, Frasier and Two and a Half Men are still making bank because they have tons of episodes and are generalist enough to be popular across pretty much any cable network globally.
I think I've noticed another change in the few days too. This one related to closing credits.
Maybe a month back, they started cutting off playback as soon as closing credits started to roll. I can understand the motivation because sometimes credits are boring.
But other times, they are part of the enjoyment of watching the show. For example, every episode of "Grace and Frankie" ends with a different song, carefully chosen to fit in thematically with that episode. People have written articles about these song choices, made Spotify playlists, etc. Yet Netflix cut them off. (And that's a Netflix original show.)
Anyway, in the last few days, it seems like they've stopped doing this. They now have a button in the UI that will stop playing the credits, but the button looks different, and it doesn't cut the credits off by default.
This bot i'm building is less of a "recommendation engine" and more of a "customized web alert engine" where the customization interface is the conversation with the bot. Recommendation engines are a non-trivial problem that companies like Amazon and Netflix spend lots of money on and still don't get right for a lot of people(I have the same issues with both services-- Grace and Frankie Season 3 is not something i'm interested in Netflix, geez). People like us can make google alerts or use Feedly or setup searches for custom hashtags or a million other ways there are to create a personalized information stream. But many non-technical people have to settle for scanning a Facebook feed full of junk, fake news, and ads trying to find the best nuggets of what they actually are tracking. The bot aims to solve that problem and give these people some of their time back.
I'd love to hear any more thoughts on it.
"For one monthly price, members around the world will be able to enjoy Netflix original series including Marvel’s Daredevil and Marvel’s Jessica Jones, Narcos, Sense8, Grace and Frankie, and Marco Polo, as well as a catalog of licensed TV shows and movies. In 2016, the company plans to release 31 new and returning original series, two dozen original feature films and documentaries, a wide range of stand-up comedy specials and 30 original kids series -- available at the same time to members everywhere."
This implies to me that their original content is globally available, while licensed content will still be regionally restricted (and I don't see a way they could do anything else). Unless I'm missing something in the announcement?
Here's at least the press release with a little more details:
https://pr.netflix.com/WebClient/getNewsSummary.do?newsId=2603
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DO YOU KNOW WHEN YOU WERE HOOKED? NETFLIX DOES Netflix Unveils When Fandom Begins For Some of Todays Most Popular Series Sep 23, 2015 Los Gatos, Calif., September 23, 2015 -- It may have taken Walter White nearly an entire season to become Heisenberg and Frank Underwood 13 episodes to become VP (spoiler alert!), but it turns out fans committed to these series long before those plot twists unfolded. Hint: it wasnt in the pilot episode.
Netflix analyzed its global streaming data* across the inaugural seasons of some of todays most popular shows - both Netflix original series and shows that premiered on other networks - looking for signals that pointed to when viewers became hooked. It turns out that when commercial breaks and appointment viewing are stripped away and consumers can watch an entire season as they choose, you can see fandom emerge. That is, 70% of viewers who watched the hooked episode went on to complete season one or more poetically, when members were hooked and there was no turning back.
“Given the precious nature of primetime slots on traditional TV, a series pilot is arguably the most important point in the life of the show,” said Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer for Netflix. “However, in our research of more than 20 shows across 16 markets, we found that no one was ever hooked on the pilot. This gives us confidence that giving our members all episodes at once is more aligned with how fans are made.”
While the data identified the hooked episode, it was shy on pinpointing exact moments, but we have a few ideas of our own to help jog your memory... For starters, in Breaking Bad it may have taken the flip of a coin to decide whether Jesse or Walt would put the finishing blow on Krazy 8, but when the decrepit heap of a former drug dealer rains down from Jesse’s ceiling, theres no denying viewers would stay to see how the season cleaned up (episode 2). Speaking of messes, Crazy Eyes drops both poems and fluids in her roller coaster romance with Piper in Orange is the New Black, but it was likely the throw of a pie to defend her (then) bae’s honor that had members asking for seconds (episode 3). For Dexter another episode equals another body, this time courtesy of the “Ice Truck Killer,” but our money’s on Dexter’s trip down memory lane reliving his inaugural kill that was the real tipping point - after all, fans never forget the first time (episode 3).
“There’s a unique sense of intimacy with creating a show for Netflix. Knowing you have an audience's undivided attention and that in essence, they are letting these characters in their home, we unfolded storylines at a more natural pace,” said Marta Kauffman. “In episode four, we see Grace and Frankie having no choice but to confront their fear, anger and uncertainty head on, which to me as a creator was a nice turning point to shift the narrative to focus on the future instead of the past; it is nice to know viewers were there right along with us.”
While around the world the hooked episode was relatively consistent, slight geographic differences did present themselves. The Dutch, for instance, tend to fall in love with series the fastest, getting hooked one episode ahead of most countries irrespective of the show. Germans showed early fandom for Arrow whereas France fell first for How I Met Your Mother. In Better Call Saul, Jimmy McGill won Brazilians over one episode quicker than Mexicans. And Down Under, viewers prove to hold out longer across the board, with members in Australia and New Zealand getting hooked one to two episodes later than the rest of the world on almost every show. Despite these differences, the hooked moment had no correlation to audience size or attrition, regardless of show, episode number or country.
Methodology: The data in this research was pulled from accounts who started watching season one of the selected series between January 2015 - July 2015 in Brazil, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, UK and US and between April 2015 - July 2015 for Australia and New Zealand. A hooked episode was defined when 70% of viewers who watched that episode went on to complete season one. Hooked episodes were first identified by country, then averaged to create the global hooked episode. The hooked episode had no correlation to total viewership numbers or attrition.
Denotes shows where for one or more countries, the show was unavailable to watch on Netflix and therefore the average is comprised of data from less than 16 countries
*The Netflix research didnt indicate exact plot points, but it did confirm episodes.