Fincher shoots for very long, does a lot of takes, lights everything like a film. Likely spends a lot of time in the editing room either himself directly or tinkering with the directors that direct the other episodes.
Notice how Mindhunter didn’t “look” like other Netflix shows. The reason for that is they lit it like a movie. And that takes time and money.
I work in the industry. The reason Netflix shows look a certain way is because they are not given the time to do it differently and are shooting almost documentary style or at least much much faster than a regular “prestige” show. Now a good director DP duo can still make this look good, even though it’s hard to do 20 set ups (low budget speed) instead of 5-10 a day (high budget). But that velocity means you shoot at twice the speed. Which is huge considering film costs are people costs. Production is often the expensive segment of a show like Mindhunter.
Fincher likely wouldn’t have agreed to drop episode count or shoot them faster, so they didn’t continue.
I think Netflix's incentives, especially now that they have an ad tier, have changed.
With a subscription service 10 years ago, you just need to have enough must-see content:
- Original scripted TV series that become mainstream known and/or seen as prestige TV, like "The Crown," "Mindhunter," "Bridgerton," "Stranger Things" etc.
- "Crown Jewel" reruns with huge fanbases such as The Office, Friends, Seinfeld, Modern Family, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Arrested Development, etc.
- Unscripted TV series that become buzzy - like Love Is Blind, Tiger King, etc.
Having those categories all well-stocked ensures that only a fool would cancel their Netflix subscription as they'll be out of the loop when the new season of a 'zeitgeisty' show drops. You don't really need all your viewers to watch more hours to get more money every year, you can grow revenue with a combo of new viewers and price increases as long as users just watch regularly.
I think present-day Netflix sees incentives:
- to get as many people on the ad tier as possible so they can scale revenue with watch time
- to increase watch time which is a solved problem via psychological manipulation if you have good ML like they do
- more watch time without spending more money points pretty obviously to lowering cost per show as much as you can, which manifests as worse quality, more reality, more imported dubbed shows, etc. and drastically curtailing giving huge checks to the Matthew Weiners, David Benioffs, and Vince Gilligans of the world to bet on a massive superhit.
So they will want to focus heavily on the unscripted category plus whatever they can slap together cheaply, then autoplay and optimize their way to growth.
There must be more to that story. Netflix, HBO, BBC and a bunch of others keep pumping out these kinds of crime dramas exactly because they are quite conservative bets. They are extremely cheap to produce, a handful of mid-range actors on very mundane locations. They can stay as a miniseries or expand later on as wanted. And if the writing is good some of them become incredibly popular and profitable.
I mean, the last Stranger Things series, of all things, is the single most expensive production in history. More expensive than Marvel films, than both Avatars, than all of Games of Thrones, than Rings of Power per episode… It’s mad, for a quaint small-scale mild-horror story set in the 80s.
There is no way Mindhunter was simply too expensive.
Sad news. HBO has a veritable treasure trove of TV shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Silicon Valley etc. Even their more recent ones like White Lotus, How to With John Wilson are leagues above Netflix. Only HBO can bet on artists’ vision like that.
I cancelled my Netflix subscription 7 years ago, 99% of their content is algorithmic drivel. Mindhunter, Dahmer, House of Cards were something I liked but nothing beyond that. I knew they were trash once I saw the sheer number of spinoffs they have just on Pablo Escobar. They had had one decent run of Narcos but then they just tried to extract every drop of juice out of that one persona. Most of Netflix dramas are just the equivalent of abhorrent and ugly graffiti. Their shows are Exhibit A in what happens if you give into algorithmic drivel and have no human touch to curate them.
HBO has some timeless TV classics that I keep rewatching every year even though I have watched them multiple times. Netflix can’t produce TV dramas like that, ain’t in their blood. Completely different DNAs.
Netflix does deserve all the plaudits wrt to their streaming experience though.
HBO cancelled Perry Mason, one of the better done noir detective series. That was kind of the nail in the coffin for me. I still get it free because of my AT&T subscription, but I can't argue that Netflix has really come out with anything really worth watching either - Department Q and Mindhunter are only two that I think of that were decent.
I agree that the majority of stuff on streaming services is complete garbage and nothing is really "binge worthy" like it used to be. The one thing I used to love about Netlfix was going back and watching old movies like Chinatown or To Live and Die in LA. Those are all gone now, replaced with its own produced content that I just think isn't in the same league.
I'm going to stop now but I hope I've made my point. I've watched many of the above. I've heard about most of the above.
Your tone is pretty snarky so I'm not sure if it's worth responding but here is a list of TV shows, all within the last decade, that I believe are exceptional and not limited to "just the Sopranos":
* Chernobyl
* Rick and Morty
* True Detective
* Fargo
* Severance
* 1883
* Mindhunter
* Westworld
* The Knick
* The Peripheral
* Succession
* Years and Years
* Orange is the New Black
* Halt and Catch Fire
* Insecure
* Watchmen
* Atlanta
This is only from 10 minutes of searching. You'll note that many of them are produced, directed, written and star high profile artists. The subject matter that they deal with can be done at a pace and care that's impossible to do with a 2-3 hour movie. The quality of the above series or mini-series was virtually non existent, maybe with some very few exceptions, before 2000 and only began to pick up pace in 2000 to 2010.
> _Contrast Netflix with HBOMax and Disney+, each of which have consistently incredible quality._
Agree on HBO, but I wouldn't be able to tell with such certainty whether Disney+ has consistently higher quality than Netflix, or Disney+ has simply the benefit of owning almost all recognizable world-building IP in the industry (Disney itself, Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, plus everything they acquired when they acquired FOX).
For example: Not being a die-hard Star Wars Fan and being oversaturated with the Marvel franchise for years now, content from these universes on Disney+ is in no way of higher quality to me than comparable-size content of Netflix i.e. Stranger Things, Mindhunter, Peaky Blinders,...
I find myself increasingly browsing Disney+ like "oh, interesting!...maybe another time...", but that might be just me.
In addition, I keep noticing how Disney+ is producing big-budget series which end up with only ~8 20-30min episodes, whereas Netflix and HBO still consider ~50mins to be the minimum.
Do people really talk about movies? It seems you do. Do you talk with your friends? Online? On some specific forum? With your significant other?
I'm so surprised that there are memes from big hits, but no real talk about them.
I mean there's relatively a lot of talk about how Harry Potter feels good but doesn't make sense, and of course lots of critiques, reviews, "reaction videos", but somehow it seems actual people stopped talking about movies with each other (beyond the very shallow have you seen it? yes/no. was it good? yes/no.)
maybe I just miss when people talked too much about the Matrix? :D
also I find it strange that it's still so hard to find good movies/books/series/games that I would like.... despite all the data, metadata, taxonomy, folksonomy (tags! unstructured data! big data! bad data, bad!)
for example, IMDB knows what I like, Netflix too, yet the recommendations are pretty bad.
let's take Mindhunter. "CSI done well", right? but I still haven't found something that is similar to it. (not that I looked very much.)
> "In voice pitch, we are looking at more like 60 percent [difference between men and women]."
Is this speaking in raw frequency? If so, I think it is overstated. A 50% reduction in frequency is only one octave, which is 10% of the range of the human ear. And a 50% increase in pitch (from men to women, which is what I think they are saying based on other sources on human voice pitch) is only a 5th, the interval in the Star Wars theme, or 'God Rest, ye merry gentlemen,' which really isn't that much.
> According to Puts, this fits with the immunocompetence handicap hypothesis, which states that since testosterone takes away energy from the immune system, only men in the best of health—whose immune systems are not suffering due to physiological stress—can afford to develop testosterone-dependent traits.
Well I guess my autoimmune disorders explain why I'm a tenor. Oh well, that means I get the best arias.
For most people, I've found that what they call a 'deeper' voice is simply a more resonant voice. There's a video where Tom Scott is trying to sing. He sings a note more resonantly, and he thinks he dropped down the octave. But he actually stayed at the same pitch.[0] So I wonder if that is why 'deeper' voices are perceived as more confident, simply because the people are speaking at roughly the same pitch but are speaking more loudly and more resonantly.
I also question a bit whether deep voices really are more appealing on a society-wide basis, maybe for sexual attraction purposes, though I have some thoughts on that too.[1] But, most male singers that have been prized as stars sing higher. It's a meme now that all male pop singers sing way up in the stratosphere, but it's been true historically too--the tenors got the best arias most of the time. There are certainly lower-voiced outliers (Bing Crosby comes to mind), but the 'stars' so to speak have often been higher-voiced.
[0]: https://youtu.be/2QKPQ6JYVhU?t=439
[1]: I remember being inexplicably taken when I watched Mindhunter by the male lead. I took a straw poll of several gay men I knew, and they all said that Jonathan Groff was sexy specifically for his voice, which is indeed quite high, noticeably so even just casually viewing his movies. Obviously, this anecdata doesn't undo the actual research in the article, but I do think it is a bit more complicated than presented here.
>And yet, it's hard to look at Netflix as anything more than a total failure of the promises of data analytics and personalization. Netflix should be putting out nothing but hits. A dozen Breaking Bads or Game of Thrones.
I don't follow this argument. Knowing what people like has very little to do with the quality of original creative content; surely you don't expect Goodreads to put out Shakespearean novels, or Spotify to be producing original hits on par with the Rolling Stones? Should ESPN have better pro sports scouting and coaching talent than the professional leagues?
Knowing what people like, however, _does_ have to do quite a bit with selling those people a product - which Netflix just reported 15% YoY growth to $7.7B yearly revenue, they're clearly very successful to this end. I think you actually have it backwards - if anything, Netflix represents a total fulfillment of the promises of data analytics and personalization. Despite mediocre original content, this is a $200B company with 200M subscribers growing revenues by double digits two decades after IPO.
If Netflix paid $450k+ salaries to screenwriters instead of engineers, you'd very likely get better movies on a worse streaming platform. And when Netflix has shelled out for Hollywood talent, like Mindhunter which has David Fincher and Charlize Theron, the results are quite good.
Regardless, to take the fact that Netflix pays for premium engineering and analytics talent, but does not pay for premium filmmaking talent, and then spin that fact into Netflix being "a total failure of the promises of data analytics and personalization" is a questionable criticism.
It’s okay. Fincher cancelled it to do a movie with Netflix that looks great. Netflix wasn’t going to get Mindhunter continued successfully without Fincher’s interest.
Several people who worked on the show are on the Pennsylvania Film Industry Association Board, and it was filmed in and around Pittsburgh. Maybe that had something to do with it.
That said I believe I read an article suggesting that Netflix plans to not film in Atlanta because of a variety of conservative laws passed in the state of Georgia. That was post the 2018 filming of Mindhunter season 2, but it may affect future shows and films.
Netflix’s recommended content has become so terrible outside things I want like Better Call Saul or Mindhunter, that I’ve cancelled the sub. Most of what they push to the top is straight garbage. Really badly written stuff.
Meanwhile I can pay the same for amazon and get more Picard, Mr Robot, The Expanse... and if the TV sucks there are plenty of movies on rotation.
I feel so seen! For a very long time, I couldn't sleep without watching TV shows on my laptop, to the extent that I'd have insomnia if the Internet went out. In fact, even though I've weaned myself off it for the past several months, I'd probably still have trouble sleeping if I didn't at least know I could watch reruns of 30 Rock if I had trouble sleeping.
More to the point: just like the author, there's a very particular kind of TV I'd watch to sleep: nothing for the first time, and nothing tense. The West Wing and the US version of The Office were both great for me, since there's so much of it to get through. I've probably seen every episode of The West Wing at least 15 times by now.
Which, to me, sort of answers/challenges the concern the author has about binge watching. On a normal night, I'd barely make it through half an episode before I'd notice time slipping as I watched, my cue that I'm nodding off and should shut the laptop. I'm never watching first-run stuff like Mindhunter or Russian Doll, the stuff Netflix really wants me to be streaming, because it'd keep me alert.
Are you saying Netflix hasn’t made quality shows that will last through 2039? I’d like to know which company you think has made close to the amount of quality shows Netflix has since 2014. Here’s part of a list I have for a content project. No company comes close to this output in recent history.
House of Cards launched February 2013 (7 seasons, finished)
Orange is the New Black launched July 2013 (7 seasons, finished)
Stranger Things launched July 2016 (3 seasons, 1-2 more)
—
Dark (2 seasons, 3rd is last)
Glitch (2 seasons, 3rd might never come)
Russian Doll (1 season)
Haunting of Hill House (1 season, anthology)
American Vandal (2 seasons)
Black Mirror (anthology, last season not that good)
The Crown (3 seasons)
When They See Us (mini-series, 2019)
Unbelievable (just came out)
—
Glow (3 seasons)
Kimmy Schmidt (4 seasons, finished)
Arrested Development (they tried, hard to get it all back together after years of being done)
Sex Education (1 season)
Bojack Horseman (5 seasons?) #animated
Mindhunter (2 seasons)
The OA (2 seasons)
Maniac (mini-series)
Wet Hot American Summer (2 seasons, but season 1 is the top notch one)
F is for Family (3? seasons) #animated
Big Mouth (2? seasons) #animated
—
Documentary mini-series
—
Staircase
Making a Murderer
Evil Genius
The Jinx
Wild Wild West
——-
There’s more I’m missing and I didn’t include a number of shows Netflix helps finance but isn’t the main financier or producer or original place of distribution. Shows like Glitch.
It just sounds like they’re doing what every other network does. A bunch of it is trash you don’t care about but another subset of their customers do. It’s not all commissioned for us personally, and Netflix will always prioritise their own shows before others in the app.
It’s not like you watch HBO 12 hours a day expecting pure content that you love from start to finish.
That said, apart from the tent pole series they [plan to] push out each year (stranger things, better call saul, Fargo, mindhunter, nightflyers, etc.) the rest is clearly data driven garbage that doesn’t realise it’s working a cliche. With a couple of exceptions even the marvel universe shows fell into their pattern.
In that sense it’s Netflix Unoriginal Content. But you still get the diamond in the mine.
Being in the EU I get about 8 different translations of two different kinds of zombie story, but you’re not really paying for that.
And on the same level, it’s a shame that streaming is now split. American Gods, Good Omens, The Expanse, and Mr Robot are all on Amazon. Netflix definitely dropped a ball on some of that. The TV show costs the same but I have to pay 2x to watch because of the networks.
Of all the shows you mentioned the only ones I have watched is,
OITB (left it at after watching S04 I think), Master of None (both the seasons), I realise that its a drama that leans toward being a rom-com but I do not watch rom-coms at all. Kudos to Mindhunter, indeed that was entertaining and right in my ballpark. Liked House of cards till the time Spacey was there, S06 disappointed me. Season 1 of Making a Murderer was outstanding, season 2 didn't catch my interest. Also the last comedy I watched end-to-end I think was Entourage (which was produced by HBO), The Office (US) and Parks And Recreation, not surprisingly Netflix doesn't stream any of these in my region, Prime Video does the last two and Hotstar streams Entourage.
These are good shows not great ones like The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, BB, Six Feet Under you know about the stuff that critics rave about etc. I don't care if Birdbox was watched by all of Netflix's subscribers, thats precisely the sort of thing that I don't watch the majority of the time, you watch that thing once and you forget that you ever watched it again. I'm now on probably my sixth or seventh rewatch of The Wire, that should tell you something about my viewing habits and why Netflix's content just doesn't work for me. I don't expect a network to consistenly churn out shows like that but at least some of the shows should be somewhere close to that level which HBO continues to do with The Deuce, Succession, True Detective(I know they fucked the dog on S02) etc.
Also you have the time to watch ALL of that, I don't. I work in tech too, I have an hour on weekdays and maybe 2-3 on weekends for leisure, so its only natural that I would be picky about what I watch, the absolute best, currently that would mean shows like The Americans, Escape from Dannemora and shows from the past like Halt and Catch Fire(from AMC), Six feet under, Deadwood which not surpisingly were also made by HBO. Netflix doesn't stream any of that.
I also don't understand how you think AMC won't exist, are they going to be insolvent ? Doesn't look like it, they have a cash-cow in The Walking Dead(I only watched till S06 then got bored) They got two of the best TV shows I liked BB and BCS, BCS is gonna kill it in the next season. They also produced The Terror, a brilliant mini-series which Netflix didn't stream as well and again Prime Video did. As a viewer I don't care about Netflix's subscriber numbers or HBO's lack thereof, I want to watch content I like which sadly Netflix doesn't produce on a consistent basis, this is entirely subjective and I realise that I might be one of the edge-cases in all the millenials when I say Netflix don't tickly my fancy.
I'm not biased towards HBO, hell HBO doesn't even stream in my country, I'm incredibly picky about what I watch since I'm short on time, Netflix churns out a LOT of shows, its only natural that some of them turn out to be brilliant and some of them indeed are, but the rest, like 90% of the shows are just average, they don't work for me, I simply do not have the time to watch them.
In that sense, Netflix is like the Y-Combinator of producing original content. You produce(invest in) hundreds of TV shows(startups) and hope one of them makes it big (becomes a unicorn) and the rest of them, well they would be probably cease to exist after some time.
Mad Men didn't even have an audience when it aired (<2 million viewers most episodes), and airs on a network that likely won't exist in 5-6 years (or at least won't be producing new content), so it's not super clear to me what your point is about those shows as evidence of how a network grows. The way a network grows is by producing content people want to watch, whether that's disposable content made to last a minute or content made to last the test of time. HBO isn't growing because people are subscribing to watch Sopranos re-runs.
Past reporting suggests churn in most subscription content services is very low, so your Netflix cancellation may be unusual. I'd also add that exclusive content is one part of the story, but there's also a lot of licensed content that's very good on Netflix as on other services.
But for what it is worth, I would rank the following Netflix originals to be "top tier" within their genre -- some of these genres lend themselves more to rewatching than others, and some are closer to my taste than others, some held up in quality through their run more than others, so in a sense I am ranking shows based on their peak quality --
Orange is the New Black; Bloodline; Stranger Things; The Crown; Gilmore Girls AYITL; The OA; A Series of Unfortunate Events; Mindhunter; The Haunting of Hill House; Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt; Master of None; Love; Lady Dynamite; Santa Clarita Diet; GLOW; American Vandal; Maniac; Bojack Horseman; F is for Family; Disenchantment; Hilda; Dark; The Rain; Elite; Chef's Table; Making a Murderer; Shot in the Dark; Wormwood; Wild Wild Country; Salt Fat Acid Heat; Queer Eye; The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell; My Next Guest Needs No Introduction; Lilyhammer; Terrace House; Alias Grace; The End of the Fucking World; Collateral; Wanderlust; Longmire; Black Mirror; Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.
In addition to these, the following shows are Netflix originals in my region, indicating that although someone else initially funded them, Netflix bought them for exclusive distribution here, and also meet the above requirements:
Babylon Berlin; Bodyguard; Casé; Crashing; Cuckoo; Derry Girls; The Great British Baking Show; Happy!; Happy Valley; The Investigator; Peaky Blinders; River.
I have pretty broad taste in TV and watch a lot of TV while I am programming or running data analysis, so maybe the breadth of stuff I include here is surprising to most. But to the extent your post is a useful anecdote about how Netflix has no great shows, I'm responding to your challenge to "Name one show" that would meet that criteria.
(These are TV shows only, not films. I haven't really liked many Netflix original films although there are a few I would say are great, like Okja and Roma)
Highly subjective and therefor probably not welcome here, but since this was the comment I saw first:
My Top Netflix Shows:
- Better Call Saul
- Bojack Horseman
- Mindhunter
- Fargo
- Maniac
- The End of the Fucking World
- Master of None
- American Vandal
My Top Netflix Movies:
- Beats of No Nation
- Roma
- Annihilation
- Okja
And where I think your list is wrong:
- 13 Reasons Why
Very problematic show[1]. I found Netflix' response to the criticism lacking and season 2 doubles down on the mistake. Even if one can ignore that, I think the writing and characters are still insultingly thin.
- Ozark
Not bad at all. But also not nearly as good as Breaking Bad. If we didn't live in this gilden television age, I might've found it worth my time
- Altered Carbon
Visually very entertaining. But it's definitely pulp.
1. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, by Scott McCloud
A comic about comics, but I don’t think you have to enjoy the medium to get something out of the book. If you enjoy exploring subjects to their core, give it a shot.
2. The Sculptor, by Scott McCloud
The latest fiction graphic novel by the person who wrote a seminal book on comics. No surprise it does a lot of things right.
3. S-Town, by Brian Reed
Technically a podcast, but it was released all at once and is a contained story that lasts for seven hours. I’d say a fairer assessment would be to call it a well produced non-fiction audiobook, which is what you’d expect from the producers of Serial and This American Life. When I recommend it I always tell people to give it until the end of the second episode before deciding if they’ll stick with it.
4. Mindhunter, by John Douglas
Enjoyed the Netflix show? There’s a good chance you’ll enjoy this.
> there are basic cable channels (AMC and FX) that have given HBO a run for its money.
Each has produced a couple series ever of the quality that HBO has a few of at any given time. They aren't playing at the same level.
> Does anyone really believe that HBO is going to outcompete Netflix on original programming over the long run?
Yes.
> They just randomly drop them in the middle of the week, as if they don't have time even to promote them. Have you ever started an episode of Jessica Jones and had to wait 2 minutes for them to promo the next season of Mindhunter?
Netflix promotes more heavily in the app than most other streaming g services do; I actually find this both more intrusive and less effective than pre-roll promotions like HBO does.
> Meanwhile, after Game of Thrones ends, what's HBO got for tentpole series?
Succession, The multiple (IIRC, 5) GoT spinoff series that are already confirmed in the works, potentially with the first airing as soon as 2020, the Watchmen series they are rumored to be picking up...
> But premium cable is over, everything is going to be disintermediated,
The trend seems to be more streaming services offering premium add-ons like HBO, and away from “streaming means the end of the premium cable model” that was more defensible a claim a couple years ago.
I don't buy the logic here, and I'm not sure David Sims does either; this strikes me as one of those headlines that was written by an editor, independently of the article.
For as much as anybody here likes HBO, the diagnosis Stankey (and, I think, Sims) has of it seems apt. HBO has a sterling reputation. But so what? Even today, they're no longer distinctively good; in fact, there are basic cable channels (AMC and FX) that have given HBO a run for its money.
Does anyone really believe that HBO is going to outcompete Netflix on original programming over the long run? Netflix introduces new programs like Google introduces new chat programs. It's not even an event for them. They just randomly drop them in the middle of the week, as if they don't have time even to promote them. Have you ever started an episode of Jessica Jones and had to wait 2 minutes for them to promo the next season of Mindhunter?
And that's just Netflix. Amazon will eventually figure TV out. Disney controls Hulu now. Apple is making a move into online video.
Meanwhile, after Game of Thrones ends, what's HBO got for tentpole series? Westworld? Besides the fact that it won't be airing again for 2-3 years, its renewal was not even a certainty.
I think Stankey is right. If HBO is going to be a factor long-term, a thing people pay substantial amounts of money to retain access to, it is going to have to look more like Netflix and less like a thing you pay your cable company extra for. HBO could afford lulls of a year or two taking flyers on just 1-2 new prestige series (Carnivale; Newsroom; Vinyl). But premium cable is over, everything is going to be disintermediated, and HBO will need to justify demanding $15/mo directly from people. I'm not sure it's worth that today.
This reminds me of the Netflix series Mindhunter, about the FBI doing the same with serial killers in the 70s. It's based on real life work. Well worth watching both for the complicated but well handled subject matter and for the direction (David Fincher) and performances.
For anyone doubting the 'morality' of this researc or presuming rapists are just vile apathetic scumbags and nothing more, go watch it or better yet read the real life story it's based on. This kind of research has saves hundreds of lives and prevented many men (mostly) from becoming serial killers. Let's hope this new research does the same for rapists.
Hacker Cinema
26 comments on Hacker News
I just want AI to write and "film" the third season of Mindhunter, that's watchable
Fincher shoots for very long, does a lot of takes, lights everything like a film. Likely spends a lot of time in the editing room either himself directly or tinkering with the directors that direct the other episodes.
Notice how Mindhunter didn’t “look” like other Netflix shows. The reason for that is they lit it like a movie. And that takes time and money.
I work in the industry. The reason Netflix shows look a certain way is because they are not given the time to do it differently and are shooting almost documentary style or at least much much faster than a regular “prestige” show. Now a good director DP duo can still make this look good, even though it’s hard to do 20 set ups (low budget speed) instead of 5-10 a day (high budget). But that velocity means you shoot at twice the speed. Which is huge considering film costs are people costs. Production is often the expensive segment of a show like Mindhunter.
Fincher likely wouldn’t have agreed to drop episode count or shoot them faster, so they didn’t continue.
I think Netflix's incentives, especially now that they have an ad tier, have changed.
With a subscription service 10 years ago, you just need to have enough must-see content:
- Original scripted TV series that become mainstream known and/or seen as prestige TV, like "The Crown," "Mindhunter," "Bridgerton," "Stranger Things" etc.
- "Crown Jewel" reruns with huge fanbases such as The Office, Friends, Seinfeld, Modern Family, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Arrested Development, etc.
- Unscripted TV series that become buzzy - like Love Is Blind, Tiger King, etc.
Having those categories all well-stocked ensures that only a fool would cancel their Netflix subscription as they'll be out of the loop when the new season of a 'zeitgeisty' show drops. You don't really need all your viewers to watch more hours to get more money every year, you can grow revenue with a combo of new viewers and price increases as long as users just watch regularly.
I think present-day Netflix sees incentives:
- to get as many people on the ad tier as possible so they can scale revenue with watch time
- to increase watch time which is a solved problem via psychological manipulation if you have good ML like they do
- more watch time without spending more money points pretty obviously to lowering cost per show as much as you can, which manifests as worse quality, more reality, more imported dubbed shows, etc. and drastically curtailing giving huge checks to the Matthew Weiners, David Benioffs, and Vince Gilligans of the world to bet on a massive superhit.
So they will want to focus heavily on the unscripted category plus whatever they can slap together cheaply, then autoplay and optimize their way to growth.
There must be more to that story. Netflix, HBO, BBC and a bunch of others keep pumping out these kinds of crime dramas exactly because they are quite conservative bets. They are extremely cheap to produce, a handful of mid-range actors on very mundane locations. They can stay as a miniseries or expand later on as wanted. And if the writing is good some of them become incredibly popular and profitable.
I mean, the last Stranger Things series, of all things, is the single most expensive production in history. More expensive than Marvel films, than both Avatars, than all of Games of Thrones, than Rings of Power per episode… It’s mad, for a quaint small-scale mild-horror story set in the 80s.
There is no way Mindhunter was simply too expensive.
Sad news. HBO has a veritable treasure trove of TV shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Silicon Valley etc. Even their more recent ones like White Lotus, How to With John Wilson are leagues above Netflix. Only HBO can bet on artists’ vision like that.
I cancelled my Netflix subscription 7 years ago, 99% of their content is algorithmic drivel. Mindhunter, Dahmer, House of Cards were something I liked but nothing beyond that. I knew they were trash once I saw the sheer number of spinoffs they have just on Pablo Escobar. They had had one decent run of Narcos but then they just tried to extract every drop of juice out of that one persona. Most of Netflix dramas are just the equivalent of abhorrent and ugly graffiti. Their shows are Exhibit A in what happens if you give into algorithmic drivel and have no human touch to curate them.
HBO has some timeless TV classics that I keep rewatching every year even though I have watched them multiple times. Netflix can’t produce TV dramas like that, ain’t in their blood. Completely different DNAs.
Netflix does deserve all the plaudits wrt to their streaming experience though.
HBO cancelled Perry Mason, one of the better done noir detective series. That was kind of the nail in the coffin for me. I still get it free because of my AT&T subscription, but I can't argue that Netflix has really come out with anything really worth watching either - Department Q and Mindhunter are only two that I think of that were decent.
I agree that the majority of stuff on streaming services is complete garbage and nothing is really "binge worthy" like it used to be. The one thing I used to love about Netlfix was going back and watching old movies like Chinatown or To Live and Die in LA. Those are all gone now, replaced with its own produced content that I just think isn't in the same league.
Mindhunter. I'm hoping they pick that one back up. The long thread in that series is BTK, which they teased throughout the existing episodes.
Apparently Netflix never "got the numbers" they wanted, which disappoints the hell out of me; it is some of the best work Netflix has ever done.
Clerks - $27,575 [0]
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night - $56,000 [1]
Butt Boy - $100,000 [2]
The Blue - <$100k [3]
Call Me Brother - <$100k [3]
Frances Ferguson - <$100k [3]
Greenlight - <$100k [3]
Love in Dangerous Times - <$100k [3]
Man in Camo - <$100k [3]
I'm going to stop now but I hope I've made my point. I've watched many of the above. I've heard about most of the above.
Your tone is pretty snarky so I'm not sure if it's worth responding but here is a list of TV shows, all within the last decade, that I believe are exceptional and not limited to "just the Sopranos":
* Chernobyl
* Rick and Morty
* True Detective
* Fargo
* Severance
* 1883
* Mindhunter
* Westworld
* The Knick
* The Peripheral
* Succession
* Years and Years
* Orange is the New Black
* Halt and Catch Fire
* Insecure
* Watchmen
* Atlanta
This is only from 10 minutes of searching. You'll note that many of them are produced, directed, written and star high profile artists. The subject matter that they deal with can be done at a pace and care that's impossible to do with a 2-3 hour movie. The quality of the above series or mini-series was virtually non existent, maybe with some very few exceptions, before 2000 and only began to pick up pace in 2000 to 2010.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerks_(film)
[1] https://byrdtheatre.org/news/2019/10/a-girl-walks-home-alone-at-night-brings-beauty-to-vampires/
[2] https://www.cautionspoilers.com/film-reviews/butt-boy/
[3] https://musiccitydrivein.com/2021/02/19/film-threat-award-this-announces-2021-indie-film-nominees-for-drive-in-event-virtual-ceremony/
> _Contrast Netflix with HBOMax and Disney+, each of which have consistently incredible quality._
Agree on HBO, but I wouldn't be able to tell with such certainty whether Disney+ has consistently higher quality than Netflix, or Disney+ has simply the benefit of owning almost all recognizable world-building IP in the industry (Disney itself, Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, plus everything they acquired when they acquired FOX).
For example: Not being a die-hard Star Wars Fan and being oversaturated with the Marvel franchise for years now, content from these universes on Disney+ is in no way of higher quality to me than comparable-size content of Netflix i.e. Stranger Things, Mindhunter, Peaky Blinders,...
I find myself increasingly browsing Disney+ like "oh, interesting!...maybe another time...", but that might be just me.
In addition, I keep noticing how Disney+ is producing big-budget series which end up with only ~8 20-30min episodes, whereas Netflix and HBO still consider ~50mins to be the minimum.
Do people really talk about movies? It seems you do. Do you talk with your friends? Online? On some specific forum? With your significant other?
I'm so surprised that there are memes from big hits, but no real talk about them.
I mean there's relatively a lot of talk about how Harry Potter feels good but doesn't make sense, and of course lots of critiques, reviews, "reaction videos", but somehow it seems actual people stopped talking about movies with each other (beyond the very shallow have you seen it? yes/no. was it good? yes/no.)
maybe I just miss when people talked too much about the Matrix? :D
also I find it strange that it's still so hard to find good movies/books/series/games that I would like.... despite all the data, metadata, taxonomy, folksonomy (tags! unstructured data! big data! bad data, bad!)
for example, IMDB knows what I like, Netflix too, yet the recommendations are pretty bad.
let's take Mindhunter. "CSI done well", right? but I still haven't found something that is similar to it. (not that I looked very much.)
Taste is not subjective. The critics (cc Metacritic, >>> Rotten Tomatoes) are usually right about TV/film.
Decent Netflix TV: Maid, Unbelievable, Ozark, Narcos, Bloodline, Mindhunter, Black Mirror, Sweet Tooth.
They average like one decent TV show every 18 months. It's an absolute disaster.
> "In voice pitch, we are looking at more like 60 percent [difference between men and women]."
Is this speaking in raw frequency? If so, I think it is overstated. A 50% reduction in frequency is only one octave, which is 10% of the range of the human ear. And a 50% increase in pitch (from men to women, which is what I think they are saying based on other sources on human voice pitch) is only a 5th, the interval in the Star Wars theme, or 'God Rest, ye merry gentlemen,' which really isn't that much.
> According to Puts, this fits with the immunocompetence handicap hypothesis, which states that since testosterone takes away energy from the immune system, only men in the best of health—whose immune systems are not suffering due to physiological stress—can afford to develop testosterone-dependent traits.
Well I guess my autoimmune disorders explain why I'm a tenor. Oh well, that means I get the best arias.
For most people, I've found that what they call a 'deeper' voice is simply a more resonant voice. There's a video where Tom Scott is trying to sing. He sings a note more resonantly, and he thinks he dropped down the octave. But he actually stayed at the same pitch.[0] So I wonder if that is why 'deeper' voices are perceived as more confident, simply because the people are speaking at roughly the same pitch but are speaking more loudly and more resonantly.
I also question a bit whether deep voices really are more appealing on a society-wide basis, maybe for sexual attraction purposes, though I have some thoughts on that too.[1] But, most male singers that have been prized as stars sing higher. It's a meme now that all male pop singers sing way up in the stratosphere, but it's been true historically too--the tenors got the best arias most of the time. There are certainly lower-voiced outliers (Bing Crosby comes to mind), but the 'stars' so to speak have often been higher-voiced.
[0]: https://youtu.be/2QKPQ6JYVhU?t=439
[1]: I remember being inexplicably taken when I watched Mindhunter by the male lead. I took a straw poll of several gay men I knew, and they all said that Jonathan Groff was sexy specifically for his voice, which is indeed quite high, noticeably so even just casually viewing his movies. Obviously, this anecdata doesn't undo the actual research in the article, but I do think it is a bit more complicated than presented here.
>And yet, it's hard to look at Netflix as anything more than a total failure of the promises of data analytics and personalization. Netflix should be putting out nothing but hits. A dozen Breaking Bads or Game of Thrones.
I don't follow this argument. Knowing what people like has very little to do with the quality of original creative content; surely you don't expect Goodreads to put out Shakespearean novels, or Spotify to be producing original hits on par with the Rolling Stones? Should ESPN have better pro sports scouting and coaching talent than the professional leagues?
Knowing what people like, however, _does_ have to do quite a bit with selling those people a product - which Netflix just reported 15% YoY growth to $7.7B yearly revenue, they're clearly very successful to this end. I think you actually have it backwards - if anything, Netflix represents a total fulfillment of the promises of data analytics and personalization. Despite mediocre original content, this is a $200B company with 200M subscribers growing revenues by double digits two decades after IPO.
If Netflix paid $450k+ salaries to screenwriters instead of engineers, you'd very likely get better movies on a worse streaming platform. And when Netflix has shelled out for Hollywood talent, like Mindhunter which has David Fincher and Charlize Theron, the results are quite good.
Regardless, to take the fact that Netflix pays for premium engineering and analytics talent, but does not pay for premium filmmaking talent, and then spin that fact into Netflix being "a total failure of the promises of data analytics and personalization" is a questionable criticism.
It’s okay. Fincher cancelled it to do a movie with Netflix that looks great. Netflix wasn’t going to get Mindhunter continued successfully without Fincher’s interest.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mank
Several people who worked on the show are on the Pennsylvania Film Industry Association Board, and it was filmed in and around Pittsburgh. Maybe that had something to do with it.
That said I believe I read an article suggesting that Netflix plans to not film in Atlanta because of a variety of conservative laws passed in the state of Georgia. That was post the 2018 filming of Mindhunter season 2, but it may affect future shows and films.
Netflix’s recommended content has become so terrible outside things I want like Better Call Saul or Mindhunter, that I’ve cancelled the sub. Most of what they push to the top is straight garbage. Really badly written stuff.
Meanwhile I can pay the same for amazon and get more Picard, Mr Robot, The Expanse... and if the TV sucks there are plenty of movies on rotation.
I feel so seen! For a very long time, I couldn't sleep without watching TV shows on my laptop, to the extent that I'd have insomnia if the Internet went out. In fact, even though I've weaned myself off it for the past several months, I'd probably still have trouble sleeping if I didn't at least know I could watch reruns of 30 Rock if I had trouble sleeping.
More to the point: just like the author, there's a very particular kind of TV I'd watch to sleep: nothing for the first time, and nothing tense. The West Wing and the US version of The Office were both great for me, since there's so much of it to get through. I've probably seen every episode of The West Wing at least 15 times by now.
Which, to me, sort of answers/challenges the concern the author has about binge watching. On a normal night, I'd barely make it through half an episode before I'd notice time slipping as I watched, my cue that I'm nodding off and should shut the laptop. I'm never watching first-run stuff like Mindhunter or Russian Doll, the stuff Netflix really wants me to be streaming, because it'd keep me alert.
Are you saying Netflix hasn’t made quality shows that will last through 2039? I’d like to know which company you think has made close to the amount of quality shows Netflix has since 2014. Here’s part of a list I have for a content project. No company comes close to this output in recent history.
House of Cards launched February 2013 (7 seasons, finished)
Orange is the New Black launched July 2013 (7 seasons, finished)
Stranger Things launched July 2016 (3 seasons, 1-2 more)
—
Dark (2 seasons, 3rd is last)
Glitch (2 seasons, 3rd might never come)
Russian Doll (1 season)
Haunting of Hill House (1 season, anthology)
American Vandal (2 seasons)
Black Mirror (anthology, last season not that good)
The Crown (3 seasons)
When They See Us (mini-series, 2019)
Unbelievable (just came out)
—
Glow (3 seasons)
Kimmy Schmidt (4 seasons, finished)
Arrested Development (they tried, hard to get it all back together after years of being done)
Sex Education (1 season)
Bojack Horseman (5 seasons?) #animated
Mindhunter (2 seasons)
The OA (2 seasons)
Maniac (mini-series)
Wet Hot American Summer (2 seasons, but season 1 is the top notch one)
F is for Family (3? seasons) #animated
Big Mouth (2? seasons) #animated
—
Documentary mini-series
—
Staircase
Making a Murderer
Evil Genius
The Jinx
Wild Wild West
——-
There’s more I’m missing and I didn’t include a number of shows Netflix helps finance but isn’t the main financier or producer or original place of distribution. Shows like Glitch.
It just sounds like they’re doing what every other network does. A bunch of it is trash you don’t care about but another subset of their customers do. It’s not all commissioned for us personally, and Netflix will always prioritise their own shows before others in the app.
It’s not like you watch HBO 12 hours a day expecting pure content that you love from start to finish.
That said, apart from the tent pole series they [plan to] push out each year (stranger things, better call saul, Fargo, mindhunter, nightflyers, etc.) the rest is clearly data driven garbage that doesn’t realise it’s working a cliche. With a couple of exceptions even the marvel universe shows fell into their pattern.
In that sense it’s Netflix Unoriginal Content. But you still get the diamond in the mine.
Being in the EU I get about 8 different translations of two different kinds of zombie story, but you’re not really paying for that.
And on the same level, it’s a shame that streaming is now split. American Gods, Good Omens, The Expanse, and Mr Robot are all on Amazon. Netflix definitely dropped a ball on some of that. The TV show costs the same but I have to pay 2x to watch because of the networks.
Of all the shows you mentioned the only ones I have watched is, OITB (left it at after watching S04 I think), Master of None (both the seasons), I realise that its a drama that leans toward being a rom-com but I do not watch rom-coms at all. Kudos to Mindhunter, indeed that was entertaining and right in my ballpark. Liked House of cards till the time Spacey was there, S06 disappointed me. Season 1 of Making a Murderer was outstanding, season 2 didn't catch my interest. Also the last comedy I watched end-to-end I think was Entourage (which was produced by HBO), The Office (US) and Parks And Recreation, not surprisingly Netflix doesn't stream any of these in my region, Prime Video does the last two and Hotstar streams Entourage.
These are good shows not great ones like The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, BB, Six Feet Under you know about the stuff that critics rave about etc. I don't care if Birdbox was watched by all of Netflix's subscribers, thats precisely the sort of thing that I don't watch the majority of the time, you watch that thing once and you forget that you ever watched it again. I'm now on probably my sixth or seventh rewatch of The Wire, that should tell you something about my viewing habits and why Netflix's content just doesn't work for me. I don't expect a network to consistenly churn out shows like that but at least some of the shows should be somewhere close to that level which HBO continues to do with The Deuce, Succession, True Detective(I know they fucked the dog on S02) etc.
Also you have the time to watch ALL of that, I don't. I work in tech too, I have an hour on weekdays and maybe 2-3 on weekends for leisure, so its only natural that I would be picky about what I watch, the absolute best, currently that would mean shows like The Americans, Escape from Dannemora and shows from the past like Halt and Catch Fire(from AMC), Six feet under, Deadwood which not surpisingly were also made by HBO. Netflix doesn't stream any of that.
I also don't understand how you think AMC won't exist, are they going to be insolvent ? Doesn't look like it, they have a cash-cow in The Walking Dead(I only watched till S06 then got bored) They got two of the best TV shows I liked BB and BCS, BCS is gonna kill it in the next season. They also produced The Terror, a brilliant mini-series which Netflix didn't stream as well and again Prime Video did. As a viewer I don't care about Netflix's subscriber numbers or HBO's lack thereof, I want to watch content I like which sadly Netflix doesn't produce on a consistent basis, this is entirely subjective and I realise that I might be one of the edge-cases in all the millenials when I say Netflix don't tickly my fancy.
I'm not biased towards HBO, hell HBO doesn't even stream in my country, I'm incredibly picky about what I watch since I'm short on time, Netflix churns out a LOT of shows, its only natural that some of them turn out to be brilliant and some of them indeed are, but the rest, like 90% of the shows are just average, they don't work for me, I simply do not have the time to watch them.
In that sense, Netflix is like the Y-Combinator of producing original content. You produce(invest in) hundreds of TV shows(startups) and hope one of them makes it big (becomes a unicorn) and the rest of them, well they would be probably cease to exist after some time.
Mad Men didn't even have an audience when it aired (<2 million viewers most episodes), and airs on a network that likely won't exist in 5-6 years (or at least won't be producing new content), so it's not super clear to me what your point is about those shows as evidence of how a network grows. The way a network grows is by producing content people want to watch, whether that's disposable content made to last a minute or content made to last the test of time. HBO isn't growing because people are subscribing to watch Sopranos re-runs.
Past reporting suggests churn in most subscription content services is very low, so your Netflix cancellation may be unusual. I'd also add that exclusive content is one part of the story, but there's also a lot of licensed content that's very good on Netflix as on other services.
But for what it is worth, I would rank the following Netflix originals to be "top tier" within their genre -- some of these genres lend themselves more to rewatching than others, and some are closer to my taste than others, some held up in quality through their run more than others, so in a sense I am ranking shows based on their peak quality --
Orange is the New Black; Bloodline; Stranger Things; The Crown; Gilmore Girls AYITL; The OA; A Series of Unfortunate Events; Mindhunter; The Haunting of Hill House; Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt; Master of None; Love; Lady Dynamite; Santa Clarita Diet; GLOW; American Vandal; Maniac; Bojack Horseman; F is for Family; Disenchantment; Hilda; Dark; The Rain; Elite; Chef's Table; Making a Murderer; Shot in the Dark; Wormwood; Wild Wild Country; Salt Fat Acid Heat; Queer Eye; The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell; My Next Guest Needs No Introduction; Lilyhammer; Terrace House; Alias Grace; The End of the Fucking World; Collateral; Wanderlust; Longmire; Black Mirror; Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.
In addition to these, the following shows are Netflix originals in my region, indicating that although someone else initially funded them, Netflix bought them for exclusive distribution here, and also meet the above requirements:
Babylon Berlin; Bodyguard; Casé; Crashing; Cuckoo; Derry Girls; The Great British Baking Show; Happy!; Happy Valley; The Investigator; Peaky Blinders; River.
I have pretty broad taste in TV and watch a lot of TV while I am programming or running data analysis, so maybe the breadth of stuff I include here is surprising to most. But to the extent your post is a useful anecdote about how Netflix has no great shows, I'm responding to your challenge to "Name one show" that would meet that criteria.
(These are TV shows only, not films. I haven't really liked many Netflix original films although there are a few I would say are great, like Okja and Roma)
Highly subjective and therefor probably not welcome here, but since this was the comment I saw first:
My Top Netflix Shows:
- Better Call Saul
- Bojack Horseman
- Mindhunter
- Fargo
- Maniac
- The End of the Fucking World
- Master of None
- American Vandal
My Top Netflix Movies:
- Beats of No Nation
- Roma
- Annihilation
- Okja
And where I think your list is wrong:
- 13 Reasons Why
Very problematic show[1]. I found Netflix' response to the criticism lacking and season 2 doubles down on the mistake. Even if one can ignore that, I think the writing and characters are still insultingly thin.
- Ozark
Not bad at all. But also not nearly as good as Breaking Bad. If we didn't live in this gilden television age, I might've found it worth my time
- Altered Carbon
Visually very entertaining. But it's definitely pulp.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13_Reasons_Why#Social_impact
1. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, by Scott McCloud
A comic about comics, but I don’t think you have to enjoy the medium to get something out of the book. If you enjoy exploring subjects to their core, give it a shot.
2. The Sculptor, by Scott McCloud
The latest fiction graphic novel by the person who wrote a seminal book on comics. No surprise it does a lot of things right.
3. S-Town, by Brian Reed
Technically a podcast, but it was released all at once and is a contained story that lasts for seven hours. I’d say a fairer assessment would be to call it a well produced non-fiction audiobook, which is what you’d expect from the producers of Serial and This American Life. When I recommend it I always tell people to give it until the end of the second episode before deciding if they’ll stick with it.
4. Mindhunter, by John Douglas
Enjoyed the Netflix show? There’s a good chance you’ll enjoy this.
> there are basic cable channels (AMC and FX) that have given HBO a run for its money.
Each has produced a couple series ever of the quality that HBO has a few of at any given time. They aren't playing at the same level.
> Does anyone really believe that HBO is going to outcompete Netflix on original programming over the long run?
Yes.
> They just randomly drop them in the middle of the week, as if they don't have time even to promote them. Have you ever started an episode of Jessica Jones and had to wait 2 minutes for them to promo the next season of Mindhunter?
Netflix promotes more heavily in the app than most other streaming g services do; I actually find this both more intrusive and less effective than pre-roll promotions like HBO does.
> Meanwhile, after Game of Thrones ends, what's HBO got for tentpole series?
Succession, The multiple (IIRC, 5) GoT spinoff series that are already confirmed in the works, potentially with the first airing as soon as 2020, the Watchmen series they are rumored to be picking up...
> But premium cable is over, everything is going to be disintermediated,
The trend seems to be more streaming services offering premium add-ons like HBO, and away from “streaming means the end of the premium cable model” that was more defensible a claim a couple years ago.
I don't buy the logic here, and I'm not sure David Sims does either; this strikes me as one of those headlines that was written by an editor, independently of the article.
For as much as anybody here likes HBO, the diagnosis Stankey (and, I think, Sims) has of it seems apt. HBO has a sterling reputation. But so what? Even today, they're no longer distinctively good; in fact, there are basic cable channels (AMC and FX) that have given HBO a run for its money.
Does anyone really believe that HBO is going to outcompete Netflix on original programming over the long run? Netflix introduces new programs like Google introduces new chat programs. It's not even an event for them. They just randomly drop them in the middle of the week, as if they don't have time even to promote them. Have you ever started an episode of Jessica Jones and had to wait 2 minutes for them to promo the next season of Mindhunter?
And that's just Netflix. Amazon will eventually figure TV out. Disney controls Hulu now. Apple is making a move into online video.
Meanwhile, after Game of Thrones ends, what's HBO got for tentpole series? Westworld? Besides the fact that it won't be airing again for 2-3 years, its renewal was not even a certainty.
I think Stankey is right. If HBO is going to be a factor long-term, a thing people pay substantial amounts of money to retain access to, it is going to have to look more like Netflix and less like a thing you pay your cable company extra for. HBO could afford lulls of a year or two taking flyers on just 1-2 new prestige series (Carnivale; Newsroom; Vinyl). But premium cable is over, everything is going to be disintermediated, and HBO will need to justify demanding $15/mo directly from people. I'm not sure it's worth that today.
This reminds me of the Netflix series Mindhunter, about the FBI doing the same with serial killers in the 70s. It's based on real life work. Well worth watching both for the complicated but well handled subject matter and for the direction (David Fincher) and performances.
For anyone doubting the 'morality' of this researc or presuming rapists are just vile apathetic scumbags and nothing more, go watch it or better yet read the real life story it's based on. This kind of research has saves hundreds of lives and prevented many men (mostly) from becoming serial killers. Let's hope this new research does the same for rapists.