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The Crown
2016 · TV series · 6 seasons
Created by Peter Morgan
The gripping, decades-spanning inside story of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the Prime Ministers who shaped Britain's post-war destiny. The Crown tells the inside story of two of the most famous addresses in the world – Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street – and the intrigues, love lives and machinations behind the great events that shaped the second half of the 20th century. Two houses, two courts, one Crown.
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55 comments on Hacker News
There's a play called The Audience, which is a series of meetings between Queen Elizabeth and her prime ministers. It's a fascinating lens through which to view British history.
It runs up through Tony Blair. I'd love to see a final update:
Truss: Hi, I'm Liz Truss
Elizabeth: Urkh! (dies)
Curtain
(The Audience is the basis of the TV show The Crown. The audience parts of The Crown are the most interesting. As the show goes on, it's less about British life and more about royal scandals, ho hum. Gillian Anderson gives an amazing turn as Thatcher; it's too bad the rest of that season is so tedious.)
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.
The Crown is absolutely a prestige TV show. Stranger Things is also high quality and high budget. You could probably include Bridgerton in there too, it's not my kind of show but I can still recognize that it's a well put together one.
Seriously?
The Crown, Stranger Things, Unbelievable, Russian Doll (wow, just wow), Orange Is The New Black, Narcos, Narcos: Mexico, GLOW, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Ozark, Nobody Wants This, Altered Carbon, Dirk Gently, Mindhunters, The Queen's Gambit, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
And that's just what I can remember off the top of my head. And that's my taste, there's more not to my taste like Squid Game, Wednesday, Bridgerton, etc. And not including the films, documentaries, shorts, etc. they done like Love, Death and Robots.
Honestly when watching I had figured The Crown was playing it up for drama or invented it whole-cloth because the whole thing was so foreign vs what I was taught about WW2 British monarchy. And that's why the way they calmly deliver receipts (artifacts from the Windsor File/Marburg Files) in the credits triggered a rabbit hole of surreal bewilderment. In fact you will find historians of the British royalty who say The Crown was very lenient in its handling. But specifically about S2E6 there's a section here that summarizes what was in the episode
https://www.history.com/articles/history-behind-the-crown-queen-elizabeth-edward-margaret-fact-check
British TV is doing _great_ in the streaming era: black mirror, adolescence, peaky blinders, the crown, call the midwife, derry girls, downtown abbey; and so many great police procedurals: line of duty, endeavour, the bay, Sherlock, grace; even those Harlan coben miniserieses - the ones with at least one absurd plot twist per episode - are great fun!
While I’ll be among the first to moan that we’ll never see another red dwarf, python, tinker tailor/smiley’s people, yes minister, father ted [0] .. British tv is still producing great stuff.
It’s the “bureaucrats” in the bbc who are under threat from streaming. I’m not losing sleep!
[0] made in Britain; simply could not have been made in Ireland as was.
This was featured in an episode of The Crown [0]. I had never heard of it and didn't know what the episode was going to be about. I think they did a good job conveying the magnitude of the tragedy.
[0]https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/nov/17/television-drama-the-crown-portrays-aberfan-disaster
The Crown, Season 3 Episode 3, tells this story.
Is this Mr Bates vs the Post Office? Worth watching? I am just finishing up the latest season of The Crown, and was looking for some other british docudrama to watch (sometimes it's nice to watch a show without a mandated sex scene, car chase, etc)
> The people have a relationship with the king, they’ve grown up together and there’s a connection there that’s hard to define. In times of crisis that connection could play a key role.
That relationship really is hard to define... As a Brit my defining memory of the now King was - as an 8 year old - learning of his desire to be a tampon in his then mistress and current Queen.
https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/film-tv/a41913184/tampongate-true-story-the-crown-season-5/
Monarchy is absurd but it has been particlarly difficult to take him seriously since.
I mostly just feel sorry for him. No-one should have to live their life in the public eye like that.
Nationalise their considerable private wealth (which only exists due to their role) and let them live their lives in peace.
Ireland and Germany both show that we can enjoy the benefits of a ceremonial head of state without having to put up with the nonsense of monarchy.
The story of Reddit would make a good TV show, kind of "The Social Network" crossed with "The Crown". So many ups and downs, and many cross overs to other things happing in tech and the wider world. You could easily fill three or four seasons.
"The front page of the Internet"
None of this is true, nor does it need to be. As my photography professor says, “digital is better, but I don’t want better.”
Roma is as beautiful as anything shot on film, Amelie from 1995 is as teal-orange medium-shot photo filter as anything on Netflix. The Crown is often beautiful because of impressive practical lighting effects.
[EDIT: Amelie is from 2001, I mixed up the date with the same director’s City of Lost Children from 1995]
>Why do tv shows need multiple seasons ?
Because people get comfortable with the characters/storyline and want to see more. Is it really that difficult of a concept?
And I find it amusing that you bring up British TV, because the only shows that I can think of that are super popular and have a worldwide audience are the ones that run for quite a while. The Crown, Downton Abbey, Peaky Blinders, Sherlock. Yeah they do a lot of shorter ones but those barely get out of the country as far as I'm aware.
> the quality of films/TV produced in the west has been in steady decline for quite some time
I could agree the average quality has dropped. But surely you agree that the sheer volume of high-quality content has ballooned. How many high-quality TV shows can you name from the 90s?
Compare that to the last 10 years of shows like: Succession, Ted Lasso, The Queen's Gambit, The Handmaids Tale, Better Call Saul, Ozark, House of Cards, Stranger Things, Silicon Valley, The Crown, Fargo, Mr. Robot, True Detective, Veep, and even (controversially) Game of Thrones.
I doubt we'll see Angelina Jolie and Johnny Lee Miller in a film together after their divorce
On another note - I thought Johnny Lee Miller was great as John Major in the crown - you could barely tell it was him
Perhaps less so in the UK and other places than in the US? It's TV so who knows, but I loved the episode in The Crown where Princess Margaret says to a middle-class Margaret Thatcher something like "Just say 'What?'. Never beg for anything, much less for pardon".
I agree with everything you wrote. We keep Disney+ because their family content is untouchable by anyone else. HBO/Apple we trade off every couple of months depending on what's new and what we are most interested in.
Netflix I subscribe to for about 1 month per year to binge the latest of whatever I'm watching (this year: Stranger Things, The Crown) and then cancel. Anything else (Hulu, etc) is a 1 month and churn kind of situation.
Netflix especially seems to be in a content death spiral of sorts. They cancel their original content so aggressively and often in such unsatisfying ways for the audience that I've decided I don't want to watch anything on Netflix until after it is an established success with multiple seasons produced. I wish they would put more wood behind fewer arrows. Or maybe just make a move toward miniseries so at least the audience can have a satisfying beginning, middle, and end to something they've invested time in watching. I would so much rather have 5-8 episodes that form a cohesive story, than a Season 1 that sets up a world and then never gets to go anywhere because some algorithm decided the show wasn't successful enough to continue.
Radical idea: Limit sharing to a set number of hours per month. Not that I want this, far from it. I have enjoyed sharing my parent's account for many years. However, the total time that I spend watching Netflix is around 1 hour per month. I'm not a heavy user. I'll binge season 5 of the Crown but may not watch it again for a month.
My parents on the other hand use it more. When we run out of sharing time, I can no longer access it. If I really, really want it, I can get my own account. I feel like that's a good middle ground, particularly for those with kids off at school.
All my rich feelings about this as a millennial woman are from watching Netflix's The Crown.
I think that fact is absolutely incredible, and I'm just noticing how it works, the glimpses of feeling I get as I scroll news feed... images from real photos of the queen seamlessly woven in with flashes of scenes and emotions evoked from watching... Even emotional bits that I KNOW are not legit accurate/real.... My mind treats it all as one category anyway.
The show is an elegant testament to what fiction does, to portray a woman's epic coming of age and into the power and duty of something much bigger than her, across a century.
Our literature just doesn't have that grandness anymore, there are no literary novels by writers today about today that do this. Aesthetics there have changed in their scope somehow.
It's all on our film and tv technology to refresh these themes of responsibility, inner steeliness, honor, sacrifice, respectability etc... to make what's old new again.
I'm certain before the show I cared nothing, and after it, I care a lot.
A brief, incomplete list of Netflix series that would be horribly diminished by being movies:
Stranger Things, The Queens Gambit, Narcos, The Crown, basically all of the rest of them.
A complete list of movies that would be worse as series:
Anything by Michael Bay
Let's reverse engineer what a PM will think with data:
1. 80/20 rule: Target best performing shows, replicate success to capitalize on fan loyalty/momentum (new seasons or spins): The Crown, Money Heist, Designated Survivor, Narcos...
2. Validation: Look at high movie ratings, copy those categories: Korean dramas, documentaries, telenovelas, reality TV...
3. Culture: Follow trending themes on social media - feminism, financial freedom, woke...incorporate them into the screenplay, regardless of bias, craft, or message
4. Engagement: As long as we capture user attention and addiction, reinforce this habit via recommendations with AI algorithms
Like Facebook, they are focused on creating an addiction machine for short term gain, and this strategy is reflected on their increasingly low quality shows - this affects the brand, leading to low trust and rising churn
Netflix is screwed.
It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie, you could find it on Netflix, put it in your DVD queue and in a few days receive the DVD in the mail. Their inventory was really good, (with some exceptions) and the service had pretty fast turnaround. Phase 1.
Then broadband started becoming more available, so streaming became a natural extension. Here's where Netflix faced bigger challenges. Initially, IP owners were happy to sell streaming rights for pennies since they didn't have any idea of the real value. Netflix leveraged this to build up an even bigger catalog that wasn't constrained by the number of DVDs in their inventory.
Netflix started to dabble in producing (and buying) content for their streaming. Good stuff like Stranger Things. The Crown. Dark. Babylon Berlin. And IP owners started raising the prices for renewals for movies and series in their catalogs. Netflix decided to cheap out on the quality of their shows. And they started to cut down on their DVD catalog as well.
Now you have all of the IP owners with their own streaming services, so Netflix will find it really hard to stream anything but the crappiest stuff. And they've shown little ability to consistently produce quality series or movies.
Contrast this with ATV+. Apple knew that it had a huge potential customer base, but that licensing IP wasn't going to be sustainable; whatever they streamed had to be exclusive. So they started slow, trying to replace HBO for high quality content. And they had some meh shows like "See." Not bad, but not HBO. Then "The Morning Show," followed by "Ted Lasso." Now they're starting to get some traction. Having an infinite amount of money always helps, but they became pretty good at saying no. "For All Mankind" grabbed a chunk of sci-fi viewers. Greyhound captured the war nerds. Slowly, carefully, they've been building up a pretty solid catalog. Now you have shows like "Servant," "Slow Horses," "The Mosquito Coast," "Foundation."
Cap it off with a series and a movie that have set ATV+ on par with any streaming service: Severance and Coda.
Now ATV+ will never have the catalog that Disney+ has. They might be fine with that. But where does this leave Netflix? Netflix has no serious movies that could compete for an Oscar. They don't seem to have the ability to create must see TV anymore. Perhaps they're too driven by algorithms to give the viewer what Netflix "thinks" they want? I just can't see a path forward for Netflix as other than crappy shows. Even with their foreign content, they face increased price pressure and competition from the other SVODs.
House of Cards was certainly a big thing at the time--for the first few seasons anyway. Queen's Gambit. GLOW and Russian Doll were quite good. I'm not a huge fan of The Crown but it's well done.
Honestly, Game of Thrones notwithstanding, I'm not sure that there's a lot on HBO I consider must see level content either although some is quite good.
I'd probably consider them about a wash for content.
TV shows are really pushing things too. Twenty years ago, a big budget show was a premium cable production like Deadwood ($4.5M/episode) or Rome ($8.5M/episode), but now you have mainline shows like The Crown, Stranger Things, and The Mandalorian, all costing $12M+/episode.
Haven't seen either, I assume the Crown covered the emotional effect on the Queen, no idea what Watchmen is - it's the film with the glowing man with a dong isn't it?
To me, Tulsa is either 24 hours away, or the place Chandler went to for Christmas in Friends.
Highly recommend the Crown episode ‘The Fog’ that goes into how bad it once was in London.
Perhaps because they don't want to encourage everyone who thinks they were misrepresented in drama or documentary to try their luck. I mean, imagine what would happen if the British Royal Family decided to kick up a stink about misrepresentations in The Crown, of which there are very many.
> For example, Disney reportedly shovels $25m per episode into its prestige Marvel shows. The Crown on Netflix costs7 between $6.5m and $13m per episode, and so on.
> With the best will in the world, there’s no way in hell that Doctor Who is ever going to have that sort of money spent on it8...
> My fear for the BBC is that as generational turnover takes place, the BBC will remain outpaced and its cultural relevance will continue to decline. How can the BBC compete in a world where Disney can crank out an infinite stream of Mandalorians and WandaVisions11, while the BBC has to make do with less cash and an obligation to make worthy documentaries...
Oh no, it can't afford to make superhero-themed stuff. We're doomed!
There's an important place for stuff that isn't easily-translated superhero-themed special effects blockbusters. Frankly, I view the dominance of those blockbusters to be more of a disease than an important trend that needs to be aped.
Funnily enough, I just watched the episode from the Crown yesterday when the Queen explains to Philip that they all have bridge code names, and what his is.
I don’t think you should be using that TV show as a guide, parts of it are fictional. For examples, take a look at the wikipedia section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crown_(TV_series)#Historical_accuracy
Thirty five years ago is a long time culturally.
He was so popular he even got to meet the queen of england when he was in the UK:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bNXzzzvXMuQ
(This is dramatized in Netflix’s Crown Season 2 Episode 6)
This is a large motivation of mine for reading fiction and watching good drama. The best of it can provide insights into my own life that {categorized mental dynamic} is too blunt an instrument to probe. The Crown springs to mind - the latest season is absolutely fantastic for furthering my understanding of the human condition. My wife and I find ourselves discussing every episode and character at length for all their nuances, which are often difficult to put into words.
A few? Off the top of my head:
- The Queen's Gambit
- Narcos
- House of Cards
- Russian Doll
- Ozark
- Stranger Things
- Tiger King
- Dear White People
- The Witcher
- The Umbrella Academy
- The Crown
- Space Force
And that's just TV shows. There are a lot of films they've put out that are very good as well.
Interesting tidbit: in the Netflix show The Crown, there's an episode[0] where the queen's mother buys a castle in Scotland where the owner is happy to get rid of it because of all the pains of maintaining it.
Which is based on real-life event of the purchase of the Castle of Mey (1952):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_of_Mey
[0] s1e8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crown_(season_1)
Maybe? Between the DVR and TV from non-ad sources, we rarely see any commercials at all -- and yet my wife and I both routinely have another screen up during SOME shows.
We find there are two kinds of movies/TV: stuff that's kinda just relaxing and during which you can browse twitter or whatever, and stuff that's more serious where you can't really multitask without missing important aspects of the show, either because of the filming style or the density of the material or the pace of events or whatever.
The canonical example of the latter is The Wire. More recently, I'd put The Crown or Watchmen in this category. For the former, well, pretty much any traditional network show counts.
However, even in high-attention programming, it's pretty common for one of us to pause the show and check a screen to verify where we saw a given actor before, or look up a related bit of information (e.g., during the Crown, we often check on historical context).
I get what you are saying, but I'd find it stupid to pay a set amount per month to see the same movies over and over. Do you really think people will pay to see all of the Avengers movies every month? If yes, then fine, good for Disney. I just find the 'they have better content' line a bit much.
I'd rather watch Master of None, Fargo, The Crown and many more quality Netflix than some action here movie that has been cut from the same comic book cloth as the previous one. But that is just a matter of preferences, but to say their content is better based on how good they do in the box office is nonsense.
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.
All the web sites that go with British newspapers (and for all I know, other newspapers in the world, but I live in Britain) have been doing grey-SEO stuff that's bound to get hit by algorithm changes.
By "grey SEO" here I'm thinking of articles that are intended to get "natural" traffic as a result of people asking questions, e.g.
"When is the new Avengers movie out?" "Which channel is The Crown on?" "Was Michael Jackson a Paedophile?" "Who is that girl from Stranger Things?"
An encyclopedia is often the natural result for questions like these, or some sort of specialist fact database, IMDB for example, or a TV channel's own listings site. But the newspapers decided they could get some of those clicks. If some people who were wondering if that's the same girl in Godzilla (yup) click through and see four adverts and read speculation as to whether Kate Middleton hates her brother-in-law's new wife (probably not, also who cares?) that's more profit for the publisher.
Anyway, Google's thing has always been trying to put the answers you wanted at the top. In defiance of Babbage's oft-cited remark, Google wants to give you the answer you were looking for even if you ask the wrong question. This may often mean that a Daily Mail article trying to get you to click through to more slop about nothing is NOT the best answer when you asked a mundane question and Google may tweak their algorithm to prefer say, the Netflix video trailer for this season of Black Mirror, higher than a Daily Mail article speculating that Charlie Brooker might be gay when users ask it "When is Black Mirror new series?" even if the Daily Mail team worked really hard setting metadata tags and fiddling with the layout.
I highly recommend watching The Crown episode on the London Fog. It is amazing to hear the story of London pollution.
I use a 3M room filter for white noise generation for my kids. Has worked very well for 7 years! (I believe I got asthma growing up around dust).
Friends is my most watched show on Netflix, but that's because there are 10 seasons with 24 episodes each (i.e. a lot of content) and it's just something that plays in the background while I do other stuff. I wouldn't care too much if it was removed, but I would if they took away Stranger Things, Ozark, Our Earth, The Crown, Altered Carbon, Narcos, Santa Clarita Diet, BoJack Horseman, Queer Eye, all the comedy specials and lots more.
Netflix just released its Q1 numbers.
They've added record 6.9 million subscribers. That's new subscribers - defectors.
I'm not sure what would cause the "masses" to re-evaluate the quality of selection, especially taking into account the fact that Netlifx is now adding tons of content they'll own forever, so 10 years from now "The Crown" and "The Stranger Things" etc. will still be there plus all the shows and movies they've added in those 10 years.
Competitively Netflix is safe because to watch those 250 top movies online in one place you can go to... nobody.
HBO has some big-ticket items, but Netflix is more consistent in dropping new series for me to try. It's still my go-to place for content since there's more than I have time to watch. I just looked up their list of original content[1] for refresh my mind, and quite a few were extremely good in my opinion.
- House of Cards: I only got a little into the second season before I got busy, but what I saw was high quality and interesting.
- Orange is the new Black: My wife still loves this series
- Stranger Things: An honest to god phenomenon. The second season was weaker IMO, but I'm not sure how it could be as good as the first. That's a high bar to hit.
- The Crown: I caught a lot of it as my wife watched. Pretty good, even if a blond Doctor Who was somewhat distracting.
- A Series of Unfortunate Events: The kids liked this, as some of them are going through the books.
- Altered Carbon: Refreshingly good science fiction. Main character casting a little odd, since it's more obvious now than it was when I was younger how odd and slightly off-putting it is to cast someone with the physique of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a science fiction lead. At the same time, it's now fitting (or a trope) because of all the science fiction he helmed in the 1990's.
- Lost in Space: Interesting, but ultimately spoiled slightly by the contrived plot. Better writing and this would have been extremely good rather than worth watching, but slightly disappointing.
- The Haunting: A nice interweaving of stories, and creepy series. I liked the ending. I have friends who didn't.
That's just from the drama section of the list. There's plenty in the other sections too, such as Maniac and Russian Dolls which I watched recently that were good, and documentary section has a bunch of good things I've seen as well. Some of he Marvel series' were pretty good too (season one of Jessica Jones was excellent on so many levels).
That's a small fraction of what they released. Looking at the list now, there's no way I would cancel Netflix before Hulu, and probably HBO also. There's things I want to watch on those (for different reasons), but now that I examine it, it's clear that I use and value what Netflix is giving me way more than the other two.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_original_programs_distributed_by_Netflix
>WRT Netflix, their stated strategy was that their access to data was going to allow them to create superior content
I would argue that Netflix has and does do this except for a different definition of superior. They aren't really trying to make a single show with broad market appeal. An algorithm isn't going to help with that anyway. What an algorithm can do is find niches to serve. Netflix has done a good job of creating these smaller shows that have an intense appeal to a small number of people. Gather enough of those shows together and eventually you have everyone covered. It is basically just targeted advertising except with TV shows.
HBO might have GOT that everyone watches, but Netflix has Black Mirror, BoJack Horseman, GLOW, You, The Crown, Russian Doll, Narcos, Maniac, Ozark, One Day At A Time, Big Mouth, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and numerous other shows that have received critical acclaim and everyone probably watches at least one of those.
If you look closely enough you can see a clear trend regarding Netflix's content strategy. They will continue to make movies like Bird Box, B-style movies and "cult classics" that they can draw big numbers to via their reach and marketing.
Oscar contenders like Roma and Beast of No Nation (a bit early for it's time if you ask me).
Partnerships with foreign content makers to act as an international distributor (BBC produced, Golden Globe Winner, The Bodyguard for example).
Top quality original TV: The Crown for example, fueled by contracts with big name show-runners and writers to produce them (Shonda Rhymes).
And finally, high value syndication targets (Friends, Mad Men, The Office).
Netflix's content allocation seems pretty clear, the next few years will be optimization at the margins.
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)
Even if we classify Manic as a prestige show, what else form Netflix fits into this category? The Crown. In Europe Netflix has Better Call Saul (and labels it as a "Netflix Original") but I don't think it should count. And then what?
It seems to me that Netflix specialises in 7/10 shows. Solid and fairly forgettable productions.
I spend 5-7 hours a week watching TV shows and I find I have zero use for Netflix. It has almost that I want to watch if my goal is to watch the best thing I can find for an hour a day.
"Ever since the American-Norwegian crime drama “Lilyhammer” became Netflix’s NFLX, +2.32% first original series to premiere in 2012, the company has been committed to voraciously generating new content in addition to its huge library of existing TV shows and movies."
"huge", my posterior.
U.S. context: In the last couple of years, aside from a very few new headliners (e.g. "Rogue One"), and some lingering headliners from older contracts (e.g. "West Wing", Star Trek), and ever-fewer good independent productions, I find Netflix's streaming library to be the dreggs of barely acceptable quality. (People will watch it when there's nothing better.)
Netflix streaming seems to be more popular than ever, but, "Jessica Jones", "The Crown", and a few other Netflix productions aside, Amazon Prime is bringing more engaging content into their lineup than Netflix is. (And that isn't saying too much. Most recently, on Prime, I'm enjoying re-watching the old "Kung Fu" show from the 70's -- in good if not spotless, widescreen prints -- apparently, original filming was with cinema-format cameras.)
There are still some worthwhile titles on Netflix streaming (U.S.). But after a few months, you've seen them all.
For those of you outside of the U.S., for all that your catalogs are smaller -- so I read -- you should know that, in the U.S., almost no new major films end up on Netflix. And almost all of the older ones are now gone -- contracts expired. Per what I read and hear, some do still end up or remain in other countries' NF catalogs.
> Think about the films people will remember from the last decade: you won't find any Netflix films among them.
Films, maybe not. But House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Stranger Things, Black Mirror and The Crown have just as much cultural significance as Hollywood movies. And if we expand to HBO, then we can call in Game of Thrones, which has had far more cultural impact than La La Land. This is related to a cousin comment of mine: films are no longer the most important cultural medium. Long-form shows with high production values are.
It's also worth noting that Icarus, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, is from Netflix.
Are you talking about their shows sometimes costing $7M an episode? Do you know which ones besides House of Cards and The Crown?
> The problem with legal movies are DRM, vendor/device lock-in, forced ads, regional policies etc.
This, right here. I recently tried to start watching The Crown. So I go to Netflix on my tablet and start it up. I get an error 5.2[0]. Following Netflix's advice, I force-restart; I reboot my tablet; I uninstall & reinstall. Hmmm … I am running LineageOS, so I do a bit more googling. It turns out that this is actually a DRM error. Oddly, I can still play e.g. Stranger Things.
Why the #*&@ does Netflix do this? I've been a customer for a dozen years; they've made quite a packet from me over that time. All I want to do is watch their content, that I'm paying for, on my tablet.
[0] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/65574
> Netflix streaming, in my opinion, has degraded significantly in terms of programming choices.
One exception I'd say is that Netflix Original Programming is getting quite good. Narcos, The Crown, and Stranger Things are all fantastic.
But yes, in general their selection of quality 3rd party titles is horrible. It's rare to browse Netflix hoping to find a specific movie and not be disappointed.
We just cancelled our Sky subscription because we'd eventually realised that none of us was watching "live" TV.
I binge watched "The Crown" during a recent bout of flu and was deeply impressed.
There's a new Netflix Original called The Crown, and a few episodes in the London Fog of 1952 is a prominent plot point (no spoilers beyond that, though if you're a history buff it shouldn't be much of a spoiler anyway). Made me think considerably about how far we've come in terms of environmental regulations and our understanding of weather patterns.
I had honestly completely forgotten this even happened until that episode (though it gets a few of the finer details wrong, but nothing catastrophic.)
Can also recommend The Crown on Netflix, with American actor John Lithgow masterfully interpreting the Old British Bulldog. There's even an entire episode devoted to the affair of Sutherland's portrait commemorating Churchill's 80th birthday, considered one of the art world's great lost masterpieces:
Secret of Winston Churchill's unpopular Sutherland portrait revealed
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/winston-churchill/11730850/Secret-of-Winston-Churchills-unpopular-Sutherland-portrait-revealed.html
Yeah I saw that in the TV series Crown