Turn This TV(Netflix) Off
Related to the last issue about music streaming, I wanted to highlight Will Tavlin's piece on Netflix, Casual Viewing, published in N+1.
The article highlights how Netflix's business model does not reward excellence, at least when it come to their movies.
The difference between Netflix and its predecessors is that the older studios had a business model that rewarded cinematic expertise and craft. Netflix, on the other hand, is staffed by unsophisticated executives who have no plan for their movies and view them with contempt. Cindy Holland, the first employee Sarandos hired, who eventually served as vice president of original content, once compared Netflix’s rapacious DVD acquisition strategy to “shoveling coal in the side door of the house.”
They want to move the movie watching experience to the background.
One tag among Netflix’s thirty-six thousand microgenres offers a suitable name for this kind of dreck: “casual viewing.” Usually reserved for breezy network sitcoms, reality television, and nature documentaries, the category describes much of Netflix’s film catalog — movies that go down best when you’re not paying attention, or as the Hollywood Reporter recently described Atlas, a 2024 sci-fi film starring Jennifer Lopez, “another Netflix movie made to half-watch while doing laundry.” A high-gloss product that dissolves into air. Tide Pod cinema.
This approach feels anti-art. Great and even good movies inspire, or at least strive to make an an impact. Netflix appears to be aiming for the opposite, creating something ephemeral, the movie-equivalent of elevator music.
“Apparently for Netflix, Ryan Reynolds has made $50 million on this movie and $50 million on that movie,” Quentin Tarantino told a Deadline reporter last year at Cannes. “Well, good for him that he’s making so much money. But those movies don’t exist in the zeitgeist. It’s almost like they don’t even exist.” What everyone in Hollywood knows but doesn’t care to admit is that no Netflix film has ever achieved the name recognition of the streamer’s most popular television shows: Stranger Things, Bridgerton, and Squid Game.