An anonymous quote from a New York magazine article on Netflix programming chief Bela Bejaria has been making the rounds these past weeks. It’s from an unnamed “top agent” who advised that Bejaria “needs to keep programming things people watch versus snobby shit people don’t.”
This pretty much sums up the dilemma the streaming part of the TV industry currently finds itself in: Does it want to be the home of the sort of shows that appeal to the more sophisticated parts of the audience, the sort of shows that get extensive coverage in the pages of Vanity Fair, The Atlantic and New York, or does it want to be home to shows that get really big audience ratings?
Not that the two are mutually exclusive, but those instances of convergence are few and far between.
It’s not an easy choice either, especially for a service like Netflix, which (initially anyway) set out to be a better version of HBO, one where viewers could easily binge series like House of Cards and Orange Is The New Black, rather than wait through months of weekly episodes.
That was a different time though, one when Netflix had precious little competition. Hulu hadn’t really started to ramp up its originals game and Amazon Prime Video was playing Showtime to Netflix’s HBO with quirky shows like Transparent and Mozart In The Jungle. (The Amazon programming chief at the time was accused of making shows for “the Silver Lake crowd," referring to the trendy, hipstery part of Los Angeles.)
But now Netflix has all sorts of competition. And their competitors have (largely) figured out that making the types of “snobby” shows that set certain magazine writers all a-twitter are the exact types of shows that get them buzz.
Which is great if you are looking to reach the sort of audience that likes to watch HBO-type programming, but not so great if you are planning to be the number one streaming service out there and thus need to catch the much larger “second wave” of streaming subscribers, the ones who are generally quite happy with the types of shows that are currently on network TV and do indeed often find TV’s prestige dramas to be at best boring, at worst “snobby.”
It’s a fine line to walk.
Apple’s programming team was slammed a few years back by another anonymous executive for creating shows that were more accessible to mainstream audiences, shows the executive claimed felt like “expensive NBC.”
Netflix’s forays into greatly expanding the number of originals on the platform were met with an array of articles asking why Netflix shows had “lost its cool” (and those were the more polite ones).
The need to go from appealing to a more sophisticated audience to a more mainstream one is something the television industry has actually dealt with before. Back in the 1950s, when TVs were something only more affluent Americans could afford, the programming of the day reflected that. Hence the famed “Golden Age” of television, where movies like Judgment At Nuremberg and Marty premiered on the smaller screen.
But then the price of television sets came down and the networks needed to appeal to a broader audience, a development that led to the birth of CBS’s “rural strategy” with sitcoms like Green Acres and Petticoat Junction that targeted a much broader audience, bringing the network and its advertisers much bigger ratings.
Targeting Advertisers, Not Just Subscribers
When all streaming services needed to do was bring in subscribers, focusing on critically acclaimed shows was a smart move. It got them press and buzz, which in turn drew in paid customers. And even if those subscribers only turned on the TV once a week for an hour, that was OK, provided they didn’t cancel their subscription.
Bring in advertising though, and ratings, which translates into time spent on platform, actually matters. It’s not enough to have viewers tune in once a week, they need to actually be watching a decent number of hours each week.
Especially on streaming, where ads only get served when someone is watching.
So this brings up the more existential dilemma of what all the various streaming services want to be when they grow up.
HBO seems to be sticking to its own lane, putting out the sort of “snobby” shows the unnamed agent was talking about, shows like Succession and The White Lotus and Barry, that draw small (the December 2021 season finale of Succession only drew 1.7 million viewers) but influential audiences.
It’s a risky strategy for an ad-supported network, but they may have stumbled onto this decade’s Game of Thrones in The Last Of Us, which has been posting some impressive ratings and seems to fall into that unicorn-like bucket where it appeals to both sophisticated and mainstream audiences. That’s reflected in the 7.5 million viewers who tuned in to the latest episode.
Streamers like Paramount Plus and Peacock, the offspring of broadcast networks, have been carving out a lane that allows them to play off that heritage by creating shows that would not seem out of place on CBS or NBC, shows that should, conceivably, allow them to connect with their current/former audiences.
Netflix, though, is a curious beast in that it wants to be all things to all people. Not a foolish thought, given the absence of time as a constraint on the types of programming a service can have on offer, but still a tricky one to pull off.
There’s a subset of viewers who come expecting to find a whole block of shows similar to The Crown and The Queen’s Gambit, others who come for more Squid Games, along with plenty who come because Netflix has become a household name and is thus the first streaming service people get, but have no real idea what to expect.
These are the viewers Bejaria needs to woo with her programming. People who watch reality shows and old school sitcoms and the like, people who don’t really get why a show like HBO’s Barry is supposed to be funny.
One problem they need to address is that Netflix’s all-at-once delivery system seems to be designed for infrequent binge viewing. Which is why I suspect that Netflix will soon double down on both weekly releases for many of its non-fiction shows along with linear channels for its library content.
They’re both smart ways to increase the amount of time viewers spend on the platform, reducing choice paralysis and creating more value for advertisers.
Those moves will also appeal to the more mainstream “second wave” viewers that Netflix needs to woo in order to continue to grow and maintain their subscriber base while, at the same time, taking care not to alienate those subscribers who come for the prestige shows.
At which point the pressure will be on the famed Netflix algorithm to make sure the right shows and experiences are served up to the right audiences in a way that makes everyone think they’re still getting the Netflix they signed up for. ■
