The Other Netflix Problem

K udos to Netflix for informing its tantrum-prone employees that they’d better learn to coexist with people who hold various points of view: “If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.” In other words: Stuff it, crybabies who didn’t like Dave Chappelle’s The Closer.

Still, the really stunning announcement from Netflix in its new internal memo on corporate culture — the first to be posted in five years by the famously freewheeling disrupter — was this less-noticed injunction: “You spend our members’ money wisely.” Now that’s a new approach. Netflix also eliminated a section in the memo that used to say, “There are virtually no spending controls and few contract signing controls.” I have a hunch most large companies managed to figure this out before 2022, but as of this week, Netflix understands that controlling spending is smart. Pursuant to the new thinking, Netflix canceled Space Force after just two brief seasons.

Farewell, Space Force! One of the most expensive sitcoms ever made, the 30-minute show united the talents of Steve Carell, who was reportedly paid $1 million per episode, and sitcom mogul Greg Berlanti, whose creations include the American version of The Office, King of the Hill, and Parks and Recreation. Netflix has finally acknowledged it has a Space Force problem, and Netflix’s Space Force problem is tied into an industry-wide reckoning. There is too much content out there — a record 559 scripted television shows last year. Even people who watch for a living (raises hand) can’t keep up.

I liked Space Force and watched the entire first season as soon as it debuted. But overall reaction was tepid. Season two barely made the Nielsen Top Ten list of most-watched streaming offerings. I didn’t get around to it when it premiered this spring, and it wasn’t near the top of my list. (By contrast, the moment a new episode of Better Call Saul arrives, the remote in my household suddenly becomes as hotly pursued as the diamond in the nightclub at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom).

Space Force was . . . fine. Must-see TV? No. It was good-enough TV. In the 1990s, I probably would have watched it every week. Today, however, there is so much good-enough TV that it becomes missable. Great TV goes to the top of the stack, and I also catch up on previous episodes of great TV shows (such as Curb Your Enthusiasm) that I missed when they aired. Good-enough TV isn’t often good enough to watch anymore, not in today’s mega-mart of viewing options.

Netflix offers limitless oceanic vistas of fine. I watched many episodes of GLOW, Sex Education, The Haunting of Hill House, and Orange Is the New Black. They were fine. Bojack Horseman, Stranger Things, and Russian Doll were very good, but I lost interest in all of them. I’ll probably at least start the next season of Midnight Mass, but I suspect I’ll lose interest in it too. Looking at the voluminous list of original series created for Netflix, I would call four of them great television: The Crown, Tiger King, The Queen’s Gambit, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Netflix somehow built a market cap larger than Disney’s by spending billions on a bottomless pool of C+/B- programming.

Ta-dum! Welcome to the home of an extremely broad and diverse range of mediocre entertainment. A new model, right? This spring, Netflix is wondering whether maybe Hollywood has been right for the hundred years before the Streamer arrived: This business is all about the hits. Netflix has started to notice that people are using the service selectively: They sign up when Stranger Things drops a new season, binge-watch the whole deal immediately, then cancel. Maybe . . . dropping one episode a week to keep people on the hook is a good idea? The truly intriguing idea will be for Netflix to bring us one new episode a week of a given show plus commercials, a move that may not be far off. That’ll be TV’s Restoration moment.

Here’s my billion-dollar advice for Netflix: Cut your offerings by three-quarters, but make sure every month brings us a new event show — appointment viewing, something that people are talking about. Take some of the savings from programming and pour it into marketing: Instead of relying on people to discover new shows by logging in, buy so many commercials and billboards that people get panicky about missing out on something everyone else seems to be watching. Perceived hits are in large part a matter of marketing. Embrace the wisdom of HBO: “It doesn’t matter if people actually watch the show, just so long as they think they should watch it.” Try to make the Netflix experience a bit more like sipping wine and a bit less like drinking from a fire hose.