Netflix’s Audience Drop-Off
Welcome to my occasional Film Chat Fridays! Today, some thoughts on Netflix's bizarre Season 02 audience plummet.
I went on a small tangent in this week’s blog. Don’t blame me. I get loopy on cold pills. No sense wasting a good stream of consciousness. Enjoy my take on Netflix’s current state of affairs.
Welcome to Film Chat Fridays
Hi friends!
I don’t really weigh in on the industry, but I thought it would be fun to build in space to do that. I use Fridays for the occasional administrative post. Why not use it if I have thoughts on something worth talking about? This isn’t in line with my regular blogs, so I didn’t want to take up a Tuesday spot for it.
Hence: Film Chat Fridays. I hope you enjoy!
Why the Season 02 Drop-off?
From this week’s blog:
You likely saw this news break. Netflix is having a wild problem where their audiences aren’t coming back for Season 2 of their shows. I listened to this on the aforementioned podcast, and innately understood something that many writers don’t want to face.
Creating buy-in is extremely hard. So hard, in fact, that the industry works on relationships instead of reads.
Audiences love longevity. It’s an oxymoron in many ways. Audiences don’t want to pay for buy-in, and they don’t like giving new things a chance, but they DO get curious when something gains legs and shows it’s worth watching.
Continuing these thoughts:
Obsession is a very popular movie. I can see its numbers skyrocketing. That, in no way, has made me want to watch it. Two very different friends, from two very different aspects in my life highly recommending it to me despite knowing I’m not into horror? That made me willing to watch it. It’s now on my list.
Why do so many people watch old shows again and again? Why is it so hard to keep an audience coming back to new shows? What I love about this answer is that it’s incredibly nuanced. It’s not easy for a machine to quantify this one, because it has to understand people’s behaviour across generations of television.
I could probably recount what shows came on during what time slots when I was ten years old, because they came on every week FOREVER. After Dragon Ball Z gave every kid blue balls waiting for something, anything, to happen, Pokemon would come on next. Then Digimon, which was like Pokemon’s weird friend that you wish Pokemon would stop inviting over, whom you hoped wouldn’t ask you out if you were left alone together. They were as habitual as my mealtimes, my school, and so much more.
They were routine.
Which is the exact same logic behind me sending you this blog every Tuesday morning at 7:00AM.
Netflix isn’t routine. It’s chaos. It’s great for binge watching shows, but Netflix is also ruthless when it comes to providing longevity to its audience. My wife won’t watch a Netflix show unless it is based on a book she’s read, because she can compare it, or unless it has at least three seasons and is renewed for a fourth.
Why? Because Netflix gives shows the axe so fast that fans of the show are suing for whiplash. (They’re not, that’s a joke. Strange I felt I should clarify that.) If the average person is unsure whether Netflix is going to invest further in a show without a clear ending, why would they watch it?
Why invest time in characters you aren’t sure are coming back? In stories unresolved?
Each business decision that shakes up the industry comes with a question from the intended audience. Why? Why this show? Why would I come back to these stories, these people? There’s two answers that I believe truly hold people back. The first is quality, obviously. People will come back for great shows. Shows that provide greatness over a long period of time will be more easily forgiven if their quality takes a slide, providing they course correct. The second is homework.
People really discount what a tax homework is. If I don’t remember Season 01 well, I now need to refresh. I hate that. It’s cumbersome. I’ll bring up Law and Order SVU again later, but one aspect of that show that my wife despise is doing fucking homework to find out what episode of what crossover show I need to watch for any of their stupid tie-in episodes. For the record, I’ve never watched a tie-in episode and thought to myself, “Fuck. That was worth it.” It’s homework, and it’s the biggest detriment to the Law and Order franchise, in my opinion.
Super hero movies are suffering highly from both these issues; each film needs to be EXCELLENT. How many Star Wars movies do you consider to be amazing? My answer is less than half of them, so I don’t go to them. People tell me to watch a DC movie when it’s great, but I have no buy-in since they lost me with so many movies I didn’t like in a row. At a certain point, I remember looking at my friends and saying, “Whoever these movies are for, it obviously isn’t me.” Marvel has a better track record, but the amount of mediocre titles they have across their slate, and the amount of homework that I have to do now is insane. And I’m still a fan of that franchise, so that criticism is despite what goodwill I still have going.
This homework is the same reason I NEVER read comics growing up. Any time a little yellow box referenced some other comic that I had no way to find, let alone purchase (I was a pre-internet kid) meant that I was missing a major chunk of the story. Did I need to know who or what was happening for the story to be good? It doesn’t matter. I felt left out.
I felt bad for myself because I couldn’t keep up. That, or other feelings of annoyance, is why anything with inherent homework attached has already soured a major chunk of their fans. This is why a long delay between seasons is detrimental.
There’s one hell of a balancing act going on here. You need to give audiences time to talk. You want the social media machine time to create content and be excited. You want to build longevity on top of excellence so people won’t mind catching up on the first season, but be eager for the next one.
Netflix excitedly threw cable TV on its head, but cable does something extremely well. It produces a lot in regular cadence. The average season of Law and Order SVU is 24 episodes long. That’s roughly 24 hours of storytelling per year. The average Netflix season is 8 hours long, with two years in between seasons. That means it needs six years to make the equivalent of one year of SVU.
Did they think cable TV created and released these shows in this cadence for the lolz? They didn’t. These people weren’t stupid. Yes, the way we consume media has greatly changed, and that upended cable in a major way, but what Netflix wanted to replace that with now has a retention problem that cable knew how to solve. And the shows most watched on streaming? Cable TV shows. Huh. Weird.
Another issue is I don’t really equate Netflix to a TV show business. I didn’t have Netflix, so I didn’t watch Stranger Things. My wife will binge Bridgerton with her friends. I did check out Squid Games and that was fun, but I also never came back for a second season. I checked out the live action Airbender show, but only because the original animation is a gem. I didn’t connect with the live action’s dialogue and acting at all. Netflix to me, is a movie business. But I don’t trust Netflix’s library as a measure of quality, because I don’t trust the ALGORITHM GODS to bring quality. I trust them to bring what Netflix wants me to watch. Netflix is synonymous with “a Netflix movie” being one that is made for streaming, the same way a “TV movie” is made for cable.
Netflix is working their ass off to ensure this isn’t their reputation, but their mad drive for content forced them to be way less discerning than most studios were. Meanwhile, they’re jacking up prices, introducing ads, and annoying the customers who built habits of watching content on Netflix by continually giving them chaos over stability.
In this business, nobody knows anything. That’s a common saying you’ve heard before, and will hear again. So what do I know? I can only tell you my experience.
I came to streaming because I hated ads. Now, streaming is making ad-free tiers a luxury, and I can’t afford them all. I won’t go back to ads. I despise them. So… which streamer do I trust to bring me great media? Which streamers have a library that I truly love enough to continually dump money into?
I promise you this: people will stop paying for mediocrity. People will keep coming back if they’ve built a habit, such as with social media, but if you put Meta behind a paywall, I bet very few people would put up with their shit. Gen Z saw that dumpster fire and is highly unlikely to climb in. Netflix has to be very careful. They need a robust library to keep people entertained while they’re between seasons of their favorite show, but these also have to be great.
I guess, if it were me, I’d do something wild and invest in the writing. Get more episodes, get longer stories, and stop waiting to see whether something’s a hit. I’d hire writers to tell me a full story and if I loved it, I’d greenlight the show after that. I wouldn’t produce the first season until I knew where it was going. If I wanted something that could go forever, well, that’s different. I’d invest in sitcoms and procedurals.
For shows with a beginning, middle, and end, I’d evaluate it the same way I’d evaluate a feature script. For its whole, even if that covers multiple seasons.
But also, I wouldn’t rely on pure data to drive my knowledge. I’d talk to people. I’d really try to find people (nobody who discusses film online; suck it influencers and reviewers) who enjoyed the show, and actually speak to them. Sit them down. What did you like? What turned you away? Reddit isn’t the best place for this, btw. I’ve seen creators take the Reddit fan pages as gospel and murder great franchises. The most prominent voices aren’t always the majority.
One last point I failed to address. Ads. Okay, yes, I ranted about these already, but I was thinking about this while watching Rings of Power on Amazon. Any show that was advertised became an enemy to my time. I am trying to watch something, and in between Tide and Wayfair ads, you’ve given me a trailer to what might be a cool show. Well, guess what? I don’t give a fuck about it, I just want to watch the thing I clicked on. So now I associate that advertised show negatively.
Ouch. That’s a bad system to train people on. Advertisers have a problem, as their ads aren’t being received positively. This is why radio and cable had a regular cadence for them; ads were annoying, but they weren’t right in the middle of a guitar solo, or jammed into a Youtube video mid-sentence, or shoved in front of us with a skip button where before, there was nothing.
Streamers and advertisers alike have shot themselves in the foot. They’re shoving square pegs through round holes, and it’s no wonder people hate them. Could you imagine if they did this to sports? Just tossed an ad in at random while the game played? Hockey and Football have built-in breaks, and soccer seems to be adding them, all to stuff ads into. But somehow for “content,” this is acceptable?
Netflix has a problem. It wants to make money, and to do that, it’s selling stories. Humans pay big money for great stories; we fucking love stories. But the more you push your audience and fail to understand why those who came before you told stories the way they did, the more people will grow tired of your schtik. Netflix doesn’t have to be cable, but it wants to make money while selling stories.
For me, Netflix began as a company that wanted to make movies an amazing experience. Don’t go to Blockbuster. Don’t watch a movie on TV, interrupted by ads. Cuddle up on your couch and simply Netflix and chill.
Now, it doesn’t sound like they want to make movies an amazing experience. Anytime I hear about Netflix, it’s about the context of making their subscribers grow, or about retention, or about whether they’ll release movies theatrically. This isn’t the company that wanted to serve me during the Blockbuster days. It’s a company that wants to see how far they can push me to dump money into them each month.
This is a new season for Netflix, and I’ll be curious to see how long people stick around for it.
And as always, Happy Writing!
Loooove this rant! It's so on point!