Recently, when Netflix used its upfronts presentation to entice advertisers to side with them, there were a lot of high-profile announcements. One, however, seemed buried, almost an afterthought. In a strangely worded press release, the mega-streamer confirmed their sci-fi epic Three Body Problem would return for, ‘additional episodes to allow the story to reach its conclusion.’ On the face of it, this isn’t too bad, it’s rare for even shows on streaming platforms to be allowed to ‘reach their conclusion’ but the vagueness surrounding the wording of the statement is properly perplexing and speaks to the way Netflix has been conducting its business for a long time.
Returning for ‘additional episodes‘ doesn’t exactly sound like the team behind the scenes who make these perplexing decisions have a lot of confidence in the show. Those behind the scenes, unlike journalists, critics, fans and even creators, can use some metric to determine how well a show is performing. When Netflix or any other streaming platform shouts about how well a show is doing they don’t explain how they measure success. They don’t tell us how many people who started a show actually finished it. How many people binged an entire season over the course of a day or weekend, they don’t even think it’s important for the people who make the shows to be let in on any of that information either. When SAG/AFTRA went on strike, I caught an interview with Ted Lasso star and writer Brett Goldstein. He stood, like everyone else, holding his placard striking for better pay for writers, better protections against the rise of AI and for more transparency from streaming platforms. Ted Lasso, by anyone’s metric, was a huge hit. It won awards, was the talk of Hollywood and had a devoted and loyal fanbase who cared deeply about the show and its characters. It was a bonafide hit for Apple, a platform with several great shows that often slip under the radar, given that more people are subscribed to Netflix or Disney+. However, although Goldstein worked behind the scenes at his megahit, he was completely in the dark about how many people were watching his show. A fact I found completely bonkers. Surely, anyone working in any job needs to know how well they’re performing. How can you plan and feel secure if you’re completely in the dark about how well you’re doing your job?
Netflix has gotten *slightly* better at transparency, releasing ‘infodumps’ about how well a show is performing, but the metrics they use to determine if something is a success are still a kind of wizardry that only those who release it seem to be able to make sense of. This is from a release from the first monthly review from December 2023.
Since launching our weekly Top 10 and Most Popular lists in 2021, Netflix has provided more information about what people are watching than any other streamer except YouTube. And now we believe it’s time to go further.Starting today we will publish What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report twice a year. This is a comprehensive report of what people watched on Netflix over a six month period1, including:Hours viewed for every title — original and licensed — watched for over 50,000 hours2;The premiere date3 for any Netflix TV series or film; and Whether a title was available globally.In total, this report covers more than 18,000 titles — representing 99% of all viewing on Netflix — and nearly 100 billion hours viewed. Over 60% of Netflix titles released between January and June 2023 appeared on our weekly Top 10 lists.
The list is extensive with action drama The Night Agent coming out on top. The Netflix top 10 lists are interesting too because it shows how truly obscure a lot of viewers’ choices are. Who remembers the ITV drama Fat Friends about the trials and tribulations of people who become friends after meeting up at their local slimming club? No? It was from beloved British screenwriter Kay Mellor… No? It starred A young Ruth Jones, baby-faced James Corden, and practically ageless Alison Steadman? No! Well, when it popped up unceremoniously on Netflix a few months ago and lept into the top 10 and stayed high up for a long long time. Yes, Jones, Corden and Steadman are beloved, but the show itself is incredibly dated. It’s not its fault, any drama from the year 2000 looks dated, we’re 24 years on, but seeing Fat Friends, a show that lasted four series on ITV, but that finished in 2005, suddenly gaining in popularity tells you a lot about the power of Netflix. If it’s there, people will find it, and they will watch it and they won’t worry about the fact that it’s an old ITV show, if it’s new on Netflix it’s new to them. It’s the superpower that Netflix possesses that all the other streaming platforms and traditional broadcasters would kill for. YOU, their megahit serial killer show, that will have its final season later this year, began life on the US network Lifetime, a network primarily known for true crime melodramas, but the Penn Badgely-led pulpy but fun drama found a devoted audience on Netflix. So much so that the streamer continued to make a show that Lifetime had axed after it struggled to find an audience and turned into a 5 season show! I’m not always the biggest fan of Netflix. I think a lot of their new dramas and comedies fall way behind in terms of depth and scope when compared to what the other streamers are making. Shows like Severence, Shrinking, For All Mankind, Slow Horses and Bad Sisters are some of the best of the modern era and prove why streaming is so vital, but none of these shows have the huge pull that anything on Netflix does because all of those examples are on Apple TV+. (This isn’t a slight on Apple TV, I think they are the most exciting of all of the platforms and you can’t go wrong with any of the shows above.) Netflix, whether I like it or not, is the place people go to consume the majority of their entertainment. There is an inherent trust that most consumers have that Netflix will have something for them – and for the most part it does, but the decisions it makes are becoming more and more confusing.
Three Body Problem, the sprawling sci-fi epic based on a series of beloved books, had been hyped. Mostly, because Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss were bringing the story to the screen with co-showrunner Alexander Woo and had been working on the show for a long time. Fans of the books, and I’m sure Netflix were hoping that lightning would perhaps strike twice and they could do with Three Body Problem what they did with Game of Thrones and turn something niche into a mainstream hit. However, when the reviews came out they were lacklustre. People well versed in the source material had long known that the dense nature of the novels and their difficult story arcs would be difficult or awkward to adapt, and even though the show lingered in the all-important top 10 for a while, there was never any buzz around the show. Even though we can’t make sense of how Netflix defines a hit, it’s easy to tell whether a show has traction and 3 Body Problem didn’t appear to. This takes us back to that strange wording. “additional episodes.” Since that oddly worded press release came out, the three creators have tried to clarify things further. An article for The Hollywood Reporter quotes Weiss saying, “We knew going into this how many hours we need to tell the rest of the story because we’ve got a roadmap through to the end, and we have what we need to get to the end as intended from when we started. We knew going into this how many hours we need to tell the rest of the story because we’ve got a roadmap through to the end,” Weiss told The Hollywood Reporter. “And we have what we need to get to the end as intended from when we started.” Still quite vague given how big Netflix had hoped the show would be.
3 Body Problem is in no way a failure but I think the way Netflix have treated it says a lot about how they operate. Netflix isn’t in the business of long-form television. It wants immediate hits. This sounds daft and obvious, everyone in the industry wants instant hits, but it’s more important for Netflix because they want to remain relevant in the cultural conversation. 3 Body Problem didn’t get people talking. I know that’s true because you know what did. Baby Reindeer. Whether you know anything about that show, chances are you’ve heard about it, or you watched it because someone told you about it or you just happened to see it at Number 1 in the top 10. The success of Baby Reindeer is hugely surprising and again speaks to the immense power Netflix has. Firstly, it wasn’t given to critics ahead of its release. It wasn’t heavily trailered or promoted, it just arrived, people took a chance on it (because it’s new on Netflix) fell under its spell and the word spread like a virus! And now, even when it feels like everyone must have already seen it, it is still at number 3 in the top 10. Unsurprisingly, whilst I admired a lot of what Richard Gadd’s show did, I was not one of those people who felt compelled to everyone I knew to watch it (I didn’t need to bother as most would probably have seen it anyway) but Netflix is in the business of being part of the conversation and they’re not overly interested in telling stories over a long period. We live in a TV era where isn’t able to grow, it has to deliver instantly or it dies and that’s what Netflix wants and can ‘sometimes’ produce. It’ll be fascinating to see how we view Baby Reindeer by the end of the year. I liken its huge success to that of Tiger King – a show we all got strangely hooked on as the national lockdowns took hold. It kept us gripped and talking but didn’t stay part of the conversation for long and I think Baby Reindeer may well go that way too. In the big scheme of things it won’t matter, Netflix proved they had a hit with Baby Reindeer and by the end of the year, they will probably have had a dozen more surprise word-of-mouth hits. I’ve not written this to champion 3 Body Problem. I’m not a big sci-fi person so it was never going to be for me, but more because I think it is fascinating that Netflix would sign the Game of Thrones showrunners, give them a huge budget for this dense sci-fi series, and then a few months after its release put out a strangely worded press release as almost an afterthought.
We live in a time where so much of what we’re consuming feels disposable. Quick fixes to pass the time. Baby Reindeer took hold in a way that no one, not even Netflix could have anticipated but more and more it does feel as if Netflix is creating disposable TV – something that hits instantly but doesn’t last and then it’s on to the next “new” thing. The popularity of network shows on the platform like The Office and Suits proves the appetite for long-form storytelling hasn’t gone away. In its pursuit of finding the next big talking point Netflix has forgotten the point of television is to grow with characters, become invested in their lives and watch them develop over time and maybe that’s why I’m not connecting to a lot of their recent content.
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