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Episode: The Sunday Read: ‘How Everyone Got Lost in Netflix’s Endless Library’

Author: The New York Times
Duration: 00:36:04

Episode Shownotes

If you take a journey deep within Netflix’s furthest recesses — burrow past Binge-worthy TV Dramas and 1980s Action Thrillers, take a left at Because You Watched the Lego Batman Movie, keep going past Fright Night — you will eventually find your way to the platform’s core, the forgotten layers

of content fossilized by the pressure from the accreted layers above.Netflix’s vast library changed the business of television — in part by making a better product and showing the rest of the industry that it had to follow suit — but it also changed the very nature of television. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Full Transcript

00:00:03 Speaker_01
Hi, my name's Willie Staley, and I'm a story editor for The New York Times Magazine. This week's Sunday Read is an article I wrote for the magazine that originated out of a hunch, one I had about television.

00:00:18 Speaker_01
That TV shows these days are generally bad, or they're not as good as they used to be, at least to me. That there's been this noticeable degradation in quality. I'd bring this up at our magazine's ideas meetings.

00:00:35 Speaker_01
Maybe I sounded a little like a crank, but it was a fixation of mine that was bothering me for years. There'd be these shows that everyone loved and everyone wrote about, and I'd watch them just mystified. And I liked TV.

00:00:49 Speaker_01
Gone was the era defined by these prestige series, like The Sopranos, Mad Men, or Breaking Bad. Instead, they've been replaced with abundance, seemingly limitless libraries of content that you can passively put on in the background.

00:01:05 Speaker_01
And it seemed like a moment to step back and say, timeout, how did we get here? For a long time, this is pretty impossible to answer because streaming services are famously protective of their viewership data.

00:01:18 Speaker_01
There wasn't really a way to tell if anything on streaming was a bonafide hit in viewer numbers. In most cases, not even the showrunners or writers, the people making these things knew. But last year, that changed.

00:01:32 Speaker_01
Netflix, the streaming giant and market leader, started releasing its data. The data came in a spreadsheet, thousands of rows long, with the shows arranged from most watched to least. It covered 280 million subscribers across 190 countries.

00:01:50 Speaker_01
It was honestly fascinating. It was like a window into the explosion of streaming television, a way of understanding and actually answering Is anyone actually watching this stuff?

00:02:02 Speaker_01
And if you look hard at this data, you can start to see how the sheer size of Netflix diminished our ability to make sense of our own culture. And this led me eventually to consider a couple questions.

00:02:15 Speaker_01
What have we been doing during the so-called peak TV years? And where does TV go from here? And so now, here's my article with everything I learned, read by Ron Butler.

00:02:30 Speaker_01
Our producer is Jack D'Isidoro and our music was written and performed by Aaron Esposito.

00:02:42 Speaker_00
If you take a journey deep within Netflix's furthest recesses, burrow past binge-worthy TV dramas and 1980s action thrillers, take a left at Because You Watched the Lego Batman Movie, keep going past Fright Night, you will eventually find your way to the platform's core, the forgotten layers of content fossilized by the pressure from the accreted layers above.

00:03:04 Speaker_00
Down here, if you search hard enough, you will eventually find your way to Richie Rich. You know the one, from the old comic books.

00:03:12 Speaker_00
In Netflix's series, he was reimagined as a self-made boy who discovered a novel source of energy derived from all the vegetables he never ate, making him the world's first trillionaire.

00:03:23 Speaker_00
And now he lives in a mansion with an amusement park and a robot maid. His dad is an oaf and a layabout. His best friend, played by the future Netflix superstar Jenna Ortega, is a mooch.

00:03:35 Speaker_00
A rapper named Bulldozer lives next door with a son who is also friends with Richie.

00:03:41 Speaker_00
In contrast to the dark, lonely, and besieged version of Ritchie played by Macaulay Culkin in 1994, here, Ritchie's life is basically good, though not without the sort of headaches that arise from being a prepubescent trillionaire.

00:03:55 Speaker_00
In the fourth episode of the show, Ritchie struggles to write a book report on The Wizard of Oz. The book puts him to sleep. The movie puts him to sleep. He doesn't know what to do.

00:04:05 Speaker_00
Bulldozer's son suggests he remake the movie, and with no practical reason not to, he does. But as soon as he begins, things deteriorate. The lion character has rewritten himself to be cool and have a motorcycle. Dorothy also wants to be cool.

00:04:21 Speaker_00
She thinks she should be from Paris, not Kansas, and wants to be named Veronique. His robot maid can't accept that the tin woodsman would rust because he's made of tin.

00:04:31 Speaker_00
She's apparently right about this, so she decides she's the tungsten carbide woodsman. By the end, the movie is being shot in 3D, and there are time-traveling dinosaurs, an asteroid, and evil space robots, a decision that offends Richie's maid.

00:04:47 Speaker_00
For once, she says, it would be really cool to see a positive role model for young robots. Did someone say cool?" says the Scarecrow, now dressed up as an ice cream cone. You know what else is cool? He has secured a product placement deal.

00:05:02 Speaker_00
Rather unwittingly, the episode poses a question that haunts our age. What happens to entertainment when a newcomer, armed with an effectively endless amount of money, starts making it? What happens, in other words, when you become Netflix?

00:05:19 Speaker_00
Richie Rich was part of the early cohort of Netflix originals, released at the tail end of the short era in which casual TV viewers could still keep track of what the company was producing.

00:05:30 Speaker_00
It premiered on the platform in early 2015, the same year as shows you probably know and may even love, like Master of None and Narcos. Netflix was fresh off the enormous success of House of Cards, something the company could tell a nice story about.

00:05:46 Speaker_00
Seeing that its subscribers liked Kevin Spacey, David Fincher, and the original British version of the series, Netflix bought a show that checked all three boxes.

00:05:56 Speaker_00
It was expensive to acquire, but Netflix could spend more on its programming because it knew what we wanted before we did. Richie Rich tells a rather different story.

00:06:06 Speaker_00
The show was written and produced by a content studio called Awesomeness TV, which had recently been acquired by DreamWorks, which itself had recently acquired a company called Classic Media, a private equity-owned concern that had been buying dormant intellectual property and had the rights to a bunch of backbench cartoon characters, He-Man, Voltron, Felix the Cat, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Baby Huey, and, of course, Richie Rich.

00:06:33 Speaker_00
The show was originally conceived of by Awesomeness to air on YouTube, and it was shot with a YouTube budget.

00:06:40 Speaker_00
According to Jeff Hodgson, a creator of the show, Netflix executives showed up on set one day, and about a month later, word got out that they would be acquiring it. You can still see the bumpers where commercial breaks were supposed to go.

00:06:54 Speaker_00
In 2014, the year Netflix bought Richie Rich, it issued $400 million in debt, on top of the $500 million of debt it issued the year before, to vastly expand its foray into original programming.

00:07:08 Speaker_00
This is how it went from being a mass mailer of DVDs to the world's most important content platform, by borrowing mountains of money. In 2015, the company raised another $1.5 billion, aiming to triple its content offerings from the year before.

00:07:26 Speaker_00
The next year, it raised another billion. In 2017, it raised more than $3 billion, with a plan to release 80 movies the following year. The platform was already releasing an average of one a week at that point.

00:07:41 Speaker_00
Over the next two years, the company borrowed another $8 billion. What Netflix was doing was creating a sort of flywheel, where new debt helped create new shows, and new shows brought in new subscribers, and new subscribers brought in more cash.

00:07:59 Speaker_00
But it needed to continue selling bonds over and over to oil the content subscriber treadmill, to such an extent that by 2019, it had about $15 billion in long-term debt.

00:08:11 Speaker_00
It earned the nickname Debtflix in the business press, which wondered if all this borrowing was sustainable. If you apply the logic of the media business to Netflix, it looked uncertain.

00:08:23 Speaker_00
But Netflix was operating by tech sector rules, spending boatloads of cash to acquire customers, changing their habits and overwhelming competitors until, at the other end, an entire industry was transformed. And that is exactly what Netflix did.

00:08:40 Speaker_00
The library we enjoy today may have been built with debt instead of venture capital, but its sheer enormousness reveals it as a visitor from another universe, something that could have only been dreamed up in Los Gatos.

00:08:53 Speaker_00
Its size constantly fluctuates as it inhales and exhales material.

00:08:58 Speaker_00
But the most recent snapshot the company has offered shows more than 16,000 titles of content, thousands of them Netflix originals, created for or acquired by the platform, to live there practically in perpetuity, even as they are slowly entombed by new shows, new movies, new documentaries.

00:09:18 Speaker_00
If you assume conservatively that the average length of any given title in the catalog is two hours, a title can be anything from an entire season of a show to an hour of standup, then it would take three and a half years of nonstop viewing for someone to experience the whole Netflix library.

00:09:35 Speaker_00
Five and a half years if you allowed yourself to sleep for eight hours a day. 29 if you chipped away at it day by day, consuming the American daily average, about three hours. It has more content than any one person can or should watch in a lifetime.

00:09:51 Speaker_00
And even if you tried to finish this constantly morphing thing, you would wind up asymptotically chasing the end forever, as the service continually churned out new seasons of Is It Cake? and Emily in Paris.

00:10:04 Speaker_00
When the foundations of this staggering library were first being laid a decade ago, we could never have imagined the abundance it would eventually contain and how disoriented we could become in its labyrinthine corridors.

00:10:29 Speaker_00
About ten years ago, Reid Hoffman, a founder of LinkedIn, taught a seminar at Stanford called Technology-Enabled Blitzscaling. This was his concept for how the most dominant businesses would grow in the 21st century.

00:10:42 Speaker_00
They would achieve scale rapidly, using software and first mover advantage to dominate whole industries. Reid Hastings, a founder of Netflix who at the time was its chief executive, spoke to this class in November 2015.

00:10:57 Speaker_00
Netflix was at this point a survivor of the tech bubble of the 2000s, and Hastings was starting to sense another one coming. In 2000, to raise money was as easy as taking a tin can and shaking it, he said. $50 million would show up in the can.

00:11:12 Speaker_00
It was incredible. Never seen anything like it, until last year. Venture capital deals were only then, by the middle of the decade, returning to the highs of the 2000s bubble.

00:11:24 Speaker_00
In 2015, nearly $130 billion in venture capital deals were closed, almost as much as the previous two years combined. By 2021, that number reached $621 billion. For those looking to blitzscale, there was suddenly a lot of money lying around.

00:11:44 Speaker_00
One popular explanation for the huge inflow of capital to venture funds is ZERP, zero interest rate policy. In the wake of the global financial crisis, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to nearly zero and kept them low for more than a decade.

00:12:00 Speaker_00
Central banks do this to stimulate borrowing because low interest rates make it cheaper to borrow money. But it also pushes investors to take on more risk.

00:12:10 Speaker_00
When the Fed rate is around 4.9%, as it is currently, you can find 4.9% annual returns in a basically risk-free way by buying government debt. That's pretty good. When it's at or near zero, risk-free returns are no longer available.

00:12:27 Speaker_00
So capital flows out along what is known as the risk curve into investments that can still offer significant gains. Real estate, equities, and then at the far end, venture capital, which tolerates enormous numbers of bad bets.

00:12:42 Speaker_00
A conservative estimate of the failure rate for startups is 75% in exchange for a few that pay off gloriously. These businesses are the ones that substantively remade our world in the last decade, and they are designed with world remaking in mind.

00:12:58 Speaker_00
In Zero to One, the Startup Founder's Bible, Peter Thiel says that the power law seems to apply to venture investments.

00:13:06 Speaker_00
The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined.

00:13:16 Speaker_00
The conclusion he draws from this is that any decent fund must follow two rules, a little like the ones from Fight Club. One, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.

00:13:28 Speaker_00
And two, because rule number one is so restrictive, there can't be any other rules.

00:13:34 Speaker_00
Thiel's book is a guide to seeking out creative monopoly businesses, those that build and corner a market, enriching themselves and their founders, who can then, in Thiel's vision, invest in further innovation.

00:13:47 Speaker_00
This is the point of the marriage between venture capital and technology, to remake the world over and over and over. Companies were encouraged to seek growth at all costs and worry about profitability later.

00:14:02 Speaker_00
Not an unheard of strategy, but one that could now be pushed to new extremes.

00:14:07 Speaker_00
Uber could burn through billions in cash for about 15 years, bending the market, smashing local regulations and monopolies, altering consumer behavior in the process, and then go public at an $82.4 billion valuation while losing $800 million a quarter.

00:14:25 Speaker_00
WeWork could lose billions of dollars a quarter buying up and renovating commercial real estate in 39 countries, all in an effort to remake office space in the image of the venture-backed startup.

00:14:36 Speaker_00
Flexible, open, ready to scale, treats all over, never turn a profit, and declare bankruptcy last year.

00:14:45 Speaker_00
This rampant spending was visible everywhere, resulting in what the Times technology columnist Kevin Roos has called the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy.

00:14:54 Speaker_00
On-demand drivers, food delivery, maid services, car rentals, home rentals, all sold at a loss using venture cash while trying to achieve liftoff.

00:15:04 Speaker_00
This is how millennials came to live like a bunch of little Raskolnikovs, seemingly destitute, but somehow with access to servants.

00:15:12 Speaker_00
And maybe it's worth thinking of those peak TV years as a cultural version of the same phenomenon, another byproduct of a corporate battle over new terrain opened up by computer technology.

00:15:25 Speaker_00
Netflix is unusual even when compared with the other streaming companies. A zebra among horses, as the media studies professor Amanda D. Lotz puts it in her 2022 book, Netflix and Streaming Video.

00:15:37 Speaker_00
Apple TV Plus and Amazon Prime Video are corporate complements to massive technology businesses.

00:15:43 Speaker_00
Paramount Plus, Peacock, and Disney Plus are extensions of legacy entertainment studios and tap into and leverage their considerable intellectual property wealth.

00:15:54 Speaker_00
Max is a Frankenstein hybrid of Netflix's closest living ancestor, HBO, sutured together with maybe a dozen high-on-the-dial cable channels.

00:16:03 Speaker_00
Netflix is the purest expression of the streaming model and the force that summoned the others over the ledge.

00:16:11 Speaker_00
Netflix's vast library changed the business of television, in part by making a better product and showing the rest of the industry that it had to follow suit. But it also changed the very nature of television,

00:16:24 Speaker_00
TV once had the single, oppressive goal of amusing as many people as possible at the same time, which is also what made it so stupid.

00:16:33 Speaker_00
Television is the way it is, David Foster Wallace wrote in 1993, simply because people tend to be really similar in their vulgar and purient and stupid interests, and wildly different in their refined and moral and intelligent interests.

00:16:48 Speaker_00
The SVOD model, streaming video on demand, liberated TV from the law of averages and the prison of time, and made it seem as if our refined, moral, and intelligent interests might now be found on the other side of the screen.

00:17:03 Speaker_00
Loetz argues that by freeing itself from the core goal of linear television, selling an assembled audience to advertisers, the streaming model completely changes the calculus of programming.

00:17:15 Speaker_00
That's because instead of building an audience, Loetz writes, on-demand delivery allows SVODs to build audiences. Loetz pointed out to me a seemingly banal but actually profound and strange experience that has become common in this era.

00:17:33 Speaker_00
You go to an Airbnb and turn on the TV, already open to someone else's account, and you see all this stuff you didn't even know existed. Same TV, same app, same subscription.

00:17:44 Speaker_00
The house might even feel similar to your own, but the screen gives way to an alien world. In December of last year, Netflix provided an unprecedented map of its library by releasing a comprehensive look at its viewer data for the very first time.

00:18:01 Speaker_00
It comes as an Excel file, less than a megabyte, and ranks 18,214 pieces of content in Netflix's gargantuan library by the number of hours viewed during the first six months of 2023, rounded to the nearest 100,000.

00:18:18 Speaker_00
In fact, this rounding means that it doesn't even capture the entirety of the thing, because Netflix excluded titles with fewer than 50,000 viewer hours.

00:18:29 Speaker_00
At the top was The Night Agent, a sub-clancy quality thriller about an FBI guy with more than 812 million hours viewed.

00:18:38 Speaker_00
At the bottom was My Teacher, Mr. Kim, a South Korean comedy from 2003 with 100,000 hours, though this placement is an artifact of Excel's sorting through the vastness of the catalog. Roughly the last 4,000 entries all have 100,000 hours viewed.

00:18:55 Speaker_00
This is as low as the scale goes and are arranged alphabetically. Thanks to Netflix's considerable international offerings, the bottom of the 100,000 hour club fills up with titles in other alphabets, Arabic, Japanese, Korean.

00:19:11 Speaker_00
Outside the very top, which is dominated by Netflix originals and kids movies, it's not totally clear why anything winds up anywhere. Why is Memento down in the 300,000 hours ghetto, while Coach Carter has 21 million viewer hours?

00:19:27 Speaker_00
Perhaps Memento was only available in, say, Slovakia. Or maybe it got bad placement in the app. Or maybe it never triggered whatever algorithmic cultural tripwire turns back catalog titles into contemporary hits. The chart doesn't say.

00:19:42 Speaker_00
And to scan through it is to appreciate how the library's sheer size has heightened the importance of chance in our consumption habits. Your view into the catalog may feel like a grand vista, but in actuality, you are peering through a keyhole.

00:19:59 Speaker_00
When I open up Netflix on my TV, I am immediately met with a carousel of 75 shows and movies new on Netflix, then the top 10 TV shows in the US today. Beneath that, a carousel of another 75 suggestions because you watched Rebel Ridge.

00:20:16 Speaker_00
Beyond that, an algorithmic selection of 33 Today's Top Picks for you. Then, binge-worthy TV dramas, 75 of them. Then there's your next watch, a combination of stuff my kid watches and stuff I might, 75 more. Next, the last 10 things we didn't finish.

00:20:36 Speaker_00
Then, a list of 75 more titles because I watched Shot Caller. Beyond that, no fewer than 30 more carousels of about 75 titles each. That's a whole lot of TV, but it's still just a small slice of the catalog.

00:20:53 Speaker_00
What we're paying for, in the end, is not any one show, or any three, or ten, or 50 shows, but rather this fathomless sense of abundance.

00:21:03 Speaker_00
Which, in turn, means that any given show just doesn't matter quite as much as it could in the era of broadcast TV. In this context, even an undeniable hit can wind up feeling like a sort of failure.

00:21:18 Speaker_00
Take Triple Frontier, the 2019 action thriller starring Ben Affleck and Oscar Isaac. It was one of the platform's most popular movies that year. But as Lotz points out in her book, that doesn't mean it's any more valuable to the company.

00:21:33 Speaker_00
A $115 million movie budget is hard for Netflix to justify at almost any level of viewership, given that at the end of the day, it supplies just two hours of content for a subscriber base that's paying for a sense of infinity.

00:21:47 Speaker_00
And indeed, Lotz's skepticism was confirmed. Ted Sarandos, the company's chief content officer, reportedly singled out the title in an internal meeting, calling for a better calibration between budget and audience.

00:22:01 Speaker_00
This was in the middle of 2019, when the financial press was starting to ask questions about the sustainability of Netflix's debt-financed growth.

00:22:11 Speaker_00
Matt Stoller, the anti-monopolist writer, cited the same story in a blog post about Hollywood's travails. His theory was that Hollywood has gotten so big that it can't even discover what people really want anymore.

00:22:25 Speaker_00
As a contrast, he cites the success of Back to the Future, an odd movie that became an enormous hit, eventually earning hundreds of millions. But as Stoller points out, in 1985, this happened slowly.

00:22:40 Speaker_00
It opened small in July, in about 1,400 theaters, and crept up to 1,550 theaters by the end of August, staying in at least 1,000 theaters until the Christmas season.

00:22:53 Speaker_00
A big budget Hollywood movie released today typically opens in about 4,000 theaters and is gone in a few weeks. The movie, Stoller writes, was put into a market where information circulated among buyers and sellers.

00:23:07 Speaker_00
There was a constant interplay between the art and the audience, and the middleman, that determined its reach and legitimacy. Now, in Stoller's eyes, the public is instead subject to something like content gavage, delivered 4,000 theaters at a time.

00:23:25 Speaker_00
The situation is more dramatic in streaming, where the churn rate, the number of people canceling their subscriptions, is what really affects the bottom line, at least at Netflix.

00:23:35 Speaker_00
For a company like Apple, where the streaming business is practically an afterthought, the shows it produces are stashed away in the app and hardly spoken of, no matter how big their budget and how impressive the talent involved.

00:23:47 Speaker_00
In some instances, streamers have shelved finished movies entirely so they could write down the losses on their taxes. These are the incentives of the streaming marketplace pushed to their logical extremes.

00:24:00 Speaker_00
Mass entertainment completely severed from market signal, paradoxically by entities that know more about our viewing habits than ever before.

00:24:09 Speaker_00
Which isn't to say that the streamers don't make hits and that people don't watch and enjoy a lot of streaming television, as Netflix's 183 billion viewer hours in 2023 can attest. But it can certainly account for the rise of so-called mid-TV.

00:24:26 Speaker_00
Shows that look expensive, are reasonably smart and packed with talent, and somehow manage to be, in the Times TV critic James Poniewozik's words, fine?

00:24:37 Speaker_00
There's no denying that in the long journey prestige TV has taken from the wire to the bear, a certain slackness has crept in. Comedies without many jokes. Dramas without any stakes.

00:24:51 Speaker_00
A pronounced preference for backward-looking plotting that fixates on characters' traumas. A plague of visibly Canadian filming locations. Barry.

00:25:01 Speaker_00
The first generation of prestige shows was created by veterans of linear TV who longed for creative freedom, but knew the rudiments of the business. The things that kept you watching through the commercial breaks.

00:25:13 Speaker_00
Pacing, structure, believable dialogue. But the leash has been off for a decade now, and eventually you face the same problem Richie Rich did. When you're drowning in cash, it's always tempting to say yes.

00:25:38 Speaker_00
Maybe the most disorienting outcome of this information poverty has been the significant disconnects that can and do arise between what people watch and what we think we're watching.

00:25:50 Speaker_00
This has been a persistent element of TV criticism since at least Mad Men, but it's hard not to sense that things have gotten worse since then.

00:25:59 Speaker_00
And to look at these Netflix numbers is to realize that high quality television is not the necessary outcome of the streaming model, but possibly the happy byproduct of an industry in transition.

00:26:11 Speaker_00
And at this point, maybe something like a small subculture. For example, take I Think You Should Leave, the sketch show that has become an absolutely endless source of memes and shared reference points on the social Internet.

00:26:25 Speaker_00
It's hard to think of another show whose jokes quickly became common parlance online. And yet the latest season, which came out in the first half of 2023, was not in the top 10, 100, or even 3,000 titles Netflix released.

00:26:39 Speaker_00
It was way down in the 3,181st slot. Some caveats, the show was released in May, so the spreadsheet captures only the first month of viewing. The episodes are very short, about 15 minutes long, and there are only six a season.

00:26:56 Speaker_00
So the hours viewed metric punishes it. Still, it didn't even move into the top 500 TV shows on the audience report from the second half of 2023, which used slightly different metrics to address problems like these and segregates TV from film.

00:27:13 Speaker_00
Noah Baumbach's White Noise adaptation, starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig,

00:27:18 Speaker_00
One of the more hyped releases of that winter was the 547th most viewed title on the early 2023 spreadsheet, dwarfed by, among other things, White Chicks, the 2004 Wayans Brothers movie.

00:27:33 Speaker_00
It was practically a rounding error in comparison to FUBAR, an Arnold Schwarzenegger series I'd never heard of.

00:27:39 Speaker_00
And the first season of a show called Ginny and Georgia, which came out in 2021 and is apparently one of the most popular shows on Netflix. With both seasons appearing in the top ten, together accounting for nearly a billion viewer hours.

00:27:54 Speaker_00
Never heard of it, don't know anyone who has. Maybe that's my problem because I'm an out of touch magazine editor, but maybe it's yours too.

00:28:03 Speaker_00
Remember Hannah Gadsby, the Australian comedian whose 2018 Nanette special was an inescapable feature of Me Too era discourse? Gadsby released another special in 2023, Something Special, which I didn't even know about until studying the Excel file.

00:28:21 Speaker_00
It is way down there, thousands of places down, outranked by comedians who have never captured elite attention in the same way.

00:28:30 Speaker_00
Andrew Santino, Leanne Morgan, and in particular, by one who has attracted mainly negative attention, Shane Gillis, whose Beautiful Dogs was among the most popular stand-up releases that year.

00:28:43 Speaker_00
The media's job is, of course, not to merely tell people what is most popular. And the net was all but certainly much more widely viewed than something special, at least in part because of the media coverage.

00:28:55 Speaker_00
But the fact of the matter is that we all spent years basically having no idea what was going on in there and taking guidance from friends, social media, newspapers, magazines, and websites, all similarly blinded.

00:29:10 Speaker_00
Netflix has continued to release these reports, and I have continued to look at the top of them, mystified. The Night Agent, Outer Banks, One Piece, Dear Child, Who Is Aaron Carter, The Gentleman.

00:29:24 Speaker_00
These are all top five shows on Netflix from the three spreadsheets released so far. I don't know anyone who watches these, and I don't think I'd ever read a word about them until I sat down to write this.

00:29:35 Speaker_00
They seem to be relics from another timeline where none of this ever happened, evidence of the commercial wisdom of doing things the old way.

00:29:43 Speaker_00
And it makes you wonder about the Talmudic discourse that surrounds every episode of buzzy television shows, trying to use them to make sense of the zeitgeist.

00:29:52 Speaker_00
What if the geist of our zeit mostly involves binging some British murder mystery based on a Harlan Coben novel called Fool Me Once? That was the most watched show on Netflix in the first half of this year.

00:30:06 Speaker_00
There are some economists who fretted about Zerp because it can enable so-called zombie businesses. Companies that survive only because of the availability of cheap capital, who stagger along, refinancing debt, never failing.

00:30:21 Speaker_00
Artificial, undead things. And I think about this concept when I look back at the tech world's takeover of culture.

00:30:29 Speaker_00
That these business strategies, and this river of money diverted to bring them to fruition, created a sort of zombie discourse in our culture.

00:30:38 Speaker_00
One that appeared vital and real, and then, coincidentally or not, over the last few years, started to dissolve before our eyes.

00:30:48 Speaker_00
This discourse emerged in part out of digital media, from companies that were themselves kept afloat by investor exuberance and access to cheap money. something that became apparent only in retrospect.

00:31:02 Speaker_00
When Vice declared bankruptcy last year, the Financial Times called it a Zerp phenomenon and a cash incinerator that raised hundreds of millions of dollars to invest in growth that never arrived.

00:31:14 Speaker_00
BuzzFeed similarly took on venture investments at an enormous valuation, listened to investors who wanted growth over profits, and is now deeply in debt, with Vivek Brahmaswamy buying up its dirt cheap stock, waging an activist campaign to make the site more conservative.

00:31:32 Speaker_00
Both of these companies, along with countless other smaller enterprises, aimed to generate profits through scale. The profits never came. But all of journalism was nevertheless remade in the image of these outlets.

00:31:45 Speaker_00
Faster, looser, cheaper, and eager to churn out recaps and think pieces about TV. And so, just as the old market signals had become obsolete, an entire meaning-making apparatus arose to take its place.

00:32:00 Speaker_00
New synthetic replacements were conjured, with a constantly expanding supply of televised content to direct them at.

00:32:07 Speaker_00
And social media feeds made up of highly non-representative samples of the public to put all of this back into, spraying the messages around this new ecosystem like light from a disco ball.

00:32:20 Speaker_00
It's hard not to wonder, looking back at it all, if this situation created a pack of zombies, and they started to follow one another down a strange course. One paved with a whole lot of, you know, nanette.

00:32:33 Speaker_00
Titles that implicate the viewer in ways that are more interesting to write about than they are to watch. Creators had little idea who was watching. In fact, access to viewer data was one of many demands made in the writer's strike last year.

00:32:47 Speaker_00
But they did have TV criticism written by 26-year-old MFA graduates to take in. Perhaps the shows started to reflect that input, and strange feedback loops took hold. We can only speculate about how it happened.

00:33:02 Speaker_00
All we can say for sure is that the gulf between elite and popular discourse that so famously opened up during this era was helped along by the intrusion of the tech world into pop culture.

00:33:13 Speaker_00
Now, as fiscal gravity reasserts itself, Netflix has signaled an end to the expansionary era. There were layoffs. The new head of film, Dan Lin, has been canceling big budget projects that might not find a large enough audience.

00:33:28 Speaker_00
And perhaps most consequential, in 2022, Netflix introduced an ad-supported tier, inviting back in the very forces it had liberated television from. This hardly means the end of intelligent, creative television.

00:33:44 Speaker_00
Case in point, Baby Reindeer, the buzziest, smartest, most daring show Netflix put out this year, was also one of its biggest hits.

00:33:53 Speaker_00
It was also made thousands of miles from Hollywood, which is awakening from the writer's strike to a substantial reduction in scripted TV production.

00:34:03 Speaker_00
The producer and writer James Seamus has lamented what he calls the uberfication of Hollywood under the streamers. Netflix and the others have demoted the creative talent from sharing in profits to working for hire, like Uber drivers.

00:34:17 Speaker_00
It's a particularly suggestive comparison because Uber, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the Zurp era, has similarly ushered in a world that is obviously superior in many ways and subtly, almost imperceptibly worse in others.

00:34:33 Speaker_00
Less distinct, less interesting, and sometimes even less useful. According to the latest data, there are now more than 100,000 rideshare vehicles in New York City, and Manhattan's streets have never been harder to traverse.

00:34:50 Speaker_00
Ambulance response times are getting measurably worse by the month. A recent Times article described a taxi ride from the Port Authority to the Museum of Modern Art, about 11 blocks uptown and two avenues over, that took a half hour.

00:35:04 Speaker_00
It described a study showing that more than half the cars on the road are for hire.

00:35:09 Speaker_00
The city's iconic yellow cabs, now engulfed by an anonymous fleet of sedans and SUVs, summoned seamlessly through apps, serving the market so well that the streets have nearly ceased to function.

00:35:23 Speaker_00
And perhaps that is what will become of our entertainment landscape, too. There's always something available, more of it than ever before.

00:35:31 Speaker_00
more than you could have dreamed of, and it's available to you at the tap of a button, like magic, the way you always hoped it would be. Whether it can always get you where you want to go is another question.

00:35:45 Speaker_00
The good news is that if you get bored, you can just look at your phone.