1. Why Netflix Needed HBO
There’s been a lot of speculation around why Netflix might want to buy Warner Bros—a deal that was announced this morning just as I was about to hit send on the newsletter, much of it centering around their need for the IP franchises in the Warner library.
But as the final season of Stranger Things began airing this week, it’s clear there was something else Netflix needed too: an HBO-like show.
Or two or three.
It’s an odd thing to say about a company whose reputation was largely made by outbidding HBO for a hit show (House of Cards) that was quickly followed by a spate of other HBO-like “peak TV” shows: Orange Is The New Black, Narcos, Black Mirror and BoJack Horseman.
Shows that became cultural touchpoints, at least for a certain type of coastal elite member, and gave the service its “must-have” aura.
And now, with Stranger Things set to permanently return to the upside down, that era seems to be long behind us.
Which could be a bigger problem than Netflix seems to realize.
Why It Matters
Netflix understood that catering to the so-called chattering classes made for great PR but didn’t do much to move the needle on subscriber numbers.
And they wanted big subscriber numbers.
It was not a new game plan.
In the 1950s, the first Golden Age Of Television came about because the only people who could afford TV sets were educated and affluent, the chattering classes of their day.
And so movies like Marty and Judgement At Nuremberg were right up their alley.
But as TV sets went mass market, so did the programming and by the early 1960s, CBS was serving up corny countrified fare like Petticoat Junction and Green Acres.
Netflix followed this same playbook: early streaming viewers were largely well-educated, affluent and prone to favor the sorts of morally ambiguous main characters and plotlines that defined the highbrow television of the Obama era.
But then the pandemic happened, streaming grew faster than anyone had anticipated and Netflix needed to capture a mass audience.
It was time, as an anonymous Hollywood executive said in a now famous quote, for Netflix to “stop making snobby shows that nobody watches.”
Harsh, but also accurate: “snobby” shows traditionally have terrible ratings. Mad Men, for instance, struggled to break a million viewers per episode back in the days when over 90% of Americans still had a cable subscription.
So the old programming chief was thrown out, and a new one was brought in, someone who specialized in reality TV and mass market dramas like Bridgerton.
It was a sound strategy for the moment: Netflix’s subscriber base grew and grew and forgettable series like The Night Agent and Ginny & Georgia garnered the lion's share of views.
And now Stranger Things is ending and with it goes Netflix’s appeal to all those HBO viewers.
I mean sure, there may be another season of The Crown, but that’s not going to save them.
That this shift is happening at a time when the monoculture has been displaced by feudal media is equally unfortunate.
Because absent that HBO aura, series show up, are cleverly promoted and yet much of the potential audience is completely unaware of them.
They’re stuck in their bubbles and the promos never get there.
And that is a hole that HBO may well be able to plug.
You see, people who are looking for HBO-like TV are going to look for it on HBO. And if they can’t find it there, they may go to Apple, which has been doing a good job of playing Showtime to HBO’s HBO.
But that’s it.
So a Netflix with HBO becomes a bigger threat. Because not only will it attract the mass market, it will also win back all those Serious TV viewers who will then write about those HBO shows in the New Yorker. The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal. Vanity Fair. The Atlantic. The Free Press. The Guardian. And countless other publications both in the US and abroad.
Which will create an aura around Netflix that will further cement its status as The Streaming Service You Can’t Possibly Live Without.
Provided, of course, they don’t blow it.
What You Need To Do About It
The thing about making these sorts of HBO series is you need an environment that supports them.
Say what you will about current Warner Bros. management, but they’ve managed to keep that magic intact and have been rewarded with everything from The White Lotus to Succession.
And if Netflix wants to keep that vibe going, then they need to consciously create an environment where that sort of storytelling is rewarded.
Where no one is instructed to have the characters say what they are doing because the assumption is that no one is actually watching. One where shows are not abruptly cancelled because beancounters or AI bots have determined they’re no longer bringing in enough new subscribers.
If they can do that—stand back and let HBO be HBO—then a Warner Bros. purchase will boost Netflix far more than all the IP franchises in Warner’s library combined.
But given Netflix’s recent behavior, that’s a great big if.
Stay tuned.
2. The End Of News
In his most excellent Rebooting newsletter, Brian Morrissey lays out some disturbing facts about how Gen Z looks at news.
To cherry pick three of them:
- 80% of Zoomers said journalists fail to produce more impartial information than other online creators.
- 43% get their news from TikTok.
- 38% regularly get news from influencers on social media.
Now if you have not paid much attention to “news influencers” on social media, it’s important to note that few of them have any sort of actual journalism training of the sort that would allow them to differentiate fact from opinion, or truth from falsehood, or carefully planted propaganda from reality.
Which is a great big honking problem.
Why It Matters
News has long been one of the main reasons media exists and a healthy news and information ecosystem has long been considered a sign of a free and advanced society.
But the younger generation no longer trusts the news: as per The Rebooting, 45% of U.S. teens said journalists do more to harm democracy than protect it.
And it is about to get worse as the Dark Ages of media grows even darker.
The gatekeepers who once upheld standards have abandoned their posts. But not before very purposefully blurring the lines between “news” and “opinion” in a way that opened the floodgates for the “news influencers” who feed into Zoomers’ growing distrust of the mainstream media.
Cable news cracked first.
In attempting to fill up a full 24/7 news cycle, they chose to fall back on opinion, first in bits and pieces, and then to the point where opinion completely dominates prime time. Which also had the unexpected consequence of reintroducing the notion that news was supposed to have a political bias.
Mainstream newspapers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal quickly followed suit. They learned that the outrage clicks generated by over-the-top Opinion pieces were internet gold.
And so those pages, once relegated to the back of the front section, were elevated to the front page, where the line between news and opinion became blurrier still.
It should come as no surprise that the decline of news aligns neatly with the Feudal Media theory, in that the Romans had a factual canon that was widely accepted across the empire (the monoculture) and that canon disappeared in the Dark Ages, where superstition and sorcery took precedence over facts, and science was summarily tossed out the window along with the slop buckets.
Or, to put it more succinctly, feels took precedence over facts.
What You Need To Do About It
Hope is about all the encouragement I can offer right now, but I do think things will eventually get better.
CNN (which is not part of the Netflix deal) and Newsmax are running with freestanding subscription news services, so someone believes in the future of 24-hour TV news.
I may not be one of them, but I do believe that the scrum of online news influencers will eventually spit out some whose fame is based on their ability to actually impartially report the news and frame it in a way that feels like good reporting, not opinion and not Timesian both-sides-ism.
And those people will gain audiences and build their own news empires that will eventually overshadow all the outrage jockeys and AI News Bots.
But then again I tend to see the glass as half full and filling up rapidly.
So there’s that too.
Alan Wolk is co-founder and lead analyst at the consulting firm TV[R]EV. He is the author of the best-selling industry primer, Over The Top: How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry. Wolk frequently speaks about changes in the television industry, both at conferences and to anyone who’ll listen.
Week in Review is an opinion column. It does not necessarily represent the opinions of StreamTV Insider.