Will Tallinn, on Netflix’s original productions:
High output alone can’t account for Netflix’s garbage quality. In the 1920s and ’30s, studios like Paramount and Warner Bros. put out as many as seventy movies per year. Around its peak in the ’90s, Miramax tried releasing a new film almost every week. The difference between Netflix and its predecessors is that the older studios had a business model that rewarded cinematic expertise and craft. Netflix, on the other hand, is staffed by unsophisticated executives who have no plan for their movies and view them with contempt.
I’m not so persuaded they’re an outlier in terms of quality. It sounds a “good old days” argument — did Hollywood, or cable TV, cared about quality more than the new streaming overlords? Quality is an outlier for all of them. Marvel makes a lot of money, whether or not their shots lack movements. A lot of us don’t even notice quality outside of our areas of expertise; quality sometimes requires prior knowledge to be seen. We’re aware of the details in the things we know but aren’t necessarily as attentive to the rest. Tl;dr studios have been producing cheap stuff since ever, and Netflix is no special there.
What I think is different is that Netflix had access to an unprecedented amount of cash; it operated by tech-sector rules. Willy Staley wrote about this recently for The New York Times:
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 — 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. It earned the nickname Debtflix in the business press, which wondered if all this borrowing was sustainable. If you applied the logic of the media business to Netflix, it looked uncertain, 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. 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. Its size constantly fluctuates as it inhales and exhales material, 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.