One of the issues is how much Netflix content just reflect whatever crap is a fad in California politics. I am not even from US, I don't want to hear about Californian political themes in the media I consume, SPECIALLY when it is a remake of something from a country that has nothing to do with California culture! (like... Japan, or Poland...)
That said, political content is pretty popular with a big chunk of their subscribers. The rest of us lose out because of it, unfortunately... I don't even know if I would call it political, more just forcing in bits of virtue signaling where it doesn't make sense.
Edit: typo
What are some examples of this? Of all the issues Ive seen people have with Netflix, this is definitely a very new one.
Hard to say Netflix is worse for this than various other Hollywood studios tho.
(to clarify in anticipation of downvotes, I welcome and enjoy some of the media about trans people etc, I am just answering your question, to elucidate this issue with the services' content that some people have. Definitely not a rare or new issue, I've been listening to people go on about it for years)
I dont see how stuff like this is complained about though, especially since most shows dont actually have more than token representation anyway. Whats the actual complaint here? That the average cast of a show is slightly different now than it was 10 years ago? People complain about "woke" themes but I hardly see concrete examples of them, and explanations as to whats wrong or what should be done differently.
And fwiw I think using Star Trek as an example is funny* since the show has historically been based on diverse groups of people.
In Star Fleet the fact that someone happens to be a polygamous tri-sexual trans-species cat person should pass mostly without comment.
But modern sensibilities set up a dynamic where nobody is just a character.
Everyone is seen as representing "their team" - a race, or a class. This is a big responsibility, so everyone has to take themselves super seriously.
I think we're in a transitional phase for TV. Representation is a priority (great!) but the industry isn't fully confident with it yet. It's OK, TV has always been about the zeitgeist as much as the show.
Perhaps what we need is also more diversity among writers/producers. Right now it feels like a lot of writers are handling their "diverse" characters with kid gloves which can leave them a bit wooden and gets in the way of telling a good story.
> Perhaps what we need is also more diversity among writers/producers. Right now it feels like a lot of writers are handling their "diverse" characters with kid gloves which can leave them a bit wooden and gets in the way of telling a good story.
This is the answer. Seems like just a bit more time is needed for things to find less wooden footing.
Here's a handful of "woke" things I've grown tired of, more because they're such overused cliches or unrealistic things that break my suspension of disbelief than any opposition (I'm a far left, pro-LGBT+, progressive atheist feminist to disclose any biases), but in no particular order:
Every show having an "overcoming sexism" or "overcoming racism" narrative, where inevitably a white guy is the evil villain who underestimates, mistreats or is unfair to the protagonist and then the female/poc character gets to overcome this systemic injustice. (Sometimes this is central to the whole show, sometimes it feels like just an obligatory scene in an otherwise unrelated story).
Casts that have an unrealistic "forced diversity" element. You might call it token representation, but if the scene is a random office in middle-America and the 6 characters are 6 different races or when each character is designed specifically to be the inverse of a stereotype, it makes the show feel less authentic and genuine. Related is changing characters from existing stories to be more diverse according to contemporary American notions of identity.
Men being depicted as so absurdly rapey, or the general overuse of sexual harassment or threatening behavior.
Exaggerations of nepotism, sexism and racism in most shows.
As to your question of "whats wrong or what should be done differently", I think there are a few challenges. For instance, we all sort of accept action movies being full of guns and explosions while recognizing they're not at all representative of reality. However, there does seem to be some evidence that these movies contribute to European misunderstanding and to greatly overestimating the likelihood of encountering gun violence in America. The current set of media might bias a generation of young women to fear there's a rapist in every room and that every career disappointment is a manifestation of systemic discrimination.
An easy parallel might be looking at the over-use of depictions of Black men as gang members, drug dealers or criminals in 1980s and 1990s Hollywood. Any one particular movie scene or tv show might be fine on its own with such a character, but when similar characters and scenes show up in dozens of unrelated titles and as a disproportionate representation it becomes problematic. It's different groups now being the recurring villains, recurring fools, etc, but it's the same fundamental issue.
No one complains about the fresh prince of Bel-Air having a 100% black cast. But I doubt you wouldn't mind if a reboot was made with 80% white cast because it's a show "from 15 years ago".
What many people hate is the lack of creativity and the "corruption" of already-existing shows for ideologic views.
I would however, pay good money for "Star Trek: all David Bowie edition" where an entire starship is crewed with David Bowie clones.
Thanks for the bigman comeback earlier too, you phrased it better than I could have.
The complaints about CA politics in Netflix are new complaints to me.
As far as politics goes Bridgerton is probably the best example which has American racial and gender politics bolted onto some weird fairy tale version of the British aristocracy in the worst way imaginable.
edit: another thing I just remembered, Netflix removed what is probably the best episode of Community from its catalog because of a blackface character, despite the fact that the character is explicitly used to address racism in the fantasy genre.
The one character that outright critiques the practice still ends up revolving around a guy that "she chose" but is lower class. Why did she need a man?
Not only that but the show is all about 15yos marrying 20 something dudes? Just creepy.
On the other hand I thought sex education was great with how it deals with social issues surrounding sex. I do enjoy the aesthetics of it, never really found it weird but its definitely an "american 80s" aesthetic, though that is also how young people are dressing, at least over here.
Personally I dont see an issue with exploring social questions at all, but it does most of the time a superficial analysis just ends up ignoring too many things to be of any use and ends up simply as a performative action. I think this is the case for Bridgerton but not Sex Education.
In any case, what angers me with Netflix is the way they cancel shows without giving them a way to wrap up their stories in a final season. Sure, if you have 2 seasons and you were planning 5 it might be difficult to wrap everything on a third season but it is surely better than simply leaving the story open.
Yes, like most American content sources, the content tends to be flavored by American culture.
> As far as politics goes Bridgerton is probably the best example which has American racial and gender politics bolted onto some weird fairy tale version of the British aristocracy in the worst way imaginable.
I would say it has fairy tale versions of racial and gender politics (which are not, insofar as they connect with real world versions, any less connected to British than American ones) bolted on to a weird fairy tale version of early 19th Century British aristocracy; it's very American, but less in the politics than the style of romance story for which the setting provides the context.
I mean how do you say any of this is American politics and not British/Western European politics? Racial inequality, women's rights, and class structures are not just American things.
I think your mistake is reading Bridgerton as utopian political fiction and not a romance film with a fantasy drawn around combining exaggeration of a few specific facts of Regency England with a couple things drawn from modern Western race and gender politics is the context and engine of conflict.
> There's no classism or anything structural in that show
There is fairly intense classism in the show.
> In that sense it's no different than Hamilton, where you had, ironically enough, an almost all POC cast represent not a single POC character.
Minor nitpick: Hamilton, in fact, has a single explicitly-named on-stage POC character, though the part has no lines.
Major nitpick: you...did not understand a few layers of metaphor in Hamilton.
> superficial diversity in place of actually talking about race, class, and so on.
Hamilton rather directly talks about race, class, “and so on”.
You write this as if the same questions of racial and gender politics are not also significant in other parts of (a) the anglosphere (b) western europe.
You’re right, it’s infuriating but not limited to Netflix unfortunately. Look at Picard… a total cringe-fest. That said, I did randomly watch an Israeli TV series about the lives of ultra-orthodox Jews, Shtisel, and despite the lack of CGI and all that, I found it an interesting watch.
...what?
Ozark seems like a directly bad comparison because it appears to be one of their last big content swings/risks (and is ending soon) from the first few years where they seemed to heavily curate their projects and who the creators were and who the talent were and give them enough seasons to tell the full story they were hoping to tell. (Ozark is one of the very few and seems one of the last to get its full number of seasons expectation and will get to tell a "complete story".) Ozark is not quite as successful as benchmarks like Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul, but it fills a niche and gambles on good talent pulling off a tough tightrope of "bad people doing bad things but you root for them in spite of themselves", which is still a very risky niche even with big "Prestige TV" breakouts such as the aforementioned benchmarks. (I've only finished the first season of Ozark because I have a hard time watching this "cringe" genre, but I recall it was very well made and I enjoyed it for what it was.)
Since Netflix ordered Ozark they have indeed seemed to move their Originals content much more to a algorithm-generated "shotgun" approach: building lots of single season shows (or maybe if first weekend and only first weekend views are high enough, or so it seems, they will get two seasons) and seemingly designed overall to take fewer risks (on creators, on talent, on genres). There's definitely a lot extremely generic or at least extremely low risk programming coming out of Netflix's shotgun at this point. Some of it has still been entertaining.
But calling Ozark out for being a product of the shotgun and "low risk" seems backwards when it seems so much more emblematic of riskier Netflix Originals projects than current ones.
Yes, it is crazy, in part because "the algorithm" (how i hate this term) really derives most of its power because it represents huge numbers of human beings making choices. The store clerk may have been an excellent recommendation engine for you, or they may not have been, but they almost certainly were not equally good (or bad) for most people.
Independent video stores are not so tightly tied to one distributor, so yes, a clerk that takes a few moments to hear what movies you like could point you in the right direction....even if that direction is to go a different store entirely.
-First the intersectional genres became harder to find, or create.
-Then the reviews were wiped.
-Then you see the same content you actually watched as recommended and often
But the way their UI/UX is built, it is not conducive for exploring. They've taken so much control away from me. I have to rely on what IT thinks I should be watching.
I know one of the reasons why they do this is because they don't want people to easily see and track of how small their content library is, and how frequently content disappears.
Not sure who else feels this but for me:
There's a lack of "regular tv shows". I knew it was over when they got rid of The Office, that was pretty much the only reason I kept Netflix.
HBO Max, Disney Plus, Prime Video, AMC (temporary) all have the shows we regularly go to. Sopranos/Frasier, Simpsons/Star Wars/National Geography, The Office/Friends, Breaking Bad/Better call Saul (just need to see how it all ends).
Heck even Prime managed to bag many of the shows that used to be on Netflix. Aliens, Tora Tora Tora and even Independence Day is on Disney Plus. Lot of movies outside Netflix.
Netflix just has these one off good shows that frankly doesn't attract across the demographic. Sure there's something for everyone but its lacking those "must have and easy to access binge reruns".
I don’t think they want you exploring too much. It would expose how little content they actually have.
I usually google for "best movies netflix april 2022" (or shows) and look through rotten tomatoes, metacritic, etc to see if that is something worth checking out.
(It doesn't help that they drag their customers into their fight with Apple by not integrating with Apple TV. Given their quality now I don't open Netflix by default and now that they don't integrate my global queue I legit forget to resume a show.)
Killer Clowns From Outer Space
Of those, the very clear ordering in terms of taste and vision is: Disney+, Apple, HBO >>>> HBO, Hulu.
Apple is the most amazing one to me - they came from nowhere, and are bringing original content like CODA or Severance after only a few years.
Maybe it's because Apple - the largest (tech) company on Earth still has at its core the idea of beautiful things designed by humans, and Netflix never has.
Netflix used to be that way too. But now it is trying to play moneyball.
Netflix was great for about 10 years when it's only competition was Hulu. Now everyone has yanked their content off of Netflix and put it on their own streaming platforms.
When Netflix had ALL of the streaming videos, it was amazing, it was the Video Supermarket as you say.
Now Netflix makes it's own content and I hear nothing but bad things from other people and my own experiences of their programming is that it's substandard to what they could get from other studios.
They need to go back to being the #1 streaming content provider, not a movie studio.
Given that, how is this:
> They need to go back to being the #1 streaming content provider,
even possible?
I think the exact opposite: Ozark was great, because it is basically a rip-off of Breaking Bad, which was made by a mainstream TV network (which has a lot of experience and research about what kind of stories people do like). The "risky content" from artists that were "set free" is a recipe for disaster: you spend a lot of money to produce a show that only appeals to some exotic audiences. Netflix has some examples of that. Only once in a while you'll hit the jackpot and have this risky content make you a lot of money.
Netflix are going to end up with lots of content but very little original IP that people are seeking out.
Netflix isn't doing any of that. It isn't going for the best and brightest it's going for the best and brightest, and "murder shows", and crappy reality shows, and cooking shows, and, and, and: https://www.vox.com/2015/4/16/11561544/netflix-doesnt-want-t...
A perfect example is Scorsese's "The Irishman." That movie could have easily been 2-2.5 hours yet it came in at over 3 hours. It was a detriment to the movie rather than a positive. Yet, I bet Netflix loved the extra content even though it was not a good thing for the movie.
Speaking as someone who knows Netflix producers, they very much do...
Speaking as someone with the misfortune to still be holding the stock, down 25% after hours, right now.
And what’s wrong with Ozark? I thought it’s one of the better shows on Netflix.
In my view they need more creative risky shows like the OA, Altered Carbon, Love, Death & Robots, Dark Mirror and more old HBO style content… quality and like you said not this mass produced stuff trying to satisfy the lowest common denominator, because then you will satisfy no one.
Maybe they have good shows I just don't know about. Their recommendation system seems to be crap. I browse for 20 minutes and then give up frustrated, because I can't find anything interesting.
I was just looking to downgrade my plan. Basic only gives you SD quality, which I'm OK with but only allowing one device at a time is taking the p!ss.
How fair is that though? Who's to say that we wouldn't find the quality of content of CBS/NBC/ABC to be equally as bad if we had it comprehensively laid out in a nicely engineered UI like in Netflix? In the previous model, most of us didn't watch TV for huge chunks of the day and simply weren't around to see if the television was good during those chunks.
They need to think like a Hollywood studio, and less like a Video Supermarket. You need to be a Disney or PBS , Universal or MGM, and the subscribers will pay for high quality content.
The only notable Netflix content seems to be the one purchased externally. Internally developed content, tends to follow a common amorphous pattern, that becomes very predictable as it gets extended into multiple episodes of the same script.
They need charismatic movies and set free artists with risky content. Not 20 episodes of Ozark.