by Cory Barker
ALSO OF INTEREST AND FROM MCFARLAND
* * *
Edited by Cory Barker, Chris Ryan and Myc Wiatrowski
Mapping Smallville: Critical Essays on the Series and Its Characters (2014)
Edited by James F. Iaccino, Cory Barker and Myc Wiatrowski
Arrow and Superhero Television: Essays on Themes and Characters of the Series (2017)
The Age of Netflix
Critical Essays on Streaming Media, Digital Delivery and Instant Access
Edited by CORY BARKER and MYC WIATROWSKI
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE
BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE
e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-3023-6
© 2017 Cory Barker and Myc Wiatrowski. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Front cover images © 2017 iStock
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Cory Barker and Myc Wiatrowski
Part One: Netflix as Disruptor and as Cultural Institution
From Primetime to Anytime: Streaming Video, Temporality and the Future of Communal Television
Justin Grandinetti
Terms of Excess: Binge-Viewing as Epic-Viewing in the Netflix Era
Djoymi Baker
Streaming Culture, the Centrifugal Development of the Internet and Our Precarious Digital Future
Joseph Donica
Part Two: Netflix as Producer and as Distributor
Doing Time: Queer Temporalities and Orange Is the New Black
Maria San Filippo
Netflix and Innovation in Arrested Development’s Narrative Construction
Maíra Bianchini and Maria Carmem Jacob de Souza
Circulating The Square: Digital Distribution as (Potential) Activism
James N. Gilmore
Part Three: Netflix as Narrowcaster and as Global Player
Binge-Watching in Practice: The Rituals, Motives and Feelings of Streaming Video Viewers
Emil Steiner
Narrowcasting, Millennials and the Personalization of Genre in Digital Media
Alison N. Novak
From Interactive Digital Television to Internet “Instant” Television: Netflix, Shifts in Power and Emerging Audience Practices from an Evolutionary Perspective
Vivi Theodoropoulou
Digital Delivery in Mexico: A Global Newcomer Stirs the Local Giants
Elia Margarita Cornelio-Marí
Selected Bibliography
About the Contributors
List of Names and Terms
Acknowledgments
The editors would like to thank all 11 contributors for their meticulous work, consistent kindness, and true patience as the collection grew from a compelling idea into a satisfying final product. Their wonderful insights found within these essays made it easy to remain committed to this project amid grueling schedules, job changes, and much more.
Cory would like to thank his coeditor Myc for his work and commitment to bringing a great idea to life. Cory would also like to shout out to his friends in the critical and scholarly community for always lending their time and ears to workshop ideas big and small and his family for their warmth and support.
Myc would like to thank his coeditor, Cory, whose enthusiasm and dedication brought this collection together. Without his hard work, this book would never have come to fruition. Myc also owes his greatest debt to his family, Laura and Lucas, whose endless patience and understanding have made this all possible and worthwhile.
Introduction
CORY BARKER and MYC WIATROWSKI
In 2016, citizens in the United States and around the globe were forced to confront the deep-seeded political, economic, and cultural divisions among themselves. From shocking voting results in the U.S. presidential election and the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union to heated debates about “fake news” and the “filter bubbles” of social media to the (re)emergence of fringe groups driven by nationalism, hatred, and conspiratorial thought, the modernized world experienced more tumult than usual. Nonetheless, despite the very real partitions among people, one entity continues to bring us together—sort of. Already with an enormous footprint in the United States, Netflix expanded to 130 new countries in early 2016.1 As detailed in its third quarterly report in October 2016, the company added more than 12 million new subscribers in the year’s first nine months and brought its total number of paying customers (and thus not including those who share accounts or passwords) to nearly eighty-seven million.2
The brilliance of Netflix’s strategy is in how its streaming video library manages to appeal to disparate groups of people across the world without a unified cache of content. Indeed, the company takes the opposite approach, using its sophisticated algorithm and seemingly endless resources to buy, develop, and distribute as many different types of content to as many micro-targeted audience groups as possible.3 This data-driven narrowcasting manifests in a variety of genres of programming tailored to particular audiences, including the prestige drama (House of Cards [2013–] and Bloodline [2015–2017]), the rebooted multi-camera sitcom (Fuller House [2015–] and One Day at a Time [2016–]), and the superhero franchise (Marvel’s Daredevil [2015–], Jessica Jones [2015–], and Luke Cage [2016–]). However, in 2016, Netflix took this approach even more globally, introducing more non–English language series such as France’s Marseille (2016–) and Brazil’s 3% (2016–).
Netflix’s worldwide expansion almost guarantees that the company will further integrate itself into our everyday lives. Since its now-famous shift from physical media rentals to a high-definition streaming video platform, Netflix’s stature has grown significantly. In North America, the company finds itself at the fulcrum of countless industrial, cultural, economic, technological, and political developments. Its role in the popularization of streaming video has fundamentally altered the ways in which we watch, discuss, and generally consume media. From the rise of binge-watching and password-sharing to intermittent debates about spoiler etiquette and how critics should cover programs that are released all at once, Netflix is the central force in the contemporary experience of media consumption. The company has an equally notable impact on how television and film is produced, distributed, and marketed. Armed with a large operating budget, Netflix has improved its position within Hollywood’s inner circle since 2012, outbidding HBO for A-list talent as well as spending lavishly on independent films across the festival circuit. Much of what Amazon or Hulu or even HBO has done in recent years has been in response to Netflix’s embrace of original or exclusive content, setting off an arms race to craft the most valuable subscription streaming video service.
Meanwhile, Netflix projects are not only meticulously targeted with audiences’ taste profiles in mind, they are also immaculately marketed and “eventized” to cut through modern popular culture’s dense clutter. The company’s streaming of full seasons all at once situates those releases as must-watch and must-complete occurrences—and is a tactic that networks and cable channels have mimicked in recent years.4 Yet, the existence of the ever-changing Netflix library taps into the phenomenon of the long tail, with consumers always having another new-to-them series or film to watch years after its initial release. As a result, the co
mpany manages to imbue its library with a sense of perpetual personalized discovery that, in theory, offers enough content to keep consumers subscribing from month to month and year to year.
Although much of the attention paid to Netflix hinges on its influence on consumers and industry practice, the company is similarly relevant in other arenas. The influx of cord cutting—consumers unsubscribing to traditional cable packages—over the past five years is regularly attributed to streaming video and Netflix more specifically.5 Cable and Internet companies have tried to lure customers back with bundles including Netflix trials, but have more recently turned toward cheaper, more targeted “skinny bundle” options to reach those who, for example, may appreciate the personalized Netflix experience but still want to watch live sports on ESPN.6 Netflix’s embrace of streaming video and subsequent indifference in its DVD rental business has also been identified as a catalyst in the death of physical media, with cultural critics and scholars decrying the declining availability of older and more obscure films and television series. As Hollywood and consumers move toward Netflix and further away from physical media, more products fail to make the jump to the next platform, whether due to rights issues, conversion challenges, or perceived lack of demand.7
Netflix has also been a key figure in the discourse surrounding net neutrality and data caps, perhaps most notably when it reached an agreement with Comcast to ensure that subscribers would receive Netflix content at “faster and more reliable speeds.”8 In the aftermath of the deal, Netflix executives repeatedly went on the record in support of net neutrality.9 Conversely, the company has installed a ban on customers trying to watch via a VPN (virtual private network) as part of a larger process known as “geo-blocking,” wherein content is not accessible to those outside a particular geographic location.10 Meanwhile, American cities like Pasadena, California, have proposed a so-called “Netflix tax” to recoup lost revenues from increased cord-cutting, while Chicago has successfully installed its own “cloud tax” on streaming services like Netflix that are “delivered electronically.”11
Altogether, these efforts illustrate the prominence of Netflix beyond binge-watching and all-at-once release strategies. Both Netflix and its opponents within the government have displayed a predictably inconsistent perspective on who can access its streaming library, and what those people should be required to do—or, perhaps better said, how much they should be required to pay—to make that access possible. Likewise, as a technology company driven by the contemporary Silicon Valley ethos of “get big fast,” Netflix has been less concerned about what content is left behind in the march toward the great streaming video singularity.
Although these headline-grabbing data points and anecdotes underline Netflix’s disruptions of culture, less discussed is the company’s uncanny ability to build on pre-existing business models or industry practices. The DVD rental service of course combined the video store with Amazon’s nationwide shipping practices. The move to streaming video followed both Apple’s iTunes store and similar streaming platforms developed by U.S. and UK broadcasters. The shift from licensed content to original products mirrored the path traveled by countless American cable channels, from HBO to TNT to MTV. These realities do not limit Netflix’s centrality to modern life, but simply serve as a reminder that, as Lisa Gitelman asserts, “media are themselves denizens of the past. Even the newest media today come from somewhere, whether that somewhere gets described broadly as a matter of supervening social necessity, or narrowly in reference to some proverbial drawing board and a round or two of beta testing.”12 Thus, while this collection investigates why Netflix is omnipresent in our lives, it also returns to how the company evokes the phenomena of years past and of other cultures. The book is focused on what Gitelman calls protocols, or the “vast clutter of normative rules and default conditions, which gather and adhere like a nebulous array around a technological nucleus,” that have been altered, replaced, or introduced with the advent of this streaming platform.13 Still, authors resist the urge to proclaim Netflix as a singular power among changing protocols.
With this in mind, this collection consists of three parts that aspire to underline the far-reaching but occasionally contradictory influence of Netflix around the globe. Each part addresses how Netflix’s attempts to be many things—technology company, media conglomerate, policy stakeholder, and so on—and generate products and protocols that consumers have both celebrated and decried. In Part One, “Netflix as Disruptor and as Cultural Institution,” the authors highlight three core developments that are the result of Netflix’s recent success. In the first essay of this section, Justin Grandinetti analyzes the company’s all-at-once release model and its effect on consumers but also critics, who have been confronted with the challenge of writing about an entire season of television in a weekend or risk losing the web traffic that television coverage generates. In this realm, Netflix has functioned as a particularly disruptive force, destabilizing the popular—and, for digital media companies, lucrative—style of television criticism, wherein writers produce recaps and deconstructions of episodes that subsequently enable viewers to discuss the episode among themselves in the comments section. Websites like Television Without Pity and The A.V. Club popularized this style, replicating a more obsessive form of water cooler conversation in a digital environment. While viewers have been navigating the challenges of these digital water coolers for years—including but not limited to spoiler etiquette and disputing factions within fandom—the release and coverage of a full season expedites those challenges for readers and critics alike. In spotlighting commentary from both groups in the early stages of Netflix’s all-at-once rollout, Grandinetti shows how the contours of communal television have been redefined on the fly, with everyone caught between the traditional television distribution schedule and the desire to participate in the online conversation.
Djoymi Baker concentrates on another essential characteristic of Netflix: binge-watching. However, rather than detailing how consumers have embraced this kind of viewing practice (as others later in the collection do), Baker turns his attention to how the company frames its original programming as binge-worthy. For Netflix, the simultaneous release of a season’s episodes is only part of the strategy to inspire binge-viewing. Many of its original series eschew the discrete episodic structure of television, with fewer standalone episodes and more collections of scenes moving slowly to a climax. Netflix also utilizes A-list casts, lavish budgets, and endless marketing resources to brand its original productions as must-see events. Netflix is not just encouraging binge-viewing; the company crafts what Baker, borrowing from Vivian Sobchack, calls “epic-viewing.” For Baker, Netflix’s approach recalls not only HBO’s cunningly marketed “Not TV” era, but also the epic miniseries of 1970s and 1980s broadcast television. Examining the company’s production and promotional practices, Baker underlines how Netflix elongates Sobchack’s “excess of temporality,” where television is one exhaustive, epic text.
The last essay of Part One moves to Netflix’s position within the net neutrality debates. Using Netflix’s controversial agreement with Comcast as a starting point, Joseph Donica examines the former’s broader role in the current structure—and potential future—of the Internet. Netflix has aligned with “open Internet” supporters, positioning itself as a kind of “good” corporation that has its eyes on more than the bottom line. Nevertheless, Netflix surely spoke out for net neutrality to protect its place within the market, as more vertically integrated competitors stood to benefit from less restrictive regulations. These contradictory positions are at the center of Donica’s analysis, where Netflix is both an open Internet advocate with a “hacker ethic” corporate culture and the target of criticisms from leftist groups expecting more from a supposedly outspoken corporation. Donica details how Netflix unintentionally became a central player in the net neutrality controversy, and occasionally acts in a manner that illustrates Silicon Valley’s murky understanding of freedom and capitalis
m.
The collection’s second part, “Netflix as Producer and as Distributor,” concentrates on a trio of vital Netflix projects: the original series Orange Is the New Black, the revival season of Fox’s Arrested Development (2013), and the Sundance Film Festival documentary The Square (2014). In this part, the authors consider how the presence of Netflix as a partner transforms the processes of production, distribution, and reception. Like Grandinetti and Baker, Maria San Filippo displays an interest in how Netflix’s distribution model affects the temporal and communal experiences of television. Unlike the premiere of House of Cards or Arrested Development’s big return, the first season of OITNB arrived on Netflix in 2013 with relatively little hype, only to generate the most passionate response of all the company’s original series. Acclaim for the series stemmed from its commitment to representational diversity and its transgressive spirit within the framework of a prestige dramedy. San Filippo considers how queer viewers, commonly ignored by the machinery of mainstream Hollywood, are both freed and limited by OITNB and its all-at-once release. Noting the wave of passionate online conversation that comes with a Netflix release, San Filippo argues that queer viewers lose some of the “embodied interactions” that are central to their subcultural identities. Still, in her analysis of character arcs and storylines, San Filippo shows that the series nevertheless offers multifaceted expressions of queerness and a queering of television’s structures of temporality and seriality.
The revival of cult Fox sitcom Arrested Development was one of the first signs that Netflix was serious about its shift from distributor to producer. Although the Mitch Hurwitz–created project upended some of the sitcom’s fundamental conventions during its Fox run, Hurwitz and the creative team (including producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer) used the freedom granted to them by Netflix to take even more risks with the return season. These risks are at the center of the essay by Maíra Bianchini dos Santos and Maria Carmem Jacob de Souza. Beginning with the history of Arrested Development’s journey to Fox’s schedule, the authors trace how Hurwitz and company developed the series’ verité style and later transformed a self-conscious and layered vision into an even more fragmented, referential puzzle. The authors show how prior projects (Howard’s work on the reality television-esque EdTV [1999]) and production obstacles (scheduling challenges with the series’ large cast) regularly inspired the experimentation on all seasons of Arrested Development. Thus, Netflix is shown to be a respectful partner, but not the singular power crafting one of television’s most unique projects.