The Age of Netflix

by Cory Barker

  Netflix has made the connections between its extended format, novels, and the cinema particularly overt in the promotion of the loosely historical epic Marco Polo. Creator John Fusco suggests “this is basically a ten hour long movie…. It’s like literature, it’s a very novelistic format.”100 These connections appear to be part of a deliberate marketing strategy, as they have been repeated in other interviews with various production members. Although House of Cards functions as Netflix’s main flagship program, its foregrounding of an aesthetic of expense is reserved in comparison with the fanfare surrounding Marco Polo, which has been interpreted as a branding exercise for Netflix’s expansion into the international market.101 Netflix spent a reported $90 million on the ten-episode first season of Marco Polo, and promotional interviews surrounding the series have emphasized the scale and expense of the project. Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos, along with the series’ producers, stressed the 800-strong crew who speak 26 languages; 160 crewmembers in the art department; 400 in construction; and “the sets … including 51 sets in Malaysia,” which “required 130 tons of plaster and 1.6 tons of silicone.”102 This emphasis on “size and scope” is nothing new to the historical epic.103 Sobchack argues that “the genre formally repeats the surge, splendor, and extravagance, the human labor and capital cost entailed by its narrative’s historical content in both its production process and its modes of representation.”104 The cost and scale of the production are emphasized in the promotional material and in the visual construction of the text itself, such that the “history of production and the production of history” become intertwined.105 Writing in 1990, Sobchack suggests that the labor invested in the television epic miniseries tends not to be publicly celebrated as a marketing strategy.106 This is clearly no longer the case. The promotion surrounding Marco Polo invites us to be impressed by, and take pleasure in, the expense and expanse of the image, the ten-hour running time it takes to display it as well as the work entailed in producing it. Thus, as Sobchack argues, the “temporal excess” of the epic becomes “encoded as empirically verifiable and material excess—entailing scale, quantification, and consumption in relation to money and human labor.”107 This is not to suggest a return to the dubious notion of cinematic television, but rather to note the way in which the concepts of the cinematic and the epic are deliberately employed in the promotion of Marco Polo. Reviews have not been favorable, and references to “B-movie clichés” must particularly sting given the considerable expense showered on the program.108 For our purposes here, what matters is not the success or reception of Marco Polo, nor indeed its high-end treatment of quasi-historical subject matter, which we have seen before (in programs such as Rome [2005–2007]). Rather, what is important is the way in which Netflix has framed its promotion of the series, linking the grandness of the scale and cost of the series with the grandness of experiencing the program as one epic whole on Netflix. This is intended to infer that to watch series on other providers is to be impoverished by the temporal restrictions of scheduled viewing, to be held back both by textual fragmentation and the act of waiting.

  Indeed, Sobchack notes that the primary object of her study is not so much epic films in themselves but rather the language surrounding public experience of them, including promotional materials and reviews; the cultural and experiential field of the epic’s temporality.109 Sobchack suggests that the extratextual discourse about the production of an epic film is an inherent part of creating and expanding its “temporal field.”110 What is revealed in the way that Marco Polo has been promoted is not only a marketing strategy common to the Hollywood historical epic genre that Sobchack discusses, but also a culmination of what Netflix has been trying to harness all along as a brand: the sense of consecutive streaming spectatorship as bigger and better than “ordinary” television viewing, as an event and as an experience, as grand and impressive—as epic-viewing. That is, its appeal to the epic extends beyond the field of genre per se, but rather speaks to a broader branding strategy and the promotion of a particular mode of viewing.

  Conclusion

  Epic-viewing is predicated on spectator endurance of an extensive text, one that frequently foregrounds its construction (albeit in different ways across different programs) as a site of pleasure posited as worthy of that endurance. Netflix’s writing, marketing, and delivery methods particularly encourage viewers to conceptualize its programs as epic texts. As other providers start to copy this model, Amazon Studios’s head of comedy Joe Lewis proclaims, “We’re actually getting to make up this new form of storytelling…. That’s the only way to think about it. I don’t think about it as bingeing. We need to figure out a new word for it.”111 By extending Sobchack’s work, I have suggested epic-viewing as the term Lewis is searching for, with its associations of heightened temporality. The epic as a genre is, therefore, only one manifestation of epic television viewing. The Netflix model sets up a viewing experience in which any television serial or episodic/serial hybrid is conceptualized as one whole, expansive, epic text. Epic-viewing becomes a journey that is physically experienced in extended time, as our bodily fatigue conjoins with, and partly underpins, our viewing pleasure of this new epic paradigm.

  NOTES

  1. I would like to express my thanks to Dr. Diana Sandars at the University of Melbourne, Australia, for her comments on this essay.

  2. Bob Verini, “Marathon Viewing Is Forcing Showrunners to Evolve,” Variety, June 19, 2014, accessed June 1, 2015, http://variety.com/2014/tv/awards/binge-viewing-is-forcing-showrunners-to-evolve-1201221668/.

  3. “New Words Added to OxfordDictionaries.com Today Include Binge-Watch, Cray, and Vape,” OxfordWords Blog, August 2014, accessed June 1, 2015, http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/press-releases/new-words-added-oxforddictionaries-com-august-2014/.

  4. http://www.OxfordDictionaries.com includes more regular updates on current English, whereas the Oxford English Dictionary (http://www.oed.com) is a historical dictionary, and as such tends to be more conservative in its introduction of new words. At the time of writing, binge-watch had been added to the former but not the latter.

  5. Rachel Herring, Virginia Berridge, and Betsy Thorn, “Binge Drinking: An Exploration of a Confused Term,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 62.6 (2008): 476.

  6. Jim Lemon, “Comment on the Concept of Binge Drinking,” Journal of Addictions Nursing 18.3 (2007): 147–148.

  7. Debra Ramsay, “Confessions of a Binge Watcher,” Critical Studies in Television, October 4 (2013) http://cstonline.tv/confessions-of-a-binge-watcher.

  8. Matt Hills, “From the Box in the Corner to the Box Set on the Shelf: TVIII and the Cultural/Textual Valorizations of DVD,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 5.1 (2007): 41–60; John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema:Television:Video (London: Routledge, 1982), 128, 161–162.

  9. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).

  10. Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 20, 73.

  11. Ibid., 114.

  12. Lynn Spigel, “Installing the Television Set: Popular Discourses on Television and Domestic Space, 1948–1955,” in Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer, ed. Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 13–15.

  13. Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 23.

  14. John Hartley and Tom O’Regan, “Quoting Not Science but Sideboards,” in Tele-ology: Studies in Television, ed. John Hartley (London & New York: Routledge, 1992), 206.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Ellis, Visible Fictions, 113.

  17. See for example Ellis, Visible Fictions, 128, 161–162.

  18. Ibid., 128. Similarly, Roland Barthes argues that television is “the opposite experience” of cinema. Quoted in Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “Psychoanalysis, Film, and T
elevision,” in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed. Robert C. Allen (London: Routledge, 1992), 217.

  19. “Kevin Spacey MacTaggart lecture—video,” The Guardian, August 23, 2013, accessed June 1, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/media/video/2013/aug/23/kevin-spacey-mactaggart-lecture-video. A full transcript, which is slightly different to the delivered lecture, is also available. “Kevin Spacey MacTaggart lecture—full text,” The Guardian, August 23, 2013, accessed June 1, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/media/interactive/2013/aug/22/kevin-spacey-mactaggart-lecture-full-text. The version quoted here refers to the lecture as it was delivered.

  20. Amanda D. Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 2–3.

  21. Ibid., 17.

  22. Stephen E. Dinehart, “Transmedial Play: Cognitive and Cross-Platform Narrative,” The Narrative Design Explorer: A Publication Dedicated to Exploring Interactive Storytelling, May 14, 2008, accessed June 1, 2015, http://narrativedesign.org/2008/05/transmedial-play-cognitive-and-cross-platform-narrative/. See also the discussion of transmedia and VUPs in Angela Ndalianis, The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), 172–173.

  23. Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (New York: Routledge, 2012), 141.

  24. Hills, “From the Box in the Corner to the Box Set on the Shelf,” 58.

  25. Amanda D. Lotz, “Rethinking Meaning Making: Watching Serial TV on DVD,” Flow 4.12 (2006), http://flowtv.org/2006/09/rethinking-meaning-making-watching-serial-tv-on-dvd/.

  26. Thus Matt Hills argues fandom studies tend to be too singular in their focus on fandom of a specific text. A fan might move from one text to the next, or may be a fan of several texts at once. See Hills, “Patterns of Surprise: The ‘Aleatory Object’ in Psychoanalytic Ethnography and Cyclical Fandom,” American Behavioral Scientist 48 (2005): 801–821.

  27. Bob Verini, “Marathon Viewing Is Forcing Showrunners to Evolve”; Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 134–151; Matt Hills, “Defining Cult TV: Texts, Inter-Texts and Fan Audiences,” in The Television Studies Reader, ed. Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill (London: Routledge, 2004), 509–523; Joshua Green and Henry Jenkins, “The Moral Economy of Web 2.0,” Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method, ed. Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 216, 222.

  28. “Netflix Original Series—The Future of Television Is Here,” YouTube, posted by Netflix, September 3, 2013, accessed June 1, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kOvUuMowVs.

  29. Vivian Sobchack, “‘Surge and Splendor’: A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical Epic,” Representations 29 (1990): 37.

  30. Ibid., 29–30.

  31. “Samsung UHD TV Netflix Promotion 1,” YouTube, posted by Samsung Australia, May 10, 2015, accessed June 1, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TwCGh8KsPY (video discontinued).

  32. Philiana Ng, “‘Transparent’ Team Talks Binge Viewing, Defends Digital Platform Pay,” The Hollywood Reporter, July 12, 2014, accessed June 1, 2015, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/transparent-team-talks-binge-viewing-718157; Michael O’Connell, “NBC Releasing Complete ‘Aquarius’ Season on Premiere Day,” The Hollywood Reporter, April 29, 2015, accessed June 1, 2015 http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/nbc-releasing-complete-aquarius-season-792478.

  33. Sobchack, “‘Surge and Splendor,’” 41. For a more extensive history of the miniseries, see John De Vito and Frank Tropea, Epic Television Miniseries: A Critical History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010).

  34. Sobchack, “‘Surge and Splendor,’” 41.

  35. Ibid., 42.

  36. Djoymi Baker, “‘The Illusion of Magnitude’: Adapting the Epic from Film to Television,” Senses of Cinema 41 (2006), http://sensesofcinema.com/2006/film-history-conference-papers/adapting-epic-film-tv/.

  37. Ibid.

  38. Sobchack, “‘Surge and Splendor,’” 37.

  39. Ibid., 37–8.

  40. Ibid., 39. Writing in 1990, Sobchack suggests that “in the electronic era of the television and the VCR, temporality is transformed” in that “one can materially and literally manipulate time,” a factor that she discusses in terms of postmodern approaches to history. This relates particularly to her broader argument about the historical epic’s ability create the feeling of “being-in-History” (rather than merely being in time), a genre-specific argument that I will not examine here for reasons of scope. Ibid., 42.

  41. Verini, “Marathon Viewing Is Forcing Showrunners to Evolve.”

  42. Sobchack, “‘Surge and Splendor,’” 29.

  43. For example, Australian streaming service Stan advertises “hundreds of series including complete box sets.” “Stan. The Biggest Deal in Entertainment,” Stan, 2015, https://www.stan.com.au/.

  44. At the time of writing, the Netflix Australia tagline had changed to “Watch TV shows & movies anytime, anywhere.” Netflix Australia, accessed June 21, 2015, https://www.netflix.com/au/; Ben Grubb, “How the Australian Netflix Differs from the U.S. Service,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 24, 2015, accessed June 1, 2015, http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/hometech/how-the-australian-netflix-differs-from-the-us-service-20150324-1m60g8.

  45. Quoted in Michael Idato, “House of Cards Season 3 Launches on U.S. Netflix, Will Australians Be Watching?” Sydney Morning Herald, February 27, 2015, accessed June 1, 2015, http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/house-of-cards-season-3-launches-on-us-netflix-will-australians-be-watching-20150227–13qc1k.html.

  46. A new term has even arisen to explain continued viewing of a program we do not like: purge-watching. Adam Sternbergh, “Make It Stop: When Binge-Watching Turns to Purge-Watching,” Vulture, April 21, 2015, accessed June 1, 2015, http://www.vulture.com/2015/04/when-binge-watching-turns-to-purge-watching.html.

  47. Lotz, “Rethinking Meaning Making.”

  48. Verini, “Marathon Viewing Is Forcing Showrunners to Evolve.”

  49. Sobchack, “‘Surge and Splendor,’” 37–38.

  50. Megan Mullen, The Rise of Cable Programming in the United States: Revolution or Evolution? (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 167–168; Barbara Klinger, “24/7: Cable Television, Hollywood, and the Narrative Feature Film,” in The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, ed. Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Art Simon (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 302.

  51. The term cannonballing appears not to have been adopted in scholarly work as yet, but is used colloquially and in the popular press. See for example, Wendy McClure and Maris Kreizman, “Arrested Development Binge-Watch vs. One a Week: Which Viewing Strategy Worked Best?” Vulture, September 3, 2013, accessed June 1, 2015, http://www.vulture.com/2013/09/arrested-development-viewing-tortoise-vs-hare.html.

  52. Jason Gilbert, “Netflix’s ‘Post-Play’ Feature Will Suck You into More TV Show Marathons,” Huffington Post, August 16, 2012, accessed June 1, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/16/netflix-unveils-post-play_n_1789111.html.

  53. See Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 23–46.

  54. Hills, “From the Box in the Corner to the Box Set on the Shelf,” 58.

  55. Lotz, “Rethinking Meaning Making.”

  56. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1974), 89–90.

  57. Ibid., 89. See also, Gregory A. Waller, “Flow, Genre, and the Television Text,” in In the Eye of the Beholder: Critical Perspectives in Popular Film and Television, ed. Gary R. Edgerton, Michael T. Marsden, and Jack Nachbar (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1997), 59–61.

  58. Hills, “From the Box in the Corner to the Box Set on the Shelf,” 45.

  59. “Netflix Quick Guide: What Is Streaming And Why Is It Better?” YouTube, posted by Netflix, May 21, 2013, accessed June 1, 2015, https:
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW9BLmjzi_4&list=PLvahqwMqN4M3HhXOhAybp03ysb6uxBXUf&index=1.

  60. Sobchack, “‘Surge and Splendor,’” 42.

  61. Verini, “Marathon Viewing Is Forcing Showrunners to Evolve.”

  62. Ibid.

  63. Quoted in Lotz, “Rethinking Meaning Making”; Thus Simon Blackwell, co-executive producer of Veep (2012–) argues that it would be preferable to adopt binge-viewing as the default position, because it would negate the need for too much exposition referring back to earlier events—you would just assume that your audience remembered. See Verini, “Marathon Viewing Is Forcing Showrunners to Evolve.” Elsewhere Jason Mittell discusses the now-famous false teasers for Arrested Development that are never shown in the series itself. See Mittell, “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television,” The Velvet Light Trap 58 (2006): 34. This gag predates the series move to Netflix but becomes more obvious in successive viewing on DVD or streaming.

  64. More broadly, Lotz argues that there can be a “profound difference in meaning available to those who watch a season or even an entire series over the course of a few days or even a month,” particularly as viewers can forget plot details if watching a complex series over a period of years. See Lotz, “Rethinking Meaning Making.”