Just suffered through their Three Mile Island "documentary" yesterday while working on something else. Apparently Bechtel operates a hit squad in Pennsylvania and everyone in a 5 mile radius got severe cancer. Out of four hours you get about 10 minutes of meaningful detail about the incident; the rest is headline rehash you can get on the first page of a Google search, emotional personal stories and a lot of self promotion.

All the true crime stuff is retired officers cashing in. So much for books.

I feel this is just true for every non-Ken Burns documentary I've ever seen and I find it kind of annoying. They always seem to have some axe to grind and just do anything they can to support that biased thesis with no room for caveats or shades of gray.

I'm currently watching the Andy Warhol documentary series. 20% of the documentary is about his art and 80% of it is about who he slept with.

Sounds like many of the things Vox produces--ideological content ostensibly labeled as "explainers".

I hate to break this to you but that's all documentaries in general. Every documentary has the goal of convincing you of something.

I was surprised how hard it was to find nature documentaries that mostly showed nature and animals and not talking heads very concerned about the planet. I'm all aboard but it wasn't what I wanted to show my 1.5 year-old. I wanted her to see cool animals.

This was across a few platforms, had to really dig.

If we want that nature to still exist in 50 years, then yeah, it's probably good to remind folks that they should care about fixing that doom. You could argue it were unethical to pretend the environment isn't in danger, or should we just be happy we got some video footage while it lasted?

I'll never be able to find it, but I remember watching an interesting clip from a nature documentary about cuckoo's breaking eggs or something. The narrator was talking through the scene, then abruptly "How could an all-loving God possibly..." It was narrated by Richard Dawkins.

I guess this is the classic attention economy dark pattern: we know that you already know about this title you are looking for, therefore we want you to take a look at these other things first, just to make you stick to the platform for one more title.

It becomes a problem though when shows are catering to what 1% (or less) of the population looks like or is diagnosed with. This is what people are getting upset with. Representation is fine. But when every new show you turn on has half of the cast as a trans person, a non-binary person, and a whatever else it gets old. It gets old when historical shows and films have distorted facts or figures to, again, fill some quota. Having people in key roles where they would have never been introduced to those parts of the world at that time. Or, shoehorning some form of sexuality into a historical figure for no reason other than to check a quota box.

The implication being that anything outside of the anodyne mainstream of cable TV must be a concerted effort to brainwash the public.

Netflix has many problems, the big ones being that they lost old shows like The Office and Friends, which hurts retention. And they also kill off promising new shows after 2 seasons to save money on renegotiating cast contracts.

If you read comment sections however, you'll get a very different idea. The problem is that Netflix is "too woke" and consumers are revolting. Never mind the fact that Netflix is a global network with millions of customers around the world, and thousands of shows from multiple countries.

The whole idea of representation was that minorities were unable to enjoy media because it didn't contain characters that looked like them or that had life experiences that they could relate to.

So Hollywood bent over backwards to shoehorn in representation everywhere they could and now they find that the majority of people don't like these shows and movies that are all about people who don't look like them and have experiences they can't relate to. This is surprising somehow?

Personally, I never had a problem enjoying a good story regardless of how different the characters are from me, but it seems a lot of people only want to watch things about themselves. The studios also seem to put a lot more emphasis on checking the correct boxes rather than telling a good story.

It's different these days though. Much more emphasis on whatever fresh sexual and gender identities happen to be in vogue right now, apparently for no purpose other than to preach about them to the viewer.

Whereas in Star Trek, it made sense that a future spacefaring crew would be made up of people with origins from all different parts of the world. This was entirely consistent with the overall storyline.

People are saying that right now about the new Star Treks. And I don't think most disagree with the politics/social commentary, it's just so in your face/contrived that it ruins the show for many.

But netflix is making historically white characters black for no good reason.

If some ruler in middle age europe was white then why do they have to change that just to showe more black people into the show or whatever. They should make original shows and stories where they can do whatever they want

The hippie Star Trek episode remains ludicrously terrible 60 years later.

Star Trek was actually good though. Netflix pulp is completely devoid of content other than politics. Nobody wants to pay to watch propaganda.

From what I can tell Netflix's catalog includes Stal Trek so you are just backing up his point.

Narcos and Narcos: Mexico were both good. Dark, Katla, Frontera Verde. I guess those are all non-English speaking, or in Narcos' case, mixed language. As long as you don't hate subtitles, there's been good stuff. Russian Doll, Big Mouth, and Arcane were all pretty terrific among English speaking. Brand New Cherry Flavor wasn't mind-blowing, but more than worth watching. Same with Stranger Things. That's just content from the last couple years.

Netflix honestly has plenty of good content. You just have to not use the in-app recommendation system at all and find content through traditional sources, i.e. word of mouth, professional critics, and industry publications, then search directly. As long as they allow you to find a title by name when you already know the name, they're fine.

I'd add the following to the list myself.

* Russian Doll S01 * Stranger Things S01 * Squid Game S01 * Glow S01-02 * American Vandal S01 * I Think You Should Leave S01 * Mindhunter S01-02

There's also a lot of content aimed at different audiences that is considered good, but not for me (Gilmore Girls reunion show, Shadow and Bone, many romantic-oriented shows, etc.).

I'm not saying that's exclusively the good content, and I have also canceled my sub, but I think you're underselling it a little bit. Bojack is, without question, my favorite thing that's come out of Netflix.

I like Stranger Things and the Chef’s Table series is wonderful. Castlevania is good.

I don’t want to defend Netflix though, lots of crap too.

They had to. Consumers don't care about streaming tech; in their eyes all the services are the same levels of fine. They do care about content and once content producers started rolling their own streaming services, cutting Netflix out, and pulling their content, they had to do something to keep their shelves looking stocked.

They had to focus on content as they feared other studios would start their own streaming studios and took their content away (as mentioned by the article).

What you’re describing would not work in the movie industry, which is very contract and license heavy.

This is basically how they started, as they licensed a lot of content for the platform to begin with. The content providers looked at that juicy monthly revenue and decided they wanted a slice of the action, and now we have Netflix, hbo max, Disney+, Apple TV, Amazon prime and probably a few others I've forgotten. Lots of content, as long as you don't mind subscribing to each one individually!

That might result in legal problems (see FCC vs Turner cases) or unfavorable terms for the company (i.e no incentive for networks to keep shows on Netflix).

But all consumer device were vetted with quite often drastic DRM. Those that no one will install on their computer given the choice.

So it's Linux technically, but not in spirit, hence a different proposal.

Please vote with your wallet and never purchase a "smart" TV. They're cheaper because the data they harvest from your network (and the always-on microphone) is extremely profitable.

As the parent alluded, you can just not respect copyright. They can either give you a decent experience, or they can be content with only having uneducated dummies as their customers. Alternatively, you can just not watch their shitty content.

this is not the way

I agree, netflix might be too embarrassed by their catalogue to show people a simple A-Z listing of everything they have, but I'd absolutely watch netflix more often if they did. Scrolling through the same shows I'm not interested in over and over across their multiple random/useless categories takes up way too much time.

Every so often I'll go to search and enter random 2-3 letter combinations because I usually find a bunch of stuff I'd like to see but Netflix has been hiding from me.

Netflix was doing fine as a dvd rental platform, hell netflix was doing great, they then made a jump to a streaming platform and did well there. The movie production studios saw how well netflix was doing and so started making their own streaming platforms preventing netflix from streaming their movies. so netflix in a desperation move said "fine" then we will make our own movies.

And so here we are, despite living in the post movie scarcity future you can never watch the movie you want to because it is on a different streaming service.

It used to be even better, they had user ratings in early versions. Hiding content or forcing users to watch things is extremely bad. they got away with all this because they had such a huge headstart on 90% of online streaming. There were no other options. Now... those things are starting to sour out.

I remember finding great b movies and content with user reviews.

> I would like to pick shows where the original audio is some particular language, I don't get why that isn't there?

I’m somewhat confused by your sentiments here, if you search “French”/”Spanish”/etc Netflix will bring up a list of movies and shows in those languages, it’s one of my main uses of Netflix these days.

The HBO section only includes the "max" shows. All their best shows are "hbo originals" so they're actually doing much better than it looks.

Yeah, I was confused by GP's phrasing as well. Maybe I'm taking the word "average" too literally and this is just one of those "5 stars good, 4 stars okay, 3 or fewer stars is garbage" things, but wouldn't the expectation be that the average show is...average? Unless you think that Netflix is has some reason to be more likely to make good shows than anyone else, it seems like their shows should be on average, average.

There is a disconnect between what I want and what providers are trying to offer me. I want quality content with powerful search. Providers seem to think I want a huge unsearchable library from which they will make recommendations. Netflix has lots and lots of great original content, but given a random show, it's far more likely to be average or less (versus, say, HBOmax).

How would you know?

Between deliberately bad search and a bias towards pushing you to waste time rather than entertain, they bury their own content and deliver swill.

Netflix got away with it because they were the only game in town. Disney really broke the seal and delivered a good platform. Apple is delivering strong content that compensates for the horrific application.

The ratio of OK-or-worse to good-or-exceptional sure appears to be a less favorable for Netflix than the others.

Though people's rankings seem crazy to me. Apparently just producing a Star Wars thing and not totally shitting the bed in the process counts as "exceptional". Then again... yeah, that's kinda true, I guess. From a certain point of view. Still, better than nearly all shows on all those services? Yikes. I dunno about that.

Right. I don't care about the shows/movies I don't want to watch on a streaming service. I only care if there are enough shows/movies on there I do want to see.

They don't really have that many more shows well out to the right; it's mostly a draw. (And at that point you're talking pretty small numbers.) But it's pretty clear from the graph that, as a percentage of their total shows, more Netflix shows are just OK than the other services. (Now if the bulk of that is very cheap drek to boost the size of the catalog, that's OK I guess. But I doubt that it is.)

The chart doesn’t include HBO originals. I’ve never seen a Netflix show that is on par with the best HBO content.

Wow yeah, that's bad. It took me a while to realize what's wrong with it. It seems logarithmic, but actually just between the boxes is logarithmic; inside each box is linear. That's why the points have such a strange distribution, clustering toward the left of each box.

The clustering is a visualization of Benford's law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

I dislike this format because it makes a 4 hour story into an 8 hour story where 4 hours of it is showing the character in some type of inebriated state. I think flight attendant did this too, and the only reason I can think of is to pad their statistics and it being cheap to film those sequences. But it just ends up boring me.

And all the content producers are doing it. I tried Severance on Apple TV+, and I had to stop after 4 episodes because nothing was happening, and this is supposed to be a critically acclaimed show.

The new Batman movie was excruciatingly long too. I miss my 100min stories from the early 2000s and before.

Agree with this assessment, Cindy Holland is bitter she was pushed out and reached out through "channels" to deliver her own take on events. Its not really reporting just highlighting a power struggle from an individuals viewpoint(Cindy).

If the events mentioned in the story are in fact a cause of NFLX's decline is another story. People were forced inside(globally) during the pandemic and consumed alot more media than ever before in history. The quality of shows at NFLX has gone down considerably the past 2 years. NFLX pushed a show that alienated alot of people with Cuties. Friends and other hit shows left NFLX. Inflation has hit a 40 year high and gas and food are expensive, people are cutting costs and NFLX seems like an easy cut.

Would Cindy have stopped all of the above events? Maybe the quality issue but costs(under her) seemed steep, who can say? I think no matter who is at the top NFLX would have suffered in some way. If Ted had chose Cindy instead of Bela Bajaria we would have a similar article talking about Bela's sources and how Cindy's excessive spending and smaller show lineups are killing NFLX.

> They seemed to think they could significantly increase output without decreasing quality.

An executive is quoted, on their strategy, as saying “We succeed if 1 in 10 shows is a hit.” I think it’s pretty clear they didn’t think they were pumping out pure winners.

My favorite variation of that is “a source familiar with X’s thinking”. Of course that is X.

Absolutely love behind the scenes stuff. I'm only a little way into Binge Times[0] by Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski and I'm pretty sure I can recommend it here.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B099WY4H6G/ref=docs-os-doi_0