We Need to Talk About Netflix (Premium)

Netflix this month reported its first drop in subscribers in a decade, and everyone is scurrying to write the service’s obituary. That’s more than a bit premature. In fact, it’s nonsensical. But as a long-time Netflix subscriber who pays for its most expensive tier, I do have some thoughts about what went wrong. And how the service can continue to thrive going forward.

But first, it’s important to point out that news of Netflix’s death is greatly exaggerated. And that whatever mistakes it’s made do not in any way point to an imminent downward spiral. Netflix is, by all measures, the single most dominant streaming content service on earth, and it has, by far, the deepest and richest content library. Were I forced to choose just one such service, and regardless of whether I involved my wife and kids, that decision would be simple. It would always be Netflix. Always.

(The only question, really, is what other service(s) we should pay for. That question is complex and ever-changing, as up-and-comers like HBO Max, Apple TV+, and Disney+ are always adding new content. But I listed those in the order I prefer them right now.)

That said, I do remember the moment I started wondering about Netflix. Yes, I’m talking about Ryan Reynolds.

Look, I love Ryan Reynolds. I even liked him when he was making crap like Van Wilder. But some of his more recent movies, like the Deadpool films, which are amazing, and even The Hitman’s Bodyguard (the original, not the sequel), have kind of cemented him as some impossibly funny, wise-cracking character.

But Reynolds suffers from the same problem as anything else you get too much of. At first, it’s just repetitive. And then it becomes almost annoying. And then you really start to wonder about the decisions others are making.

Which is where Netflix comes in. Sometime in the past couple of years, this service started footing what I think of as “pseudo-blockbusters,” or perhaps “B-movie blockbusters,” projects that use the latest inexpensive technologies to make what appear on the surface to be big-budget studio movies. But they’re not. At all. And Ryan Reynolds has popped up in some of these films recently, maybe a few times.

I actually like one of these movies, called 6 Underground, and it’s weird how under-the-radar it is. It just appeared on Netflix one day, and while there are no real A-listers in there besides Reynolds, it’s fun-enough action farce. A bit by the numbers. But you can tell they really visited the locations shown in the film, like Florence, Italy, and Abu Dhabi.

And then Netflix started mailing it in. For Red Notice, it obviously spent all of the money on its three A-list stars—Reynolds, Dwayne Johnson, and Gal Gadot—and it is very clear in watching the film that it was almost entirely made on a green screen soundstage somewhere. The movie depicts a lot of globe-trotting, but they didn’t do a lot of actual traveling. And the movie itself feels flat, almost boring, with all the right action and comedy elements, but with no real charisma.

And then we must briefly discuss The Adam Project, a time travel adventure in which Reynolds is teamed with a child actor playing his character as a kid. Hilarity does not ensue, and both versions of Reynolds’ character come off as more annoying than humorous. The jokes are so obvious you can see them coming.

Basically, each of these movies is less good than the one before it. And watching them unfold in real-time, it occurred to me that Netflix was transitioning from prestige TV— high-quality long-form series, often with big stars—to … crap. Often with big stars.

I can’t blame Reynolds for the cash grab, though I feel like this combination of overexposure and crap affiliation can’t be good for his career. But what I can do is blame Netflix, which despite its public utterances on the topic is clearly feeling the heat from some of its newest competitors.

There’s also a broader problem with streaming video, of course, in that we now have too many choices. And those choices range from high-quality options—HBO Max, Apple TV+, Disney+, and, to a lesser degree Hulu and even Amazon Prime—to truly esoteric options like Paramount+, AMC+, and that ilk. This explosion in options dilutes the available talent on both ends of the camera, and it makes it harder—and potentially more expensive—for consumers to figure out which they want.

But this is about Netflix. And I feel like the solution for this service is clear enough: if it truly wants to maintain its lead against HBO Max, Apple TV+, and Disney+, it needs to focus on quality, not quantity. It has said it will do so with both TV series and movies. But remember that quality doesn’t necessarily require big stars on-screen. Some of my favorite Netflix series—Narcos, Orange Is The New Black, and Ozark among them—don’t feature any current A-list movie stars at all. I bet most of them don’t.

Netflix’s rivals also offer a combination of prestige and non-prestige content, for sure, and each has its own issues. But Netflix has veered too far into the swampy end of this equation, and it has valued bankable stars over quality too frequently. Shifting the balance is an easy and obvious change to make.

Before moving off of this topic, there’s one other troubling sign I’d like to address. One thing that Netflix has always gotten right, in fact, it arguably invented the very concept, is the notion of binge-watching. When Netflix dropped a new TV series season, it dropped the entire season at once. This is obviously the right approach, as it allows those who can’t wait for the next episode to watch as many as they’d like back-to-back while letting those who like to space things out do so as well. Its rivals, for the most part, don’t do that, forcing users to come back each week like it’s the pre-Internet “must-see TV” era of the 1990s all over again. My wife and I simply wait for such shows to conclude and then watch them the way we prefer, back-to-back. That we have to do so is dumb.

But recently, Netflix has started to crack. The most recent (and last) season of Ozark, for example, was split in half, with the first half now available and the second half coming later this year. This feels like a betrayal of one of the big reasons we like Netflix, and I’m hoping it’s just a temporary pandemic-era necessity and not a strategy shift. If Netflix starts debuting new shows one episode each week like most of its rivals, then we really will have a problem.

For now, however, Netflix still reigns supreme. And while there have been stumbles of late, it’s all fixable.