The Binge Purge

Happy Thursday, and welcome back to Buffering. Today’s newsletter is packed with the highlights from New York Magazine’s TV issue, which includes a couple of stories written by yours truly. Thanks for reading, and if you don’t already, and it’s within your budget, please consider getting yourself (or a loved one!) a subscription to the print version of New York. Even though we all spend so much of our lives online, there’s something special about reading great stories in a (beautifully packaged) physical form. Plus, it’s an easy way to support the journalism we do here. –Joe Adalian

Reach Joe on Twitter @tvmojoe or email [email protected].


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So in case you’ve been wondering why Buffering hasn’t been landing in your inbox quite as regularly as usual the last few months, it’s mostly because I was busy working on a couple big stories for the magazine. There was my journey down the rabbit hole known as Tubi back in April, and then earlier this week, the real beast: My colleague Lane Brown and I teamed up for the deepest of dives into TV’s ailing streaming model. The genius headline artists over at the magazine dubbed it “The Binge Purge,” and I think that’s a perfect distillation of where we are right now in the industry.

After a decade of unchecked expansion, Hollywood is having to get very serious, very quickly, about making streaming work. Lane and I spoke to scads of writers, producers, directors, agents and execs to get their take on what went wrong and what it will take to fix things. It’s a long read, but hopefully one that adds some context and insight to the rapidly-changing story of how this most important of mediums is reinventing itself by the hour. Read an excerpt from the story below, or check outthe full articleover on Vulture.

It’s been a little more than a year since the Great Netflix Freak-out, when the streaming pioneer’s first-ever loss of subscribers and ensuing stock drop sparked overdramatic proclamations that TV as we’d come to know it was finished. In that time, it’s become clear that the business model dominating modern Hollywood is deeply broken but also that it probably isn’t going anywhere — at least not yet.

Across the town, there’s despair and creative destruction and all sorts of countervailing indicators. Certain shows that were enthusiastically green-lit two years ago probably wouldn’t be made now. Yet there are still streamers burning mountains of cash to entertain audiences that already have too much to watch. Netflix has tightened the screws and recovered somewhat, but the inarguable consensus is that there is still a great deal of pain to come as the industry cuts back, consolidates, and fumbles toward a more functional economic framework. The high-stakes Writers Guild of America strike has focused attention on Hollywood’s labor unrest, but the really systemic issue is streaming’s busted math. There may be no problem more foundational than the way the system monetizes its biggest hits: It doesn’t.

Just ask Shawn Ryan. In April, the veteran TV producer’s latest show, the spy thriller The Night Agent, became the fifth-most-watched English-language original series in Netflix’s history, generating 627 million viewing hours in its first four weeks. As it climbed to the heights of such platform-defining smashes as Stranger Things and Bridgerton, Ryan wondered how The Night Agent’s success might be reflected in his compensation.

“I had done the calculations. Half a billion hours is the equivalent of over 61 million people watching all ten episodes in 18 days. Those shows that air after the Super Bowl — it’s like having five or ten of them. So I asked my lawyer, ‘What does that mean?’” recalls Ryan. As it turns out, not much. “In my case, it means that I got paid what I got paid. I’ll get a little bonus when season two gets picked up and a nominal royalty fee for each additional episode that gets made. But if you think I’m going out and buying a private jet, you’re way, way off.”

Ryan says he’ll probably make less money from The Night Agent than he did from The Shield, the cop drama he created in 2002, even though the latter ran on the then-nascent cable channel FX and never delivered Super Bowl numbers. “The promise was that if you made the company billions, you were going to get a lot of millions,” he says. “That promise has gone away.”

Nobody is crying for Ryan, of course, and he wouldn’t want them to. (“I’m not complaining!” he says. “I’m not unaware of my position relative to most people financially.”) But he has a point. Once, in a more rational time, there was a direct relationship between the number of people who watched a show and the number of jets its creator could buy. More viewers meant higher ad rates, and the biggest hits could be sold to syndication and international markets. The people behind those hits got a cut, which is why the duo who invented Friends probably haven’t flown commercial since the 1990s. Streaming shows, in contrast, have fewer ads (or none at all) and are typically confined to their original platforms forever. For the people who make TV, the connection between ratings and reward has been severed.

So who is getting rich off hits like The Night Agent? Not streaming services, no matter how many global viewing hours they accumulate. Many streamers have spent themselves into billions of dollars of debt building their content libraries, and subscription fees haven’t grown fast enough to close the gap. If platforms like Netflix make any money at all, it is only a fraction of what entertainment companies used to make back when more than 105 million U.S. households spent an average of $75 per month on cable.

“The entire industry,” says the director Steven Soderbergh, who has been navigating structural changes in Hollywood since 1989’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, “has moved from a world of Newtonian economics into a world of quantum economics, where two things that seem to be in opposition can be true at the same time: You can have a massive hit on your platform, but it’s not actually doing anything to increase your platform’s revenue. It’s absolutely conceivable that the streaming subscription model is the crypto of the entertainment business.”

Like cryptocurrency, which has created massive on-paper fortunes built atop 1 + 1 = 3 arithmetic, streaming TV has always seemed too good to be true but seduced a lot of smart people anyway. Over the past decade, Hollywood completely reorganized itself around the digital model, as once-mighty networks and studios turned themselves into apps and abandoned reliable income streams hoping larger ones would materialize. They tripled their output, overpaid Oscar winners to debase themselves in miniseries, and hired all of your friends to work in writers’ rooms. Viewers across every niche and taste cluster were inundated with more bespoke programming than they could ever realistically consume.

We knew it couldn’t last, and it didn’t. Amid much lip service to fiscal responsibility, streamers have signaled plans to make fewer shows — a dramatic shift considering that the number of original scripted series had exploded from 210 in 2009 to 599 in 2022. We’ll still have enough to watch, at least for a while; billions will still be spent, and Ted Sarandos alone claims to have enough Netflix content stockpiled to last through the strike and beyond.

But for a certain type of viewer — imagine someone in her 30s or 40s who has never in her adult life had to worry about where her next critically acclaimed dramedy would come from — something already feels like it’s ending. Peak TV, as one of the industry’s most powerful tastemakers wearily puts it, “was a brief but intense mania that led to too much television.” Read the full story at Vulture.

The other big story that’s been keeping me busy in recent months has been our annual streaming power rankings. The brainchild of my New York colleague (and former Vulture TV editor) Gazelle Emami, it’s our attempt to quantify just how well each of the major platforms performed over the past year. We focused on four metrics — overall impact, momentum, critical buzz, and industry opinion — and then combined their scores in each of those areas to come up with a ranking. In other words, it’s not simply my personal ranking of the streamers (though I get a vote, as it were, since I determine which platforms have the most momentum). If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll check out our full rankings here. And as a Buffering-only bonus, here’s my take on why our survey ended up the way it did.

7. Paramount+ has got plenty of populist faves and it’s growing like hotcakes, thanks in part to a very smart deal with Walmart to make the service a part of the retailer’s membership program. There’s a reason it’s No. 2 for momentum, and adding Showtime to the platform is a savvy move and long overdue (as long as Showtime doesn’t just become another franchise factory). But even if it’s going in the right direction, Paramount+ doesn’t feel essential, especially since so much of its library content is available elsewhere (and its awful user interface and seemingly non-existent algorithm make it hard to find all the stuff that is there).

6. Prime Video does a lot of interesting stuff and given how many homes it’s in, its content also gets watched a lot more than online analysts might expect. For those of us who love classic movies and TV, it also has, hands down, the deepest, most wonderfully eclectic oldies. But like Paramount+, it also has a subpar user interface (even after a refresh last year) and insufficient marketing. As a result, Prime too often just blends into the background. Fix those two things, and maybe find one or two more new undeniably great shows, and Prime could easily shoot into the top three.

5. Yes, there’s still a lot wrong with Peacock, including an original content slate that’s a bit too small and still too all-over-the-map (though it’s gotten more focused in the past year or two). Plus, all the attention and money NBCUniversal is diverting to Peacock is arguably doing real damage to NBC and its cable networks (even as linear shows such as Vanderpump Rules, Night Court and all things Dick Wolf are driving big viewership numbers.) But Peacock did just enough right this year — like Poker Face and The Traitors — to move out of our basement.

4. By focusing exclusively on original content, Apple TV+ is always going to feel too small for streaming customers who expect a ton of stuff for their subscription dollars. But if you judge it for what it is — a destination for a steady supply of well-done original scripted series like Shrinking and The Afterparty — the platform continues to succeed. It’s just not essential for everyone to have year-round, at least not yet.

3. Neither Hulu nor Disney+ had their best years in terms of fresh content. While Andor got critical love, it didn’t resonate quite as loudly with regular consumers; meanwhile Disney’s Marvel machine felt less feisty as well. And while FX scored with The Bear and new seasons of returning hits, Hulu overall also had a much smaller presence this year in terms of Emmy bait and buzz. But combined, the two platforms often feel like must-stream TV, and with content pros now running the show, that should become even more true in the future.

2. Netflix launched some of its most-watched shows in the past year and saw its stock rally back. Industry types giggled when content chief Bela Bajaria started talking about serving members “gourmet cheeseburgers,” but audiences seemed to eat them up. Now the question is whether or not they’ll keep paying for it in a world where password sharing is no longer considered a God-given right. Also worth watching: Having changed its mind on ads and gotten a little more flexible with binge releases, does Netflix adapt even more linear TV conventions such as weekly releases and 20-episode seasons?

1. Despite a year of bad headlines and a less-than-beloved name change, the streamer now known as Max is still playing the hottest hand. The extreme corporate cost-cutting and cruel cancellations couldn’t overshadow content chief Casey Bloys, who in addition to managing a roster of critical faves did something even more impressive with the launch of Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon. Losing Succession and Barry will cost it some buzz points, but far bigger audience hits such as The Last of Us and Euphoria, plus a very promising development pipeline, will keep the streamer humming post-strike. Max’s tagline is “the one to watch”; it’s also the one to beat.

This week’s TV issue of New York is packed with several other stories you’ll want to check out, including:

➽ E. Alex Jung’s definite profile of Drew Barrymore, the Gen X icon who’s become just as beloved by millennials and Zoomers. Based on early ratings, Barrymore’s syndicated talk show shouldn’t have lasted more than a season. But thanks to her own persistence, and the innovative thinking of her bosses at CBS Media Ventures (part of Paramount Global), it’s become a perfect example of how the linear model can still work— even in the very, very challenged world of daytime TV. While local TV stations are where The Drew Barrymore Show premieres everyday, its pop culture impact comes from its massive social media presence (more than 6.9 billion minutes watched this season) and a savvy strategy that has episodes stream for free on Pluto TV and behind a paywall on Paramount+. Read Alex’s instant classic here.

➽ My colleague Jesse David Fox has been preaching the revival gospel of The Simpsons for years, and he has now brought his evangelical fervor to the pages of New York with this look at how a show some of us fell in love with in real time back in the early 1990s managed to make itself feel vital again (while still making plenty of d’oh, er, dough for Disney). Read The Simpsons Is Good Again here.

➽ Elsewhere in the issue, Roxanna Hadadi talks to Devery Jacobs of Reservation Dogs, Carvell Wallace profiles rapper turned TV mogul Curtis ’50 Cent’ Jackson, and our very own Pulitzer Prize winner Andrea Long Chu offers her insights on Yellowstone in “How the Cowboy Was Colonized.”

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