Keep a home long enough and you’ll come up with “laundry TV.” It’s the kind of show you put on in the background while doing a simple chore that doesn’t require much problem-solving: folding laundry, washing dishes, scrubbing the bathroom. It doesn’t have to be TV—it could be a pdocast—but TV fills the role very well.
FreeVee (Amazon’s rebranding of imdbTV) has been a treasure trove in this regard. Broadcast TV is ideal laundry TV. The plots are formulaic, no matter how good the writing is. The characters all revert to their mean by the end of each episode. And there were a lot of good broadcast primetime shows in the recent Golden Age. Person of Interest turned progressive/libertarian concerns about government surveillance into fast-paced suspense drama. The Good Wife made a soapy law office drama relevant by peppering in every liberal blogger’s favorite talking points. And because they were both CBS shows, you could count on a character recapping any major plot developments before and after every commercial break. You didn’t even have to look up from separating your linens!
Having a TV show on as background noise isn’t unusual. It’s how most people consume TV and it has been for years. But until the streaming era, you were limited to what your cable package provided. Netflix’s big push into streaming meant you could rewatch all your favorites, or even binge something you’d always heard about but never tried. Then tablets grew cheaper and phones grew more powerful, and suddenly your TV could travel with you. You never needed to spend a second alone with the sound of your own thoughts again.
The promise of streaming was that we could all “cut the cord”—sever our relationship with the old cable monopolies. We did a fearless and searching inventory of just how many of our dozens of channels we watched in a month, and decided we could do without most of them. I was a cordcutter and I loved it. The only time I’ve paid for a full cable package in the last 15 years was when I needed reliable HBO access to review TK True Detective (S2) for Decider. Xfinity sent me a cable box which I returned, unopened, a year later.
Of course, as soon as the big networks realized they were losing viewers to Netflix and only getting licensing fees in return, they got into the game. Now the three major broadcast networks each own their own streaming platform: ABC (Hulu), NBC (Peacock), CBS (Paramount+). Amazon, Discovery/HBO, and Apple have also gotten into the mix. Many of us have had to reconstitute our old cable subscriptions by subscribing to half a dozen different streaming platforms, netting out to the same monthly payment.
But the expansion of offerings has not led to an expansion of material. The back catalogs are still under the control of giant media companies. $100/month for an infinite library of a century of television and film might be worth it. But nobody’s offering that. In fact, media companies and rights holders are going out of their way to restrict content.
One example: M was home sick last week and watched more Paw Patrol than I’d normally be comfortable with. Paw Patrol has now been around long enough to generate spin-offs. The latest is Paw Patrol: Rubble and Crew, centering around the backhoe-driving bulldog and his extended family of construction workers. You can watch it on Nickelodeon. But you can’t watch it on Paramount+, the streaming platform owned by Paramount Global, parent company of Nickelodeon. Paramount+ only has 7 of Paw Patrol‘s 10 seasons, and if you think 182 episodes about a coastal tourist trap that’s outsourced its emergency services to dogs is sufficient, please explain that to my child.
It’s not that they haven’t gotten around to transferring the newest episodes off of video cassette or ripping them off of DVD. It’s all going over the same fiber. But our household only pays for internet, not for cable TV. I have no reason to pay for Nickelodeon. Paramount knows this, and teases episodes of Rubble & Crew, or its other shows, before each Paw Patrol episode we stream on Paramount+.
That explains why networks would restrict media to one platform when they could otherwise make it available elsewhere. But it doesn’t explain why networks would pull a show mere weeks after it airs, or even shelve it before it aired at all:
Two years ago, Nautilus was big news. A vast, expensive Disney+ prequel to Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Nautilus promised to tell the early story of Captain Nemo as he embarked on an epic submarine adventure, seeking revenge on his former captors the East India Company. A colossal replica submarine was built. Several soundstages on Australia’s Gold Coast were given over to it. Hundreds of crew members were hired alongside hundreds of extras. Filming took almost a year. The Queensland government claimed that the series would inject A$96m into the local economy. It looked certain to be a hit; an exciting new big-budget spectacle, underpinned with contemporary themes, based on a legendary piece of intellectual property. Nautilus couldn’t go wrong.
Except nobody is going to see Nautilus because, even though it has already been made, Disney+ has decided not to stream it. […] Disney+ has a different reason for getting rid of Nautilus: it was axed as a cost-cutting exercise.
In May, Disney+ announced a content removal plan designed to cut US$1.5bn worth of content, meaning it substantially reduces the company’s value, giving it a lot less tax to pay. Nautilus is not the only victim: a live-action TV adaptation of The Spiderwick Chronicles was also completed and then axed. Disney isn’t the only network to abandon shows that have largely been made, with HBO Max cancelling the second season of feminist porn comedy Minx just as it was finishing production (only for Starz to buy it, saving it from never seeing the light of day).
AMC has also deleted shows with completed and unaired seasons, such as the animated drama Pantheon and legal drama 61st Street, for similar tax purposes. It pulled the plug on its adaptation of Adrienne Celt’s Invitation to a Bonfire partway through production. One US sitcom, Chad, was pulled just hours before it was due to air on US network TBS.
Shows are also steadily vanishing from streaming platforms. Earlier this year, Disney+ removed a range of high-profile titles such as Willow, The One and Only Ivan, Big Shots and The Mysterious Benedict Society. Nor is it alone. In a similar move, Warner Bros Discovery has also removed dozens of shows like Westworld, Raised by Wolves, Gordita Chronicles, Run and Love Life from its platforms to save money, as has Paramount+ with its Grease spin-off The Pink Ladies and Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone remake.
Westworld was a huge deal when it first aired: a show whose scope and spectacle made it a talking point in the entertainment press, even if the writing itself was middling. You’d think HBO would’ve wanted to keep it available for years. And Willow was on Disney+ for less than a year before Iger pulled the plug. If you didn’t catch it within a few months of launch, you never will (through legal means, anyway). And the 96m dollarbucks Disney invested in Nautilus is apparently better for them as a write-off than as the cost of a finished work of art.
The streaming business model relies on a constant flow of new content. Viewers have to have something to anticipate, a reason to keep their account active for another month. Investors need a splashy visual for the pitch deck or the earnings call: a $100MM action flick starring The Rock? a modern fantasy police thriller starring Will Smith? a high-stakes political drama starring Kevin Spacey? That certainly sounds like a successful media studio. Keep the money coming.
But the actual work produced—the “content”—isn’t meant to linger. You’re not meant to return to it and prize it highly. Netflix’s first original film, Beasts of No Nation (2015), was nominated for a BAFTA and a Golden Globes, and netted Idris Elba a SAG Award. But Netflix doesn’t care if you watch it today. Netflix released 17 original feature films the next year; 40 the year after that. The only one that’s had any staying power in the popular consciousness is A Christmas Prince.
(I’m being unfair; the documentaries 13th and Get Me Roger Stone, released in 2016 and 2017 respectively, each received a good measure of critical attention. That’s a one hot film every twelve month average.)
In 2022—the same year Columbia Pictures released 10 films—Netflix released over 170 features. I challenge you to peruse the list and recall the first detail about more than a dozen of them. And that’s not even touching on their original television series! It’s a pretty remarkable list of shows. Wikipedia orders them by category (Drama, Comedy, Animation), and then by airdate. You start each list with a name you remember (House of Cards; Orange is the New Black; Bojack Horseman) and then scroll down through an avalanche of series you’ve never heard of (Soundtrack; Spinning Out; Hollywood; White Lines; Grand Army; Midnight Mass; Justice Served; Transatlantic; Brews Brothers; Sneakerheads; The Chair; Decoupled; Boo, Bitch; and I haven’t even gotten to the kids’ stuff yet).
There was a brief window of time where the new era of home media promised a deep dive into your favorites. We binged 24 or The Wire or Sports Night on DVD. We queued up reruns of Friends or The Office on Netflix while we mopped our kitchens. The major media companies had learned the lesson of the heyday of digital piracy: consumers just wanted an infinite library of convenient media. They would torrent it if no one could provide it in a user-friendly format, but they would gladly pay.
Then Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and the others decided the cost of licensing an infinite library was too much of a price to pay. Then the free money faucet from the ZIRP era shut off. Now we’re hunting from platform to platform again, wondering who’s hosting our favorites.
This is because art is not a calling or a form of entertainment or a shared cultural experience to the owners of these platforms. Art is an asset. “Intellectual property” is a piece of capital, like land or an assembly line or a pizza oven. Of course, it’s a much more financializable piece of capital than any traditional asset. A tract of land can only be subdivided so many times, but a piece of “content” can generate cash any time someone is willing to pay for a license to “consume” it.
This is, as ever, not cynicism or an exaggeration. This is literally how executives talk about it:
Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav sees a major challenge in his media empire: the underutilization of “Harry Potter,” “Lord of the Rings” and DC.
“One of the other real strengths of Warner Bros. is we talk about the great IP that Warner Bros. owns,” Zaslav said at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference. “But, for us, the challenge is that our content, our great IP — “Harry Potter,” DC, “Lord of the Rings” — that content has been underused.”
Zaslav went on to note that the company hasn’t done “long-form Superman” in over 10 years. Zack Snyder’s “Man of Steel” premiered back in 2013. And though WBD has a stake in The CW, the network behind the currently running “Superman and Lois,” it is not the majority shareholder of the network.
“We haven’t done anything with ‘Harry Potter’ for more than a decade. We haven’t done anything with ‘Lord of the Rings,’” Zaslav said.
Zaslav makes a few basic errors there—Batman vs Superman and Justice League are both less than a decade old; the Fantastic Beasts series has put out three movies—but those only make Zaslav’s viewpoint more galling. A nearly constant presence in the cinemas for the last ten years, global brand recognition, theme parks that bring in thousands of tourists a year: not enough. In the year that Barbie became Warner Bros’ biggest grossing film of all time, the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery thinks it’s time to commit even harder to old favorites.
Zaslav can say this with a straight face less than a year after cancelling the release date of a nearly completed Batgirl film because he’s talking to the finance community. He’s not talking to the dozens of actors or hundreds of crew members whose work will never see the light of day. He’s not talking to the writers and actors who are still out of work because Warner Bros Discovery would rather throw away $500 million than share the streaming data necessary to pay out fair residuals.
So long as capital has had a hand on the scale, art has never belonged to the artists or to the audience. Every advance that has given a little bit of control back to creators or to viewers—residuals, fair use, home taping, moral rights, any of it—has been hard fought since it was won and constantly under attack since. Were it not for the tightening financial markets, the writers and actors picketing the major studios might have already lost. But that’s how progress is made: when the opportunity arises, in the face of unreasoning opposition, one inch at a time.