The addictive Stranger Things, devoured by adults and teens alike, is a genuine hit, but is Netflix more style than substance? While the company is expert at generating eyecatching headlines, it’s hard to escape that nagging feeling that the site’s original content consists of a top layer of quality cleverly concealing the more pedestrian fare below.
Russian Doll demonstrated Netflix can do comedy, while the production values of The Crown make it TV’s most swooned-over show, even as a top-quality cast and smart script keep it from being Downton Abbey on steroids. The documentary slate is also strong, with recent standouts including the funny and moving Sunderland ’Til I Die. And it has landed a slew of buzzy standup specials, such as Hannah Gadsby’s much-garlanded Nanette.
Meanwhile, bold deals with big names such as Ava DuVernay have resulted in powerful and important dramas such as When They See Us, which tackled the case of the Central Park Five, and there’s considerable excitement building over both Shonda Rhimes’s Regency romance series Bridgerton and Ryan Murphy’s comedy The Politician.
It feels slightly rude, then, to quibble about quantity over quality. But increasingly Netflix feels like the sort of place where you find good but not truly great TV: a show such as The Haunting of Hill House or Godless or Glow, which you can sit down and, yes, chill with, but not The Sopranos or Deadwood or The Wire. Not the sort of series that linger in the memory for years after.
It’s partly because of the way in which it commissions. When the company first moved into television production it was famous for giving no notes and allowing creators to simply make what they wanted. Here, supposedly, was the promised land, a world where creative vision ran untrammelled, backed by a company that simply wanted to allow the best people to make the best content featuring the best talent with the best budgets.
Nothing is ever quite that simple. The truth about Netflix’s method is that removing notes created shows with a tendency to meander or sag.
This has become an issue with longer-running series – that the once-explosive House of Cards ended with a whimper was not entirely down to external events. Meanwhile, prison drama Orange Is the New Black has leaked a large amount of the inventive joy that once made it so much fun to binge. And all those much-vaunted dark takes on Marvel superheroes have slowly petered out.
Bingeing is also an issue. It’s easy to slump in front of a Netflix series and simply keep letting episode run into episode, but how much of it do you really take in? The endless food shows, true crime documentaries and reality series start to blend into each other. It’s TV consumed in much the same way as fast food and about half as satisfying.
Many of the recent original shows have ranged from uneven (The Umbrella Academy) through ludicrous (What/If) to truly terrible (Friends from College).
That unevenness is unlikely to change any time soon, as Netflix continues to throw everything from French comedy to Japanese anime and Korean period drama at the wall in the hope of seeing what sticks. Perhaps in that sense it’s best to think of it not as a television company but rather the world’s biggest library. It can take some searching to find and pull out the gems.
