Feature-length gaps
New TV can’t be all TV
AUGUST 10TH, 2016 — POST 219
One of the unintended consequences of releasing a series as good as Stranger Things onto the world through a streaming service is that the whole game is looked at anew. Series that attract this many eyeballs, and this much praise, are concentrated moments in which the current state of TV — and especially streaming — are put under the microscope. For Ben Bajarin writing at Tech.pinions, Stranger Things was the prompt for him to begin to see storytelling as a service.
Bajarin points to the series’ self-contained story as leaving the binge-watcher at a loss of what to do when the season is burnt through. This kind of watching that is inherent to streaming, Bajarin posits, keeps audiences hungry. TV networks simply won’t be able to keep up; their models demand content to be drawn out over weeks because of how ad rates and deals are calculated. However, Bajarin spots the central challenge facing the streaming service when they’re getting an audience craving more — and that audience is paying a monthly fee. Constant, quality delivery — or story as a service — is how Bajarin sees this being solved.
One of the more contentious parts of Bajarin’s analysis is his talk of the distinct storytelling quality of serialised television. Bajarin writes:
“This model allows writers to do more than they could in a movie given the time constraint. I’d even offer the viewpoint that this model allows for better storytelling overall.”
What “this model” — serialised television — is presumably “better” than is both episodic television (Law and Order, The Big Bang Theory) and feature-length movies. If we concede that this model does in fact allow writers to “do more”, it’s because writers are able to write more story, protracted out to revel in more detail. For Bajarin at least, this is “better” — presumably more compelling, with more audience pull — than episodic television and features which just don’t have the temporal real estate to engage in minutia and slow-burn payoffs (the recent series of BoJack Horseman another exemplary case of both).
But if Bajarin wants to see serialised television as the best form of storytelling, and he acknowledges that delivery of constant quality in this form is imperative for the story-as-service model, something has to give. As much as we all have loved Stranger Things, House of Cards, and BoJack Horseman, these binge-watchable monuments are not easy to sustain. My soundbite of praise in discussion of Stranger Things with friends is that it’s the best new series (that I’ve watched) since House of Cards in 2013. The “that I’ve watched” is critical, and something that many have remarked upon in recent years: serialised television requires a huge investment from the audience.
Once again I need to invoke FX CEO John Landgraf and his remarks last year about the industry having reached peak TV (Landgraf yesterday couched his “peak TV” prediction — “the peak will be in calendar 2017… calendar 2019 at the latest.”) There’s no conceivable world in which every “good” TV series can be watched by a single person. As such, we’re staunchly loyal of the shows we watch and extremely hesitant to start something new, especially when there are 3 or 4 seasons to get through to get up to speed. There are Game of Thrones people, West Wing people — identity defined in concert with one’s consumptive practices. I’m currently a Better Call Saul person, a Broad City person, but I’m not sure if I want to be a Mr. Robot person or a The Americans person — both requiring exorbitant time spent in front of a TV to become.
Similarly, the investment on the part of the streaming company is huge: these shows aren’t getting any cheaper to make and shows like Stranger Things or Game of Thrones only continue to raise the bar. At the same time, the “all episodes at once” model burns through an incredibly high-value asset arguably all too quickly. If a viewer is able to watch an “8-hour movie” in a weekend, can we reasonably expect to have a new series every weekend?
Other kinds of programming needs to fill the gaps. One of the first pieces I wrote on Medium makes the case for unscripted TV to fill these gaps. Things like Crackle’s Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee or Vice’s Fuck, That’s Delicious are not only cheaper to produce, but require far little investment from viewers. I argued then that podcasts like Reply All and This American Life offer up “dramatic vignettes”, strong in story but not serialised, unscripted (or probably more accurately “factual”) but of supreme quality.
However, the dramatic vignette form could only do some of the work. One thing that’s hard to drum up around these kinds of shows is the “event” — something that Netflix weaponised first with House of Cards and which has proved one of the defining characteristics of the binge-watchable series. As a streaming company, you want your content to absolutely dominate entertainment mindshare, like Stranger Things has done, and “a new series of Comedians In Cars…” isn’t a headline that would do that. But if anything has “event” potency, it is the feature-length movie.
It’s incredible to me that at the same time as “new TV” is coveting supreme filmmaking talent on both sides of the camera, releasing series that are brilliant, that Special Correspondents and The Ridiculous Six have been Netflix’s highest profile features of this year: two dumb-as-shit comedies which simply can’t hold a candle to the best of Netflix’s original serialised catalog. The question then is:
When will streaming companies give their crazy good talent free reign on original features?
The cliché is that all good independent and “non-Hollywood” filmmakers have left the shrinking middle-class of movies and gone to TV. So if they’re all there, why can’t we let them make some movies? A quality Netflix original movie ostensibly has the same capacity to drum up an “event” as a series, but require less resources to produce. Feature production on the scale of TV like Stranger Things is more sustainable both in terms of cost to produce the show and in the capacity for a slate of features to be dripped out across weeks and months, not burned up in a weekend (albiet with a healthy month-long glow). At the same time, audiences can be more fickle and as such more likely to watch and talk about these movies. Because even if they didn’t like it, they’ve only wasted 2 hours.
When story is a service, paid for monthly, stories need to steadily flow. This is just too hard to do with serialised monoliths of the new TV model. Sure, we still want to clamour for the next season of the It series, and the new TV model will continue to generate huge audiences and masses of critical acclaim. But features might just be about to be allowed to pull their own weight.
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