Casual viewing – n+1

In an effort to reduce “churn,” the rate at which customers canceled their subscriptions, the streamers began pushing a different kind of production model. Instead of acquiring films by auteurs, which had gotten them into trouble — Maïmouna Doucouré’s Cuties, a film about preteen dancers in Paris, sparked a baseless right-wing panic that Netflix was sexualizing children — they turned to a safer, more uniform product that could be made in-house, and replicated and tailored to the diverse tastes of their enormous subscriber bases. (This also guaranteed they’d keep global distribution rights instead of having to negotiate for them.) “They no longer wanted that outlier,” Hope said. “They wanted someone to have correct expectations: ‘Oh, look at those two couples kissing. One’s wearing pool flippers. That must be a romantic comedy. I get it, do you want to watch a romantic comedy tonight?’ And that’s what it reduced down to. As long as people got what they expected, they stayed in tune.”

In documentaries, too, executives shifted to conventional feed. “It’s not enough to do something that a few million people might really love when you’re trying to reach twenty-five million people or fifty million people,” a former Netflix executive told the journalist Reeves Wiedeman in a 2023 article in New York about the documentary streaming “boom.” “A lot of documentaries — I would say the majority of documentaries — don’t meet that bar.” So what did? Grisly true crime, garish cult exposés, celebrity hagiography, sports and food miniseries, pop science, and pets. Netflix’s documentary slate quickly became a supermarket aisle of tabloid magazines. […]

Such slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” (“We spent a day together,” Lohan tells her lover, James, in Irish Wish. “I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” “Fine,” he responds. “That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”)

One tag among Netflix’s thirty-six thousand microgenres offers a suitable name for this kind of dreck: “casual viewing.” Usually reserved for breezy network sitcoms, reality television, and nature documentaries, the category describes much of Netflix’s film catalog — movies that go down best when you’re not paying attention, or as the Hollywood Reporter recently described Atlas, a 2024 sci-fi film starring Jennifer Lopez, “another Netflix movie made to half-watch while doing laundry.” A high-gloss product that dissolves into air. Tide Pod cinema.