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Will Netflix Flourish Where Hollywood Failed?

February 13, 2013
Will Netflix Flourish Where Hollywood Failed?

It’s not hard to imagine why Netflix has decided to focus on original programming (most recently with House of Cards and now with an animated children’s series). Making oneself an exclusive source for a show starring Kevin Spacey is a great way to sweeten the value proposition and compete with Hulu and Amazon. Plus, eventually every grocer wants to be a P&G. Why merely manage the channel when you can start filling it?

But Hollywood is not just any industry. It’s the true north of our culture. To become a broker here! Think of the power! Think of the parties! And this is why so many are called. Everyone would like to be a player and Hollywood is littered with the wreckage of careers of people who looked at the entertainment industry and thought, “I would love to be a big shot and, anyhow, how hard can it be?” It turns out that making entertainment is extremely hard. Even Disney can make a stinker like John Carter. Even very talented people (the Weinstein brothers or Bonnie Hammer, for instance) make mistakes.

So does Netflix have an edge? Is there any reason to think they can flourish where so many have failed? The apparent answer is data. Netflix has lots and lots of data. They know what we watch, when we watch, where we stop watching, where we repeat a scene, where we reach for the fast-forward button, and most critically, when we break off and move on. They know which movies sell well at 8:00 on a Friday night and which ones we like to watch on Sunday afternoon. They can surmise which directors, writers, and stars produce the most watchable entertainment. They have magnificent data.

And that’s a tragedy. Netflix has so much data that they are going to be tempted to climb into the creative tent and start offering “advice.” I mean, what is all that data (and power) for, if it doesn’t let you call some shots? They can claim to know exactly what works and what does not. Well, sorry, no. Knowing that something works leaves us a long way from knowing why something works. And this leaves us a long way from knowing how to reproduce it in another movie. The only thing this data can be absolutely sure to produce is arrogance. We have seen this mistake before.

As HBO CEO Richard Plepler explained during the Harvard Business School Entertainment and Media Summit, it’s important to give talent creative freedom. “What happened to us, which is very instructive for any company or any business, is that we fell in love with what we were doing. We got elected to the top of the entertainment firmament and we liked it there. We forgot the insurgent voice and we got arrogant…We lost the very DNA which helped us get where we were, which is that talent wanted to be in our house.” HBO had stopped being a place “where painters could paint.”

Plepler is right. There is a larger issue here, especially as every enterprise learns to speak to a dynamic, sometimes chaotic world with a new order of creativity and innovation. Everyone, not just Netflix, has to learn how to manage “painters.”

This means that whatever the data say, Netflix cannot tell a director, “We need a fight scene here.” And it really can’t say, “We need a fight scene at the 14-minute mark.” Doing so, will not only drive creatives away, but viewers as well. As Henry Jenkins has said, viewers are newly sophisticated and critical. They can see formula a long way off. They can see plot mechanics the second they hit the screen. And the moment this happens, they are off.

Netflix, therefore, will have to temper their itch to intervene. Naturally, we are not talking carte blanche here. We are not saying that we take any artist and turn them loose. Because we know a great deal of capital has been squandered by creatives keen to prove how artistic and avant garde they are. No, what we need are culture producers who are — in the language of Goldilocks — “just right.” They need to be able to tell a story and obey some of the story-telling conventions even as they do new and interesting things to break and bend those conventions. Only then will painters paint and patrons watch.

Thanks to Erik Rodin and Leora Kornfeld for contributions to this piece.
