Netflix’s crowning glory
The popular online film and box-set streaming giant has its sights on expanding its viewership base, says Benji Wilson
THREE years ago last January, writer Peter Morgan and director Stephen Daldry went to see Ted Sarandos, chief content officer of Netflix, with an idea for a TV series. Thirty minutes later, Sarandos said they could have £100-million (R1.7-billion). Without seeing a script.
The idea was for The Crown, a drama telling the story of the life of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.
The first series, released towards the end of last year, has received near-universal praise, and represents yet another step in the online film and box-set streaming giant’s seemingly inexorable march towards persuading everyone on the planet to watch TV on the internet.
Netflix, which started out as a DVD postal delivery service in the late ’90s, doesn’t function like a traditional broadcaster. It is a game-changer, a disruptive force that has decisively altered the way we watch television and film.
There are no schedules or live shows: subscribers are simply free to download any of Netflix’s thousands of films and series to watch when they want and where they want, whether on a traditional television, a tablet or a mobile phone.
But Netflix, along with other video-on-demand giants such as Amazon Prime and Hulu, hasn’t just changed the way we consume television; it’s changed the way it is made.
As with House of Cards – Netflix’s first foray into producing its own shows in 2013 – all the episodes of the first series of The Crown were available to download on the day of its launch.
Not being tied to a traditional TV schedule means that the lengths of Netflix episodes can vary to suit the plotline.
It’s less important to end on a cliffhanger, because you can just binge-watch a whole load of episodes at once.
It’s a formula that’s been vastly successful, with 80 million worldwide subscribers and rising.
Subscribers mean data. And the more subscribers Netflix gets, the more data it amasses – what we watch, when we watch, which episodes get us hooked, even when we hit the rewind button to watch a scene again.
You can see how The Crown benefits a business looking to expand its subscriber base. It will have global appeal, but is also intended to extend Netflix’s reach from a younger audience to a 50-plus demographic (who probably don’t have Netflix).
“A lot of people think, ‘Well, my parents would never use Netflix’,” says Sarandos, when we meet.
“And I say, ‘Well, you probably said your parents would never use Facebook, yet now they do’. They just need a reason. I think The Crown will be a reason that an older generation may get on the internet.”
Downton Abbey, which was shown on Netflix in the US, proved to the company that British costume drama could bring in the numbers.
“It was our first sense that the big costume drama could have mainstream appeal on our platform.”
But if The Crown represents the zenith of the Downton effect, it dwarfs the Downton budget.
Netflix refuses to confirm the cost of The Crown , but if we take the reported figure of £100-million for two series, that’s £5-million (R84.5-million) an episode.
“That budget relative to a film is pretty modest,” says Sarandos. “And when you see it on screen, it’s not lacking for anything. When we think about budgets, why wouldn’t you do $20-million-an-hour episodes? That would be much closer to a typical film.”
No doubt Netflix soon will spend that amount, so long as they think they can recoup it. Which leads to the question of what Netflix considers a hit. They don’t publish ratings, so when Netflix says something is a smash, who’s to say it’s not just hot air?
Ratings, Sarandos says, do matter: “But it isn’t measured in a small timeframe. The audience may not show up the first weekend, but that’s OK, because the people will come to it over time.”
Netflix’s use of data, culled from its audiences, then crunched through algorithms to construct a picture of what will and won’t fly, is no secret.
I press Sarandos for examples where Netflix has thrown money at something and, in spite of all that data, still got it wrong: “[The horror series] Hemlock Grove is an example that just didn’t connect with the audience.”
That there is still an element of hit and hope to television is good to hear. If algorithms could serve up drama, then surprise hits like Netflix’s Stranger Things would never get made.
“I want my team to take big risks,” says Sarandos. “If they’re mostly petrified of failure, they wouldn’t.”
The Crown, he reiterates, has all the makings of a surefire hit – the best creative talent money can buy. But in television nothing is a shoo-in.
It’s perhaps fitting that in the same month that The Crown launched in London, that other great British institution, Top Gear, was getting ready for its rebirth as The Grand Tour on Amazon Prime. That series, with its established global following, is surely a safer bet than any drama.
“We made a play for that show, definitely,” says Sarandos. “But we’ve had every season of Top Gear on Netflix in most territories in the world, so we had a better sense than most of what the audience was for Top Gear on our platform. We knew what it was worth.”
Amazon is said to have paid about $160million (R2.7-billion) for the new series.
“That’s an under-reported number,” says Sarandos.
He could equally be talking about The Great British Bake Off and its move to Channel 4 without three of its four stars.
“I wish we’d had a shot at Bake Off. It moved very quickly, and we didn’t. The show’s very, very popular on Netflix, so we would’ve definitely been interested.”
With the vast coffers, the global scale and the names involved – David Fincher has a series called Mindhunter in production; Baz Luhrmann’s The Get Down is there; Sylvester Stallone is producing Netflix’s first global reality show, Ultimate Beastmaster; and the studio has series in the works with Brad Pitt and Will Smith.
Is there anyone famous left for Sarandos to seduce to his platform?
He reels off PT Anderson ( Boogie Nights), Wes Anderson, Spike Jones: “They mostly love the cinema experience. At some point people just kind of move with the times or move with their audience. It will happen.
The trailer for Ultimate Beastmaster is out and the show goes live February 24.
Executive produced by Stallone, the new show features “hundreds of athletes from six countries all competing on the course until one is finally crowned the winner”.
Says Sarados: “What’s happening now and is going to happen even more in the next few years is the melding of cinema and television.”
He means that the actors, directors, writers, special effects and all the pizzazz of cinema will increasingly be found on the small screen.
“It shouldn’t be measured by money, but it requires money to do these things. Some day when they talk about the budget for The Crown , they’ll think about it as small.” — The Daily Telegraph