Netflix is having a long, cruel summer
Netflix is having a no good, very bad summer, and the ambient glee is palpable.
The third season of “Stranger Things” may have arrived to such record-breaking viewership that the Braintree Police Department recommended it as an alternative to committing crime during the East Coast heat wave, but other recent news about the streaming platform seems to have come straight from the Upside Down.
First came the loss of “Friends,” the streaming service’s single biggest draw, along with many other popular shows, including “The Office” and all the CW titles, which soon will be migrating to the new HBOMax streaming service.
Then the one-year era of Netflix as top Emmy nominee ended: Last week, HBO knocked Netflix flat with 137 nods to the streamer’s 117.
To add injury to insult, the very next day Netflix reported its first decline in U.S. subscribers since its 2011 attempt to spin off separate streaming and DVD services. Almost 130,000 U.S. subscribers bailed in the second quarter (presumably after fee increases ranging from 12% to 18%), while international subscription rates increased by only 2.7 million—half of what Netflix had projected.
Stock prices fell, one stockholder sued and media pundits came out of the woodwork to say, “We told you so.”
Told you that the spending spree could not be sustained forever, that too many of its new original series lack the critical and cultural impact of early hits like “House of Cards”—which concluded last fall—and “Orange Is the New Black”—which ends this week. That competition from an increasing number of streaming services would take a bite out of its library. That only so many viewers will put up with all those subtitles. That signing everyone from Ryan Murphy to the Obamas was all hubris and no business plan. That the new habit of canceling shows after three seasons is at odds with its own binge model. That if Pop TV gets a hit or an Emmy nod out of its recent Netflix acquisition “One Day at a Time,” heads are going to roll.
OK, that last bit is all me. But the rest? The only thing Americans love more than a highly successful brand enterprise is a highly successful brand enterprise that stumbles. Especially a brand like Netflix, which in less than a decade has morphed from the ultimate symbol of low-effort leisure (why go anywhere when there are so many shows to watch?) into the flagship for the frenetic and competitive cycle of endless television production that threatens to drown us all .(How can I go anywhere when there are all these new shows to watch? And how do I turn off this damn dubbing?)
I’m not sure when Netflix became the company so many people loved to hate, but I suspect it was somewhere around the time older folks discovered what the term “Netflix and chill” actually meant. Having the name of your company become a verb is a heady thing; when it enters the lexicon as a euphemism for sex, you would do well to remember Icarus and prepare for a fall.