There’s a point in The Romanoffs, the Amazon Prime Video series from Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men, when you will say to yourself, “What exactly is... the point... of this?” It won’t come straight away. After all, this is the great Matthew Weiner we’re talking about.
You’ll watch and at first you’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. Why would you not? And so what if the setup is so simple as to be meaningless. Each episode is an independent story, with no connection to the rest, save the fact that in each setup there are people who believe they are descended from Russian royalty.
But hold your horses if you think that is remotely important, because it isn’t: The Romanoffs is essentially a cluster of standalone films, each around 90 minutes in length, that needed to have some kind of title in order for Amazon to claim it’s a TV series. In truth, it is actually a blank cheque for Weiner to make eight films about whatever he wanted.
As Weiner himself told the New York Times, “It was a wildest-dreams scenario.” He had told Amazon, simply, “These are the things I would like to do that I couldn’t do on Mad Men.” And what did he want to make films about? It’s... really quite hard to say. The first episode, set in Paris, is about a racist aunt, her Muslim carer and her nephew and his girlfriend who want her grand apartment. I guess it’s about racism and identity, but only in the way a black doctor treating a racist patient in an episode of Casualty is about racism and identity. The second episode is a slow-burn meditation on a couple’s disintegrating marriage as they attend therapy, which is better, but says nothing new about marriage or therapy. The third episode is like an episode of Black Mirror if it had twice the budget but half the brains. “Self-indulgent and wrong-headed,” said the BBC, in a review of the series that summed up the critical feeling.
Two things struck me watching The Romanoffs. The first, as mentioned: what is the point of this? The second: that our prevailing notion of streaming services is almost entirely wrong. The idea goes like this: because these sites collect so much big data on our viewing habits, they can “Moneyball” the commissioning process and so only these machine-designed shows get made. It’s also why, the logic goes, they produce lots of good shows but few great ones. It’s how we end up with “four-quadrent” shows such as Stranger Things – so-called because, with its mix of sci-fi, melodrama, adolescence and nostalgia, it appeals equally to both male and female audiences and those both under and over 25.
But look at the other end of the commissioning process, the big-name showrunners with hits behind them, and it’s a fight to the death between the upstarts (Netflix, Amazon), traditional cable (HBO, AMC, Showtime) and the soon-to-launch streaming services from Apple and Disney (which is why the latter is acquiring 21st Century Fox for a cool $50 billion).
Money, as you’d imagine, plays a large part – Netflix famously kicked off its self-made revolution by outbidding both HBO and AMC for House Of Cards to the tune of $100 million for the first two seasons alone – but just as important is freedom. In order to woo TV’s biggest names, they essentially offer them carte blanche. Make what you’ve wanted to make, they say. Have all the money you want to make it, they add. Just come to us, not them.
As Weiner said to me in an interview while he was making The Romanoffs, he wanted to make a show that was something of a throwback to when TV began, where “you didn’t have any ground rules” and where “you’re never going to see those people again”. But watching The Romanoffs, you have to wonder: is this a good thing?
If you want an example of how streaming behemoths Netflix and Amazon have turned TV’s power dynamic upside down, look no further than Ryan Murphy – the man behind Glee, American Horror Story and The People V OJ Simpson: American Crime Story. He’d just written a pilot script for a show called Ratched, a loose prequel to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and while he usually made all his shows for Fox (he had four on air), he’d just seen the incredible deal Netflix had made for another showrunner: a staggering $150m for Shonda Rhimes, creator of Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal. So he sent his script to Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Hulu instead. All wanted to make it, so he did the tour. Instantly, he knew it had flipped: he wasn’t pitching to them, each was pitching to him. He sold the show to Netflix and soon moved there on a five-year contract for an unheard-of $300m.
Who knows how successful Murphy’s Netflix shows will be, but its commission of Ratched is typical of its method. Rather than commission a pilot episode – the traditional first step to see if the idea works or not – it commissioned two full series off the bat. That doesn’t mean Ratched will be bad, but it sure does allow more of a chance of badness.
Take the example of Game Of Thrones. A storming success, right? Well, not at first. The pilot was a notorious disaster. The actors wore wigs that kept falling off. The costumes were end-of-the-pier panto. The dialogue was joyless and sombre and saw characters wanging on about liege lords and wine flagons. It would have been a stone-cold flop. But HBO saw potential and helped it start over, retooled and reimagined. The script was rewritten, feedback was fed back on and Game Of Thrones as we now know it was born.
But to repeat: Netflix doesn’t do that. It sees making pilots as waste, so everything is a series (those digital shelves need filling, after all). Amazon, when it’s luring a big name such as Weiner or Woody Allen, does the same. And it might – whisper it – be quietly ruining TV.
I know, I know. It’s easy to counter this argument. What about Stranger Things, you’ll shout? Or Making A Murderer, you fool? Or The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, you dimwit? Or The Crown, you idiot? Claire Foy’s portrayal is a joy for the ages!
Look, I’m not arguing Netflix is evil or that all Amazon shows are rubbish (The Crown and The Marvelous Mrs Maisel are worth the relevant subscriptions alone), just that, well, the likes of Netflix and Amazon are essentially set up to create more rubbish than not.
A recent cover story in New York Magazine divulged that Netflix is churning out so many shows – its annual budget is a gargantuan $8bn, dwarfing HBO’s $2bn – it’s ditched the traditional hierarchical process in order to commission them all. In fact, so many people at Netflix can greenlight a show that the company effectively acts like ten to 15 independent production companies: when an agent gets a no from one, they move on to the other. “I’m building a team that’s orientated to say yes in a town that’s built to say no,” explained Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer.
Most remarkably, Netflix executives can not only commission a series without Sarandos’ approval, but against his wishes. He points out that true-crime podcast spoof American Vandal, a sleeper hit, is one of these. But what about the ones they’re less proud of? Well, chances are, you’ll never know they exist.
Use Amazon Prime or Netflix for any period of time and unbeknown to you, you will soon be categorised into one of an unfathomable number of subcategories of viewers. In Netflix’s case, there are almost 20,000 of them, known as “taste clusters”. And which cluster you’re in will determine what Netflix shows you. The idea is obvious: to highlight what you might be into. But it works the other way too, effectively hiding what it knows you won’t.
Ever spotted Amazon original Jean-Claude Van Johnson on your home screen, the “comedy-drama” starring Jean-Claude Van Damme as a retired action-movie star who decides to become a private undercover investigator? No? How about Netfllix recommending you The Good Cop, which sees a former lawman who’s done time for corruption team up with his straight-laced officer son? You sure? Surely you caught historical epic Marco Polo, which ran for two seasons and cost Netflix $200m? No again? Then how about... I really could go on.
The reality is the streaming giants produce far, far, far more flops than hits, but, unlike regular TV, they don’t stink up the schedule.
The personalisation algorithms of Netflix, by the way, don’t stop there. The Observer recently reported that their “artwork personalisation” means that not only will Good Will Hunting, say, be represented by a shot of Matt Damon and Minnie Driver for romcom fans or Robin Williams if you watch a lot of comedies, but the same film will also be promoted by different races, depending on your ethnicity – the most remarkable example being Like Father, a Netflix original film starring Kelsey Grammer and Kristen Bell, which is sometimes promoted by a shot of two of the film’s minor black characters as if they were the stars.
Still, perhaps worse than the turkeys are the shows that could have been good with more care – decadent-but-oh-so-indulgent dramas such as Godless, or interesting supernatural nonsense-fest The OA, or great-idea-shame-about-the-stupidity sci-fi Altered Carbon, or The Get Down, with which zero people got down.
You know how every so often an oligarch will buy a Premier League football team and the first few transfer windows are batshit hilarious as they try to buy a whole team in four days, but end up with four Brazilian sweeper-winger benchwarmers bought for so much money that their clubs thought the bids contained typos? That’s streaming sites right now. I mean, sure, it’s not my $8bn, is it? It’s not me that’s almost $9bn in debt, as Netflix is. But what else explains Netflix’s multimillion deal to make shows with the Obamas? Don’t get me wrong, I love Barry as much as the next liberal, bedwetting Remoaner, but I don’t want to watch a show made by the guy. But, hey, the Obamas, right? Netflix! And the Obamas! Make something! What something? Doesn’t matter! Just more something! Must! Make! More! Something!
And what else explains the reality-bending Maniac, in which Emma Stone and Jonah Hill played everyone from mob stooges to Forties mediums to elves on epic quests, all in the space of ten episodes? Apart from, of course, the fact it was a show solely designed to lure two A-list actors by letting them play mob stooges, Forties mediums and elves on epic quests, all in the space of ten episodes. So what if it doesn’t make sense? It’s the big-screen’s funny-boy loser Jonah Hill on your tellybox! It’s America’s big-eyed sweetheart Emma Stone on your flatscreen. She’s won an Oscar, you schmuck. It doesn’t have to make sense.
Surely – surely – this will all calm down; the content arms race will cease. And Netflix and Amazon might finally say to each other, “Shall we only make things that are, you know, good? Or, at least, should that be the aim?” After all, they’re not only stocking a library for people to watch now, but for new customers to rediscover in the future, in the way a millennial might watch The Sopranos or The Wire.
Because you know what they won’t ever say? They will not say to each other, “What, you’ve never seen Netflix’s Gypsy starring Naomi Watts? But she plays a New York clinical psychologist who oversteps personal and professional boundaries as she begins to develop relationships with people close to her patients under the alias Diane Hart!” Trust me, I’ve seen it and they will definitely not say that.
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