The big entertainment news last weekend was that Netflix, the California company founded in 1997 and famous for riding the tide from its original core business model of mailing out DVDs to customers for rental to becoming a huge provider of video-on-demand via the Internet when the DVD business died one day in 2011, has announced it has 15 new original series debuting in 2016.
As CBS News noted Jan. 1, “With shows like House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, Netflix has led the pack when it comes to original streaming series. The streaming service picked up several Golden Globe nominations recently for Narcos, Orange Is the New Black, Grace & Frankie and House of Cards.”
And if that’ not enough, Forbes magazine ran a story Jan. 3 headlined, “Why ‘Making a Murderer’ Is Netflix’s Most Significant Show Ever” and “not just because the genre has switched from scripted drama and comedy to a true crime documentary,” says Paul Tassi, a Forbes contributor who writes usually about video games for the magazine, but rather “because this is the first Netflix show that seems to have completely consumed its viewerbase from top to bottom. Though many of the shows mentioned above are popular, they have pretty specific audiences. But Making a Murderer? The story of Steve Avery has seemed to hook pretty much everyone who has laid eyes on it.”
Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, co-executive producers, writers and directors at Synthesis Films LLC, a Los Angeles-based film production company, spent a decade whittling down over 700 hours of footage to craft the 10-part Making a Murderer documentary series released on Netflix Dec. 18.
With serious long-form true-crime documentary being the hottest genre of the moment, the Making a Murderer documentary series is perfect for its legendary binge-watching autoplay audience that Netflix has made a science of creating and studying with series episodes that run one right after the other before you have time to even get up from the couch and refill the bowl with Cheetos®. The phenomenon is so profound at the moment that UK-based Collins English Dictionary picked “binge-watch” in November as its 2015 Word of the Year. Usage of the verb – defined as “to watch a large number of television programs (especially all the shows from one series) in succession” – has tripled since the previous year, according to the publisher.
“Although not a new coinage, the word was a runaway winner due to a sharp rise in its usage, which reflected a change in behavior,” Elaine Higgleton, international publisher at Collins Learning, told CNN.
“It’s actually been around since the 1990s, and binge is an old Lincolnshire dialect word that made its way into common English in the 19th century,” she said. Helen Newstead, head of language content at Collins, told BBC News: “The rise in usage of ‘binge-watch’ is clearly linked to the biggest sea change in our viewing habits since the advent of the video recorder nearly 40 years ago.”
“However, none of the shows Netflix looked at, which included originals and licensed series, hooked viewers with the pilot,” Variety observed. “In the traditional TV biz, conventional wisdom holds that a show’s pilot is the most critical linchpin to igniting viewer interest, given the nature of how new television programs debut.” Netflix “sees the metrics as validation of its binge-release strategy of delivering all episodes of a season at once.”
For Orange Is the New Black, which Netflix has said is its most-watched original series, the magic number was Episode 3. Same for House of Cards, the American political thriller developed and produced by Beau Willimon and now in its fourth season. It is an adaptation of the four-episode serial 1990 BBC mini-series of the same name, set after the end of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister and which aired from Nov. 18 to Dec. 9, 1990. Both the British and American series are based on the novel by Michael Dobbs, former chief of staff of the Conservative Party. The entire first American season on Netflix, comprising 13 episodes, premiered on Feb. 1, 2013.
Set in present-day Washington, House of Cards is the story of the fictional Frank Underwood, played brilliantly by Kevin Spacey, as a Democrat from South Carolina’s 5th congressional district, who is the House majority whip, and who after being passed over for appointment as Secretary of State, initiates an elaborate plan to get even and more.
In researching more than 20 shows across 16 markets, Netflix found that no one was ever hooked on the pilot, although they did find slight geographic differences in the “hook” study, which analyzed data from the accounts of subscribers who started watching season one of the selected series between January and July 2015 in Brazil, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States, and between April and July 2015 for Australia and New Zealand. The company noted that the hooked episode had no correlation to overall viewership numbers or viewer attrition for a particular series.
While all the Netflix hyperbole is fine – or at least is what it is – regular readers will know by now I’m something of a counterintuitive contrarian curmudgeon, so my enthusiasm for all-things Netflix, including Making a Murderer, autoplay and binge-watching is, well, limited, truth be told. While the story of Manitowoc County, Wisconsin’s Steve Avery, the real-life character at the centre of Making a Murderer, is indeed strangely compelling, it’s compelling in the way one can’t take their eyes off a slow-motion train wreck or accident-in-progress. Perhaps I just spent too many years sitting in courtrooms every day as court beat reporter for the Peterborough Examiner to ever need to hear again yet another defence lawyer methodically ask prosecution witnesses under cross-examination those questions which must admittedly be asked methodically. Questions such as, “Officer, are these your notes and were they made contemporaneously (sometimes rephrased as at the time or shortly after) you attended at the scene?” Or perhaps, “Do you have any independent recollection, aside from your notes, officer, of the events in question?” Or maybe, “Have there been any additions or deletions, officer, to your notes, since they were made?”
Me? I’m looking forward to setting my personal video recorder (PVR), while I’m working at the University College of the North library here, for 8 p.m. CST Thursday, Jan. 7 on Vision TV, which is airing reruns of McMillan & Wife, the now unintentionally ironic but still delicious (well, if you like beige and the faux-wood paneling such as maybe you knew growing up) 1970’s American police procedural, set in San Francisco, of course, which aired originally on NBC from Sept. 17, 1971, to April 24, 1977, as a popular original partner in the NBC Mystery Movie trio, which also included initially Columbo and McCloud.
As Vision TV notes on its website: “It was Rock Hudson’s first foray into our living rooms on the small screen and he was paired with the luminescent and ultra-charming Susan Saint James to create the most popular crime fighting couple of the ’70s. Throwback Thursdays are about to get even more mysterious and exciting than ever before!”
And after I have had a good hit of 1970’s pop culture nostalgia? Well, maybe a trip over to Fox TV (did I really write that?) to check out Lucifer, as the devil, Prince of this World, is about to get his due debuting Monday, Jan. 25 at 8 p.m. CST.
The new DC Comics-based Fox TV high-concept genre series where Lucifer Morningstar “bored and unhappy as the Lord of Hell, resigns his throne and abandons his kingdom for the gorgeous, shimmering insanity of Los Angeles, where he opens an exclusive piano bar called Lux” admittedly may give new meaning to the dangers of glamorizing evil, something we Catholics get a refresher course in every Easter through the renewal of our baptismal promises where the priest asks us, “Do you renounce Satan and all his works, and all his empty show; do you renounce the glamour of evil, and refuse to be mastered by sin; do you renounce Satan, the author and prince of sin?”
While the production of Lucifer is incredibly slick and well done, watching a three-minute trailer on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4bF_quwNtw), I couldn’t help laughing near the end of the trailer when Lucifer, played by Tom Ellis, baffled, asks the female L.A.P.D. homicide detective, Chloe Dancer (played by Lauren German) who unlike almost all the other women who are charmed by him, while she isn’t, “Did my father send you?”
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