Disappearing into the algorithm

Adam White

AT the very end of 2019, when many of us were cramming in our last bits of Christmas shopping, an expensive and inventive musical drama series appeared on Netflix. Soundtrack saw a host of vaguely recognisable faces star as interconnected and heartsick Los Angelenos. Their love lives played out via song, with the cast lip-syncing along to famous pop hits. By February, however, Soundtrack was dead, the latest in a run of short-lived Netflix experiments that drop on the platform with little notice and are axed just as discreetly.

“What if you made a show and no one noticed?” asked Soundtrack creator Joshua Safran, in a refreshingly honest message for an employee of a company famed for its secrecy. “That’s how it felt with Soundtrack. The most incredible team of artists worked tirelessly on it … and felt we’d made something unique, fresh, weird, and, well, great. And yet, it all but disappeared. Barely even got reviewed.”

Soundtrack came and went as rapidly as Spinning Out, an ice-skating melodrama, Chambers, a horror thriller, and the smart animated comedy Tuca & Bertie. All were either well received or at least deemed creatively promising — their early cancellations hinting at the bleak future of a streaming service once envisaged as a televisual utopia. Instead, Netflix has become the space where television goes to die. Soundtrack was a fascinating series. That it vanished without a trace could merely be a symptom of television today.

Netflix is a closed book. We know nothing of its viewership numbers unless they tell us, and even then, they’re slightly suspect. We also know little about how they utilise audience data to market their shows, or even how they decide what lives or dies on their service — which has always seemed more specific than merely “no one was watching it”.

The service’s move away from long-running shows has been deliberate. Not, as you might suspect, to curb creative drought, but because long-running shows don’t actually benefit Netflix’s bottom line. In the language of algorithms, additional seasons of a series won’t inspire people to subscribe to Netflix, while shiny new products will. That also helps explain why the only long-running shows Netflix has ever produced (including House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black and Grace & Frankie) were launched at the very beginning of their move into content-creation. Meanwhile, recent hits including 13 Reasons Why, Glow and Mindhunter were all felled after three or four seasons — Mindhunter, it should be said, only speculatively.

For series like Soundtrack or Tuca & Bertie, muted critical notices and a lack of audience response may have led to their early departures — though it remains unclear whether they were granted much in the way of a promotional push in the first place.

It suggests that Netflix has a class system, particularly with the coming influx of A-list producers wooed to the platform with million-dollar paychecks. The two biggest showrunners in television, American Horror Story’s Ryan Murphy and Grey’s Anatomy’s Shonda Rhimes, are in the midst of launching their wares on Netflix, and it’s unlikely either will produce shows that’ll disappear into the algorithm.

The raft of scripted series cancellations has also coincided with a boom in Netflix reality shows. It makes sense that, eight years into its existence as an original content factory, Netflix is beginning to experiment with its release strategy, and the kinds of shows that it wants to produce. But it means that much of its output is quietly abandoned, creatives and fans left heartbroken. — The Independent