How Netflix became the number one streaming service in just ten years, with 38 original series, from auteur series like House of Cards and David Fincher’s Mindhunter, a revived sci-fi to witty and straightforward shows about teenagers and puberty.
Netflix began this decade as the fastest-growing online video streaming service and ended as the most popular. The popularity of this resource is the envy of games like Blackjack India. It started with zero movies and series of its production and ended up with several hundred.
They say the service’s success has a lot to do with the algorithm – they started developing it back in the days when the company was sending out DVDs by mail and trying to guess which movies customers would like. The same algorithm now analyzes how and what users are watching on the service, calculates popular requests, and, based on these requests, recommends to users what to watch and the owners of the service – what to shoot.
But to write off all of Netflix’s achievements on just one algorithm is a significant oversight. In the end, the algorithm can never tell a hundred-percent working formula, and this thesis is proved twice: both the most successful shows, which turned out to be such all of a sudden, and quite powerful failures, in which the management of the service miscalculated somewhere.
Meanwhile, with or without the algorithm, Netflix has managed to occupy whole niches of content that would have been empty without it. Here are ten reasons the service has been able to get viewers to love it – and 38 shows to prove it.
Ambitious authoring projects.
One of Netflix’s first proper series was House of Cards, a remake of a British political mini-series about a power-hungry trickster. And whatever “House of Cards” became in its later seasons, it had an impressive start: directed by David Fincher and starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright; in what was already a reasonably saturated series market at the time, it was still a new bar and a good reason for cable channels to start worrying.
A few years later, Fincher returned to Netflix with Mindhunter, and again, with a complete glut of content, it’s hard to find anything similar, comparable in quality. It’s unlikely that Netflix was guided by an algorithm here because “Zodiac,” which coincides with “The Hunter” in theme, is one of Fincher’s most unpopular films; trust in the director played a far more significant role.
And then there was Sense8, the Wachowski sisters’ series, a humanistic sci-fi about people from different parts of the world connected by empathy. And Maniac, a remake of the Norwegian series with Cary Fukunaga in the director’s chair and Oscar pool actors Jonah Hill and Emma Stone in the lead roles. Of course, neither one of these is Netflix’s most successful project, but the fact that they exist is essential – the service is willing to give the floor to risky and expensive projects. But, of course, the algorithm’s opinion is the last thing considered here.
Science Fiction Renaissance
Ten years ago, science fiction series could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and the genre was considered dying. But, as Netflix’s algorithm suggested, there was demand after all. So the service approached the genre from several angles: there was a remake of the classic Lost In Space series, a collection of animated short films Love, Death and Robots, and a remake of Black Mirror about the impact of modern technology on our lives.
A particular love of sci-fi has also been combined with a willingness to take risks with signature projects, which is how Stranger Things, the service’s most popular show to date, turned out. When they began work on Stranger Things, the Duffer Brothers had only made a few short films, one low-budget film, and had written a couple of episodes of another sci-fi series, The Pines, which barely lasted two seasons. But Netflix gave the brothers a chance anyway-and it more than paid off. A similar story turned out with Natasha Lyonne’s “Russian Doll,” a thriller about a girl stuck on the day of her birth and her death at the same time (yes, like “Groundhog Day”).
The OA is also an extraordinary and hard-to-describe series by American independent film star Brit Marling. It, however, turned out to be unaffordable for Netflix – even if those who finished the second season of “OA” were delighted but were too few to keep the series afloat. However maybe the fans were few, but they turned out to be incredibly loyal – one of them, for example, is still picketing the Netflix office and is on hunger strike until the decision to cancel the series is reversed.
Mystical dramas for teenagers
A separate genre is obtained when the previous two points are combined. The most obvious example is The Defenders, which was unfortunately already closed but existed in parallel with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “The Defenders” are:
- Daredevil,
- Jessica Jones,
- The Punisher,
- Iron Fist,
- and Luke Cage.
Netflix’s Marvel division formerly existed in the same universe as the Avengers (in particular, the fact that the Avengers destroyed an impressive portion of Manhattan in a battle with Loki in 2012 plays a vital role in the series). Still, if the Avengers’ world is sterile enough for parents to take ten-year-olds to the franchise’s movies, then the world of The Defenders has sex and drugs and various social problems, and the Punisher doesn’t beat enemies to a pulp but shoots them to their brains on the wall.
The “Defenders” project, however, turned out to be quite uneven: “Daredevil,” though it was the most popular of all, had a different showrunner every season due to the differences between just about everyone with everyone else; “Iron Fist” is not entirely clear why it existed at all; “Jessica Jones” too quickly went on self-repeat, and the actual joint appearance of all the characters in “Defenders” was crumpled and unimpressive. Unfortunately, Netflix lost the rights to the characters, but a few intense moments like the first seasons of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and The Punisher came out of that endeavor.
However, nothing is ever empty, and for teens who crave mysticism without a ton of sugar syrup in the delivery, Netflix now has “The Umbrella Academy” and “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.” By the way, there is also Teen Patti online or other games based on these series.
Horse BoJack
Yes, this is the only show that has earned its spot on this list – and deservedly so, because there’s nothing like it not only on Netflix but nowhere else. But, of course, no algorithm will ever tell you that you need a catalog of content about the cartoon horse, who was the star of a popular TV series in the 1990s and now has turned into a depressive alcoholic. It’s not just a robot; even the average viewer would be suspicious of such an application – and you can understand it. But BoJack Horseman is not what it seems, and he should be given a chance, even if, in general, you eschew the animation. The closest analogs to “BoJack” lie outside the energy world – it’s “Mad Men,” Californication, and other dramas about anti-heroes. And “BoJack” manages to go even deeper in its exploration of the anti-hero character.
It is by far one of the best works about depression ever made, and it does an excellent job of describing the depressive state of the hero without justifying in passing the abominations that the hero commits. Unlike its predecessors, BoJack manages to separate the illness from the dreadful acts often associated with the disease. Yes, you sympathize with BoJack because his parents didn’t love him, and life mistreated him, but you hate him too.
Sometimes you wonder if you could have done the same thing without animation, but watch an underwater episode in the third season, and all doubts disappear.