How the Paradox of 'Original Series' Explains the Video Industry

December 12, 2018 6:50 AM

Using the phrase "Original Series" (or some similar label) was superfluous for the first sixty years of TV. Until a series hit syndication (which took at least five years), ABC shows were on ABC, NBC shows were on NBC, and so on. [...] This raises the question of what, exactly, is an "Original" - and how could Netflix possibly produce several times more than HBO, Amazon, Hulu, Starz and Showtime combined? The answer is simple: "Original" isn't a technical definition but a marketing one. And thus not only is the definition of "Original" vague, it also differs from network to network. And no one has a wider definition than Netflix.

This is part four of a four-part series on Netflix by Matthew Ball, former Head of Strategy at Amazon Studios.

1. Netflix's Content Budget Is Bigger Than It Seems
2. Netflix Is a Product & Technology Company
3. Netflix Isn't Being Reckless, It's Just Playing a Game No One Else Dares

posted by smcg (30 comments total)

For someone who has so much knowledge, he seems to be clinging tightly to an idiot ball.

"Original series" as a term came about because cable channels (and later Netflix) were known for airing only reruns. Airing first-run TV on their channel was a novelty, and needed a name.

The viewer doesn't give a fuck if Netflix produced the show, or if it was sold to Netflix after another network balked, or if it aired elsewhere, but then was sold to Netflix for the first run in the viewer's country.

It's all original to the viewer, and that's what matters. The marketing is saying, "this is TV that you get only/first on Netflix," and only an industry insider dweeb would be upset that Netflix has an expanded definition.
posted by explosion at 7:03 AM on December 12, 2018 [28 favorites]

The marketing is saying, "this is TV that you get only/first on Netflix," and only an industry insider dweeb would be upset that Netflix has an expanded definition.

The point of that part of the series of articles is what the author is writing about as to how it helps shape the entire picture regarding Netflix's strategy for virtual monopolization of "TV". As the author points out:

However, this ambiguity (which Netflix does nothing to clarify and seems to prefer) certainly aids the company’s marketing message and share price. Put another way, redefining the phrase “Original Series” may literally be worth billions to Netflix.

All four parts are meant to be looked at as indicating something of the whole, that one section isn't just a semantic quibble about the word "original".
posted by gusottertrout at 7:13 AM on December 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

"The viewer doesn't give a fuck if Netflix produced the show, or if it was sold to Netflix after another network balked, or if it aired elsewhere, but then was sold to Netflix for the first run in the viewer's country."

I do. I assume that a "Netflix Original" meets a certain level of quality (Ozark, House of Cards, etc.), and is new, and I think at one point, it generally did. But now, that same label is applied to shows/movies of varying quality that often don't meet the standard I expect when I see "Netflix Original." I guess I'm just going to have to ignore it.
posted by jonathanhughes at 7:17 AM on December 12, 2018 [14 favorites]

It's all original to the viewer, and that's what matters. The marketing is saying, "this is TV that you get only/first on Netflix," and only an industry insider dweeb would be upset that Netflix has an expanded definition.

I care and I am no industry insider. Netflix started repackaging BBC and other overseas shows as Netflix Originals a while back and it pissed me off. It is disrespectful to the network that first took the chance on the show. It is disrespectful of the truth. It's disrespectful of the meaning words. It would really be good for Americans to know that good things exist in other parts of the world and to give them some credit for it.
posted by srboisvert at 7:18 AM on December 12, 2018 [21 favorites]

Can we also look at use of the word "Premiere"? Last weekend I watched the World Premiere of Dr Strange on both Friday and Saturday night, I'm not sure if TBS knows what "premiere" means.
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:19 AM on December 12, 2018

Netflix started repackaging BBC and other overseas shows as Netflix Originals a while back and it pissed me off

I find it rich that Netflix labels "Great British Bake Off" as a "Netflix Original Series".
posted by briank at 7:20 AM on December 12, 2018 [13 favorites]

For a brief moment in time Netflix was using the label "A Netflix Semi-Original Series" for programs it brought back to life like Arrested Development. That stopped very quickly but I think it's a useful label to have around. It shows that Netflix spent some money on it, but it's not their totally original creation.
posted by Servo5678 at 7:26 AM on December 12, 2018

in fairness even "BBC shows" like GBBO aren't wholly BBC creations, GBBO is produced by another company and is now carried by Channel 4 in the UK

but it is still pretty confusing when Netflix slaps "Original Series" on overseas shows they just bought the broadcast rights to
posted by BungaDunga at 7:56 AM on December 12, 2018

I thought they were being cheeky with Arrested Development in calling it "semi-original content," but I could be wrong.

And it seems like Matthew Ball is missing some key details. To use one of his examples against him, Breaking Bad wasn't AMC content abroad, so much so that 'Breaking Bad' won Netflix its first international BAFTA TV award in 2014, British Academy of Film and Television Arts' TV awards aim to reward "the very best in television broadcast on British screens over the past year." AMC might get the "branded" recognition for originating the content, but Sony Pictures Television was also backing the original production, though Netflix made it an international hit. Show producer and creator Vince Gilligan thanked the on-demand video service Netflix at the Emmy Awards in September 2013. He even went as far as to say that Netflix "kept us on the air."

But also this framing is missing a huge point: Netflix's 2018 $8 Billion content budget will/has fund(ed) 700 "TV" shows and movies, including 80 productions for non-English markets. Netflix spends more on content than anyone else on the internet — and many TV networks, too. In 2015, it spent almost as much as Disney on non-sports programming. This was the topic of the first post, but that connection wasn't carried through to the 4th part, to the point that Stranger Things was used as banner art, which is very much "original content" in the historic/ typical sense of the word.

Still, Netflix is pretty broad with that particular brush. I assume they're using the term "original content" in place of "exclusive content (in this market)."
posted by filthy light thief at 7:58 AM on December 12, 2018

In an ideal prescriptivist world there would be "Netflix Originals" and "Netflix Exclusives" or some such, but I'm sure they decided that was too confusing for a viewer who's just looking for something to watch and doesn't care to dive into the production history of their options.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 8:00 AM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

The viewer doesn't give a fuck if Netflix produced the show, or if it was sold to Netflix after another network balked, or if it aired elsewhere, but then was sold to Netflix for the first run in the viewer's country.

I 100% care about this. It drives me crazy when I see some foreign show on Netflix and can't tell if it's something old, something new, or something rebranded. I am also an organization freak,and this seems designed to confuse and obscure.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:19 AM on December 12, 2018 [12 favorites]

_{No Artificial™ Flavors.}
posted by Fizz at 8:30 AM on December 12, 2018

But also this framing is missing a huge point: Netflix's 2018 $8 Billion content budget will/has fund(ed) 700 "TV" shows and movies, including 80 productions for non-English markets. Netflix spends more on content than anyone else on the internet — and many TV networks, too.

This too is covered in the series of articles in part one, where it's pointed out:

While it might seem pedantic to criticize statements such as “Netflix will spend between $7 billion and $8 billion on content in 2018,” the distinction is critical. To point, Netflix’s 2018 spend is likely to be closer to $12B. Not only is this nearly 50% more than publicized, it means that Netflix will spend more on non-sports content than any of its traditional TV peers (e.g. Disney, Time Warner, NBCUniversal) – even when their many individual networks are consolidated on a corporate basis

Really, the entire set of articles is quite good and painting a larger picture of how Netflix is essentially trying to become something like the Google or Facebook of online streamed entertainment. In the case of those other two companies, it is worth noting before it happens as monopolization always leads to bad results in the end.
posted by gusottertrout at 8:39 AM on December 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

It's all original to the viewer, and that's what matters. The marketing is saying, "this is TV that you get only/first on Netflix," and only an industry insider dweeb would be upset that Netflix has an expanded definition.

I think the article itself actually touches on this:

As a result, it’s important to highlight that only one of Netflix’s major hits (Stranger Things) is a “Developed Original”. This point is often used to criticize Netflix – and there’s a fairness to this critique. But the provenance of original series is not just immaterial to audiences, it’s imperceptible. And for Netflix, cash spend and “at bats” are key competitive advantages – just as development is HBO’s. Both companies are smart to lean into their strengths and strategies.

I don't think anyone's upset about this state of affairs; this is a pretty dispassionate description of what players in the industry are doing. And given the nature of the article series, you probably wouldn't be reading it unless you were a bit of an "industry insider dweeb," insofar as you're interested in how this part of the industry works and want to learn more about it.

The point of this specific article seemed to me to be much less "YOU ARE GETTING FOOLED BY NETFLIX, ORIGINAL SHOWS AREN'T ACTUALLY ORIGINAL!" and more about the ramifications of that wider definition and what they mean about Netflix's content strategies. For consumers, it can also make the picture muddier when comparing services. That's not even all Netflix's fault, according to the article; different services simply have different methods of acquiring and licensing content, and while Netflix might be more complex than most, it's always going to be hard to compare content stables even without Netflix calling a bunch of stuff "Originals" that some people might not think are "original-y" enough.
posted by chrominance at 8:52 AM on December 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

(this piece is also published as a REDEF Original).

LOL.
posted by chavenet at 9:10 AM on December 12, 2018

The viewer doesn't give a fuck if Netflix produced the show, or if it was sold to Netflix after another network balked, or if it aired elsewhere, but then was sold to Netflix for the first run in the viewer's country.

Several folks have chimed in to refute this, but this statement also suggests that the only audience for Netflix's confusing use of "originals" is the viewer.

Investors, since Netflix is a public company and is competing with other public companies, may care a lot about this. When you use a term that's material to the business differently to the rest of the industry, one might ask whether you're misleading shareholders about what you're doing and how money is being spent.
posted by jzb at 9:33 AM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I may have accidentally muddied the waters; given the presentation of part 4 "above the fold," I took it as a stand-alone article that was a part of a series of industry articles. Not the "read this fourth" that it is.

Sorry folks.
posted by explosion at 9:33 AM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I definitely could have framed this better, seeing how the discussion has gone. I highlighted the fourth article in the post because it was the most interesting to me personally, and because I read it first.

Thanks to the folks re-railing this despite the framing.
posted by smcg at 9:43 AM on December 12, 2018

"Original Series" is a bit anachronistic at this point. As others have noted, it came out of the cable TV swamp, when channels like TNT—which originally just re-ran content from the big networks—started making their own shows (and miniseries, and specials, and...). They wanted to call attention to the fact that they could create content as well as just broadcast it. Understandable.

A better term, as used by Netflix and others in 2018, would be "Exclusive". Not so much "Original", since often Netflix isn't really the originator of the content, but they are the exclusive purveyor of the content in a particular market.

But there are shows on Amazon and Netflix that do deserve to be called "Original", e.g. Altered Carbon on Netflix. That wasn't some pre-existing show that they just bought the distribution rights to, it was a show that literally would not have existed if they hadn't funded it; the producer optioned the movie and TV rights to the book like 10+ years ago, and exactly zero TV networks were interested in producing it in that time.

So it'd be nice if they were more precision between "Original" and "Exclusive" but it seems an odd linguistic hill to die on.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:57 AM on December 12, 2018

I find it rich that Netflix labels "Great British Bake Off" as a "Netflix Original Series".

I find it rich that Netflix labels "House of Cards" as a "Netflix Original Series".
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:24 AM on December 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

I think a major reason why Netflix would rather use "Original" than "Exclusive" (these are mostly my assumptions, to be fair) is that Netflix doesn't just want to be seen as the home for all the stuff you want to watch and can't watch elsewhere; they want to be seen as a source going forward for that stuff as well. So it's not enough for them to just say "hey we bought all the rights to your favourite shows," especially now that people are savvy enough to understand those rights are generally time-limited. They want to say, "hey, you know those shows you love on Netflix that you can't watch anywhere else? we're going to make way more of those." One encourages a bit of a mercenary approach--go where the content rights are--while the other encourages loyalty--stick with us and you'll get more of the same because we own all of it.

In theory it could also speak to a specific Netflix approach to content, in the way HBO successfully branded itself as the home of top-tier serialized dramas in the past, but I think that's fallen apart a bit in recent years because of this expansion of the term "Original."
posted by chrominance at 10:28 AM on December 12, 2018

I am reminded of the guy who used to run around Usenet back in the 90s being all Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers about how letterboxed* movies were being censored because there were these black bars at the top and bottom of the screen blocking out part of the movie.

Invariably someone would try to explain to him that that was the complete image, and in fact it was full screen pan and scan versions that were showing a modified version of the film, but he'd never manage to get it. I'm pretty sure in retrospect he was a proto-troll out to mess with people. And I'm kind of getting that vibe here.

*heh. Remember letterboxing?
posted by Naberius at 11:02 AM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

If Netflix is laying out cash to keep content fresh, even if it's trash, why would I be upset about this? It's useful sometimes knowing that you can't watch the show anywhere else, and that it will more than likely not disappear from their library anytime soon.
posted by Brocktoon at 12:46 PM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

I will continue to use the term "Original Series" only in the context of Star Trek.
posted by exogenous at 12:51 PM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

Remember letterboxing?

Its legacy is still with us, in reverse; one of the stipulations that Netflix made with the producers of MST3K was that all new episodes had to use widescreen films in color, so there wouldn't be black bars on the sides of people's HDTV screens. This means that they can't do any of the old academy-ratio b-movies of the 50s and 60s that used to be featured on the original show.
posted by Strange Interlude at 12:56 PM on December 12, 2018 [4 favorites]

All of which just goes to prove that marketing people really DO live in a completely different World to the rest of us, which I've always suspected!!
posted by Burn_IT at 1:19 PM on December 12, 2018

"Investors, since Netflix is a public company and is competing with other public companies, may care a lot about this. When you use a term that's material to the business differently to the rest of the industry, one might ask whether you're misleading shareholders about what you're doing and how money is being spent."

If investors are basing their decisions on the graphics in front of TV shows, that's kind of them, not Netflix. Also, in the case of something like "Babylon Berlin" (most expensive non english TV produced), it clearly shows who the creators are of the show after the netflix logo... And if an investor really wants to be savvy about the financial origins of any given TV show they can deep dive into something like... *checks notes*... Wikipedia.

Personally, I think it's remarkable that Netflix is bringing high-quality non-English TV to American viewers. It's showing there is enough demand to do so, and introducing American viewers into other cultures (well, you know, as much as American TV has brought US culture to other countries... It's certainly a distorted view, but it's better than nothing).
posted by el io at 2:07 PM on December 12, 2018

Netflix is in a desperate race against Disney, Amazon, and the behemoths that own Hulu, and they are burning cash at an unsustainable rate, so I don’t see this as an attempt at monopolization so much as an attempt at survival.

In my house Netflix is losing pretty badly, fwiw. Almost everything I want to watch is on Hulu or Amazon, and Netflix doesn’t have as many must see offerings anymore. Or maybe I just can’t find them because their UI is the fucking worst.

Either way, I am bearish.
posted by schadenfrau at 5:17 PM on December 12, 2018

I definitely remember this guy. He called it “letterschlocking.” It quickly became obvious (to me, anyway) that he wasn’t worth arguing with. Whether that’s because he was a zealot who couldn’t be reasoned with or just a troll I never figured out 100%.

I agree that the “Netflix Original” label feels shifty, not because it’s an especially big lie on their part, but just because it gives me the impression that they’re trying to pretend they are something they are not. They should be above that.

Then again, Netflix commits many worse crimes. I loathe the fact that I have to go fumbling for my remote Immediately at the end of a given program, just to avoid bring vaulted into another goddamned program. (Someone paid good money for the song selections that play over the end credits of HALT AND CATCH FIRE and I wanna fucking hear them.) Even worse? An acquaintance on Twitter says he was watching DUMPLIN’ on his PC and got a pop-up asking him if he wanted to watch the last scene again. He claims it happened five times. That’s an abomination.

The only channel I know of that actually treats it’s original content like something worth being proud of is HBO. They don’t smash the credits into one corner of the screen to show a promo, they don’t play other audio over the music, they don’t speed the credits up to the point where it’s literally impossible to read anything without freeze-framing, they don’t ejaculate tonally incongruous graphics and typography onto the screen to promote some other stupid show at the expense of the one I’m trying to watch. They don’t do any of these things, all of which make me feel a little stupider when I have to see other channels doing it. They treat their original shows like jewels; it’s really heartening.
posted by Mothlight at 6:23 PM on December 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

I love love love that there are so many Netflix Originals that spring from international sources, whether they be co-productions or just re-licensed stuff. Give me Korean dramas and German sci-fi and English mysteries. Give me all that stuff please. I have an easy time finding plenty of good International TV now and I love it.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:11 AM on December 13, 2018