Kevin Spacey as a ruthless politician in a slow burn political thriller. 2013. Wait, Kevin Spacey in a TV show?! This all seems like a winning formula. It was a formula, in fact. Netflix found that the people interested in Kevin Spacey also liked the British House of Cards series. This same target audience liked David Fincher movies. From somewhere in the innards of the Netflix algorithm, David Fincher is slotted to direct. This was Netflix’s first Netflix Original; they did their research. As they should, considering they dropped one hundred million bucks developing the first two seasons. Failure wasn’t an option. An algorithm may seem a bit inhuman, but cold and calculating was in order. This first step into new territory had to be on sure footing. A winning formula was called for.
And it’s undeniable that just such a thing was delivered by House of Cards. It lit up Twitter. Anecdotally, everyone around seemed to be talking about this new and exciting television show. My parents became House of Cards junkies. Netflix subscriptions rose in number, this much is not anecdotal. Further evidence is speculative, however. Netflix does not release pure audience numbers. Without advertisers, they have no need to. The only metric they regularly share is subscriber numbers. One could look at social media to gauge interest; @houseofcards has 1.7 million followers. Not too shabby. Still not quite comparable to Game of Throne’s twitter account which has a whopping 5.4 million followers. But, these are fairly meaningless metrics.
Symphony Advanced Media assembled a 15,000-strong panel of US subscribers and tracked their viewing on mobiles, tablets and computers. This data isn’t fit for comparison against a regular TV show’s viewership. Netflix has disputed these numbers as being wildly inaccurate. However, some degree of analysis can be made between the different Netflix shows Symphony gathered information on. Symphony ranked the top streaming service programs in the US in 2016 as Orange is the New Black, Stranger Things, Fuller House, Marvel’s Luke Cage and Marvel’s Daredevil and estimated that the fourth season of House of Cards, in sixth place, was watched by less than half the number of US viewers (8.8 million) who pressed play on Orange is the New Black (23 million).
What happened to House of Cards? In the heat of an intense presidential election, a political drama seems to be at its highest potential. One would think Trump against Hillary offers a situation that House of Cards was in the perfect position to capitalize on. Right? Yet this is not the situation the (admittedly sketchy) numbers reflect. House of Cards was on its fourth season in 2016, and its source material stopped at three. Like Frank Underwood, Netflix’s greed led them to hunger ever for more. They went past their source material and decided they would write a new path for themselves. They attempted to make House of Cards into a monster, but fizzled in execution. The compelling narrative was somehow lost. Even my parent’s stopped watching, in favor of the next shining novelty.
This is one of the problems with the Netflix algorithm. It’s not designed for quality, it’s designed to be the most bang for Netflix’s buck. In other Netflix shows, the hallmark’s of House of Cards are not present. Super star actors are nowhere to be seen. There aren’t popular directors ensuring a level of quality. The level of dough being dropped isn’t there. These are the things that made House of Cards alluring! The hallmark of House of Cards that is seen in other Netflix Originals is a series length that goes beyond the show’s ability to deliver. Breaking Bad knew when to stop. The Wire knew when to stop. These show’s weren’t created from an algorithm. A refined human touch is still a necessity when attempting to make a quality show. However, this is obviously not Netflix’s primary motivation.
I first watched the British House of Cards which I did not think I would like. It took me a couple episodes to get used to the main character talking to the audience, and it also took me awhile to decide that I actually liked the main character despite all his unlikeable characteristics. I then watched the Netflix House of Cards. I loved the first 2 seasons, even though it was clear that the Netflix version took at least 2 or 3 seasons to accomplish what the British version did in one season. After the third season, I quickly lost interest and it became clear that the storyline had devolved into a soap opera that might never end.
ReplyDelete