In the opening episode of Netflix’s animated Hollywood satire BoJack Horseman, the eponymous steed gives a drunken speech about “Horsin’ Around,” the fictional feelgood sitcom that made him a star in the 1990s.
“For a lot of people, life is just one long, hard kick in the urethra, and sometimes, when you get home from a long day of getting kicked in the urethra, you just want to watch a show about good, likable people who love each other — where no matter what happens, at the end of 30 minutes, everything’s gonna turn out okay,” he says.
BoJack Horseman is a rare thing on Netflix in that it is original, critically adored and extremely popular. It is the 15th-most-viewed Netflix show in the US, according to analytics firm Jumpshot — one of the best guides to what is popular on the platform, as Netflix does not release stats.
Photo: AP
However, cast your eyes up that list and there are far more “Horsin’ Arounds” than there are BoJack Horsemans. The most popular show is the US version of The Office, which ran for nine series on the US channel NBC in the 2000s.
Friends, the archetypal feel-good 1990s sitcom (iffy sexual politics notwithstanding), is the second-most-streamed show on the platform.
This week, a former employee of Robert De Niro’s production company was alleged in its court claim to have watched 55 episodes of it in one four-day period. No wonder Netflix is believed to have paid WarnerMedia US$100 million to license the show for this year.
Gilmore Girls, Parks and Recreation, Arrested Development and Frasier also appear high on the list, more prominent than heralded Netflix Originals, such as Stranger Things and House of Cards.
It seems that, in this time of unprecedented choice and quality, the so-called golden age of prestige television, most people still want to watch half-hour shows about vaguely likable people in which everything turns out okay. Ideally from the 1990s, but maybe the 2000s, and preferably something that they have seen many, many times before.
“Over the past month or so, I have been watching as much Modern Family as possible,” said Ciaran, 29, who works as a policy analyst in London. “I’ve seen them all loads of times, but I just don’t feel like watching anything else, because I love the warmth and comfort that comes from the show. I think I started watching it again when I was going through a particularly bad time at work. I got addicted to the warmth, and then I got addicted to just feeling good about myself.”
Lucy, 28, from London, feels the same about Gilmore Girls. The kooky comedy-drama never drew sky-high ratings when it aired on US cable TV between 2000 and 2007, but it has become a huge hit in the streaming era.
Netflix did deign to reveal a couple of years ago that it was its “most binge-raced” show.
“I rewatch it when I’m stressed as low-level distraction, but also to return to reassuring worlds with low jeopardy and known outcomes,” Lucy said.
She said she still likes to watch the prestige shows that everyone is talking about, but they are a bit like haute cuisine to Gilmore Girls’ pasta.
“I find it more relaxing to rewatch, as I don’t have to join in on the hot takes and social threads that surround the ‘big new series’ or worry about spoilers,” she said.
It has often been observed that the emergence of Netflix, Amazon Prime, Now TV, Hulu, Facebook TV and the rest has opened up frontiers for TV — makers do not have to worry so much about averting flagging ratings when viewers start losing interest. Now that people can consume series at their own pace, their tolerance for convoluted narrative arcs, enormous casts and season-long digressions has increased hugely.
There is lots of Silicon Valley cash to bankroll the programs, too, but while dinner party chat still centers on Russian Doll and Big Little Lies, platforms are increasingly thinking about the other stuff: the chewing-gum TV, the long-tail TV, the shows that vaguely brighten up the room.
That could be a random episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air that turns into a weekend-long binge, or it might be mid-2000s cookery flotsam or makeover TV detritus.
Matthew Ball, a US venture capitalist and sharp commentator on the streaming platforms, calls it “tonnage.” For him, the idea that it is “quality” driving the shift to streaming is a misconception.
“Netflix’s biggest shows drove subscriber growth and branding, but most of its success comes from enabling audiences to easily watch large volumes of all types of content wherever they are, without fail, and at a low cost,” he said. “Netflix isn’t ‘hired’ for Stranger Things, but for entertainment at large.”
Tonnage is increasingly where the platforms are focusing their algorithms and cash as the attention wars escalate.
Netflix is likely to lose Friends and the US version of The Office — a combined 400-plus episodes of non-event TV — as WarnerMedia and NBC, their owners, launch their own streaming platforms at some point in the next couple of years.
Apple is to launch a streaming service in the autumn, and has lobbed a reported US$6 billion at new programs — including a drama starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston as warring TV hosts.
Yet although audiences come for the shiny new stuff, they stay for the old reliables such as Seinfeld, over which there is a bidding war.
Disney+ is launching in the autumn — and because Disney owns the Pixar, Star Wars and Marvel franchises, that is a lot of “tonnage.”
All this presents an additional challenge to the traditional channels,.
The average Briton watches nearly five hours of video a day, on TVs, laptops, phones and the rest, statistics from the UK’s Office of Communications show.
However, while people might no longer be content to settle for random reruns on regular channels, the British Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board says that people are not watching vastly more than they used to.
Twenty-five years ago, Britons were still watching close to four hours of broadcast TV each a day, and that was not counting satellite and cable — nor hours spent watching old VHS tapes.
The major innovation is that while the particular lineup of non-event TV used to be chosen by broadcasters, now people choose it themselves.
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