I think you for your service in being a guinea pig for the forum by watching bad Netflix shows. Your sacrifice is appreciated. I’ve been tempted by promos for these and now I am safe.
As a counterpoint I enjoyed How to Sell Drugs Online (fast) - and the OpSec complaints you have are what led to the real life Moritz being caught. It’s also pretty short, 3 seasons of 6 episodes a piece.
Watching Pieces of Her and I’m in episode 4 and it feels like work and my mind is wandering. It needs more Toni Collette and less Bella Heathcote but more Toni probably won’t save it.
Does it get better?
I made it to the end. It was okay, not really memorable. The best I can recall is that it had too many cases of people doing not-very-smart things as a way of advancing the plot.
I really liked this as well. It’s also an eye opener how today’s kids have easy access to drugs (one click in an App and a courier will deliver it). My kids admitted that it captures their life as a teenager pretty well (the digital age, the memes, the music, the highschool drama).
I recommend watching Shiny_Flakes on Netlix afterwards. An in depth documentary about the teenager this was all based on.
I liked this show as well. It could have been a supernatural replacement (of which I am still looking for). It had a lot of potential, but no, netflix canceled it. It seems if I like a series, then it gets canceled. I also liked Jupiter’s Legacy. The presentation was awful, but the story was certainly interesting.
Welp.
Phil Rynda, whose official title is Netflix’s Director of Creative Leadership and Development for Original Animation, was let go this week, along with several of his staff, TheWrap can exclusively report and Netflix has confirmed.
Rynda’s firing was perhaps an inevitable end to a deeply chaotic period for Netflix Animation, particularly its Kids & Family division, which saw a boom of talent and creativity give way to corporate pressure, mixed messages and accusations of “staged data.”
Netflix Animation, especially when it came to Kids & Family content, was once considered a glittery Utopia. Superstar creators and visionary young talent were swayed by promises of unprecedented creative freedom and healthy production budgets, backed by the financial and promotional might of the Netflix empire.
One producer, whose show on Netflix wasn’t renewed, said that when they got to Netflix, Rynda, who served creative roles on groundbreaking animated series like “Gravity Falls” and “Adventure Time,” told Netflix creators, “We want to be the home of everybody’s favorite show.” By the time the producer left several years later, there was a “new thesis statement”: “We want to make what our audience wants to see,” Reed Hastings, Netflix’s Co-CEO, now told animation talent. As far as mission statements go, those are vastly different.
True to this “new thesis statement,” several high-profile animated projects in the Kids & Family space have been outright canceled, including “Bone” (which Netflix confirmed), an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s “The Twits” that was meant to be part of several Dahl-based projects (Netflix insists “The Twits” is still alive, potentially now as a feature film) and Lauren Faust’s witchy “Toil and Trouble.” Netflix currently touts “Boss Baby” as the ideal of what an animated series on the platform should be and what kind of numbers those animated series should be bringing in.
If that’s the case, then I’m glad they missed their whack at Bone. Hope the rights can go elsewhere and aren’t tied up with Netflix.
I liked Skylines, a German crime show centered around a hip hop studio in Frankfurt. Really solid performances from all the actors, the characters felt believable and had consistent motivations, and the story mostly made sense. (Except the first 5 minutes of episode 6, which had me go wtf at very high frequency.) It is pretty light on both the police and the criminals, most of the time is spent on people who get caught in the mess by accident.
Unfortunately this is impossible to recommend. It was cancelled after one season, despite being popular and reviewing well. There is no closure. Basically none of the plot threads is resolved, they just set up the actual conflicts with the initial episodes. The reason is surprising: Netflix got sued by a real life record studio of the same name for defamation. The lawsuit went nowhere but Netflix decided that the show wasn’t worth the bother.
Jesus. How the hell do you start out with people who created incredible shows like Gravity Falls, Adventure Time, City of Ghosts and Trollhunters and end up pointing at Boss Baby as the pinnacle of your success? Bad Management apparently.
The article even talks about how great Netflix’s executive and marketing teams were to work with according to content creators, but then they implemented the 360-feedback culture and it killed all of the good shows because they didn’t get the time and support needed to grow into classics.
That’s a huge amount of fail. If you really want to make a dent in the Kids & Family market space, you absolutely have to support your shows by building hype, extensive marketing campaigns, merchandising and fast-food and retail tie-ins. These shows are not “The Witcher”, where you have a built-in fanbase you can count on to talk up your show at the office water cooler.
Yeah, I remember Lisa Hanawalt complaining about Netflix’s lack of marketing for Tuca & Bertie. Especially baffling considering the easy sell ton the back of Bojack Horseman.
What’s going on a Netflix? Competing execs!
Several important Netflix creators voice a very consistent theory about what’s gone wrong with the streamer’s culture. They see a link between Netflix’s problems and the 2020 fall of Cindy Holland, who played a key role in launching the service’s originals — brilliantly and often expensively — with House of Cards , Orange Is the New Black and Stranger Things , among others.
These sources say Holland was the one who nurtured strong relationships with talent and took time to offer thoughtful development notes while still making people feel safe and supported in pursuing their passion projects.
The 2016 arrival of former CBS and Universal Television executive Bela Bajaria as head of unscripted and international content represented a huge turning point, according to multiple sources.
In 2017, she gave a 13-episode order to Insatiable , a dark, hourlong comedy pilot that had been rejected by The CW. Holland’s team had passed on it. One prominent Netflix supplier calls Bajaria’s decision “the beginning of the Walmart-ization” of the streamer. (The series also attracted negative press for fat-shaming, among other sins.)
“It’s called Insatiable -gate within the halls of Netflix,” this source says. “It gave the power of greenlight to several people. It caused absolute demoralization and chaos. Everybody thought it was a terrible thing Ted did, allowing one team to greenlight something that another team had passed on.” Though the show was critically panned (it sits at 11 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), it performed well enough to get a second season. “It sent a message to Ted because it did OK numbers,” this source continues. “Ted, wanting to increase content by a huge amount, started to look to Bela as what the company should be. Cindy kept saying we should still be betting on high-end creators and making some cheaper things, too.” (A Netflix insider notes that Sarandos was impressed when Bajaria picked up the thriller You from Lifetime — a project that Holland had rejected as a pitch. The series turned into a Netflix hit.)
Sources say some Netflix executives began to worry about the burgeoning number of shows. “It was, ‘Hey, guys, do we think this is enough? Because we are cannibalizing our own shit,'” says a former insider. And then there was Holland’s concern about the lack of curation and quality control. An important creative talent who had successes working with Holland muses: “I wonder if, say, a bonobo throwing shit at a whiteboard full of titles as a method of deciding what projects to make would have more or less success than all of these other ‘deciders’ who think they know what people want or don’t want.”
But a prominent creative who was squarely on Team Holland says, “They pitted Bela and Cindy against each other.” Adds a former Netflix insider, “People would always say they didn’t know who to go to [to pitch]. And Ted loved that stupid phrase, ‘There are multiple paths to yes.’”
Sounds more like Ted Sarandos is the problem to me. He’s the one fostering the competition between Holland and Bajaria (both of whom have championed some awesome shows), demanding volume over anything else, etc. Not that he’s the only one with dirty hands, I’m sure. But it sounds like his leadership played a huge role.
Yeah, basically any exec that champions the “I’m going to let my employees and departments fight for supremacy” style of leadership is asking for an eventual blowout. In the short term, you get fast and dynamic results, but it always ends with a morale hit, loss of talent, and a toxic environment.
It’s like that classic Ballmer-era MS org chart of all the different business groups pointing guns at one another.
Wow, sounds like Netflix fell prey to that idiotic boardroom mantra of “healthy competition”. Competition within your own corporate ranks is rarely “healthy” and almost always leads to severe morale issues and departure of experienced talent. Given the amount of external competition already present in the streaming market, making your own people go up against each other as well seems really stupid.
It looks like Cindy Holland ended up joining some former Bad Robot and Amazon execs at something called Genvid, which looks like a streaming content startup. Given Holland’s strong rep with the creative talent and 18 years of relationships forged at Netflix, Genvid could be something to watch out for.
Ozark season 4 part 2 drops in 14 hours. My wife and I love the show. A little slow at times and the 3rd season dragged a bit but it’s just a very well done series. Cant wait!
In the past few months there have been a whole bunch of Harlan Coban novels adapted as limited Netflix series in different countries in Europe. I think there have been at least 2 Spanish ones, a couple of UK ones, one or two Polish ones. Coban seems to have an exec producer credit on most of them.
Seems weird to me that there is such a burst of them, almost as if it’s easy or cheap to get the production rights. They all follow a kind of formula: ordinary people leading ordinary lives and then Something Happens and slowly we discover that every one of these ordinary people have been hiding their past and aren’t so ordinary after all. Most are fair to good. The most recent Polish one was pretty disappointing.
I hear that. It’s part of why I loved Counterpart SO MUCH.
BTW, I just learned of a recent German show (supposed to be on Netflix but haven’t checked) called Tribes of Europa. It stars one of the main cast of another German show (a period Cold War drama, but surrounding a small town) I recently posted a thread about here (Tannbach/Line of Separation). It’s supposed to be post-apoc/sci-fi so it may be dire, who knows.
There are apparently nine of them either on Netflix or in production for Netflix.
I read a couple of Corben’s novels. They are good but follow the same plot arc, at least the two I read. A man’s wife is murdered and years later he gets a mysterious communication that she may still be alive. The rest of the book is the hunt for the truth and eventual reunion of husband and wife.
He’s a good thriller writer, but he found a format that works and seems to go back to it. I moved on.
I did see one foreign film, French, based on one of the books I read – Tell No One. It was good. I’d recommend it. (I saw it in a theater and there was only one other person in the audience!)