“I’m a brand new guy over here,” said “Little” Steven Van Zandt in the first episode of Lilyhammer, back in January 2012. He wasn’t that new: Van Zandt was basically reprising the New Jersey mobster persona he’d successfully deployed for nearly a decade in The Sopranos. After ratting out his associates, his new character, Frank “the Fixer” Tagliano, had to begin a new life – in Lillehammer, Norway. The sleepy, snowy town didn’t know what was about to hit it. The same could be said for us: Lilyhammer was Netflix’s first original series.
Ten years on, our entertainment landscape is almost unrecognisable. Netflix has changed what we watch and the way we watch it. It has successfully reorganised traditional broadcast television and theatrical cinema models and put itself at the centre, growing from 24 million subscribers in 2012 to 214 million this year. It is available in more than 190 countries (Netflix UK launched the same month as Lilyhammer). It has created more than 1,500 original series, including planet-straddlingly massive shows such as Stranger Things and Bridgerton. In 2021 alone it released over 150 original movies – three per week. Its competitors have been playing catchup ever since. So how did it take over entertainment in just 10 years?
Lilyhammer was not exactly a smash hit, even if an estimated 20% of Norway’s population watched it. But the show marked the streamer’s first tentative step into making its own content, in partnership with the Norwegian broadcaster NRK1. By this stage Netflix had seen the writing on the wall. It had successfully transitioned from a mail-order DVD service to delivering content directly to consumers over the internet. This had always been the plan: the clue was in the name. But its biggest hits were existing shows such as Family Guy, Grey’s Anatomy, Law & Order, the US Office and Parks and Recreation. It was only a matter of time before the big media players noticed Netflix’s booming subscriber numbers and reclaimed their programmes for their own streaming platforms. So Netflix borrowed a trunkload of cash ($16bn over the past 10 years) and plotted its transition from distribution to production.
Netflix has not only transformed our entertainment landscape but our social one, too – and not just in terms of “Netflix and chill”. In 2010, two years before Lilyhammer, the company acquired the now-feted Breaking Bad, which had just finished its third season on AMC. The crime series already had a cult following by that stage, but Netflix supercharged its popularity by putting the first three seasons up on its platform ahead of the fourth. Not only could new viewers quickly get up to speed, they could consume Breaking Bad the same way Walter White’s customers consumed his top-grade meth.
To the under-35s, the idea of dutifully congregating round the living room television at the same time each week to catch your favourite show sounds laughably old-fashioned. We now expect the next episode to be available when we want it – which is often straight after the previous one has ended – and where we want it, be that the living room flat-screen, our laptop in bed or the phone on the commute to work.
In 2013, the term “binge-watch” was a runner-up to “selfie” for the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year. By that time Netflix itself had published the results of a survey that found that 61% of streaming viewers binge-watched regularly and 73% had positive feelings towards it. Never mind that binge-watching has been blamed for everything from political apathy to insomnia, attention deficiency to declining birthrates; as Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer put it, “binge-watching is the new normal”.
The year after Lilyhammer, Netflix released the show that really put it on the map as a producer: House of Cards, whose mix of big-name talent (David Fincher, Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright), buzzy political themes and cinema-standard production values were impossible to ignore. Netflix bid over the odds for the rights to the series – some $100m – and even took the unprecedented step of greenlighting a second season up front. It has continued to bring in the big names in the years since: Martin Scorsese, the Coen brothers, Noah Baumbach and Alfonso Cuarón (whose Roma won Netflix its first Oscars in 2019). It looks likely to figure again in this year’s race, with contenders such as Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter. The channel has courted big names from outside cinema, too, signing high-profile production deals with the likes of the Obamas and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
In truth, though, these are the exceptions rather than the rule. The typical Netflix programme is not created by Oscar winners or royals. Indeed, by design, there is no “typical” Netflix programme. Where mainstream broadcasting has traditionally taken a “one size fits all” approach to programming – with that one size being determined by a small upper echelon of executives – mainly straight, white, American and male – Netflix has taken the exact opposite approach, casting the net far and wide in search of fresh talent and tailoring content to underserved audiences.
This has been key to Netflix’s success, says Deborah Jaramillo, a professor of film and television at Boston University: “[Traditional TV] was putting the idea out there that there was one sort of universal experience that we could all attach to and identify with, when the reality was that we are many different people with many different backgrounds, needs and struggles. Those things were not being spoken to by the whole model of broadcast television.” Jaramillo hates the term “binge-watching”, she adds, with its connotations of guilt and sin. “I think it casts a negative light on active, exuberant television-viewing. Watching movie marathons or reading a book aren’t understood in the same way, even though you’re still engaged for long periods of time.”
Netflix has attracted Black film-makers and showrunners such as Ava DuVernay (who has delivered documentary 13th and series When They See Us and Colin in Black and White), Spike Lee (She’s Gotta Have It) and Shonda Rhimes (Bridgerton). It has championed LGBTQ+-friendly programming such as Orange Is the New Black, Sex Education and RuPaul’s Drag Race.
“One thing that Netflix does extremely well on the English-speaking side is content that others wouldn’t have done because there just wasn’t seemingly an audience for it,” says Julia Alexander, of Parrot Analytics. A great example for her is teen series and romcoms, shows such as Never Have I Ever, The Kissing Booth and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. “If you were a young girl or a woman between 14 and 34, there was no one really making television for you. And Netflix over the last 10 years really leaned into it and thought: ‘There’s an audience here. They’re hyper online and they will like it, it will become their identity.’”
It has done the same in many other areas: Japanese anime, adult-oriented animation, true-crime documentary, standup comedy, fantasy and sci-fi. It has also established footholds in territories including Spain, France, India and South Korea. As a result, non-English-language series that would otherwise never have travelled outside their country of origin have begun to find global audiences, such as Spain’s Money Heist, France’s Lupin and, most recently, South Korea’s phenomenally popular Squid Game.
Netflix matches this pluralistic approach with an unorthodox work culture, a senior Netflix UK producer explains: “Rather than a situation where you’ve got a massive hierarchy within a company, what you have is lots of people who have real agency and can make their own decisions, but they do it whilst keeping everybody else in the company super-informed.” Netflix also encourages extreme candour: employees are encouraged to give and receive honest feedback rather than sniping behind people’s backs. For British people especially, all of this takes a lot of getting used to, they say.
The UK is Netflix’s third biggest production hub, after the US and Canada, and it has invested massively here. But it has also moved the dial of British TV in general. Unrestrained by traditional management structures, public scrutiny and limited broadcasting slots, Netflix has been free to go where public service broadcasters could not. At a parliamentary committee hearing in 2020, for example, the MP Kevin Brennan questioned whether the BBC could have made a series such as The Crown, given the outrage it would have generated from politicians and hostile media outlets. One independent producer suggested that as a result of Netflix’s edgier British fare, like The Crown and Sex Education, the BBC and Channel 4 had been emboldened to commission riskier material such as Normal People, It’s a Sin and I May Destroy You.
Rather than a competitor, Netflix sees itself as part of the thriving ecosystem of British film and television production, it says. It cites the first season of The End of the F***ing World, which aired on Channel 4 in the UK, then on Netflix for the rest of the world. When the show returned for its second season, it had gained a global audience, which resulted in increased viewing numbers for Channel 4 – so a win-win.
It doesn’t always work out like that, though. Last year, Michaela Coel revealed she had been in discussions to make I May Destroy You with Netflix, but it refused to grant her any portion of the rights to her show, not even 0.5%. It told her “it’s not how we do things here”, Coel said. She took the show to the BBC and HBO instead. Netflix has declined to comment on that specific case, but says it does different deals with different producers. A spokesperson also points out that “for many of our commissions Netflix finances 100% of the budget, and thus bears the full risk of whether the show is ultimately a commercial success or not, while producers and rights holders are guaranteed their payment.”
Netflix has not always lived up to its diversity commitments, either. In October 2021 it released The Closer, the last of six standup specials by African American comedian Dave Chappelle. In the show, Chappelle made a number of comments that were widely condemned as transphobic, not least by Netflix’s own employees. Sarandos defended the show, emailing employees that Netflix’s leadership “do not believe that The Closer is intended to incite hatred or violence against anyone” and that “content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm”. Some Netflix workers staged a walkout in protest. The queer Australian comic Hannah Gadsby, who had filmed two standup specials for Netflix and was cited by Sarandos as a model of Netflix’s commitment to “marginalised communities”, responded on Instagram: “Fuck you and your amoral algorithm cult.” Sarandos swiftly backed down and apologised that he had “screwed up”, but the incident pointed to possible faultlines in Netflix’s model. Its desire to cater to all tastes had set two of its communities against each other.
A common criticism of Netflix is the extent to which it has atomised our viewing habits. Like Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, its model depends on presenting viewers with a never-ending succession of new content, tailored to their personal viewing habits so that they never cancel their subscription. This is where Netflix’s fabled algorithms really do come into play. Users’ behaviour data is cross-referenced with its 2,000 different “taste groups” to produce a unique homepage for each user, presenting categories and “because you watched” suggestions that might appeal. Combine this fine-grained approach with the “anytime, anywhere” availability of streaming content, and we’re heading for a landscape where we’re all in our own discrete entertainment realities, watching different things at different times.
With all this fracturing, does there come a point when film and TV no longer function as “popular culture”? So far, Netflix has managed to square this circle, generating mainstream hits while diversifying our tastes. Look at The Queen’s Gambit, for example, whose success led to a boom in sales of chess sets. Or how Squid Game became the network’s most watched series ever.
Can Netflix keep it up for another 10 years? Last month, for the first time, it announced worse-than-expected results that saw its share price drop an alarming 20%, wiping nearly $50bn off its value. Its rivals are finally catching up. Big media companies such as Disney, Universal and Warner have taken back their content and used it to build their own streaming platforms. Earlier this year, for example, some of Netflix’s popular titles, including Modern Family and How I Met Your Mother, migrated to Disney+, which could translate to a loss of 750,000 subscribers, according to analysts. Big tech players Apple and Amazon are also making inroads, fuelled by almost bottomless funds. Amazon Prime Video’s forthcoming Lord of the Rings series alone has a budget of nearly half a billion dollars. Even binge-watching is not what it used to be. Some of the most talked about rival shows of the past year, such as Disney’s The Mandalorian and WandaVision, and HBO’s Succession, have lodged in the public consciousness partly as a result of dropping their episodes once a week, old-school.
For the time being, at least, Netflix is one step ahead, says Julia Alexander: “They’re still dominant by, like, aeons,” she says. Comparisons are often difficult to draw, but Netflix’s largest comparable rival, Disney+, has about 100 million fewer subscribers. “Yes, competition is affecting Netflix, but at the same time Netflix is hitting a saturation point in the US and Canada, they’re making up for that in regions its competitors still aren’t even in.” Netflix is still growing globally, especially in Asia and Latin America. And it now has production centres across the world: Spain, France, Germany, Brazil, South Korea and more.
“They’re in these regions, they have access to the talent, they have the partnerships,” says Alexander. “And these are places where Disney and Warner and NBC and Viacom all are going to want to be in, but [those companies] are still building up their presence in the United States and Canada. So it feels like they’re playing two different games at this point: everyone is going to wind up wanting to be a global player, but one of the only real global players right now is Netflix.”
We’ve come a long way from Lilyhammer. One key difference between Netflix and its rivals is that it is not part of any larger media or retail or hardware business. Netflix is just Netflix. It lives and dies by the popularity of its content. In theory, therefore, it has a deeper interest in giving us what we really want to watch. Although given the past 10 years, it seems to have a better idea of what that is than we do ourselves.
