The Apex Predator of Mid TV
We live in the era of mid TV, which is defined by an overwhelming abundance of competently crafted but fundamentally unambitious television. If you ask your friend to rate the latest mid TV show they’ve watched, they will inevitably give it a “B-, maybe a B.”
FX’s Shogun, which dominated the Golden Globes this year, is the quintessential example of mid TV. (That Shogun harbors “prestige” pretensions only makes it more mid.)
Shogun looks impressive. Occasionally, it even feels impressive. If pressed, I would probably give it a B-, maybe a B. But, like all mid TV shows, Shogun can’t combine its promising ingredients into a compelling dish.
The show’s foundational problem is that it doesn’t trust its audience. The protagonist spends almost the entire series yelling in disbelief at various Japanese customs (we get it! You’re foreign!). Meanwhile, the show’s titular Shogun, Yoshi Toranaga, isn’t so much a character as an all-powerful puppet master, occasionally popping by to explain his comically intricate plots to you, the credulous viewer.
Which… I guess is what people want?
Netflix leadership has begun mandating that shows and movies which fall into this category feature lots of dialogue where characters clearly explain what they're doing and announce their intentions. The purpose is to ensure that users who aren't watching, and only partly paying attention, can keep up with the story and follow along while distracted. The result is an abundance of exposition by characters recapping things they just did, are doing, or are about to do. (Emphasis mine.)
It would be easy for me to bemoan this development, to excoriate the art-hating executives behind this strategic shift.
It’s what I want to do.
But, alas, I can’t quite summon the rage. Netflix is merely responding to our environment, and it’s our environment more than anything that ensures we’ll never see another Mad Men.
As ever, the problem is attention.
Show runners like Vince Gilligan, who created Breaking Bad, could once assume that the people tuning into their shows actually watched them. But now, the viewer’s attention is eternally half-split, either because they’re literally viewing another screen, or because the mere thought of that screen — lying dormant in a pocket or on an end table — occupies a mass of our brains that will never be relinquished. We are always and everywhere producing a mental model of that screen’s infinite possibilities: annoying Slack messages we might receive, possible texts to send, all the beautifully crafted apps we could randomly decide to drag-down-to-refresh. We are computers whose chipset is permanently running the world’s most frivolous subroutine.
No wonder we can’t drive anymore…
Or, it seems, do something as passive as watch a moderately intelligent television show.
The trough overfloweth
Granted, there are worse things than mid TV. You are welcome to blame Netflix for those.
Take the “boxing match” between Logan Paul and Mike Tyson, which evidently every single person in America watched (yes, including me — I’m not too good for the slop I’m bemoaning).
I got the feeling — watching the fight — that it would have been the perfect moment for the world to end.
“In this corner… from Westlake, Ohio… an avatar of the attention economy who leveraged his celebrity into a lucrative boxing side hustle!”
“And, in this corner… from Brooklyn, New York… a thoughtful old man who channeled the pain of his upbringing into boxing excellence… undone by the cruel and ceaseless march of time… reduced to one last pathetic cash grab!”
“Watch! Watch now as the former beats up the latter as a too-obvious metaphor for the moral values of our fallen world!”
“Youth over wisdom!”
“Spectacle over substance!”
“Mediocrity over craftsmanship!”
Sorry… I got carried away.
Plus, as gross as the spectacle was (I needed to take a shower afterward), you can still only pin so much of the blame on Netflix. They have merely responded to the realities of our attentional environment in an impressively ruthless way.
Like many men, I love to think about the Roman Empire. So let me draw a comparison that would no doubt drive a historian crazy.
During Nero’s reign, things got pretty bad. So bad that people needed a distraction. But it needed to be a big distraction. That’s why Nero’s successors built the Colosseum and filled it with the most ghoulish entertainment imaginable.
Spectacle stifled rebellion.
Today, our collective attention has been shattered by the modern equivalent of Nero: smartphones, social media, and algorithmic short-form video. Whereas you might have once earned America’s attention by making something, I dunno, good, you now require something shameless and fleeting: Watch an unrealistic number of Japanese people commit seppuku! Take Greenland, or the Panama Canal! Tune in to watch a legendary boxer maybe die!
The business model of mid
I used to find it odd that Netflix optimized for viewing time even though they’re a subscription business. In theory, the beauty of a subscription model is that the choice to renew or cancel is more nuanced — and dare I say more human? — than mere consumption. For example, I like The Economist precisely because it publishes weekly, not in spite of it. I even like that it studiously maintains a “classical liberal” point-of-view that I 70% agree with and 30% drives me crazy. I hire my subscription services to do a job, and if they succeed in that job, I won’t cancel.
Unlike the executives of Netflix, I’m an idiot.
Netflix realized something fundamental about internet economics: In theory, it’s possible for someone to appreciate having fewer, better shows, but in practice, Netflix is competing for consumption time against “free” services like YouTube and Instagram. Since these ad-driven platforms are among the most powerful businesses ever to exist, Netflix must compete on their terms, not those that have traditionally structured the pay-TV industry.
We once spent money to let David Chase and David Simon cook. Now we pay for background noise.
With this context in mind, the brilliance of Netflix’s announcement comes more clearly into focus. Instead of competing against TikTok and Instagram for viewing time, Netflix will take as given that you’re on TikTok and Instagram while “watching” their latest show. Netflix has effectively doubled the amount of screen time available for Big Tech to monetize! (Of course, that says nothing about the quality of that attention, but what’s bad for your relationship with your loved ones is good for Big Tech: distraction makes you more manipulable.)
Frankly, I dislike my own analysis, but it’s given me a new appreciation for Netflix, which I’ve long struggled to appreciate for what it so clearly is: The apex predator of our modern media environment, delivering earnings beat after earnings beat by remaining eternally adaptable.
Everyone is familiar with how the company transitioned from sending DVDs in the mail to streaming, but there have been more subtle shifts throughout its history. These shifts, more than anything, have kept the company on top.
When quality TV was the primary way of acquiring new customers, Netflix produced quality content, famously saying, “We want to become HBO before HBO can become Netflix.” But they never cared about being HBO — they cared about dominance. Now that we live in a state of permanent distraction, Netflix has pivoted again, producing content that accommodates the dark matter in our brains.
Not many businesses can shift their model — let alone their cultural attitudes — so gracefully.
For example, contrast Netflix with the NBA, whose ratings are down, leading to an extremely tedious discourse about What’s Gone Wrong: too many threes, some say; too much foreign talent, others opine; or maybe the NBA’s biggest stars — LeBron, Steph, and KD — have simply gotten old, playing for mostly irrelevant teams that sop up the attention that should be going to the next generation of stars like Anthony Edwards and Victor Wembanyama.
But I think the explanation is simpler: There are too many games! No single game matters enough to force a viewer to tune in. (Maybe Nikola Jokić could box Mike Tyson in an upcoming Nuggets game?)
The NBA’s 82-game schedule was built for a different environment, when there was a dearth of content and people needed to leave their house (!?!?) to do things. In the new environment, a 50-game schedule would be better both for the fan and ultimately for the business (at least in the long-run). But the short-run pain of losing content supply is inconceivable to owners, players, and business partners.
That inability to adapt — however justifiable — is natural selection at work.
Modern art
For one beautiful, fleeting moment, we lived in an environment that lent itself to the production of TV masterpieces: The Sopranos is one of the greatest artistic achievements ever, in any medium. The shows that followed — The Wire, Mad Men, The Leftovers — are wonderful, too.
Although we’ve long appreciated these shows in and of themselves, we’ve failed to appreciate the environment that nurtured them. It was like we had a world that selected for beautiful plumage, making Wilson’s bird-of-paradise its dominant species:
Of course that world was temporary! It had to be. The real survivors — the species that last through the eons — are adaptable, functional, resilient, ugly. They’re sharks and horseshoe crabs, cyanobacteria and cockroaches.
Picture the scene:
The apocalypse has occurred (maybe it happened during the second fight between Logan Paul and Mike Tyson). The cockroaches are all that remain. They seek comfort in the warm glow of a broken TV. Emily in Paris plays on an endless loop.
“Are you sad?” Emily says to her lover.
“I was sad,” he says, “but being with you makes me happy. I’m happy now and want to kiss you.”
“Wow,” she says. “I would like that.”
“You would?”
“Yes, follow through on your desire to kiss me.”
As they embrace, the cockroaches scurry across the television screen, obscuring Emily from view.
Whoop, sorry… I got carried away again.
In summary, art is good. Netflix’s new content guidelines are bad.