The Guide #266: The knives are out at Netflix – maybe now it will make something worth watching

In this week’s newsletter: Stalling subscriber numbers have led to a corporate bloodbath, but the streaming giant has an inherent quality problem that will be a lot harder to fix

In all the fevered hype around a certain three-hour, form-breaking documentary portrait of a disgraced tech CEO, another big Hollywood story this week has been relatively sidelined: the drama at Netflix, where sluggish subscriber numbers and a general lack of Wall Street enthusiasm has led to a remarkable spree of sackings. A thousand employees, or 6% of its entire workforce, have been laid off – including some very big names. Among a clutch of other execs, chief content officer Bela Bajaria – the figure most synonymous with Netflix’s tone and ethos over the past decade – has been fired. The company’s head of film, Dan Lin, has gone too. That shade of red on the streamer’s logo has never looked more bloody. You Can See Everything getting very messy indeed.

We’ve been here before, of course. Netflix – giant, controversial, inescapable – is the sort of company people love to make grand speculations about. Pencils were sharpened in 2022 when Netflix lost subscribers for the first time and saw its share price plummet as a result, before the company enjoyed a notable resurgence. Just as the obituaries written for the streamer were premature then, writing it off now would be foolish too.

But a cull of this magnitude is still telling, indicating that Netflix itself thinks something has gone badly awry – particularly in terms of the actual stuff it’s been pumping out. Bajaria was the exec who famously likened the streamer’s programming to a “gourmet cheeseburger”; a premium product that was also highly snackable. Her exit suggests that recipe isn’t as appealing to viewers as it once was.

It’s a question that gets asked more often than the streamer would like: when was the last time you watched a truly great new show on Netflix? Adolescence tends to be a popular answer, but that series (a limited run of only four episodes, let’s remember) was released 18 months ago. This year the cupboard has been extraordinarily bare. You might make a case for How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, or East of Eden at a push, but neither feel unmissably brilliant. And the streamer’s record with returning series is strikingly shaky, with precipitous audience drop-offs for shows’ second seasons.

Netflix’s quality issue is baked into its very model. The limitations of the company’s all-at-once, binge-friendly release strategy have been obvious for some time, resulting in shows that burn brightly but briefly for a week or two, before disappearing from the cultural conversation. But just as damaging, I’d argue, is a complete disinterest in cultivating shows with the potential for real staying power. Shows are often cancelled right as they are finding their voice, and flashy limited series with big names are prioritised over ones that could run and run. (Name-led series tend to take longer to return too, due to their stars’ many other commitments.) With the exception of cosy heartlands romantic drama Virgin River and Black Mirror (a bit of an outlier given it is an anthology series and debuted on another platform, Channel 4), no current Netflix drama has been airing for more than four seasons.

Netflix isn’t alone in its aversion to lasting, sprawling TV: in this era, post-the golden age of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad and the like, shows have tended to get shorter both in season and episode counts, with bigger gaps between seasons. TV as a whole feels less ambitious and substantial – not to mention reliably delivered – than it once did. But it is Netflix, as the chief disruptor of the old TV model, that bears the most responsibility for this shift – and that is perhaps most vulnerable as a result. It has become, for many, a platform that is clicked on to out of habit, rather than rushed to in fevered anticipation of the latest episode of a great show.

Perhaps that will change in the wake of all the corporate bloodletting; the new chief content officer, British industry veteran Peter Rice, has been talked up for his excellent taste, having overseen a dynamite run of films (28 Days Later, Sideways, Juno) when he was head of the Fox Searchlight studio. Or perhaps it doesn’t really matter either way: habit is a strong drug, and Netflix equals TV for many people. Indeed, its primary rival, in its own estimation, is not the BBC or Disney+ or the like, but YouTube, which is why it has been trying to hoover up many of the same things that are popular on that platform: influencer videos, podcasts, live sport.

Netflix has long dreamed of being the “everything store”, a place that has all the content you could ever need – which is a fine ambition. I just wish there was something good to watch on it once in a while.