Navigating the Digital Slums

On the Problems Facing Streaming Studios

An unfinished draft of this went out on Wednesday and I’ve only today had a chance to revisit it. Thanks to those of you who read it anyways. You’re troopers.¹

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I worked at multiple Movie Gallerys from 2003-2008.

Video stores have proven to be one of the martyrs of the digital revolution that I most wish would return. The whole process of perusing a video library, evoking very similar feelings to walking amongst the stacks in a university library, opened up conversations with other people on a regular basis. And it meant almost always making a discovery that surprised you. By contrast, streaming services don’t offer the same thing. Browsing or clicking through tremendous online libraries actually makes it harder to pick something out worth watching, and there’s never a polo-shirt wearing minimum wage worker nearby to give any casual advice.

But it is not only this lack of humanity that creates problems for the Streamers (i.e. Amazon Prime, Paramount+, Disney+, Apple TV+ . . . you get the idea). They also suffer from ideological problems that don’t seem to have a solution in sight. I remember, in 2019, when these “Plus” apps were launching with regularity, that the primary concern was market saturation. I was at a conference when the Warner Bros. DC Comics service was peaking in popularity because it offered comics and movies, TV shows, etc. Yet the general view was that the marketplace simply couldn’t support such a venture, and within a few months, HBO subsumed much of the content for their service. And so it goes.

The big change, in my mind, came when the Streamers began to focus on creating Original Content (or what is commonly called IP, Intellectual Property). These efforts to make themselves serious competitors to traditional studios in Hollywood provoked new problems that I would not have anticipated. While much of Hollywood’s problem stems from a nausea inducing navel gazing, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Streamers don’t suffer from the same issue. Rather, each one seems to have adopted some specific ideological concern (perhaps coming from the singular person appointed over content creation), and this somehow infects everything they produce. ²

Back when TV was wholesome . . .

Netflix has a Quality Problem, producing a huge amount of content which is mostly terrible. “But Stranger Things! Wednesday! Squid Game!” Exactly. Three creative endeavors have succeeded, maybe a few more, out of the hundreds they produced. But this also means they are batting way less than .500. The belief that quantity is better than quality seems to touch everything they do, embedded into their philosophy of creation. This is, I think, one of the reasons they have pivoted so hard to live television and comedy; it means they don’t have to be creatively responsible for anything. This almost certainly means that the upcoming Narnia adaptations will be a catastrophe (rather than a eucatastrophe). And the CEO’s recent comments are not reassuring in the slightest.

Netflix CEO Mocks Moviegoers: Theaters Are Dead!

Amazon Prime has what I call an Adaptation Problem. The most successful things they’ve produced are adaptations of already existing material, while their wholly original content is disastrous (I’m looking at you Citadel). What’s even stranger is that the adaptations they’ve successfully put out also have an Attitude Problem; these are shows where nothing conventional is allowed to stand and inversion is the only thing that governs the show. This is true of Reacher, The Boys, Invincible, etc. I didn’t watch Rings of Power, but from what I gather this is true there as well. This will likely carry over to their plans for James Bond, but maybe not?

Apple TV+ has perhaps the most interesting, and perplexing, problem: an Ethics Problem. I don’t mean that they create unethical shows or that they only conceive of their programming as a moral responsibility (though these may be true). The very best shows on Apple TV+ all suffer from an ethical cognitive dissonance that sometimes appears on other platforms, but doesn’t seem to infect everything on those others as it does on Tim Cook’s platform.

This Ethics Problem is born, I think, out of two primary issues. 1) The creators of these shows want a Christian ethic. and 2) The creators of these shows reject a Christian ethic. While I hope to eventually write up longer thoughts on how this is evident in Foundation, Ted Lasso and Bad Monkey, I offer here a brief look at another shows which demonstrate what I mean: Monarch.

Monarch surprised me with its quality. The casting, cinematography, and pacing were all really well done. And it added to the Godzilla story without creating any awkward dependency issues (a problem which plagued Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. throughout its turbulent lifespan). Specifically, the portrayal of the same character by Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell made the show something worth watching. While that hook is enough of a draw in my mind, the show is really about the ethics of relationships, families, and destiny. The Randa family who primarily drives the story is constantly dealing with their own betrayals, selfishness, shortcomings, and an inexplicable connection to the monsters of the Monsterverse that they have to sort out if they are ever going to know any kind of peace.

Anna Sewai’s Cate Randa staring down Godzilla in Monarch

Does that sound like a lot? It is, and its constant ethical tension only makes things worse. While the show is fascinating on many levels, it is ten hours of ethical cognitive dissonance as characters ping pong back and forth between sacrificing everything for their family and selfishly choosing themselves over everything else. The show wants to say something meaningful about how families can forge strong bonds in the face of adversity, but it is so caught up in holding out emotivism as the correct paradigm for the modern world that the show never finds any kind of stable ethical platform. In the end, it’s unclear who the monster is (is it Cate? her father? her grandmother? or one of the literal monsters? Who knows?) and the show refuses to make it plain. Perhaps season 2 will find something to ground it, but I’m not hopeful.

Even the role of Godzilla in the show operates along some sort of God-adjacent questioning. The first film, Godzilla (2014) handled this question in a truly interesting way, which the subsequent films have dodged in favor of a more action-oriented approach (see the clip below for an example of what I mean).³ Monarch brought the philosophical questions back into the story, but at the ground level. By focusing on the Randa siblings specifically, the door was reopened to ask interesting questions about man, his nature, and his relationships. But to do this well, some sort of transcendental aspect must be recognized (at the least) and the show simply cannot move out of the realm of “my feelings are my truth.” It hamstrings what is otherwise an interesting show, and leaves the viewer wondering if we’ll get to see more monster fights in the future.

This is a prime example of Apple TV+’s Ethical Problem. They are making shows that exists in the shadow of a Christian ethic, but they really don’t want to acknowledge or engage that ethic in any way. I don’t know exactly what this means for the future of their programming, but I doubt it means these shows will end up saying anything of value. This is a good example of why the current state of streaming shows is a long way off from replicating the endurance of the Greek tragedies or the Morality plays. These streaming shows come very close to saying something profound, but balk because it gets them too close to Christianity. I hope the makers of The Chosen take note.

1. This has happened a couple of times over the past two years, but typically the drafts are so close to finished that I correct them on Wednesday or Thursday. But this one felt, well, incomplete. Such situations remind me why having an editor is so helpful for professional publishing.

2. I acknowledge out the gate that these problems appear across multiple platforms. But what strikes me is how they seem to be more of a problem for the specific Streamers I’ve outlined.

3. This is a fine strategy in my mind. If you can’t figure out something profound to say in a movie about giant monsters that fight each other, best stick to the spectacle aspects and leave the philosophy alone.