Netflix and the value of streaming shovelware

Bloomberg published a pretty startling report yesterday revealing that several huge Netflix series are really struggling in their second season. For instance, One Piece, the live action anime adaptation, lost almost half its audience between seasons. (I’m included in that drop, didn’t come back for the second one.) The second season of Beef had an even crazier tumble, going from around 30 million views in its first outing to barely 10 million in its second. (I watched that one and actually forgot about it entirely.)

If you read any of the comments about this story on Reddit or X, you’re going to see the same thing from pretty much everyone: “We got 120-plus episodes of LOST in six years,” one user wrote. “We got 42 episodes of Stranger Things in nine years.” Which is no doubt part of the problem. Another user pointed out that we’ll have to wait until 2027 before we get a second season of Blue Eye Samurai, which came out in 2023. (Another show I loved, but completely forgot exists.)

According to Bloomberg, both dramas and comedies are suffering equally. But comedian Adam Conover put out a great video essay last week that went deeper into how comedies, in particular, are suffering in the streaming age. Conover highlights a bunch of problems — lack of studio audiences, bloated over-arching plotlines meant for binging, smaller writers’ rooms — but basically comes to the same conclusion as everyone else. You can’t get to know characters if you have to wait years to watch another season. Even newer streaming sitcoms, like FX’s Adults, which will, this year, put out its second season in as many years, and is not on Netflix, will still have only run for 12 episodes total.

But there’s also the issue of Netflix’s season three curse, or the oft-repeated gripe from viewers that the streamer tends to cancel the majority of their shows before the third season. Which may be training viewers to not even bother getting invested until a show is popular enough to last. There are a lot of theories as to why this happens, but I think this 2019 Deadline report sounds the most plausible. Basically, Netflix pays upfront production costs for both originals and outside productions, owns the international distribution, and offers a massive pay bump if the show makes it to season three. This makes sense if your business model is based on gaining new subscriptions. You’re not buying long-running audience-sustaining properties to reliably run ads against. You’re buying newness. So there’s very little incentive in, say, building a solid audience for your live action Avatar: The Last Airbender adaptation, but there’s a huge incentive in announcing you have one.

But what’s fascinating about this is how closely it mirrors the problems happening across the digital media landscape right now. Even though a Netflix show isn’t supported by the same revenue model as a YouTuber like MrBeast, the (losing) formula for producing content appears to be the same. They’re both using historical data to iterate and pump out videos that are, at first, equally popular, but eventually less sticky culturally and then eventually less popular. The shows and movies — or, for simplicity’s sake, content — that are actually doing well on platforms like Netflix paint an even more dire picture of what’s happening to the streamer’s audience. Right now, Netflix’s biggest piece of content is I Will Find You, their thirteenth adaptation of a Harlan Coben novel, and, crucially, a limited series. Netflix has adapted so many Coben novels that Esquire wrote recently, “There is something almost Kafkaesque about Netflix's commitment to adapting Coben’s novels, like a civil servant endlessly stamping forms whose purpose has long been forgotten—or a photocopier stuck on print mode.”

I imagine this was part of the reason Netflix barreled into the world of podcasting. Which apparently hasn’t worked either.

And in a recent Atlantic post-mortem on Lizzo’s disastrous new album, they point out the same trend is happening in the streaming music world. “This is why the Billboard Hot 100 over the past few years has largely occluded into a repository for easy-listening music,” they wrote. “Even Taylor Swift seems to be calibrating for the audience’s growing disinterest and distraction.” (Probably why she rented out Madison Square Garden for a wedding/concert that you will almost certainly be able to watch on Disney Plus at some point.)

This is downward slump into easy-listening muzak, or, as I’ve seen some call it, “streaming shovelware,” is something that anyone who has ever made content online knows acutely well. Hell, anyone that has ever had an unexpectedly viral Instagram post has probably had a taste of this. If you follow the data you will eventually just make mass appeal nothingness. And if you do that for too long, people will just stop coming back. Or, in Netflix’s case, they’ll just go half-watch the same nothing on a free platform.

President Donald Trump’s hideous and embarrassing Great American State Fair came to a humiliating end on Saturday. White nationalist militia Patriot Front marched through Washington in the sweltering heat, which made more than a few of them look like they had pissed their khakis. They also couldn’t figure out the subway again. Sad. Footage on X of that here and here.

And then, on Saturday night, as Trump was waiting to make his big speech (and watching a literal Fox News broadcast of himself watching Fox News’ broadcast of himself), storm clouds rolled in. An evacuation order was declared, only for Trump to go on Truth Social and tell all his supporters to stay and wait for him. A whole bunch of Trump supporters ended up sheltering in the African American Museum as the storm passed. Many others clashed with law enforcement outside.

If you want to see a good supercut of the whole miserable affair, journalist Emily Miller seems to have tried to make a fun recap video of the day, but it looks like absolute hell on Earth lol.

According to NOTUS, the Treasury Department is sitting on a draft of report that warns that the AI market is looking extremely bubbly right now. And even more exciting, it seems like the Treasury Department agrees with our analysis that the AI bubble looks a hell of a lot like the dot com bubble of the early 2000s. If you haven’t seen our video on this yet, you can watch it below.

According to NOTUS, which has seen the report, it says that, unlike the dot com companies that went bust in the 2000s, the current wobbly AI behemoths could “send shockwaves throughout the entire economic ecosystem.”

One ray of sunshine here is that the draft report argued that a complete crash wasn’t as likely. One thing AI companies have gotten mostly right so far is that they aren’t as dependent on debt financing. Though, they are very dependent on circular financing. In fact, Meta last week announced that they plan to start selling AI compute power to other AI services. Uh oh!

On Friday, I wrote about Lasse Lund, a Finnish-Norwegian man who claims that he was abandoned on the streets of Mumbai as a teenager. He’s currently making a documentary about his time in India and demanding some kind of help from the Norwegian government. A few Finnish and Norwegian news outlets have looked into his story and found that some of it checks out, while a lot of it is basically impossible to prove.

The reason I finally wrote about Lund, who has become something of a fascination among the anti-Indian racists on X, is that he showed up on a Duel casino stream last week. And this week he attended the World Cup in what appears to be an official partnership with Kalshi.

We’ve been using the term “Chudtech” for the new crop of sweaty dude apps like Kick, Kalshi, Polymarket, Stake, and Duel. They cycle every new viral Hawk-Tuah-Of-The-Week in and out of their branded videos and livestreams, like a decentralized Jerry Springer Show watched by the internet’s most gambling-addicted and goonerfied teenage boys. I assume this entire world will completely cease to exist the minute these companies run out of VC fun money.

Frank Watkinson is, well, an old guy who posts acoustic guitar covers on YouTube. I think I’ve featured his videos in Garbage Day before. I think his Blink-182 cover is really nice. His Death Cab For Cutie cover got really popular during the early days of COVID lockdown.

He just did a commercial with KFC. He covered “Linger” by The Cranberries to, uh, advertise KFC’s new chicken tenders, I guess. The spot was created by ad agency Mother.

What I think is most interesting about this campaign is that it features someone who got popular from the internet, but it isn’t dependent on you knowing who he is or ever having seen his videos before. In that way it feels very in line with recent Hollywood YouTuber-driven projects like Obsession or Backrooms. Which I think is a lot more interesting! There’s talented people on YouTube, just let them be talented in the thing you’re making. I also think that if enough ad agencies and Hollywood studios start doing this it could maybe move the center of gravity away on YouTube away from viral garbage and back towards interesting stuff that’s liked by real human beings! Maybe I’m just being naive lol.

P.S. here’s a cool new cafe that just opened up.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***