The Age of Netflix Read online

  The regime of TV viewing is thus very different from the cinema: TV does not encourage the same degree of spectator concentration. There is no surrounding darkness, no anonymity of the fellow viewers, no large image, no lack of movement amongst the spectators, no rapt attention. TV is not usually the only thing going on, sometimes it is not even the principal thing. TV is treated casually rather than concentratedly. It is something of a last resort (“What’s on TV tonight, then?”) rather than a special event. It has a lower degree of sustained concentration from its viewers, but a more extended period of watching and more frequent use than cinema.18

  In its transition from “visual radio,” through to “video theater,” and finally to domestic appliance, the remediation of television indicates shifting terms of comparison as well as associated shifts in the audience relationship to the television.

  From one perspective, the model of the distracted television glance within the domestic setting might be seen as even more distracted in the current era. Thus House of Cards actor Kevin Spacey, presenting the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival in 2013, characterized the shift in television viewing this way:

  Now when I think about what the MacTaggart lecture was like 40 years ago…. I imagine that the audience … probably went home … and shared that time-honored tradition when the entire family would gather around the television set…. Today, when I think about how all of you might go home…. It’s more likely you’ve already recorded It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) on your DVR, as you gamely try to gather the family around the giant movie screen that you’ve installed in what used to be the garage; then you can try to find out where your children are on Facebook; you might ask your partner to stop Instagramming photos … of the meal that they’ve just ordered … while Grandma desperately pins even more pictures of cats on her Pinterest page, as your son quietly and surreptitiously clears his entire browser history, and your daughter Tweets how boring It’s a Wonderful Life is … you too will feel that warm family glow of precious time when we all come together to basically ignore each other.19

  If we take Spacey’s perspective, we might see ourselves as hyper-distracted, multi-tasking television viewers. Of course, Ellis’s notion of the distracted television viewer was always inherently one of the multi-tasker who might be engaged in other domestic activities in between—or while in the process of—watching television. The difference, then, is not so much the multitasking itself, but rather the simultaneous multitasking across various media platforms. As Amanda D. Lotz argues, “We may continue to watch television, but the new technologies available to us require new rituals of use.”20

  Spacey’s imaginary contemporary family audience calls to mind what new media theorist Dan Harries has referred to as the blurring of “old media viewing and new media using as ‘viewsing.’”21 It also reflects what Stephen E. Dinehart has called the viewer/user/player, or VUP, for although Spacey frames his multitasking family within a discourse of distraction, it is also possible—and indeed increasingly likely—that the other media we might be using while watching television could be related to the series we are in the process of watching.22 This extends the nature of our engagement with the series even as it diverts our attention from being focused solely on the television text. The television glance may still be in operation here, but it is a far more complex in the new media context.

  Against the concept of the hyper-distracted contemporary television viewer, we must—at one at the same time—allow for its near opposite, the intensely engaged binge-viewer. The sketch-comedy series Portlandia (2011–) illustrates this intensity take to ridiculous extremes in “One Moore Episode” (2012), in which a couple become so entranced with the rebooted Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009) that they lose their jobs and suffer all manner of physical discomforts—including crusty eyes and bladder infections—all in the name of continuing their binge-viewing. This particular form of binge engagement with television is, then, more focused, more intense, more all-consuming than its cinematic counterpart. Even if we only take into account the practical element of duration of sustained engagement—that is, the total running time that we devote to viewing in one sitting—the idea of television being characterized by a distracted domestic glance is reconfigured in this context. The domestic setting allows us to devote so very many continuous hours to the one program. We are particularly able to binge on our favorite programs at home because we can be comfy in our jammies in bed, or allow ourselves to become crusty and disgusting—as in Portlandia—without anyone seeing. We can also both time-shift and space-shift our viewing to other locations, and in the case of Netflix, very easily pick up where we left off.

  Many commentators both in the popular press and scholarly writing have noted that binge-viewing changes how we experience television, and have reframed this form of television spectatorship in reference to other media. Michael Z. Newman and Elena Levine argue that “the intensity of uninterrupted viewing makes the experience of a TV show more like that [of] a book or film.”23 This common comparison, and the ongoing process of television remediation more broadly, is an attempt to grapple with shifts in spectatorship, but we should be wary of completely dismissing the discourse of distraction. While our Portlandia couple becomes incredibly resentful that anyone would want to contact them while viewing Battlestar, they still manage to order take-out, and text a friend to get out of a social event. The intense absorption of the Portlandia couple in the television text, and their unwillingness to be distracted from it, does not preclude other domestic, social, and media distractions to their viewing, even as they prioritize the television to a ridiculous extent. What we have today, then, is both the hyper-distracted glancing viewer and the focused binge-viewer enabled by co-existing technologies at the same cultural moment, even potentially in the same viewer.

  Before DVD box sets and streaming services were even available, fan engagement with television texts suggest that the medium has always been capable of attracting our focused attention (and not just our casual glance), depending on our level of interest in a particular program. Matt Hills argues that the advent of DVD box sets “enable[d] fans to set their own pace of consumption, ‘bingeing’ on a series by watching multiple episodes at any one time if the narrative pull is sufficient.”24 Yet as Lotz argues, broadcast television, cable, or DVD require “viewers … to negotiate contradictory fan motivations—viewing as soon as available versus” viewing all at once.25 This is where Netflix steps in; its marketing strategy very much centered on resolving that conflict. In the contemporary era, bingeing in particular need not be characterized as a fandom practice per se any more but simply as a contemporary viewing norm. In Portlandia, binge-watching becomes associated with an obsessive form of fandom, as the couple seeks out an unsuspecting man in their city who happens to share the name of Battlestar’s executive producer and writer Ronald D. Moore, in order to press him into writing more episodes. The Portlandia couple’s obsession with Battlestar only dissipates when a new program is found to be binge-worthy—Doctor Who (1963–1989, 1996, 2005–).26 If the majority of viewers now engage in binge-viewing, it becomes an example of the argument mounted by Hills, Henry Jenkins, and Joshua Green that marginal fan activities tend to become mainstream over time, and indeed are increasingly encouraged as a promotional strategy.27 The ongoing transition towards normalization is important to the way in which we conceptualize binge-viewing—and indeed fandom—because associations with excess become more difficult to sustain. Who, then, is to say what constitutes excess in terms of television viewing?

  Epic-Viewing

  Netflix markets itself as “the future of television,” situating itself as a new form of television that goes beyond the previously dominant temporal norms, such that excess is positioned positively.28 In her work on the epic in cinema and television, Vivian Sobchack suggests that “an excess of temporality finds it form in, or ‘equals,’ extended duration,” of going beyond the
normal running time.29 While Sobchack specifically focuses on the epic as a genre, she also claims that “what signifies temporal excess is not universal but culturally and historically determined.”30 Netflix’s strategy of designing and releasing texts such as House of Cards based upon the assumption and encouragement of consecutive viewing has become one of the new signifiers of temporal excess in Sobchack’s terms.

  From May through June 2015, Samsung Australia put out a joint promotion for its UHD TVs with a six-month complementary Netflix subscription. The broadcast television and YouTube advertisement depicted a couple who, like Frank Underwood of House of Cards, loathe “the necessity of sleep,” as they press on for “just one more episode.”31 On HBO, if you want one more episode of Game of Thrones (2011–), you have to wait another week. If you want one more episode of House of Cards, you can just keep watching. Netflix’s marketing and delivery model is thereby based upon an assumed and encouraged mode of consumption that exceeds the temporality of its competitors, and consolidates a new temporal norm for television. With Amazon Prime making Transparent (2014–) available all at once “à la Netflix,” and NBC “taking a cue from Netflix” by releasing a full season of Aquarius (2015–2016), both streaming and broadcast television providers are starting to copy this model, but tellingly in popular discourse it is always with reference to the game changer, Netflix.32

  Because Sobchack’s primary frame of reference is the epic film, she suggests that the genre’s transfer to television in the form of the miniseries in the 1970s and 1980s constituted a “formal debasement of the genre.”33 Free broadcast television, she argues, created a medium with “lowered expectations.”34 For Sobchack, the broadcast miniseries formally alters the “temporal field” of the Hollywood historical epic, into an “episodic and fragmented exhibition.”35 It is a decline in spatial terms of the screen size; in temporal terms of the length and cohesion of the text; and in terms of spectatorship. The history of television’s response to the cinematic epic in fact reaches back to the 1950s and 1960s, as children’s programs and one-off specials attempted to harness the popularity of the epic, albeit within the considerable limitations of television.36 From this historical, medium-specific vantage point, the miniseries of the 1970s and 1980s was, rather, an expansion of scale.37 Regardless, Sobchack suggests that television is unable to match the experience of the cinematic epic, arguing that the epic film demands an act of spectator endurance that heightens one’s awareness of bodily temporality.38 She writes:

  On the one hand, experiencing this extraordinary cinematic duration, the spectator as a body-subject is made more presently aware than usual of his or her bodily presence—indeed, is “condemned” to the present and physically “tested” by the length of the film’s duration. On the other hand, however, enduring the film in the present imprints the body with a brute sense of the possibility of transcending the present, of the literal and material capacity of [a] human being to continue and last through events.39

  As Sobchack is keen to point out, our human awareness of our own temporality is always “culturally encoded,” and therefore subject to variation within and across cultures and time periods.40 In our current era, heightened temporality is sent up in both the Portlandia skit and the Samsung Netflix promotion, a feat of television endurance in which just one more episode is never enough. For the 70 percent of U.S. viewers watching television successively, surely by comparison it is the cinema—regardless of its visual scale—that begins to feel very small in temporal terms, its narrative and character development squeezed into only two to three hours running time.41 The “elevation and transcendence of individual temporality” in Sobchack’s terms thereby finds new and even extended expression in successive television viewing.42 While Sobchack focuses on the epic as a genre with specific thematic and iconographic features, epic-viewing in the contemporary era is a mode of consumption that transcends genre, “an excess of temporality” that is manifested across a vast range of program types as we experience them in one, epic expanse.

  While heightened temporality may well be a feature of all television bingeing, it is particularly pertinent for the Netflix production model that assumes and encourages a continuous streaming session. We can already indulge in an act of viewer endurance across an extended period time with any program of any genre, using DVD box sets, cable marathons or recorded content, streaming “box sets,” or Netflix’s considerable licensed back-catalog.43 Netflix’s delivery makes the process easier to both commence and continue, either in the one sitting, or in consecutive sittings, with the ease of picking up where we left off across multiple media platforms. In this regard, streaming services such as Netflix offer a far more streamlined textual and temporal experience than earlier media forms. Netflix has set up an alignment between this extensive viewing experience and the immediacy of its brand new, high-end content. While its competitors weigh the merits of following their lead, currently Netflix is able to offer a number of new programs in full seasons, and then use its extensive library to keep viewers as a secondary branding point. Thus in the lead-up to the launch of Netflix in Australia in March 2015, all advertising material featured House of Cards. Upon going to the Australian Netflix website, however, the home page instead emphasized the depth of the library holdings (even though these are notably smaller than Netflix in the United States).44 This duality exemplifies the fact that Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos calls House of Cards its “brand ambassador,” designed to draw in new viewers, while the secondary appeal of the licensed holdings is intended to keep them.45 Netflix primarily emphasizes its own premium titles because it is around them that they can stress the appeal of both instantaneous and expansive viewing pleasures of a new, high-end product.

  Sobchack’s phenomenological focus on the experience of spectatorship helps to point to another aspect of binge terminology. The fact that the term binge has gained traction in the popular press and scholarly work speaks not only to hierarchies of taste situated around different media, but also to the sometimes conflicted feeling of television overload (when we start finding it difficult to track and process what we have seen), and the desire to keep watching to find out what happens next (making it difficult to turn off). These conflicting experiences and feelings surrounding binge-viewing partly account for the numerous terms currently in circulation to describe and explain the phenomena, of which binge is the most prevalent.46

  Lotz prefers to discuss “successive” viewing, certainly a far more neutral term.47 It is perhaps too understated, as it describes the practice but not the experience. In colloquial use, the alternative term marathon viewing has been used, suggestive of a lengthy act of endurance on the part of the audience—a challenge that the viewer meets and overcomes rather than one that overcomes the viewer.48 A marathon implies effort, exhaustion, and perhaps even pride. Does a television marathon suggest something to be boasted about, rather than a guilty pleasure to be confessed? It might even imply that viewing can become hard work as well as—or even rather than—a pleasure. Sobchack stresses that it is the extended duration of the epic that punishes its audience with a feat of physical endurance, but that this very endurance becomes one the genre’s pleasures, and contributes towards its creation of a sense of time and history.49 Taken beyond the confines of the epic genre, epic-viewing—particularly of expansive texts designed specifically to be viewed over several consecutive hours—thereby shares with marathon viewing this emphasis on endurance. The term television marathon has also been used to refer to a scheduling practice used by cable television from the mid–1980s, involving a sequential block of reruns from a particular series, although it has also been employed to refer to thematic block scheduling of programs or films (such as around a particular genre).50 Marathon viewing comes with quite a different set of associations that are at one remove from either the potential cringe of the binge or the overly neutral phrase successive viewing, but given its history as a scheduling practice and its crossover with film pro
gramming, it requires some careful clarification if used. Furthermore, while it speaks to the viewing practice, it does not necessarily imply a particular type of text optimized for this practice. Therefore, the concept of marathon viewing is but one aspect of the broader concept of epic-viewing.

  Indeed, the “excess of temporality” that Sobchack discusses is not merely a function of viewing duration, but rather epic expansiveness is also created through the materiality of the text’s construction and promotion. Bearing this in mind, another colloquial term in circulation—cannonballing—also fails to encompass the broader means for creating this temporal field.51 Cannonballing evokes either a sense of speeding through a series, or jumping into it. A marathon brings to mind a race, but its defining features are its length and endurance rather than speed. Cannonballing, then, ostensibly describes the same activity but with an emphasis on getting through the one series as quickly as possible in the smallest number of sittings, rather than stressing the temporal expansiveness of the text and our experience of it. Marathon viewing and cannonballing each suggest different perceptions of temporality while engaged in extended viewing, and yet there is something lacking in their relationship with the way that the text itself has been both structured and marketed.