The streamers' contempt for attention spans is getting harder to ignore

Last week, N+1 magazine ran a brutally scathing (and meticulously researched) essay from Will Tavlin, exploring 20 years of Netflix’s impact on the film industry—little of it good. Tavlin’s absolutely merciless takedown covers the company’s whole history of mild-to-severe consumer contempt, from the days when it deliberately slowed down shipping DVDs to frequent renters—allegedly referred to internally as “pigs”—all the way up to its modern practice of using its precious algorithms to guide users from trough to trough of generic-looking “cinematic” output. One moment appears to have drawn especial attention, though, in so far as it relates to the notes the company has given to the often fairly anonymous directors and screenwriters who pump out movies doomed to someday just be another tile on its giant wall of content: Tavlin quotes multiple Netflix screenwriters who said that, when writing dialogue, they were given a note to “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” It’s as obvious as it is grim, the next step in designing and pushing out movies built for only half an attention span, at best.

That particular quote has been picking up a lot of circulation online, including from people who’ve been directly impacted by similar notes, either from Netflix itself, or the competitors who’ve aped their model. TV writers like All Rise‘s Dylan Park-Pettiford resurfaced comments he’d gotten from TV  executives telling him they explicitly wanted “TV you don’t have to pay attention to,” while Mike McMahan—whose very funny, very “you’d better be watching if you want to catch half the jokes” Star Trek series Lower Decks just wrapped up its five-season run on Paramount+—quoted an exec who told him back in the show’s early days that “too much happens in each episode, what if someone watching is making spaghetti and only half paying attention?” Of course—and with apologies to the spaghetti cookers of the world—it’s worth noting that these examples are pulled from TV, which has typically been a bit more permissive of less attentive viewing, even if that fact is kind of a bummer. Part of the condemnation inherent to Tavlin’s piece is the way that attitude is now being applied to film, which used to have a much stronger monopoly on viewers’ attention.

It feels worth noting that this piece arrived right along news of Amazon announcing that cookie cutter Christmas action movie Red One was doing gangbusters for its streaming audience, while Netflix has been passing around internal rankings that its latest movie-of-the-week, Taron Egerton “Die Hard but it’s also Phone Booth and also it’s about the TSA” thriller Carry-On, was about to become one of its biggest hits ever. As Tavlin notes, the streamers (all following in Netflix’s footsteps) deploy this kind of data tactically, and rarely in a way that feels like it gives a clear figure of viewership. (It’s funny how something is always breaking a record, huh?) It all feels of a piece with the modern paradigm’s overall contempt for viewer attention: Netflix never markets anything except Netflix itself, constantly telling you how ridiculously successful a movie that you, and nobody you know, has ever seen has been, all so that it can keep you on the subscription hook with the endless promise of more noise and light while the laundry folds/cats get fed/spaghetti cooks.

You can read Tavlin’s full essay here.