A Netflix Original Series
Or is it?
What show is the above image from? Why, it’s The Good Place, of course! If you’re a viewer of the series in the United States, you’ve probably never seen this before. If you watch the show in countries such as the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, you’ll likely be very familiar with it.
In America, The Good Place airs on NBC. The more media-savvy among you will be aware that the show is produced by Universal Television, NBC’s corporate cousin, primarily to be broadcast on the US network. Then, almost as an afterthought in the production process, Universal sell the programme to interested buyers in the global market. Which in this case happens to be Netflix.
For viewers in the US, The Good Place exists in a certain context informed by its position in NBC’s Thursday night comedy block. It recalls a rich tradition of the “Must See TV” lineup, dating all the way back to series regular Ted Danson’s starring role on the iconic Cheers, through to a shift toward lower rated but “smart” single-camera sitcoms in this millennium of which a standout includes Good Place creator Michael Schur’s own Parks and Recreation. The show itself is very conscious of this legacy, bringing in guest stars such as Parks and Recreation star Adam Scott, and former Saturday Night Live (so often a pipeline to the NBC sitcom ranks) performer Maya Rudolph. The tone of the show is so often attempting to bring us back to an era the network has largely abandoned, when NBC was the space for comedy for people who want to think.
For viewers in countries where the series airs on Netflix, The Good Place is of course stripped of this context. American TV existing in a different context in other countries is obviously nothing new, but the way Netflix tries to blur the lines is unusual. Everyone who watched Friends in Britain on Channel 4 (and the endless repeats for a subsequent decade on E4) was very aware that this was a sitcom that had been made by a US channel and imported in. But Netflix doesn’t want this for The Good Place. The streamer has two tiers of programming: stuff it’s picked up, and the stuff just for Netflix. It wants The Good Place to sit in the second, more prestigious, category, so it invents a convenient lie: “A Netflix Original Series”.
With a stroke, The Good Place is put in an entirely new context. It exists alongside comedies such as Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Russian Doll. While its position on NBC places it as the latest and perhaps last in a long, rich tradition, Netflix puts it right into the new world. The most attentive viewers will see that The Good Place has its differences with most of Netflix’s programming. Whereas most of the streamer’s comedies run well over 25 minutes per episode and sometimes more than 30, The Good Place offers a tight 22. Its episodes are structured around neat act breaks dictated by commercial breaks that do not exist on Netflix. Maybe this paints their other shows, with episodes that seem to go on forever for no apparent reason, in a bad light. The people at Netflix probably assume most viewers won’t notice anything out of place. After all, their brand is “everything”.
The Good Place is not the only show in this position. Better Call Saul “airs” on Netflix in most of the world, complete with the above title card that irritatingly cuts into the end of the opening credits in an awkward way that makes you know it doesn’t belong. This makes a lot of sense considering, in Britain at least, Breaking Bad was a huge driver of the service’s growth. It felt like the show everyone in real life was talking about in the summer of 2013, and Netflix had the first run rights, so if you wanted to be in on people’s conversations, you had to pay the £7 a month or whatever it was back then. Saul thus gets to keep its obvious Breaking Bad legacy in this content, and in fact doesn’t have to deal with the issue it faces in the US of airing on a channel that would rather make more Walking Deads than Breaking Bads. It’s still, though, a cheat from Netflix, an attempt to take credit for a work that surpasses theirs in the same genre, a show that they might imitate but never recapture.
Netflix is envisioned as the great disruptor of television. In the eyes of those at the top of the company, we will come to talk about the medium in 50 years’ time as pre and post-Netflix. They come riding in looking to free us from the shackles of linear TV, of waiting a week for the next installment, of having to sit through the ad breaks. And yet the truth is they struggle to make great shows enough that they have to stick their own badge on the work of others and call it their own. Their best attempts tend to be complete accidents that came about through the executives just throwing money at talented people and seeing what happens, not any clear strategy from the top. NBC and AMC, for all the bad programming they churn out, at least understand what a TV series is supposed to look like. Netflix’s people know full well that they can capitalise on others’ best attempts when it suits, despite the long term aim to wipe out all rivals.
TV shows exist in the context we view them in. The Good Place and Better Call Saul are understood by American viewers in one way, and understood by viewers in other countries in a totally different way. While there are surely some in the US who would be happier if episodes of both shows just appeared on Netflix instead of airing on television, the series could never have been made like this. For viewers elsewhere, most probably assume that Netflix made these programmes, even as they are tighter, less trapped in endless sprawl, and more, well, linear than most of the service’s other “original series”. Enjoy them while they last, because if Netflix wins, there will only be 72 minute episodes of TV where nothing happens in our future.
* * *
So that’s my first newsletter, hope you liked it! Still figuring out the formatting on this a little bit, but we’re off. Please tell your friends, family and internet nemeses to subscribe.