For a while, streaming seemed like a jackpot for Hollywood. Platforms like Netflix and Hulu were investing in more creatives to share their stories and more prestige content was being produced. While moving away from the network model seemed like the right direction, as the years went by, problems arose. In particular, controversies over the pay of creatives contributing to streaming content. Amid these controversies, a producer of The Night Agent has opened up about his own salary at Netflix, and how the success of the show had little effect on his own financial gain.
A recent report by Vulture dug into the realities of streaming, and how the current system works when it comes to paying creators of shows. It turns out, the success of a series has little to do with how much a producer is paid. The Night Agent’s Shawn Ryan reflected on his own first-hand experience with this, revealing he didn’t get much of a pay bump after the show’s success. He said:
I had done the calculations. Half a billion hours is the equivalent of over 61 million people watching all ten episodes in 18 days. Those shows that air after the Super Bowl — it's like having five or ten of them. So I asked my lawyer, 'What does that mean?’ In my case, it means that I got paid what I got paid. I'll get a little bonus when Season 2 gets picked up and a nominal royalty fee for each additional episode that gets made. But if you think I'm going out and buying a private jet, you're way, way off.
For context, The Night Agent is an incredibly popular series on the streaming platform. It generated 627 million viewing hours in its first few weeks on Netflix, becoming its fifth most popular English language original series. Back in the age of network television, residuals generated from a show’s success were earned by creatives, allowing them to receive payouts if their show was successful. Ryan acknowledged how this has changed, saying:
The promise was that if you made the company billions, you were going to get a lot of millions. That promise has gone away.
The matter of pay for content is one of the issues being hashed out by the WGA as they seek to renew their contract. Writers have been on strike since May 1, causing a cease in production and pre-production on many Hollywood projects. SAG and the DGA have both had similar problems, and may both be striking alongside the writers in the near future.
The streamers however are claiming they do not have the funds to pay creatives like Ryan accordingly. While streaming has led to financial successes, streaming platforms are producing and financing hundreds of more expensive shows than the network system did. Along with these successful shows, there are also many more financial failures. As a result, creatives have been paying for these financial disasters, as platforms have been removing less popular shows from their catalog as a cost-saving measure.
Nevertheless, streaming still reigns supreme. Netflix recently cracked down on password sharing to encourage users to have individual subscriptions. While this could have been a disaster, causing a massive loss in subscribers, the opposite happened and they saw an increase in Netflix subscribers according to Antenna. While controversial, it shows how dominant the streaming model is, and how audiences will pay more to access shows in this way.
The strikes on the other hand show that creatives see a need for a change in the status quo. Important successful creatives like Ryan deserve to be compensated for their success especially when it's for shows that are as massively successful as The Night Agent. We'll just have to wait and see if that happens, pending the results of the ongoing writer's strike and all the changes being made in the world of streaming.
