In cementing its dominance in streaming over the past decade, Netflix produced hit shows, signed up almost 240 million subscribers, and minted new franchises—the Holy Grail of Hollywood success. At the same time, the company became the entertainment industry’s grim reaper. First, as a DVD mailer, it accelerated Blockbuster’s demise. Then it upended Hollywood, thrusting cable television and movie studios into existential crises of their own.
Peter Biskind, a long-time entertainment journalist and cultural critic, chronicled in previous bestsellers Hollywood’s groundbreaking New Wave of the 1970s (in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls) and the indie cinema movement of the 1990s (in Down and Dirty Pictures). Now he’s back with Pandora’s Box, a sweeping narrative that begins with HBO’s disruption of broadcast television all the way through the streaming wars and Netflix’s history from a provocative tech upstart that ushered in binge-watching and ad-free television, to now, as an industry leader pushing for the widest audience possible—just like the television networks it displaced as American cultural powerhouses.
Throughout the book Biskind argues that appealing to broad audiences leads to lackluster shows and movies, which, in turn, drives away viewers. Once that happens few entertainment companies, whether traditional powerhouses like Hollywood studios or new age streamers like Netflix, can keep audiences for long. “As Netflix, for example, plays itself out and becomes unwatchable, something will replace it,” Biskind tells Fortune.
Streamers like Netflix, Max, and its various other competitors have replaced networks, he believes. “The difference between streaming and the networks is crumbling because a lot of shows are moving back and forth between networks and streaming,” Biskind tells Fortune. “This attempt to find the biggest streaming audience is deleterious to content and they're restructuring some of these companies like Netflix in the image of Hollywood studios and the networks, and I think all that is bad news.”
Streamers, according to Biskind, are trying to outmuscle each other in the hyper-competitive streaming business. This constant one-upmanship hasn’t yielded better movies or more “prestige TV,” as Biskind might have hoped, but rather a race to the middle toward entertainment that doesn’t offend.
“It used to be, ‘Let the creators do whatever they want,” Biskind says. “Now it’s, ‘Get the biggest audience possible and beat our competitors.’ That's a big, big difference. And the way you get a big audience is to create shows that don't antagonize people. It's more important to not antagonize people than it is to appeal to people. So, the sharp edges get sanded down.”
That approach recalls the bland, family-friendly network TV content of the 1950s and ‘60s. Even during the golden period of cable television, which HBO ushered in with The Wire and The Sopranos, television studios and executives had to be cajoled, convinced, and at times even forced to accept that audiences wanted to watch a radically new form of entertainment. Namely, it was one in which the good guys didn’t just lose, but were largely absent from the story altogether.
Biskind recounts how AMC, after making the hit show Mad Men that minted new stars such as Jon Hamm and Elizabeth Moss, was “ambivalent” about taking a chance by greenlighting Breaking Bad. Over its five-season run, Breaking Bad would go on to win 16 Emmy’s and inspire a fandom that was equal parts reverential and rabid. The prevailing ethos, according to Biskind, seemed to be “why test our luck” with another edgy show.
In speaking to people who worked at AMC at the time, Biskind, was “surprised they were so frank that they hated their superiors—the executives above them—so vehemently” and considered them “pretty much morons.”
And this was one of the networks considered to be a leader of the peak TV movement in entertainment.
The streamers, Netflix in particular, took a different approach. Eager to test the waters of creating its own original series, Netflix welcomed creators who wanted to make taboo-busting shows. Among the most high-profile early releases was Orange is the New Black, about a women’s prison, and House of Cards, about a corrupt D.C. politician. Both shows appeared to be successes after being warmly received by critics. Their respective first seasons earned 21 Emmy nominations between them. But since Netflix didn’t release viewership numbers or ratings at the time, it was difficult to gauge their popularity. (Earlier this month Netflix released viewership numbers for the first time, showing the most watched shows from the first half of the year).
Even executives at Netflix’s competitors didn’t quite realize its ambition or how appealing consumers would find the prospect of seemingly infinite content. Former Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said early on that “Netflix posed no more of a threat than the Albanian army,” Biskind writes in Pandora’s Box. Netflix’s own executives were equally “myopic,” according to Biskind, failing to realize that the runaway growth of their business would attract competitors from both legacy movie studios and the tech industry. That hubris was immortalized when, in 2017, then Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said the streamer’s competition was sleep, which people staved off during late night binges of shows they were “really dying to watch.”
“That's far from the truth,” Biskind says.
He points to the rise of competitors from Disney, Paramount, and HBO parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, along with tech giants Apple and Amazon. All of them now compete for the same audience.
As more companies entered the fray the shows they produced changed, becoming more sanitized and taking fewer creative risks. That translated into characters portrayed in their shows. “The social implications of anti-heroes were very radical in the sense that the necessity of being an anti-hero meant breaking rules,” Biskind says. “And breaking rules implied that the rules of society favor the rich and powerful, and if you really wanted to get ahead, you had to break those rules. If you wanted to survive, you had to break those rules. Once the anti-hero disappears, you get this comfort viewing like Ted Lasso,” a reference to the hit Apple+ comedy about a perpetually upbeat soccer coach.
For tech companies, though, entertainment is just a side business. It’s another throwback to old Hollywood, when studios were merely subsidiaries of larger corporations. In 1948 industrialist Howard Hughes adsorbed RKO Studios into his web of companies, which he eventually sold to a tire company. The trend was perhaps best embodied by the conglomerate Gulf and Western that owned Paramount from the mid-1960s through 1994, on which Biskind focused in his seminal book Dirty Riders and Raging Bulls.
The tech companies, Amazon especially, made no secret of using entertainment to spur their core businesses by “turning viewers into shoppers,” as Biskind put it. Amazon’s “new streamer was a hobby, like stamp collecting, whereas streaming was the be-all and end-all for Netflix,” Biskind writes.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, himself, succinctly spelled out his priorities during a conference in 2016: “When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes.”
