Show business without the show

The platform first ethos has taken over Hollywood

In her 2020 memoir Uncanny Valley, Anna Weiner describes the utopia tech companies seemingly envision for humanity:

A world improved by companies improved by data. A world of actionable metrics, in which developers would never stop optimizing and users would never stop looking at their screens. A world freed of decision-making, the unnecessary friction of human behavior, where everything— whittled down to the fastest, simplest, sleekest version of itself— could be optimized, prioritized, monetized, and controlled.

In short, “the fetishized life without friction.”

I think about this quite a bit when I watch a new show on a streaming platform. For years now I have felt that calling shows produced by streamers “TV shows” is a category error. Streaming shows are not TV shows. They look and feel different. They don’t even serve the same function. TV shows used to fill the air time in between commercial breaks. Up until recently, streamers did not show ads.

The incentive structure is completely different. The end goal of a broadcast TV show was to get to 100 episodes, sell it into syndication and ride the gravy train of residuals. If a show was lacking in audience in its fourth or fifth season, there was still an incentive to keep producing it, as the huge payoff was just over the hill. Streamers have the exact opposite incentive structure. For them, there is no syndication. There are no residuals. The longer a show goes on, the more expensive it gets, the least likely it is to get renewed.

For broadcasters, a show was arguably at its most valuable in its fifth season and beyond. For streamers, a show is at its most valuable the first week of its debut. That’s when it’s most likely to attract new subscribers if the hype is strong enough, and hopefully prevent existing users from cancelling the service due to that hype. While real estate on a primetime broadcast schedule is limited, streamers need a constant supply of “content” in order to attract new subscribers and prevent churn.

So far so obvious. But there is something else that is different with streaming shows. Their very content is different from traditional TV shows. Content not as in the way Hollywood executives collapse everything from 2001: A Space Oddyssey to 90 Day Fiance: Last Resort into one and the same category, “content”, but as in the specific properties of what we see on screen.

To borrow from Weiner, what we see on streamers are fetishized shows without friction.

I will say this until I’m blue in the face: Hollywood is not an entertainment industry anymore, it is now a tech industry. Start to think of it as such, and a lot of things will make more sense. Think of Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, Instagram. These platforms value one thing above all else: engagement. They are consciously and specifically designed to keep their user base hooked on the platform for as long as possible. Why? So they can be served ads. Incidentally, a highly engaged user base brings higher ad prices for the companies owning the platform.

There are different strategies to drive engagement— short form on TikTok vs. long form on Youtube, rage bait on Facebook vs. lifestyle porn on Instagram— but the end goal is the same: keep the user glued to their screen, disincentivize them from closing the app. Algorithms are designed for this above all else.

Netflix has always had this exact goal too. The company wants you to get on the service, tape your eyelids open and watch Bridgerton until you develop bed sores. They never want you to change the program or flip to another app. That’s why they came up with “binge watching”, that’s why autoplay exists. In the absence of selling you ads, Netflix used their engagement numbers to placate Wall Street investors and juice their stock price, which enabled them to raise cheap debt financing to fuel their growth.

Binge releasing shows and auto playing the next episode, however, still wasn’t enough. To achieve full frictionlessness, the very nature of streaming shows needed to change too.

I am not naive. As much as I criticize the streamers, I am fully aware that show business was always business first. But in a strange way, seen from the vantage point of 2025 and Hollywood’s cultural death, the business first ethos pre-streaming set the correct incentives. Until the prestige TV era, and mostly even throughout it, TV shows would only stay on air if they attracted a large enough audience. Every show needed to be appointment television. How did the producers try to achieve this? By putting on a show each week that couldn’t be missed. Every episode had to offer enough promise of entertainment so that an individual would make time at a specific hour of the day and turn on a specific channel to watch it.

Ideally, every episode had to be memorable enough so you would discuss it with your co-workers at the water cooler over the following week. I’m not only talking about obvious examples like Breaking Bad or The Shield which cranked up the suspense and shock value beyond anything that had happened on TV before. Compare any random individual episode of these shows with any random individual episode of, say, Fubar or Bloodline and you will see how much tension and narrative thrust the former shows wrung out of 45 minutes as opposed to the latter. Almost every episode of the former is momentous and stands on its own. The latter offer up a continuous stream of interchangeable storylines that start nowhere and go nowhere.

The same was true of purely episodic shows as well. There is comfort in knowing exactly what you’ll get each week in a show like Law & Order, NCIS, Bones or House. But every case of the week was dramatic and memorable, the shows did not steer clear of controversy, their goal was to actively entertain you and leave a trace in your mind. What is the goal of Altered Carbon, Florida Man or Clickbait? Surely it isn’t to leave an enduring impression on the audience.

Shows used to have pilots— highly produced showcases that swung for the fences in order to capture an audience— Thanksgiving episodes, Christmas episodes, bottle episodes, season finales, mid-season finales, crossover episodes, two-part season openers. Fans would eagerly await specific episodes each season when a certain character would take center stage, a certain location would be visited, or an in-show tradition would be enacted. (Sunday funday on You’re The Worst, anyone?) Shows would tease big events like a certain character dying or returning that would increase the audience size for one specific episode, one specific week.

In short, TV programs used to put on a show. Every episode was an event. I would argue that TV shows used to serve up friction.

Streaming shows do the opposite. Their aim is not to put on a weekly show that wows or, horror of horrors, even prompts you to turn off the TV and process, think or talk about what you just saw. Their primary function is to keep you watching ideally forever, to seamlessly hand you over from one episode to the next without you even realizing that six or eight hours have gone by. Streaming shows exist to drive engagement numbers on a tech platform. They are incentivized to be flat, glossy and uneventful. Show business without the show. Frictionless.

You could argue that TV broadcasters like NBC or CBS had the same incentive that streamers have nowadays: to keep viewers on their platform, as it were. NBC’s Thursday night line-up, for example, used to be marketed as “must see TV” precisely to keep you on the same channel all night long during primetime hours when advertisers paid top dollar. However, the way the broadcasters tried to prevent you from changing the channel was, again, to offer you the most compelling and memorable entertainment possible. If they didn’t do that, audiences would get bored and shows would be taken off air. Show business was a business first and foremost, yes. But the way to do business was to put on a show. The way streamers do business is by actively boring their audience. Putting on a show is the last thing they want to do.

I am not being hyperbolic. Consider the following: in his highly recommended book What Tech Calls Thinking, Stanford professor Adrian Daub describes how Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media became a foundational text for many of the Silicon Valley literati, and highly influential in how tech elites came to think of the platforms they were building. “McLuhan regarded those analysts who focused their attention on the ‘content’ of books or TV shows as dupes”, writes Daub. “The real object of study was the medium itself.” Further:

It’s likely that this de-emphasis on content set the tone for the tech industry going forward. The idea that content is in a strange way secondary, even though the platforms Silicon Valley keeps inventing depend on it, is deeply ingrained. (…) To create content is to be distracted. To create the “platform” is to focus on the true structure of reality. Shaping media is better than shaping the content of such media. It is the person who makes the “platform” who becomes the billionaire. The person who provides the content (…) is a rube distracted by a glittering but pointless object.

When Netflix markets its history, what is emphasizes is how Reed Hasting’s David wrestled down the Blockbuster Goliath. How the algorithm is beneficial to the user. How data makes Neftlix’ decisions to renew or cancel a show more accurate. They rarely tout the amazing pedigree of its movies and shows, because there is very little “must see TV” it produced. Reed Hastings did not have a love of entertainment and built a business around it. He had a love of tech and identified entertainment as the content he would peddle.

The platform is what counts, the content is merely incidental. Bela Bajaria, Netflix’ Chief Content Officer, once described the ideal Netflix show as a “gourmet cheeseburger”. In other words: nutritionless slop that can be dressed up and marketed as somehow “premium” but is ultimately valueless. Eunice Kim, Netflix’ Chief Product Officer, openly waxes about additional content that could be served to viewers’ phones while they watch a Netflix show. “Second screen content” is what streamers are now looking for: dumbed-down background noise that can play while users scroll on their phones. As Will Tavlin described in his excellent recent piece for n+1 magazine, it doesn’t matter anymore if a viewer pays attention to a show that’s playing on their TV. In a perverse way, it’s even preferable if they don’t.

Fetishized shows without friction are good for the platform because they drive engagement. In this new Hollywood era of tech, that’s all that counts. It’s platform first, entertainment last. If you’re a creative or a fan of quality entertainment, you’re shit out of luck.