Netflix Gets Its Live Hit, And Cultural Moment, With Chris Rock

Mission accomplished. Netflix paid Chris Rock $20 million, and spent many millions more to make and market its first live “event,” Rock’s Selective Outrage. The standup comedy special streamed from a Baltimore theater and was bracketed by live pre- and post-event shows in Los Angeles featuring numerous other prominent comedians and celebrities over a combined 2.5 hours.

So what did Netflix get for all that outlay? The show itself will be a modest but notable part of Rock’s estimable canon, regardless of the carping by some next-day critics. If you missed the moment, Selective Outrage will be available on replay for years to come, unlike most live shows that typically have the lifespan of a mayfly.

In terms of viewership, Selective Outrage made Netflix’s top 10 U.S. shows for the week, a particular achievement given that it debuted at 10 pm Saturday on the East Coast and the metric’s period ended the next night. Selective Outrage ended up No. 7 among Netflix’s U.S. English-Language shows for the week of Feb. 27 to March 5.

For most of Netflix’s global audience, however, the event’s timing was not ideal, practically ensuring it wouldn’t be watched live in most of the other 190 countries where Netflix operates. After all, who’s getting up at 6 am Sunday in central Europe to watch a comedy show, or pushing back dinner time Sunday in Japan?

As well, the live stream was available only in English, with versions rolling out this week in all the other languages Netflix offers. It’ll be worth tracking how Rock’s work manifests across the globe after this week as it becomes more accessible to more people, though standup often struggles to grab audiences across languages and cultures.

The Hollywood Reporter noted that Netflix’s self-disclosed viewing numbers for its global Top 10 (Netflix doesn’t disclose viewing numbers in individual countries) showed 16.16 million households watched the planet’s No. 10 English-language series, Next in Fashion. So, initial Selective Outrage viewership was less than that.

But even if the show doesn’t set any records, it almost certainly will ultimately be seen by more people than watched another live event featuring Rock that will be forever linked to Selective Outrage. That would be the 2022 Oscars ceremony, where an enraged Will Smith charged the stage and slapped show emcee Rock for a joke about Smith’s wife. Smith later accepted his first Oscar, then was banned from the ceremony for a decade. Worse for Smith, his latest would-be Oscar contender, Apple TV+ freed-slave biopic Emancipation, was largely shunned by awards voters.

Rock had said little about Smith’s assault in the year since the ABC broadcast, other than workshopping some of the jokes he would showcase in Selective Outrage. But he clearly took advantage of the Netflix bully pulpit to talk about Smith’s bully attack, firing off a string of memorably lacerating observations late in the show.

No surprise those last 10 minutes or so would end up ginning up just the kind of cultural moment Netflix hoped for, spawning reams of hot takes and social-media posts that likely will continue to drive viewership.

Beyond that. Netflix now has a baseline of expectations as it edges further into live programming. The entire sector had long been the province of broadcast and cable, especially for news and sporting events. NBC has been broadcasting weekly Saturday Night Live episodes for more than four decades, and over the past several years, that network and others have done a handful of live productions of beloved stage musicals.

Now, Netflix is joining the live party, figuring out what makes sense for its global audience, given those limitations of time zone and language, among other challenges. The company has already announced a live stream of a London stage production built around its hugely popular Stranger Things franchise.

Netflix is also getting into awards season in a new way, recently announcing a deal to carry the Screen Actors Guild Awards live beginning next year (Netflix also streamed this year’s awards on its own YouTube channel).

Why the SAG Awards, though, as one of its first live events. The SAG awards traditionally have been a lesser player in the increasingly lengthy grind of Awards Season shows and events, but have grown in visibility and relevance to the Oscar winners handed out a few weeks later.

Now, the awards have become a moderately reliable guide to subsequent Oscar success (you can expect SAG Awards steamroller Everything Everywhere All At Once to live up to its name at this year’s Oscars on Sunday). More importantly for Netflix’s business purposes. its viewers are more likely to be interested because it’s a glitzy event featuring a lot of big-name stars from top projects in both movies and TV, regardless of whether they debuted in legacy outlets or streaming.

For the past few years, the company also has experimented offline with other kinds of live events, creating immersive takes on the worlds of Army of the Dead, Bridgerton, Arcana, and, yes, Stranger Things. Those are decidedly terrestrial experiences, tied to whatever spot where they’re created, but at least can become part of a road show moving from market to market as audience demand dictates.

But where else might Netflix now go if it wants to further expand its live offerings.

Pundits have long expected the company to get into sports, and possibly news, but neither is a source of evergreen content with value more than a day or two after their debut. They each would require a hefty investment in new kinds of production teams and on-air talent. And with sports these days, the battles over video rights have sent prices soaring.

Just look at what happened with Formula 1. Netflix series Drive to Survive essentially created a new fan base for the European-based racing circuit, which typically only as a handful of U.S. races on its annual calendar. Netflix reportedly investigated bidding on F1 rights when they came up last year, but backed off after the price jumped from $5 million to $75 million.

The world’s most popular sport, soccer (sorry, futbol in most of the rest of the universe) travels well. Apple TV+ just launched its slick first season of all of MLS under an innovative 360-degree deal with the North American league, while Peacock, Paramount Plus and others have attracted sturdy streaming audiences for their investments in top European leagues.

Netflix might consider a couple of other awards shows as potential live programming opportunities.

A few hours before Rock’s performance, the Independent Spirit Awards streamed on the sponsoring organization’s YouTube channel, the only outlet available after cable TV’s Independent Film Channel dropped the show.

“Let me reiterate how bad this is,” said the event’s emcee, Hasan Minhaj. “The Independent Film Channel did not want the Independent Film Awards.”

Yes, the Spirit Awards attract some rising names in the movie business. And sometimes winners there do well at the Oscars. Last year’s Oscar Best Picture winner, CODA, also ruled at the Spirit Awards, and the big Spirit winner this year was, again, Everything Everywhere All At Once.

But Minhaj, who previously hosted comedy talk show Patriot Act on Netflix, pointedly explained why Netflix might pass on the Spirit Awards.

“No one asked you to make the movies you made,” Minhaj said in his opening monologue, “and honestly, no one watched them.”

Ouch. But it’s just about a dead-lock certain that Netflix will be finding other live events, if it can figure out what might work.

Late-night talk shows and other news-adjacent programming on cable and broadcast networks, once a lucrative sector, are now disappearing fast. Minhaj’s own show lasted only 40 episodes from 2020 to 2022 (admittedly, amid that globe-girdling pandemic thing).

One real possibility might be more standup comedy, where Netflix has invested heavily for years, and in countries. The upcoming Netflix Is a Joke comedy festival could spawn live streams in the future. This year’s festival sprawls across 25 venues around Los Angeles and 11 days of performances. Pretty much all of it ends up on Netflix eventually, though not live, not yet.

But that could change as soon as next year. Netflix is undergoing transformation on seemingly every side, with an ad-supported tier, looming password crackdown, and even a new co-CEO. Figuring out the live conundrum won’t be easy, but it’s another opportunity for the company to expand its reach into still more corners of the industry it currently dominates.