Streamers Need To Learn Love Nonfiction Too
The Wall Street Journal has a story this week about a producer named Scott Koondel who is pushing streaming services to embrace shows like Judy Justice, a second act for the esteemed Ms. Sheindlin, which is, in fact, heading to Amazon’s Freevee.
Those of you who have been reading TVREV know that embracing this sort of “high-volume, advertiser-friendly, bingeable programming” is something I have been urging streaming services to do for a while.
The issue is simple: with the exception of Discovery+ and Disney+, they have all mostly been putting out “HBO-like” programming.
This makes a lot of sense in that those sorts of shows win awards, create buzz, and get them lots of free PR.
The Problems With Prestige
There are, unfortunately, several problems with this approach.
It makes it really hard for viewers to tell the services apart or to discern why they should subscribe to one over another. This is particularly important now, as viewers are still getting used to the various services and figuring out what they are all about and which ones they’d consider paying upfront for a year-long subscription.
You’re reaching a limited audience. HBO-like series are geared towards an educated, affluent, largely coastal audience. While that tends to describe the social circles of most people working in media, it’s not a very large group. (Just ask Elizabeth Warren.) To be successful, streaming services will need to reach a larger and broader audience, the sort of audience that really doesn’t get why Barry is supposed to be funny or why anyone would want to watch a show like Succession, filled, as it is, with unlikable characters.
You’re only helping HBO Max. When people see these sorts of HBO-like series, they often assume that they’re on HBO. Or, at the very least, note to themselves that it is the sort of series that can usually be found on HBO Max. Either way, you are building their brand, not yours.
It’s not in your DNA. Other streaming services have other value propositions, or at least their parent companies do. Better to play off of those strengths as a way to differentiate yourself than to try and be something you’re not for the sake of a possible Emmy nomination.
The Value Of Nonfiction
There are also numerous benefits to producing more mainstream programming, the sort of nonfiction and reality programming that Koondel is cheerleading for.
It’s very cheap to produce. Game of Thrones cost tens of millions of dollars for each episode. Nonfiction production costs can be a fraction of that, well below one million per episode depending on the show.
It’s evergreen. Episodes of Judge Judy from five or ten years ago do not look terribly out of date. In fact it would be hard to tell how old they are at all. (This is, admittedly, helped by the fact that hair and clothing trends have not shifted all that dramatically over the past few decades. But still...) So they can help build your library of bingeable content while also giving you something you can later sell syndication rights to.
It’s very snackable. Unlike Very Important Series, nonfiction is easily watched in pieces or while doing something else like checking email. It does not demand the full focus of your attention and thus people will watch for longer periods of time.
Clips do really well on social media. You can cut these shows down to quick clips that quickly become, if not exactly viral, then very popular on social media. People share them, talk about them, watch them and then come to your service to watch the whole show. It’s just as good as, if not better than, Emmy buzz in terms of obtaining new subscribers and retaining old ones, and, as noted above, it’s relatively evergreen.
So why the disconnect?
About 15 years ago I wrote a piece called “NASCAR Blindess” about how the ad industry largely missed out on NASCAR’s growing popularity because no one they knew was into it and so they assumed that no one was.
Same thing with Hollywood and nonfiction programming.
Yes, they are aware that it does well, yes they know that someone must be watching it…just not anyone they know. And so it’s easy to ignore it in favor of the sort of programming their peers do watch.
It’s not just nonfiction programming either. There’s a whole array of more mainstream type programming of the sort the broadcast networks have excelled at for decades—sitcoms and dramas—that can help bring in new subscribers. This programming can be very good (Abbott Elementary), it can be very popular (Yellowstone and its various prequels) but it’s got mass appeal in a way that many of the shows that win awards do not. (As we’d pointed out at the time, Yellowstone’s 2021 season premiere drew in some 14.7 million L3 viewers to a seemingly random cable network, while the buzzy Succession only netted just over 1.4 million.)
This doesn’t mean that the various SVODs should not aim for both—shows like Succession still have plenty of value in terms of subscriber acquisition and retention, it’s just that a balanced diet is best.
As we’ve also frequently noted, there are a whole lot of people, somewhere between 30 to 40 percent of all TV viewers, who are perfectly happy with cable TV as it is today and who happily settle in with the networks’ primetime lineup every night.
They’re not all old and poor either, another myth Hollywood subscribes to, and while they may not be a large enough cohort to keep traditional linear TV going indefinitely, they’re dedicated TV viewers and streaming services would do well to try and bring them into the fold.
One final note: this shift, from the fairly highbrow to the mainstream, is not without precedent in the annals of TV history.
What Comes Around Goes Around
A key reason the first Golden Age of Television came about in the 1950s was that most of the people who could afford a TV set at that time were affluent and educated and thus happy to watch prestige dramas like Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty and Abby Mann’s Judgment at Nuremberg.
Once prices came down and TV went mass market that changed and CBS, with its slate of rural-themed sitcoms (Petticoat Junction, Green Acres) took the lead in the early 1960s and the rest, as they say, is history, until 1999, when HBO took at shot on a series by David Chase called The Sopranos, ushering in TV’s second Golden Age.
TL;DR: Television serves a wide range of audiences with a wide range of needs. Mass market always outsells prestige and while streaming services can most definitely accommodate both, they’d be foolish to pass up mass market nonfiction and other more broadly targeted scripted programming which can help them build audiences while increasing view time and thus ad revenue.
