I couldn’t get out of the way of the drumbeat and excitement that so many cultural pundits have been dropping in recent days about some highly anticipated returns of original streaming series that they’ve heretofore adored. I happen to be in the camp that adores Hulu’s ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING, if for no other reason that it features some truly brilliant performances by established veterans who still have a couple of years on me. That, plus it’s freaking funny.
And I suppose I should finally give some sampling and love to SLOW HORSES, which seems to have received even more giddy anticipation, as exemplified by what GAMESRADAR’s Emily Murray gushed last week:
Apple TV’s masterful spy drama series Slow Horses has always known how to kick off a season in style. Who could forget the thrilling Stansted Airport set piece from the first installment? Or the second season beginning with the mysterious death of former agent Dickie Bow? More recently, season 3 impressed only minutes in with a James Bond-esque chase through the streets of Istanbul. All these opening scenes are immediately gripping, but the secret to the show’s success is the fact that each season only gets better from there. Thankfully, the same can be said for the upcoming fourth season.
Those last two words really struck me. Fourth season. When it comes to original streaming series, you don’t often see them paired together. We happen to be getting two consecutive weeks where those will be dropping, ONLY MURDERS taking a brief road trip to Hollywood in its fourth season which debuts with two episodes tomorrow, and SLOW HORSES will drop merely its S4/E1 a week from Wednesday.
And it got me to thinking. Exactly how rare an occurrence is this? Well, thanks to both the volume and ambiguity of credible third-party resources that could easily empirically answer that question, it’s not as easy an answer to arrive at. So I spent a little time using the same sort of metholodogy that the vaunted resources of FX’s researchers and companies like Ampere Analysis, who charges four figures for such a report, do. They have a bunch of people scour the internet and count. But since it’s just moi these days, do take this as directional more than finite, but I will stand by the essence of the effort.
The most robust and significant sources of data would, as expected, come from Netflix, since they have significant advantages in volume and lifetime over all of its streaming rivals. Via a July 2023 article on its own website from Kasey Moore, they had produced 3657 original title. Again, by their own count, as of that date 726 were films. That’s 2931 original series.
Wanna take a stab at how many of them reached a Season 4? If you said 10, toss some virtual confetti into the air. That’s a 0.3% success rate, which is even below what the Chicago White Sox have been delivering this season.
Why that is the case is a storied and consistent narrative–services have reams of proprietary data that point to factors such as engagement, subscriber stickiness and project-specific KPI goals for series to hit, and once a season is completed a host of staffers typically not working in sympatico pore over them, with the help of a lot of algorithmic conclusions, and then need to factor in the risk/reward ratio with the knowledge that typical deals for creatives invoke significant increases for a season 4 and beyond. In earlier eras, where a potential of back-end domestic sales existed, there was the allure of reaching critical mass for “stripping”, which would finally put a studio in a profit scenario, that factored into those discussions. With streamers, who have tended to take a “walled garden” approach to content, that’s rarely been an issue, though more recently WBD has taken a more open attitude to being an “arms dealer” as Sony has historically been, and assuming Skydance’s braintrust are actually allowed to run Paramount once Edgar Bronfman’s tire-kicking is vetted, they appear poised to join them. More often than not, the KPIs point to the conclusion it’s just not worth paying people more for what they see as diminishing returns.
But what if those escalators were eliminated? What if talent chose to see their reward in a streaming era is the fact they’re actually GETTING the chance to work on a fourth season, which puts them ahead of at least 99.7% of the field?
And what if the streamers, who desperately need series with more scale to sustain both usage and subscribers since broadcasters are far less of a source of them than thwy were, offset those lower fees by simply ordering MORE episodes of a series that is clearly working for them?
More streamers are discovering the logic and longer-tail value of going back to the future and not dropping series in one full swoop. Sure, it’s fun for those with stamina and passion to binge-watch, but it works against the concept of keeping them coming back for more and being counted among active subscribers. Which means far more when you’re trying to sell advertising against it, as virtually all streamers now do.
What if instead of nine weeks of OMITB or ten weeks of SLOW HORSES, we were looking forward to 18-20, you know, the way those dinosaurs at CBS or ABC used to produce?
What if there were that many more weeks of “echo effect” potential–you know, where those late to the game or otherwise distracted catch up on that they’ve missed. Metrics that actually get factored into the millions of minutes that each show’s performance reflects, and that helps to drive numbers that offset the inevitable losses of those who show up at first but don’t stick around?
And thanks to the successful negotiations surrounding SAG-AFTRA and WGA which reward overperforming series, there’s already an agreed-upon metric of success that can be used to offer additional carrots to those associated with these rare success stories. Define the “echo effect” period as one that begins when the trailer for a new season of a show drops and end it 35 days after the season’s final episode does same. That actuall enhances the chances for those bonuses for shows that have built up volume and popularity.
Admittedly, we are looking at proverbal needles in a haystack under current conditions. It’s taken Apple TV+ more than a year to reconsider a fourth season for their most successful original to date but we finally saw signs of that ossibility this weekend as DEADLINE’s Peter White and Nellie Andreeva reported:
Ted Lasso fans, this is not a drill. In a major step toward the long-awaited fourth season of Apple TV+’s hugely popular soccer comedy, the series’ studio Warner Bros. Television has picked up the options on the three original cast members who had been contracted under the aegis of the UK acting union Equity, sources tell Deadline. They are Hannah Waddingham, who plays AFC Richmond owner Rebecca Walton, Brett Goldstein, who plays hardman Roy Kent and Jeremy Swift, who plays Director of Football Operations Leslie Higgins. After securing the trio, the studio is expected to start reaching out to Ted Lasso cast members with SAG-AFTRA contracts whose options had expired, so they will need to make new deals, we hear. In addition to co-creators/executive producers Jason Sudeikis (Ted Lasso) and Brendan Hunt (Coach Beard), that is believed to include Juno Temple (Keeley Jones).
For as optimistic as that all sounds, another short season after all this much wait would seem to forebode a letdown. And we might have made more progress toward it already had there been some openness about what really should be considered a reward. A bigger salary? Or the chance to earn more of what you were more than comfortably paid before that?
I acknowledge this isn’t a bulletproof concept. But in an era where it’s so difficult to find something that excites people–even me–isn’t it at least worth a bit more consideration? Lord knows I could use the distraction, especially since binge-watching seems to be off the table.
Until next time…