It is the new concept that Netflix has been handling for a few months, with audience figures that show that it could be facing a vein or, at least, a way to renew the sometimes very worn-out codes of television fiction. It is about the “gourmet cheeseburgers”, which is being talked about just now that Netflix is looking for keys to alleviate the massive abandonment of subscribers in recent months. Luxury hamburgers, a classification for a certain type of series that Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s head of content, revealed in an interview for ‘The New Yorker’.
The initial search for prestige. When Ted Sarandos was Netflix’s chief content officer, before being named co-CEO with Reed Hastings, he stated that Netflix’s original goal was to “become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” in response to HBO’s refusal to reach a license agreement with the then brand new platform, fresh out of the remote DVD rental business. The idea was to make the prestigious television that characterized HBO at the time.
The first series. That is why in these early days, the platform launched series such as ‘House of Cards’, ‘The Crown’, ‘Orange Is the New Black’ or the extraordinary animated series ‘BoJack Horseman’. Cindy Holland, Sarandos’s right hand, was in charge of promoting this initial aspect of Netflix that sought to identify the service with careful and dramatic products. In 2020, Bela Bajaria arrived (after a few years as head of international content, where she promoted hits like the new version of ‘Queer Eye’) and Holland left the company.
Expanding sights. Sarandos’s intention was to go far beyond series that received awards and public praise, as was the case with the prestige television par excellence, HBO. They began producing outside the borders of the United States to reach an international audience, a leap that, for example, HBO has only dared to take in recent times. Netflix already did it in 2016, with the Mexican ‘Club de cuervos’. In the interview, Bajaria reveals that this strategy has evolved: they no longer want to make series that are liked all over the world, but specific versions for each country of the same product that works.
Fake originals. Another of Bajaria’s star measures was the creation of fake Netflix originals, which officially receive the less glamorous name of collicenses: financing in the early stages of projects, with the option to distribute internationally and apply the famous seal to them. It has been the case of ‘Better Call Saul’, ‘Riverdale’ or ‘Star Trek Discovery’. Or, resume canceled series and continue with their production, as has happened with ‘La casa de papel’ or ‘You’.
Good burgers. But… what are those ‘gourmet cheeseburgers’ that Bajaria talks about? It is a term created by Jinny Howe, vice president of original drama series, and which are defined as products that are both “premium and commercial at the same time.” And he gives as an example telenovelas with a very good visual finish that are produced in Latin America, but that are consumed all over the world.
That’s how they eat. That is to say, “premium and commercials at the same time” implies series that have high production values that does not prevent them from reaching high audience figures. Perhaps the best example of all that Netflix has produced is ‘The Bridgertons’ (and which has been so successful for Netflix that it has even generated its own spin-off, the recent ‘Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story’). .
The ABC referent. Perhaps the North American channel ABC (now owned by Disney) is one of the key referents in this new way of watching television, which could be considered to have been born at the beginning of the century, although it has obviously evolved a lot since then: series like ‘Lost’, ‘Desperate Housewives’ and ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ managed to gain audiences and awards, and many of those responsible now work for Netflix. For example, Shonda Rhimes, creator of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ is also the creator of The Bridgertons.
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