Why Netflix Original Series are Surpassing Standard Hollywood Fare

by Renée J. Lukas

It had to happen sooner or later. You can only have so many decades of telling the stories of straight white men when society is much more diverse than that. For Hollywood, it’s proving to be bad business. There’s been a steady decline in movie attendance, and the demographic that Hollywood has consistently prized the most—boys ages 14 to 24—showed a 15% decline in movie-going, beginning in 2014.

Netflix, on the other hand, boasted 42.5 billion hours that their members watched in 2015. Netflix has now added 450 hours worth of original programming, which has proven to be very successful.

Why is that?

Maybe it’s due to the convenience of watching movies at home. But the enthusiasm of fans of Netflix’s original programs suggests something else is going on.

Diversity. A story is only as good as its characters. It just so happens that many underrepresented characters have interesting stories to tell.

On Netflix, shows like Orange is the New Black, Grace & Frankie, House of Cards, Sense8 and others, depict characters you’d be hard-pressed to find as often on the big screen. Women who are older than 30. Women who aren’t skinny. Women of color. Hispanic women. Did I mention women? In the decades after film noir, the Hollywood powers-that-be decided that women couldn’t be main characters. Now they’re learning otherwise. Other underrepresented groups on Netflix include LGBT people, senior citizens, people with mental illnesses and more.

Fresh storytelling techniques. Screenwriting gurus often say that flashbacks are the kiss of death for a good story—slowing down the pace and ruining everything. An instructor once said to our class something like, never use them or may God have mercy on your soul. Something like that.

Shows like American Horror Story, which originated on the FX channel, rely on flashbacks to build the suspense. A Netflix original series like Stranger Things uses a similar technique, among other storytelling devices, to reveal plot points in surprising, exciting ways. In fact, the use of flashback adds more information so that viewers can grasp even more about what’s going on in the present. The maid has a glass eye? Oh, she was shot through the eye many years ago! Ah HA! This non-linear storytelling style is like a kaleidoscope where the picture comes slowly into greater focus until the mystery is fully revealed. It has an addictive quality, like a book you can’t put down. That’s why so many of us confess to “binge watching” these shows, needing to see what happens next.

I think that Netflix and other platforms for original programming are definitely good things, because they force Hollywood to rethink their Avengers/Iron Man/superhero formulas.  Anything that forces more competition and broader representation of the society we live in is definitely a good thing for the entertainment industry as a whole.