[thiagocesar]

Apple, Quibi, Amazon are trying to plan the perfect breakout show.

It doesn’t work like that. A lot of the networks’s and Netflix’s breakout shows were not planned to be great. That’s why they just greenlight a bunch of random pilots and see what sticks to the wall.

It’s extremely hard to create hits.

[johnvanommen]

> It doesn’t work like that. A lot of the networks’s and Netflix’s breakout shows were not planned to be great. That’s why they just greenlight a bunch of random pilots and see what sticks to the wall.

There's a great interview with Bryan Cranston, where he's talking about the origins of "Breaking Bad."

Basically AMC wanted to compete with HBO, but they didn't have HBO money. So they gave the creators a limited budget but a lot more creative freedom. AMC basically created an environment where creative people who had a passion project could get it off the ground if they were willing to work for less money.

In particular, Vince Gilligan had to go to the mat for Bryan Cranston, because AMC wanted Gilligan to cast someone else.

[pfranz]

This may not be relevant at all to the topic at hand, but they also made concessions for their budget (which HBO likely does, too). The pilot was written for East LA where nearby JPL was where his former founders worked. They shot the series in New Mexico because of the film subsidies. Many shows may not have been green-lit without subsidies.

[baddox]

> It doesn’t work like that. A lot of the networks’s and Netflix’s breakout shows were not planned to be great.

That might be true for a lot of breakout shows, but not all of them. House of Cards was arguably Netflix' first breakout show, and Netflix outbid other networks for House of Cards when they were just starting to focus on original programming. That was always painted in showbiz media as a very deliberate plan based on Netflix' data about their users' preferences.

[1123581321]

We know now that they didn’t really have that data at the time. They just heard Fincher was available and bought his idea unseen for a lot of money so no one else could get to propose to him.

[thiagocesar]

And as soon as they got data involved, the plot quality decreased immensely. By season 3, most people had given up on the show already.

[notahacker]

Netflix pinning a lot on winning a bidding war for Fincher sound suspiciously like investors placing massively outsized bets on the Dreamworks/Disney guy with the startup savvy CEO being the Next Big Thing in digital media...

[hardwaregeek]

House of Cards was an adaptation of a widely acclaimed British TV show, directed by one of the best Hollywood directors, starring an A-list actor. Plus it probably didn't cost 1.8 billion.

[npunt]

Yep, entirely different risk profile. Netflix already had a brand, platform, and customers, and they already offered TV shows and weren't experimenting with a new format. The House of Cards risk was all in execution, not brand, concept, product, talent, etc.

[jimmySixDOF]

Actually they are all based on the book by Michael Dobbs (1989) who was the chief of staff for Margaret Thatcher for a few years. I heard him at a book show say he wrote it almost by accident as therapy on a vacation after getting squeezed out of politics.

[enjeyw]

The difference is that the sample size for Fincher is a lot larger - 9 of his 10 films have grossed >100mil, so we have very good confidence on his hit rate.

Startup Savvy CEOs have 2, maybe 3 successful companies under their belt, so it's harder to judge how much of their success is due to repeatable factors.

[notahacker]

Katzenberg revived Disney and cofounded Dreamworks so he's not exactly short of samples of his ability to produce hit movies. Also getting the scaleup eBay CEO to sort out the internet bit was a bonus...

[enitihas]

House of cards also had the benefit of having a 2 time Oscar winner on the cast.

[root_axis]

HBO seems to be able to consistently churn out hits, and not just "hits" but cultural touchtones that ripple throughout pop-culture.

[JadoJodo]

But they also have a history of original programming that dates back to the early 90s (and earlier). They've had time to perfect those ripples.

[mkl]

Even their first original show Oz (1997) [1] was good. It was clearly experimental and low budget (it's set almost entirely inside a prison so needs very few sets, props, costumes, etc.), but designed around that limitation to focus on the writing and characters. Netflix tried a similar strategy with one of their first original series, Orange Is The New Black.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oz_(TV_series)

[dhosek]

More accurately, their first one-hour drama. They produced original content as early as 1976, not including sports programming or comedy showcases.

[strgcmc]

There's a not-very visible but nonetheless real amount of planning and "portfolio management" that goes on behind the scenes into choosing which ostensibly "random pilots" to produce. Yes it's kind of a "reptilian" strategy by design (as opposed to "mammalian", focus-on-one-baby-at-a-time), but there is a lot of careful selection done, even if the results look random. More and more, this is a data/ML-driven space, and less and less reliant on human expertise (with human insights but also human blindspots and biases).

[thiagocesar]

Absolutely, but that process is absolutely not data driven.

“Feeling” about a show, and connections to the people running are the two major factors driving those decisions.

Data driven shows tend to be forgettable and ignored by newer generations, who are the ones holding their parents’s credit cards, and therefore, a major audience for hit shows.

[schnevets]

The trailer for Apple's new Foundation show reeked of this. All of their heavily marketed content (See, Servant, Greyhound) look like they had the same person doing the trailers.

[redisman]

I love foundation and that looked like some generic high budget sci-fi with no indication of what actually makes the story interesting

[rockostrich]

I don't really think Amazon should be included with the other 2. I can't think of anything they've made that was "planned to be a breakout show" and didn't succeed. Their pilot program that they used to run might've been the reason for that. They're also really quick to give up on series that don't do well (which is pretty similar to Netflix).

[webdestroya]

The Grand Tour?

[notatoad]

The Grand Tour maybe hasn't become the cultural touchstone that Top Gear was, but i'm fairly certain it's still getting a ton of views. Every top gear fan i know watches it. It's not getting the buzz a new show would because it's essentially just more Top Gear, but it's definitely being watched.

[dageshi]

I think it was pretty successful. I guarantee it got a lot of uk top gear fans subscribed to prime, it did for me.

[death_syn]

The Grand Tour and other related shows are the only thing keeping my Prime subscription going.

[reedwolf]

>Apple, Quibi, Amazon are trying to plan the perfect breakout show.

Apple is making a series out of Isaac Asimov's Foundation books. [0] :-D

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgbPSA94Rqg

[bonestamp2]

I'm sure a lot of us are looking forward to it -- it's good source material, but there's no guarantee that they will pull it off well, or that even if they do a great job, that it will be a hit.

[bawolff]

Its pretty terrible source material if your trying to make a mainstream hit.

The foundation is great, but its not your traditional laser-battle big budget mainstrean action-sf thingy.

[hardwaregeek]

Yeah the thesis of the books (well until the Mule) is that no one person makes a big difference and it's all due to larger historical forces. Although it'd be hilarious if we follow a hero only for the show to conclude with "welp guess macro effects in galactic trade are really what caused the Empire to fall"

[Marsymars]

Kinda off-topic, but I recently read The Last Astronaut[1], and got the sense that it could make a great movie adaptation, which I almost never get from sci-fi books.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40881567-the-last-astron...

[mikeryan]

Yes but every network in existence does it and is forced into that paradigm. Every premium channel on cable (HBO/Showtime/Starz etc) have had to have a new breakout hit pretty much every year with a pretty small slate of new content - and Quibi has been able to combine this with some formats that actually should work (News, short form comedy etc).

[jrumbut]

I think the biggest issue is that there is a deluge of news and short form comedy, and it's free and good quality with a very tolerable amount of advertising on YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, television, etc, etc.

To succeed in short video they needed something that was beyond a bombshell, something desperately sought after but not forthcoming. Highly polished DeepFake Beatles concerts, with new music written by Paul McCartney. I don't see how you succeed charging for something that qualitatively better than YouTibe. You'd have to at least have new interactive elements (choose your own adventure? I don't know, but something cool).

[cleansingfire]

That's what I find striking. With all their experience & expertise, the major studios spend a tremendous amount of money and consistently produce a surprising number of failures. Personally, I like the wider seeding creatively in general (as you describe with Netflix.)

[throwaway43234]

And those are just the failures you see! Friends in the industry tell me there are many more failures behind the scenes where shows can get arbitrarily far down the production pipeline only for studio execs to come in and scrap the whole thing.

We're not so different from those 1000 monkeys writing shakespeare :)

[pfranz]

I have zero idea about Netflix, Amazon, or Disney, but I hear the high turnover in execs at the big network TV studios cause this. The story I often hear is the "new guys" are terratorial and kill off projects of their predecessors so their own projects can succeed.

[jgalt212]

Not to be trite, but this was the whole biz plan of Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, et al. The algos will generate the hits. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work that way. Algos will identify the hits earlier, but they won't "make" them for you.

[jeromegv]

Yes it's hard. But they got 1.8 billions in funding, and they are trying to get a foot in a crowded space, so expectations are high for them to deliver something. You can't stay long in the TV business with just a couple million paying subscribers

[bonestamp2]

Amazon already created a pretty perfect show in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (89% on Rotten Tomatoes). That is going to be really hard for them to top.

[wolco]

They should pack up because Amazon made a super hero show and got 89% on rotten tomatoes.

Wait till you see what Disney is offering... you are going to cancel Prime.

[bonestamp2]

I don't subscribe to prime for the video service, but they've got a couple good shows. My kids like Disney+ but I would cancel Disney+ over HBO any day.

[enitihas]

Does Disney have any good comedy series?

[enitihas]

Amazon does have breakout shows. They have won the last 2 emmy for best actress in a comedy TV series.

[peteretep]

> Amazon does have breakout shows. They have won the last 2 emmy for best actress in a comedy TV series.

I’m not disputing either of your presented facts, per se, but the first of those is absolutely not implied by the second.

[santoshalper]

So much so, in fact, that I have to think it was sarcasm.