Apparently, Netflix Is Shocked That No One Is Watching Their Crap

Here I was thinking that was the goal...

Hello to all my Wonderful World Outside Our Window Subscribers,

On Monday, reports surfaced that executives at Netflix are entering a state of mild existential panic over a fatal design flaw in their growing empire: their original series lack staying power. According to data first reported by Lucas Shaw at Bloomberg, Netflix is suffering from a massive, platform-wide “sophomore slump.” After starting strong with highly watched, discourse-driving first seasons, the streamer is finding that audiences are ghosting by season two. The live-action One Piece shed 30% of its viewers for its second season, while The Night Agent lost half its audience by season three. Season two of the previously limited series Beef tanked by 70%, while the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender plummeted 60%. Allegedly, Netflix executives simply cannot fathom why.

This crisis comes at a brutal time. After a frantic, failed bid for Warner Bros. Discovery earlier this year left Netflix empty-handed, the company has spent months stuck in a glaring rut characterized by slower growth, diminished prestige, and a losing battle for our finite attention spans.

To be fully honest, I’ve always harbored a deep-seated hatred for the streamer—a rage that goes well beyond reasonable qualms with their artistic output. Despite being the undisputed titan of the entertainment world, Netflix consistently casts itself as a plucky underdog. Spend more than a minute reading an interview with co-CEO Ted Sarandos, and you will feel an incandescent irritation building at his ability to gaslight. This is a man who has spent years insisting that up is down, forever passing himself off as a lowly, everyday film fan just trying to make “content” accessible. When confronted with the reality that people actually want their television episodic and their movies big and loud, Sarandos merely deflects, pointing to Netflix’s massive subscriber count as the only validation his strategy needs. This arrogant, Silicon Valley-informed attitude has long defined Netflix’s public persona, and it has repulsed me from the start.

Now, as is typical, the world seems to finally be coming around to my position, which makes the executive sweating all the more satisfying. Netflix’s current problems are not a mystery. While they may be in crisis, it is one they manufactured entirely by design.

The fact is, Netflix has spent the past fifteen years blitzkrieging its way to market dominance by sacrificing everything that actually makes an audience care about television. Focused entirely on hyper-growth, the streamer abandoned traditional 13-plus-episode seasons, abolished predictable yearly release schedules, and rarely bothered hiring more than a skeleton crew of writers for a temporary “mini-room.” Outside of their massive, star-driven flagship titles, they hardly market new seasons, leaning instead on an opaque algorithm to feed potential viewers whatever happens to be fresh that Tuesday. This cheap, stripped-down mode of production reliably delivered mountains of content each week, keeping Wall Street happy and cementing the myth of Netflix’s inevitable victory in a war of their own creation.

But the streaming wars are over, and Netflix has a real problem: they won.

Legacy studios have retreated to traditional theatrical windows and weekly episode drops, having realized that burning billions to replicate Netflix’s model was a corporate suicide pact. Yet, after a decade of chasing mindless growth for growth’s sake, Netflix must now reorient into something it has never had to be: a stable, trustworthy home for culture. Left to their own devices, they are being forced to contend with a simple, fatal fact: they broke TV.

The streamer’s hallmark innovation was, of course, the binge model. Guided by the data-heavy metrics of Silicon Valley, Netflix crafted shows around a single variable: immediate streams. This instant-gratification delivery system paid enormous dividends for a rapidly growing tech venture. Releasing a season all at once engineered an artificial scarcity of social relevance—watch all ten hours in forty-eight hours or be locked out of the discourse. Once the platform had you hooked, its expansive library of licensed Hollywood history was there to keep you trapped. Like a casino obscuring the exit doors, all Netflix had to do was let the psychology of digital addiction take care of the rest.

But the binge model never provided a foundation for sustainability. A binged show leaves the human brain almost as quickly as it enters it. When a tech platform drops a second season two or three years later—assuming the consumer even hears about it through noise of modern society—the odds are high that whatever memory or interest they possessed has completely evaporated.

To compound this, Netflix has spent years tacitly encouraging “second-screen viewing.” Noting that Gen Z is usually scrolling TikTok while a show is running, the platform began explicitly altering their shows to be followed with only a passing glance. To visually and narratively engineer your own art to be ignored is a bizarre creative strategy; to then feign confusion when those same audiences don’t remember the plot well enough to return for season two is pure absurdity.

Ultimately, Netflix forgot that much like film, music, or video games, television shows have to teach us how to watch them. Sitcoms historically used laugh tracks to cue the punchline and clear the runway for the next joke. Dramas paint flashbacks in a sepia haze to mark a jump in time. Sometimes this grammar is built right into the structure, like the reliable weekly loops of a monster-of-the-week series.

But Netflix changed the vocabulary entirely, replacing traditional storytelling with the language of pure momentum. Episodes no longer require distinct narrative arcs; they simply dissolve into the next chapter via auto-play countdowns. By systematically engineering away built-in pauses—like theme songs, title sequences, and end credits—the interface strips away our time to digest. Netflix successfully retrained its audience to believe that speed, optimization, and endless consumption are the ultimate goals of watching TV.

This shift explains their recent, cynical legal pivots. During its high-stakes antitrust defenses before regulators, Netflix repeatedly hammered home a highly specific, eye-raising argument: it couldn’t possibly be considered a monopoly because its greatest, most lethal competitor wasn’t HBO, Disney, Paramount, or Peacock, but rather YouTube—a platform that consistently ranks as the single most-watched destination on American television screens. Squeeze out the traditional studios all you want, the legal defense argued, but look how much time the public spends scrolling user-generated feeds instead of streaming premium narratives. How can Netflix be a monopoly if it is locked in a daily, existential battle with YouTube for the same finite hours of a consumer’s day?

Although those of us living in the real world may be quick to see that YouTube (a user-generated video host) and Netflix (a premium multimedia production powerhouse) are fundamentally different products, dismissing the claim entirely misses the more interesting truth underneath it. Netflix simply no longer sees itself as a participant in the television or film business. It sees itself as a player in the attention extraction economy—full stop.

Netflix isn’t arguing that YouTube makes competing television. It is conceding that under its own regime, television has been completely stripped of its artistic exceptionalism. It has been flattened into pure, undifferentiated “content”—an interchangeable unit of digital attention, no different than a music video, a prank compilation, or a vlog. In fact, Netflix recently proved this by licensing short-form lifestyle clips from publishers like BuzzFeed and Vanity Fair to sit right alongside their multi-million dollar dramas. Their recent integration of licensed podcasts reinforces the point. Netflix doesn’t care if you watch a prestige drama or a 30-second clip, as long as your eyeballs stay inside their digital ecosystem.

Television used to be a central part of our social fabric; it was how families bonded at night, and how co-workers greeted each other in the morning. It required patience, rewarded attention, and allowed us to share a narrative rhythm over weeks and months. Netflix successfully broke that rhythm in exchange for hyper-growth and market dominance. Now, standing alone at the top of an empire built on fleeting impressions and half-watched backgrounds, they are realizing the horrifying truth of their victory. Rather than pondering how we got here, and attempting some course-correction, Netflix is going full steam ahead. They may have broken TV, but you can bet that they won’t try to fix it. That, I fear, will be up to us.

Signing off,
Max Bolen
Once met Ted Sarandos and immediately (within seconds!) asked him about Zack Snyder.