Are you serious? Have you watched Adolescence? It's got more soul and artistic merit than practically anything else I've ever seen. And that was just last week.
Maid? The Queen's Gambit? Baby Reindeer? The Crown? Ripley? BoJack Horseman?
Sure they make a lot of schlock too, because they're a business and that's what most of their audience wants.
But I don't see how you could possibly criticize them for that when they continue to put out some pretty astonishingly artistic and soulful stuff.
You don't need this pipeline to produce 6 shows over a decade. Said another way, they almost certainly would not have bothered to build this system if the purpose was mainly to produce the shows you mention. The reason these systems exist is to enable the creation of hundreds or thousands of productions.
Those were just six examples. There are many more.
But OK yes, Netflix produces a lot of volume because that's also what its viewers want. Are you saying that's a bad thing?
Sometimes people get home from an exhausting stressful day at work and they just need to relax with some mindless entertainment. And that's OK. Not everything has to be art.
Two problems with this argument / framing:
1. Consumers frequently don't know what they want, and will consume whatever is placed in front of them. Implying the consumption of Netflix shows (or other media) is a conscious choice they are making seems disingenuous to me. You see the same with doom-scrolling TikTok or Twitter (or even HN). Frequently it is less of a choice and more of a compulsion.
2. Even when they are making conscious choices, sometimes the things people choose to consume are objectively bad. e.g. sometimes people get home from an exhausting stressful day at work and just need to shoot up heroin. While you can respect the agency of those people to make those choices, most societies do various things to discourage such behavior. A drug dealer whose entire defense is "selling crack isn't bad because my customers want it, actually" is not gonna get exonerated.
No, because people usually do know what they want in terms of TV and movies. They've been watching their whole life and know exactly what they like generally and what they don't and what they're in the mood for tonight. This is precisely why Netflix's personalization is so key, because people won't consume whatever is in front of them. People even rotate between streamers precisely to watch the specific shows they love. You're denying people's agency. Streaming isn't IG or TikTok.
And no, TV isn't heroin or crack. And who on earth are you, or me, to judge what other people want to watch on TV? That's paternalistic and insulting. Next do you want to censor which books I can read?
So on the one hand you admit that IG or TikTok are things where people literally consume whatever is in front of them, but when it's Netflix this no longer applies? Why?
And I never suggested preventing people from watching what they want to watch.
House of Cards, The Diplomat, Kaleidoscope, Lincoln Lawyer, The End of the Fucking World, etc etc