Netflix finally got some good news last week — sort of — after a long stretch of the bad kind. The streaming giant revealed that it lost nearly one million American subscribers in the second quarter 2022 during its earnings call. This is good news! Because it was what the company had predicted would be lost. Twomillion.
Netflix was once so far ahead than the competition that it could have been the whole streaming video industry for a while. Netflix’s most-watched library titles are now, however. The OfficeAndFriends, have moved to streamers owned by their respective corporate parents, while the most buzzed-about originals of the last couple of years also tend to come from non-Netflix streamers, whether it’s Apple TV+’sTed LassoAndSeverance, Disney+’sMandalorianYou can also call it:HacksHBO Max. Things have gotten so rough for the floundering streamer that it’s planning to introduce a cheaper, ad-supported plan next year to attract new subscribers (or, at least, to keep from losing more).
So, what’s the story? How did Netflix become a business school lesson in its own right, after removing Blockbuster from the market? Some of it is simply competition; once every entertainment conglomerate realized it needed its own streaming service to survive, Netflix ceased to be everyone’s first choice for where to spend their home-entertainment dollars. It is possible that some of it is due to an ethos of Netflix executives not to seek out great shows, but just enough. They believed that their superior user interface, their recommendation algorithm and heavy emphasis on serialization would encourage people to continue watching Netflix no matter what. And when few Netflix shows feel as essential as what can be found elsewhere, that’s how you get to a huge subscriber loss being presented as relatively “good” news.
But it hasn’t all been intentional mediocrity for Netflix. In the nine-plus year period since,House of Cardsdebuted and changed the streaming originals landscape, some excellent shows have escaped the algorithm’s clutches and made their way onto our screens. Some have been well-executed versions of familiar TV forms, while others have seemed so wholly new that it’s hard to imagine them existing in the pre-streaming era. Here are our 20 favorite TV shows.