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Comment by RandomThrow01 | Hacker News Reader

I actually think the Netflix originals are close to the only good content left in their library. Whether or not that justifies the price is another matter.

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Netflix originals are hit or miss. They make (or take over) some good stuff, like Stranger Things season 1 or Bonus Family, but they also make some embarrassing, awfully bad things, like Bright or Bird Box. Even within the same show they are hit or miss, like when they took over The Killing or Black Mirror. I find there's no correlation between "made by Netflix" and quality.

I thought bird box was actually quite good, apart from the atrocious, inoffensive “made for America” ending.

Bright was decent as an action movie, but terrible as the social commentary it tried to be.

I had to stop like 10 minutes in a never got to the action. It was so heavy-handed in it's political commentary that it just came off as cringy.

This is the problem I have with a lot of Netflix content. It plays as social commentary written by a college freshman. Painfully cliche and heavy handed.

Most of it is awful quality and would've died on the vine on a network channel, and their bar is pretty low. The rest of the library is getting pretty thin as well. I don't think Netflix has a very bright future and will probably be remembered like Myspace, one of the first big players in a space they will cease to be relevant in.

I can't remember where I heard it originally, but it suffers from the "This racism is a metaphor for racism" problem that a lot of sci-fi tends to get close to. The issue ends up becoming that by making the discriminated party/group a literal different species, or a robot, or an alien, you dilute the core moral argument about treating all humans the same in the real world. What should be about racism becomes closer to an animal rights argument in-universe about how to treat things that aren't human, but aren't completely inert, which is a much more nuanced argument.

In short, metaphor is hard, especially when you're applying it to complex issues.

They’re trying to reach a wider demographic than just your taste, and I must say I put them on par with any other studio (eg HBO, Showtime) for entertainment value because netflix has more variety and content I’m interested in despite HBO arguably having higher cinematic quality.

And honestly the idea of studio quality is kind of stupid—my favorite show of all time in terms of cinematic quality, The Knick, was done by Cinemax (skinemax?) and virtually nobody has heard of it. The best shows can come from anywhere, and everyone puts out shit content.

True about the wider demographic, but that has an unarguable correlation with lower quality. A show, book or movie which has something to say (artistically, socially or whatever) will upset someone; by definition the only way to reach a wider demographic is to make something blander or with less to say, so that you minimize the risk of upsetting/disappointing your audience.

This doesn't even apply to arguably good shows like The Killing, whose later Netflix-produced season is so awful it's embarrassing, not because it appealed to a wider demographic -- it was pretty niche -- but simply because it was terrible, badly acted and worse plotted. I've no explanation in this case.

I'm surprised by what people are saying about Bright. I disliked it because it was a bland knockoff of Shadowrun and similar scifi-with-orks-and-elves settings, with weak SFX and an even weaker plot. The commentary about racism -- whether well or badly done -- didn't even factor in my dislike. Bright is indeed a by-the-numbers urban fantasy made to appeal to a wide demographic, with nothing interesting to say about scifi, fantasy or even action. It was quite accurately described by the press as "a movie done with an algorithm". So of course it will likely have a sequel!

I really hope bland shows aren't the future of Netflix, but I fear they will be because they make business sense.

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