Somebody at Netflix loves old-fashioned broadcast sitcoms and they have the data to prove that you do too. The company already shows Friends, Ally McBeal, the Gilmore Girls and affectionately, parodies Full House and other Miller-Boyett comedies in its own animated series BoJack Horseman. When Full House star John Stamos announced on Monday that Netflix will revive the 90s ABC staple as Fuller House, it was just the latest example of Netflix’s nostalgia. So what makes the late 80s/early 90s such a safe bet? Numbers.
“There have been very few hit sitcoms in the last five years,” said Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson, a Wall Street analyst firm that focuses on media and telecommunications. “[Netflix] don’t have the rights to stream Full House or The Big Bang Theory, so they may be trying to create it on their own. It may be more about the opportunity to build a new sitcom.”
And the ever-rarer successful sitcom, Nathanson said, is a license to print money. The analyst pointed out that TBS gets most of its ratings from reruns of broadcast shows including Family Guy and The Big Bang Theory, while Friends helps keep TV Land afloat. In aggregate, in fact, reruns of comedies and cop shows draw far more viewers across all airings than high-rated serialized dramas like The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones, when you factor in reruns of the latter two. You can only find out who died the latest grisly death on Sunday night once, after all.
Nathanson gives Netflix primary credit for increasing the value of serialized shows, observing that viewers are much more willing to enjoy long-form TV when they don’t have to arrange their schedules around airings. They “drive engagement and subscription” – the only thing that really matters to Netflix – “because you care about the storyline”. But now Netflix is turning its attention to programs that are fun to watch more than once.
Netflix knows what viewers like – the company is forever tweaking its algorithm to make it a more efficient predictor of what you’d like to watch next from its constantly shifting library of video streams.
“Shared qualities between movies can be estimated directly from viewing behavior or from [the films’] attributes or both,” explained Michael Jahrer, who was part of the team that won a million-dollar prize from the video service after he and five other data scientists helped to improve Netflix’s recommendation algorithm in 2009. “For new movies you only have the attributes – genre, duration, actors …” Netflix, he said, has loads of other data, including clicks, watches, watch durations per-channel-per-movie and watches overall. They can use that information to find out which series are weekend-long binges and which are Tuesday evening comfort food.
The list of genres Netflix monitors goes on so long that the company has at least a hundred thousand of them, including cerebral steamy romance, action & adventure featuring a strong female lead, and dark gay & lesbian drug dramas. The challenge is to mine all that niche-focused data to create something a general audience will like.
So the key to creating new programming is making sure the genre, duration and actors are among things a large number of viewers already enjoy. The data seems to suggest that means a half-hour sitcom starring millennial viewers’ childhood crushes.
Between BoJack, the widely praised Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and rumors of new Arrested Development episodes, the company seems to be looking for broadly appealing, old-fashioned comedy content – comfort viewing rather than edgy, attention grabbers.
The move may also be about continuing to build a relationship with ABC Television parent company Disney – the media giant continues to favor Netflix over competitors with access to its library of animated features, as well as new shows like Daredevil and the upcoming Iron Fist and Luke Cage series.
Age is everything here. Full House is a relic of a period before television viewership was fragmented across a hundred cable networks – the series finale attracted 24.3 million viewers. For perspective, The Walking Dead is regularly lauded as “the highest-rated show on television” for a recent record of 15.8 million. Those same viewers who tuned in en masse as kids are falling away rapidly from traditional TV in favor of alternatives like, yes, Netflix, according to Nielsen data.
In other words, Full House was one of the biggest shows millennials actually watched on television, before reaching adulthood and opting for Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime. The generation aging into some $200bn in spending power is ageing into nostalgia, too – a nostalgia that’s being mined by algorithms.
