Mass niche

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Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, on “mass niche” vs. the monoculture within streaming.

I grew up watching public television because my parents didn’t believe in cable. More specifically, they didn’t believe in paying $30 a month to gain access to hundreds of different networks when there were, in fact, fifty or so free-to-air channels we could watch instead. This is a decision they’ve stuck with and extended to streamers, a decision I’m reminded of every Christmas holiday, when I turn on the TV to see if there’s anything better to watch than a rerun of Two and a Half Men or a new episode of General Hospital, which has been on air for 60 years. (There isn’t.) It’s pretty admirable, their decades-long refusal to fall into the streamers’ trap. The entire appeal of “peak streaming” for customers was that their favorite shows could be easily accessible at the low cost of $8 a month.

With each passing year, I’ve started to suspect that my parents’ stubborn instincts were right all along: Who needs this much TV? For Gen Z, at least, TikTok and YouTube are already replacing traditional television. And over the past two years, most reports about the state of streaming have belabored a few crucial points: The economic model is broken. It isn’t profitable, which means it’s not reliably making money for producers, actors, writers, or showrunners. And studio executives are still being paid nine-figure salaries.

Vulture’s latest investigation underscores this reality, and makes a few additional points that are rarely said aloud: “You’re seeing ideas that should’ve been movies being elongated into eight episodes, and they don’t have the narrative engines to sustain them for that long.” Why? Simply because the streamers could. More content meant more buzz—until there was too much stuff to effectively market.

The era of peak, critically-acclaimed TV (Better Call Saul, Ted Lasso, Atlanta, Succession) is on the outs: too much money, too little payoff. We’re in what Slate’s Sam Adams is calling the streamers’ “Trough TV” phase. If HBO could nix J.J. Abrams’ $200 million sci-fi drama, then nothing is safe. One writer said that streamers are now aiming for “high-quality, broad-audience shows again,” the likes of West Wing, ER, Friends, or Seinfeld. Niche prestige isn’t lucrative, at least not as lucrative as it once was—which brings to mind some minor Twitter discourse earlier this week over an Axios chart on the media’s Succession obsession.

Critics and writers seem to be stuck in the same prestige funk as studio executives and TV writers who, as one unnamed agent says, “don’t seem to like what the audience likes.” The agent then brings up Two and a Half Men as an example of a show that people seem to really like. “None of my writers want to write that. They all want to write Barry. And you know who watches Barry? Nobody.”

Fair. But this conflation—one that people tend to make when it comes to media or content that has so-called mass appeal—implies that such shows can’t be critically acclaimed or, in this case, creatively fulfilling for the people who produce them. Shows are either niche and therefore prestige, or popular and supposedly made for “everyday people.” It’s a false dichotomy because the content landscape is much more fragmented than that. Yet, most culture producers don’t seem to realize that landing a primetime show with millions of views and high Nielsen ratings is no longer the equivalent of nailing the center of “the monoculture.” For whatever reason, this goal still stands. (I abide by the belief that monoculture is a “subjective, shifting frame of reference, not a default reality,” and the closest thing Americans have to one is sports, specifically football.) This year, no broadcast drama or comedy broke the 10-million viewer mark in Nielsen’s season-long ratings “for the first time in a very, very long time,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.

For studio executives, the amorphous desire to appeal to “everyday” viewers also comes at the cost of racial, gender, and sexual diversity. One writer told Vulture: “Nobody wants to produce trans-focused shows any longer, citing the need for ‘global appeal.’” Global appeal isn’t the right way to think about television, not in a world where most consumers are siloed within our own algorithmic preferences—unless you, like my parents, simply watch what’s on at primetime. This mode of consumption might sound dated to a certain demographic of viewers, but a majority—51.5 percent—of American households watch TV using set-top boxes from traditional cable and satellite providers.

In other words, if you wanted to appeal to everyone you wouldn’t be a streamer! Game of Thrones, for instance, made an estimated $285 million in profit per episode over eight seasons. It generated $4.4 billion, mostly in the form of subscriptions, for HBO. These numbers, according to Bloomberg’s Sarah Green Carmichael, put Thrones “just below Seinfeld in the top-grossing media properties of all time, or a little more than half a PAW Patrol, which premiered two years after Thrones.” The strength of Thrones wasn’t just big IP, but a cross-platform viewership. “Game of Thrones finished a year before HBO Max launched, and was much more reliant on the cable channel, DVDs, and replays.” You know, people using set-top boxes.

For streamers, perhaps prestige is a pitch to retain some cultural cachet come awards season. And for the nitpicky television watcher (like myself), the prestige label is, in short, a mental distinction, one that elevates their tastes from the masses, even though the concept of “mass culture” is itself antiquated. Instead, today’s entertainment landscape might be better described as “mass niche,” where depth of engagement is a more reliable target than scale.

Puck’s fashion correspondent Lauren Sherman coined that phrase in a recent tweet, which was presumably a response to the Succession/Young Sheldon discourse. “These days, entertainment, marketing, entertainment-marketing, whatever, is ALL about reaching a mass of niches.” A show like Young Sheldon or Two and a Half Men isn’t generating the kind of fan edits and social media engagement that Succession has received for being “mass niche.” By these metrics, Yellowstone, which drew 17 million viewers for its fifth season premiere, also falls into this category of mass niche—a niche that most critics wrinkle their noses at. That’s not an insignificant number. For comparison, Euphoria—like Succession, another critical darling—drew 6.6 million viewers for its season two finale, while The Big Bang Theory’s 2019 season finale drew 18 million viewers. But relative to a mass culture phenomenon like Friends, which averaged 22 million per episode, that’s about a third of the viewers for its 2004 finale.

TV will always be a popularity contest, but like yearbook superlatives, there’s some room for diversity. Pick a lane; you don’t have to stay in it. If there is no center, no mass appeal, the future of television depends on nailing these content niches.

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Bloomberg’s Leticia Miranda argues that Neiman Marcus, the private equity-owned luxury retailer, is adopting a “low-end strategy” by cutting service staff and discounting excess inventory.

  • While American retailers are chasing the “sometimes affluent,” European luxury giants “have been progressively moving upmarket to capture the attention of the super-rich … [by] producing more expensive items and improving the quality of shopper favorites.”

• Bath and Body Works wants to be for men, too. (Bloomberg)

• Côte d’Illusion: On the hollow materialism of Cannes and the festival’s insistence on replicating an empty Gilded Age. (The Baffler)

  • Read critic Jenna Mahale’s Cannes diary for Dirt.

• What are novels actually good for? Should they necessarily be good for you? Ed Luker in TANK Magazine on self-improvement in fiction:

  • “If it is expected by bourgeois society that reading is an act that makes us better by opening up new understandings of experience, then this justification hits a snag when we consider actual novels and the variety of ways they can engage with the complexity of human experience.”

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