Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Tuesday, January 17th, 2023

For some streamers, having contempt for your subscribers is part of the business plan.

Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Tuesday, January 17th, 2023.

THERE'S A NEED FOR MORE REVENUE. AND THEN THERE'S SHOWING CONTEMPT FOR YOUR SUBSCRIBERS
Those of us in the media who cover the streaming business can sometimes get caught up in the inside baseball aspects of the story. How does a decision fit into the streamer's overall strategy, how will it impact the stock price or how Wall Street views the company's future prospects?

It can be easy to forget that the people who actually subscribe don't care about any of that stuff. They look at what content is available, what the service costs and how easy it is to use.

But there are also the intangible things that don't have a financial value but can heavily impact the business. Cable television is a perfect example of this. For decades, cable television companies had a customer service reputation that was nearly uniformly terrible. Customer support was ill-informed and sometimes non-existent. Every stop in the process was an effort and the cable TV industry was built around the premise that "you don't have any other options, so we're going to nickel-and-dime you to death because we can."

So it's no surprise that as soon as customers had an alternative - even an imperfect one - they couldn't run away from the cable TV business fast enough. Subscribers will put up with a lot of imperfections and aggravations. But no one likes to feel as if they are being treated with contempt.

No matter what you think of the business strategy at Warner Bros. Discovery, it seems increasingly clear that if the company's executives don't feel contempt for their customers, they at the very least don't see them as anything but a walking, talking ATM. It certainly takes a special lack of self-awareness to have both one of the most expensive general interest streaming services in the marketplace while simultaneously mentioning during interviews that the service is "fundamentally under-priced" and that there is "substantial room to raise prices."

Maybe WBD can make that argument later this year when they combine HBO Max and Discovery+ into one streaming service. Executives have said there will be a price increase for the combined service, whatever it happens to be called.

But it took an impressive level of contempt for Warner Bros. Discovery to recently decide it was raising the price of an HBO Max ad-free monthly subscription in the U.S. from $14.99 to $15.99, effectively immediately. Now that move might seem like a ballsy decision for a streamer who is not only planning on revamping the service but also raising the price again in a few months. And it’s asking its subscriber to pay more for what is arguably the buggiest user experience of any major general-interest streamer. And that's not just my opinion. Literally every top-level WBD executive has recently mentioned in interviews that the interface is terrible and that fixing it has been a priority for the company. Which makes this sudden price increase feel more like a "Thanks, suckers!" move than a deserved recognition of a job well done.

The price increase also seems tone-deaf given the relentless stream of stories that recount the latest round of content reductions at HBO Max. I'm not here to argue the positives and negatives of those decisions. But at a time when the company is burning whatever customer goodwill it has left at an accelerating rate, continuing to relentlessly suck every spare penny out of HBO Max because they can while ignoring the pushback from customers feels like a special level of contempt for their subscribers. 

WHIP MEDIA'S SREAMING ORIGINALS REPORT
The interesting stand-out for me is Disney+'s National Treasure: Edge Of History. The show has never been at the top of any list, but each weekly episode does well enough to get it into the Top Ten. And the show has received almost no coverage from the entertainment press. I won't say the show is invisible, but at the very least it is under-covered relative to its popularity.

ODDS AND SODS
* The new MSNBC Films and TIME Studios four-part documentary When Truth Isn't Truth: The Rudy Giuliani Story, will premiere on Sunday, February 19th.

* Hulu has renewed the Letterkenny spin-off Shoresy for a second season.

AND IN THE CATEGORY OF 'I DISAGREE WITH MOST OF US EXCEPT FOR THIS ONE THING'
The recent profile of Netflix executive Bela Bajaria in the New Yorker was pretty cringe-worthy and I believe I mocked it a bit when it was first published. But given the disgust The Ankler's Richard Rushfield has for the streaming business in general (and Netflix specifically), I'm not surprised to discover that he has dissected that profile with a meat cleaver in his most recent column. And while I don't agree with a lot of his take on it, I certainly agree with the way he describes the typical Netflix executive profile piece:

In what is becoming a familiar ritual, a Netflix executive descended from Olympus this week for their profile. The much-talked-about but little-seen Bela Bajaria led a New Yorker reporter around the world, for an up-close-and-personal look at the very model of the modern international television executive.

Interesting that when the Lords of Netflix choose to open up to mortals about their lives, that they don't do with a financial or entertainment publication. Instead, they lately turn to one of the high-end general interest “prestige” publications named for a city that is not Los Angeles. This is how grand narrative-setting is done.

Where Rushfield and I diverge is that he sees Netflix's interest in all genres as television as the equivalent of cranking out the equivalent of a parking lot full of new mobile homes. While I see it more as an effort to appeal to as wide an audience as possible:

But if you look at the state of the Streaming Wars, approaching half a decade since the battle was joined, it’s gotten a lot more competitive and Netflix still retains this enormous advantage of, for a huge swath of people — the biggest swath of subscribers — remaining the default service; the thing that's just always on, for the four hours every day the average American spends viewing. 

And maybe, they are on to something that what people are looking for in those four hours isn't necessarily a meticulously composed, dark, slow-moving operatic drama, but a firehose of a bunch of stuff thrown at them that keeps them engaged, filling in for the phone they've been fed by all day.

Rushfield's take on the Netflix audience borders on his own type of contempt for the TV audience. Netflix doesn't just want to be HBO! It also wants to be HGTV and A&E! It's not just primarily prestige television! It's...gulp rom-coms and reality shows and true crime documentaries!

This is the snarky elitism that often gets the streaming business into trouble. That "only I watch the really good stuff" attitude that not only doesn't reflect the experience of most people. It's an attitude almost guaranteed to lead to a lot of bad programming decisions.

AND MEANWHILE OVER AT PHILO
Here is the rundown of the ten most-watched movies last week on the entertainment-centric vMVPD Philo:

The Wedding Veil Inspiration (Hallmark Channel)
Nobody’s Fool (BET)
The Wedding Veil Expectations (Hallmark Channel)
Reba McEntire’s The Hammer (Lifetime)
Diary of a Mad Black Woman (BET)
John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum (AMC)
Kidnap (LMN)
Roadhouse Romance (Hallmark Channel)
Lies Between Friends (LMN)
How to Murder Your Husband: The Nancy Brophy Story (Lifetime)

TWEET OF THE DAY

WHAT'S NEW FOR MONDAY:

Amber: The Girl Behind The Alert (Peacock)
American Greed (CNBC)
Berlin Legal Series Premiere (MHz Choice)
Love After Lockup Season Finale (WE tv)
New Amsterdam Series Finale (NBC)
Night Court Series Premiere (NBC)
9-1-1 Lone Star (Fox)
Stonehouse Series Premiere (BritBox)
1000 Lb. Sisters Season Premiere (TLC)

Click Here to see the list of all of the upcoming premiere dates for the next few months.

SEE YOU TUESDAY!

If you have any feedback, send it along to Rick@AllYourScreens.com and follow me on Twitter @aysrick.