Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Monday, January 23rd, 2023

Peacock's unique approach to promoting "Poker Face"

Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Monday, January 23rd, 2023.

RIAN JOHNSON ON 'POKER FACE' AND THE BINGE DROP
I have to admit that I find this discussion of Poker Face from creator Rian Johnson to be more than a little perplexing. Reading between the lines, I am assuming he is talking mostly about Netflix, since the other major streamers have shown to be pretty flexible about the "binge-vs-weekly-release" discussion:

We did get a lot of blank stares. It was interesting. I basically wrote the pilot, that was the pitch process. And then we went out. We had sent the pilot, and a little document. But it was really just me explaining how the show was going to work moving forward [after the pilot]. Serialized storytelling in the world of streaming just has the gravity of a million suns right now. I didn’t really anticipate exactly how much it just is the only thing people think of in terms of storytelling. It really surprised me.

Even when we pitched this to some phenomenally smart people who know TV, that’s the mode of thinking right now. That that’s what keeps people watching; a serialized arc over the course of a season. And I just kept coming back and hammering the notion that all the shows that I grew up watching were not about the cliffhanger at the end. They were about wanting to come back to hang out with this character that you love and see them win, and that’s equally addictive. And it’s also something I miss, and I bet a lot of people also miss. And Peacock were the ones who really responded to that and who were genuinely excited about it. And that’s how we knew we had found the right partner.

I know from speaking to numerous Netflix executives on background and off-the-record over the years that the belief in releasing most television in a binge method runs deep. And I get that changing that for a high profile show would bring on all sorts of "Is Netflix Changing Its Binge Release Plan?" hot takes. But even given all of that, you have a series created by Rian Johnson and starring Natasha Lyonne. This would seem to be a project worth pursuing, even if you have to change your release schedule a bit.

NOT THAT PEACOCK IS PERFECT EITHER
Another thing Netflix executives believe in deeply is the strength of marketing efforts that are equal parts subscriber-driven buzz and UI-driven content discovery. There is this belief that there isn't a lot of press about a show before its premiere, there will be this explosion of coverage when the series drops and that will drive interest.

Peacock seems to be taking a similar approach with the press when it comes to Poker Face. The positive side is the streamer made all the season one episodes available to critics. But there is an embargo on reviews until after the series premieres on the 26th. In fact, the pre-debut feature stories have been quite limited, with an extended piece in Rolling Stone that included Johnson and Lyonne, and a smaller interview in The Hollywood Reporter featuring Johnson. The two outlets are sister publications, which makes me wonder if the interviews were a bit of a package deal. Although looking at the THR piece again, it might be comprised of quotes from last Sunday's TCA panel. The quotes sound familiar, but I didn't see any indication that's where the quotes originated.

Regardless, the odd thing about this approach for Poker Face is that it is likely to get uniformly strong reviews, so the only reason to enforce the embargo is in order to create that viral explosion of buzz when the first episodes drop. But would it have really impacted that explosion to allow reviews to post the night before the premiere?

Not surprisingly, this is not a topic anyone at Peacock seems eager to discuss. But at least it's a background if you're why a show which arguably might be Peacock's biggest original series yet has received so little advanced coverage.

ODDS AND SODS
* In case you don't see enough conspiracy theories on social media, here is the latest Tubi Deep Dive: 5 Documentaries For The Conspiracy Lover In Your Family.

* And if you're having trouble getting to sleep at night, you can ease your mind with these White Noise and Slow TV streaming channels.

* TBS has canceled the competitive cooking series Rat In The Kitchen after one season. Which isn't much of a loss, since it was pretty awkwardly terrible series.

* Here is the complete CDG Casting Awards UK nominations list.

* The Daily Beast is reporting that Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight on the "Chopping Block" At ABC News. His contract is up in July.

* ESPN has signed a rights deal with Association of Pickleball Professionals to cover eight tours in 2023, stream 200+ hours on ESPN+...and: eight one-hour recap shows on ESPN2.

THE PROBLEM WITH BUYING A STUDIO
Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw had the first interview with new Netflix co-CEOs Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos on Saturday. While you've likely already the interview (or seen talk about it), I wanted to highlight this exchange, because is a topic that no one at the company has been this explicit about until now:

That gets at churn, which most third-party metrics say has ticked up for you. You guys are still ahead of pretty much everyone, but would buying a library help reduce the number of people canceling?

Sarandos: Can you build a big business without [intellectual property] and without a library? We just did.

Peters: Acquisition might be a particularly economic inefficient way to get to that library. And as the industry is sorting itself out, we might see that more folks have to shift into the arms dealer mode.

Sarandos: The best way for those guys to monetize that library is likely to license it. They've all built rich businesses selling their content to other people.

How many years are we away from having that conversation about your company?

Sarandos: We've never had that as part of our business model. There's no studio business that we're trying to preserve. We do a better job of monetizing our content through our subscription model. We get millions of hours of viewings of a Bird Box every week. And those other businesses, particularly the linear TV businesses, are in massive secular decline. I'm not gonna try to maximize revenue from that shrinking business.

There have to be a lot of shows and movies you guys have made that don't attract much viewership, or do but don’t matter for subscriber acquisition or retention.

Sarandos: There's not much revenue in that.

It's an interesting point of view. Netflix executives believe that a streaming business contraction would lead to more licensing of content, which allows Netflix to only license the specific titles that are of interest to them.

And while it isn't framed quite this way in the interview, the reality is that any library you acquire is going to be 30 percent titles want to see and 70 percent marginal content. Netflix doesn't want all of that marginal stuff - if it did, it could license a lot of it for next to nothing. In a sense, Netflix executives are curating their library by being selective on what they license.

WHAT'S NEW FOR MONDAY:

All American Spring Premiere (The CW)
All American Homecoming Spring Premiere (The CW)
Darcey & Stacy Season Premiere (TLC)
Death By Fame Season Premiere (Investigation Discovery)
Extreme Sisters Series Premiere (TLC)
Independent Lens: No Straight Lines (PBS)
Kold X Windy Season Finale (WE tv)
Narvik (Netflix)
The Bachelor Season Premiere (ABC)
The Good Doctor Spring Premiere (ABC)
The Lazarus Project Series Premiere (TNT)
The Playboy Murders (Investigation Discovery)
Under The Vines Season Two Premiere (Acorn)

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.