Opening Argument: How Do You Get Attention For The Show That Has Everything?
Writing about this season of The Morning Show has really tuned me in to a phenomenon in television that, as a critic, is really vexing. When that show was announced, there was a certain wow to it: Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston, Steve Carell ... that seemed like a big deal.
But in terms of ... I don't know, the feel of things, it wasn't a big deal. It wasn't a big deal the way Ted Lasso, which seemed to have a lot fewer obvious hooks, was. And as tempting as it is to say that's just because Ted Lasso is good, there have been countless examples of shows that are very good that don't get attention, and countless examples of shows that are bad that become very popular.
Streaming services proliferating the way they have, and the material they offer proliferating the way it does, it's so hard to get attention for anything. For example: I deeply deeply admire and was riveted to the series Maid, which comes to Netflix on October 1, but I have no idea whether anyone is going to pay attention to it. (Based on Stephanie Land's book of the same name, it's about a young single mom who leaves her boyfriend and tries to survive the grind of being poor.) We hope to cover it on the show, by the way, but it doesn't come with a big-name showrunner. And the lead actress, Margaret Qualley, is certainly someone a lot of people admire, but is she a star? On the other hand, what do you make of Dopesick, the upcoming Hulu series about the opioid epidemic that features Michael Keaton, Kaitlyn Dever, Rosario Dawson, Michael Stuhlbarg, Peter Sarsgaard ... that's a lot of big names. Does that mean it's going to be a big deal?
Well, maybe ask Nine Perfect Strangers, which has most of the DNA of the extremely buzzed-about Big Little Lies and similar star power: Nicole Kidman, Melissa McCarthy, Michael Shannon, Regina Hall ... and yet, while certainly the show has its enthusiastic fans and viewership is now a black box into which it's hard to gain any insight, you certainly don't hear chatter about it the way you did about Big Little Lies.
Apple TV+
It used to be that you could roughly expect that if something had a big enough set of names attached to it, it would get a certain ... I don't know, default level of response? That wasn't a good thing, by any means, but it brought a certain order to the navigation of TV. Now, you can have Chris Evans -- Captain America! -- in the Apple TV+ series Defending Jacob, and people say ... "Oh, yeah, I think I heard something about that."
When I started writing about TV, people still asked movie stars why on earth they would decide to do television. That is long in the past. It's harder to think of movie stars who don't do television at this point. The blooming of the limited series means television isn't a long commitment that blocks you from doing other things, while the changes in critical and cultural cachet means it won't diminish your star power.
But now, there are all these complicated factors that go into what makes people pay attention to new shows -- and, to be clear, that's a good thing. The new series Midnight Mass on Netflix is notable not as much because of its cast, which includes Zach Gilford (that's QB1 to you) and Hamish Linklater. It's notable because its creator, Mike Flanagan, made The Haunting Of Hill House and The Haunting Of Bly Manor, to which it's sort of a loose follow-up. This isn't just a matter of star showrunners and star creators; it's a kind of semi-franchise that has earned the respect of enough people that when they hear "Mike Flanagan, Netflix, horror," that's the same implicit endorsement it once would have been to hear "Nicole Kidman, Melissa McCarthy, Michael Shannon."
Again, none of this is bad; it's just ... disorienting. There's an enormous graveyard of projects that seemed like they might have been Very Important and weren't; there's a similar collection on the flip side of things that didn't seem all that likely to get attention and did. I wish it were as simple as quality, but it's not. It's just a different set of drivers -- including, by the way, algorithms that let streaming services push and promote in new ways -- that set up the initial attention grab.
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We Recommend:
Dan Fienberg at The Hollywood Reporter wrote a sharp and entertaining review of that new Netflix series Midnight Mass, which does a fine job of capturing the show’s fundamental … wackiness.
You still have time to catch up with HBO’s Succession before it returns on October 17. I’ll just say: It’s my favorite drama series.
There’s a new season of The Great British Baking Show on Netflix! It’s time again to try to correctly make cream puffs!
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