Netflix has been a disruptive, revolutionary force in many ways, but from a PR perspective, what’s particularly interested me is how they’ve refused to play the old “bragging rights” game. You know how that works – the networks deploy an army of in-house publicists to brag about their ratings, which are dutifully reported in the TV columns the next day.
To this end, we get press releases about how Show X won the week among women aged 18-24 or that Show Y finished first among the elusive male 25-34 demographic. None of this matters in a concrete way because networks make money on ad dollars, most of which are based on commercial ratings. Shows don’t get a bonus for their ranking on a top 25 list. Nevertheless, disputes over who “won” a time slot – even by a tenth of a rating point – can become bitter, with occasional calls to Nielsen to umpire disputes between networks. This makes you wonder whether it’s business or ego driving the publicity apparatus.
Netflix, by contrast, has long disdained bragging rights. They don’t care who knows how big their shows are. They have nothing to gain by boasting about the size of their accomplishments. They make their money by selling subscriptions, not through advertising, and have no interest in reporting out numbers for individual shows.
From a PR perspective the networks are probably glad the Netflix doesn’t publicize viewing numbers because many original Netflix shows would knock traditional television programming further down in the rankings. On the other hand, the networks would dearly love to know how popular their own catalogue of TV series are when leased to Netflix for streaming. After all, 80 percent of Netflix viewing is leased content (old TV shows and movies). Content owners would have a stronger negotiating position if they knew how many people were actually streaming their IP backlist.
Now Nielsen has begun to measure Netflix. And right in the nick of time too. In a presentation last December to the international media conference organizer asi, Nielsen’s Brian Fuhrerreported that nearly two-thirds of all U.S. homes are capable of streaming, and that among those homes, 53 percent have access to Netflix, 31 percent have access to Amazon Prime and 13 percent have access to Hulu. Within homes capable of streaming, 11% of viewing is streamed content, or Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD).
Clearly streaming is a major source of television viewing, and it’s not just among cord cutters. This would explain the declining viewership of traditional television. And the impact would be even more obvious if video on devices were included, which is not the case now.
Nielsen’s actually had the capability of measuring Netflix for years. All they’re doing is measuring audio signatures, which is a core function of the people meter. However, none of the networks wanted to risk retaliation from Netflix and jeopardize a revenue stream by being the first to sign up for a new SVOD service. This meant the launch of the service had to wait until a critical mass of Netflix partners had signed up, at which point they all held hands and jumped in the pool together.
Data from the new Nielsen service confirms what we always suspected and provided a few surprises as well. It’s completely expected that Netflix is the major source of streaming, with 43 percent of all streamed viewing. But it’s a little unexpected that YouTube is second with 12 percent of streamed viewing.
Nor is it a surprise that 25 percent of all teen viewing is streamed, although the fact that a fifth of all viewing by 25- to 34-year-olds is streamed has to be alarming to the traditional networks, since this is a key ad demographic. And among specific shows, it’s interesting that two-thirds of the audience for the bleak “Bojack Horseman” is male; by contrast, women constitute two-thirds of the audience for the single-mom sitcom “Fuller House.”
Nielsen’s data also confirms that binging is a real thing that can have an impact on the rest of the TV universe. A massive hit like “Stranger Things” can dominate the living room TV during its premiere week and land four to five episodes in the top twenty list. Old-timers can remember when “Roots” swept the airwaves for eight consecutive nights in 1977. No show will ever draw audiences like that again, but binged hits like “Stranger Things” can clearly disrupt the rankings these days.
The Nielsen data seems to indicate that the “over the top” future predicted by media prophets has finally arrived. Will we see the collapse of media empires? One thing for sure is that all this great new content will have to come from somewhere. The media world survived and even thrived after the introduction of cable; my guess is that most of the same players will still be standing ten years from now, even with a larger mix of distribution systems.
In the Middle Ages, true believers went gaga over relics — physical items that were either a holy person’s body part or closely associated with a saint. All over Europe the major cathedrals claimed to display Jesus’ foreskin, the Virgin’s milk, a splinter from the cross, St. Peter’s toe, St. Anthony’s jaw and other items that seem bizarre and/or fabricated. And yet for centuries these relics were the object of veneration that strengthened the faith of millions.
We do it differently in 21st Century America. Our relics are associated with TV shows. A couple of years ago the Museum of the Moving Image had a major Mad Men exhibition, complete with the show’s memorabilia (Don Draper’s fedora, Peggy Olsen’s sunglasses, etc.). And now “Downtown Abbey” is getting the relic treatment with a full-blown exhibition in a former mansion in midtown Manhattan.
For anyone thinking of attending here is the tourist information: the exhibition is housed in a three-story, very unassuming, building at 57th and Broadway. The hours are 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tickets are $30 and you are encouraged to buy them online for a specific time.
My office is caddy-corner to the exhibition (see view below from my floor), which I’ve walked past many times since it opened, completely unaware that the exhibition was even there, so it doesn’t exactly make a big splash on 57th Street. The proximity worked for me, though, because the website was malfunctioning the day I wanted to go so I just walked over at 10:00 a.m. and waltzed in — definitely the best time to visit since I had the space largely to myself.
The view from my workspace
The exhibition is a multi-media mix of video tours narrated by Mr. Carson, a display of 50 costumes (mostly dresses but also suits and working uniforms), six or seven actual sets from the series, and lots and lots of props. All this is interspersed with clips from the show and piped-in theme music.
The exhibit has a quasi-museum feel to it, with written text on the walls explaining cultural trends from the early Twentieth Century and putting the fashions into historical context. It takes a minute to remember that what we are looking at is still just a set for a TV show and costumes that were created a few years ago — not actual artifacts like you’d find at an actual museum.
The layout of the exhibit loosely follows the layout of a grand house like Downton: the exhibits related to the servants are downstairs and the top two floors are reserved for the Crawley family’s displays.
The downstairs sets include Mrs. Patmore’s kitchen, the servants’ dining room and Mr. Carson’s study. And of course the servant’s costumes, which are even more monochromatic than they appeared on TV.
I don’t know who produced the text that elaborated on the lives of the servants but it’s in keeping with Julian Fellowes’ apparent belief that these grand houses were good for society. We learn, for example, that the houses provided employment and upward mobility for the ambitious children of the local farmers and that most of the servant girls married themselves off and left service by their late 20’s. Those without spouses could continue to rise within the hierarchy in the house and become lady’s maids and housekeepers. There was a similar path for the men as well. And who knows, this socio-economic interpretation might even be true, although the exhibit doesn’t dwell on the relentless work that being a maid entailed.
The second floor of the exhibit has a lot more color and glamour, showing the Crawleys’ dining room and Mary’s bedroom (a place of great drama, given that Mr. Pamuk expired in that bed and Anna’s baby came into the world in the same spot.) The dining room is the most spectacular set in the exhibit, with glorious silver and crystal. There’s also a helpful account of how men had to wear white tie for every dinner, until the 1920s, when standards relaxed and they could get by with black tie. How exhausting to be always playing a part!
Mary’s bedroom, complete with her evening robe and undergarments
The second floor continues the theme of Downton-as-benefactor. We have a clip of Robert Crawley exclaiming that if Downton doesn’t provide hundreds of jobs it has no point. So Downton does not exist to glorify one family and keep the lower classes in place — no, it’s a giant jobs program Why, Lord Grantham is FDR and Downton is the WPA!
Like the TV show itself, the Downton exhibit wants to have it both ways — it wants to be historically accurate and also demonstrate that the characters are more or less just like us. For example, there’s text describing how stiff and formal the nightly dinner is supposed to be — it sounds daunting and not much fun. However, this is accompanied by videos of the Crawleys breaking all the rules — laughing, yelling at each other, and not being the least bit stuffy.
In fact, the character who should be the stuffiest — the Dowager Countess — is the liveliest of all and a softy underneath too. Violet Crawley has a whole area to herself, the highlight of which is a video of her dozen or so wittiest quips. But the exhibit goes to great pains to show that she was a fierce protector of her granddaughters and a breaker of tradition when it suited her.
The third floor has no sets from the show — just a lot of dresses, with a special emphasis on wedding dresses. This section reminds me of the Smithsonian, where the First Ladies’ inauguration gowns are on display. And it was at this point where I looked around and noticed that about 75 percent of the people at the exhibit were women of a certain age. Most of the rest were their husbands or male companions. All white, of course. Not that there’s anything wrong with that — I just noted it as an interesting phenomenon.
It took me about an hour to complete the exhibit. I later read a review by someone who said she spent two and a half hours there. I can’t imagine it. She must have looked at every sequin.
In the end I was glad I attended the exhibition if only to satisfy my curiosity. Stepping into Downton World is like settling into a warm bath or drinking a glass of wine on the couch — its slightly soporific and tends to retard your cognitive ability, even as you get a feel-good tingle. It’s a soft-edges world, where everything appears to be in balance and no permanent harm can come to anyone (unless you’re an actor who wants off the show, in which case you come to a gruesome end.)
So if you’e in NYC, by all means stop by to see it. But don’t make a special trip.
Some other thoughts:
I’ve written extensively about Downton. You can read my recaps here: (Gary’s Downton pieces.)
The exhibition was originally slated to run through the end of January but the run has been extended through April.
The exhibition building only has “up” elevators so if you can’t walk down stairs (and these are long staircases), you better give it a pass. It’s hard to believe it isn’t handicapped-accessible so if this is an issue call ahead to make sure.
The exhibition occurs in a building (218 West 57th Street) that used to house Lee’s Art Supplies, a pretty well-known art store. The building has been sitting empty waiting for a Nordstrom’s to open across the street, and which point the owners plan to create a high-end retail space. Higher-end than an art supply store, at least. So this exhibition is a real gift to them, providing rental income when it might otherwise be empty. For more detail on the property, check it outhere.
We’ve just escaped from the peak travel season, when tens of millions of people spent millions of hours waiting in the airport for their flights to depart, and experiencing rising blood pressure because CNN was pouring out of screens all around them.
There are two types of people who get aggravated watching CNN at the airport: those whose heads almost explode every time Donald Trump opens his mouth, and the “fake news” crowd who think the media, especially CNN, have a vendetta against the president.
With about 50 airport outlets, CNN Airport is not available at every gate but it’s the prime video source at many of the biggest airports. And it’s important to note that the CNN Airport feed is not the same as standard CNN, having a greater emphasis on sports and weather while editing out most airplane crash stories.
But even with the extra emphasis on sports and weather, there’s still a lot of political news on CNN Airport and that means a lot of commentary about President Trump. I’ve written beforethat the news media and the President pretend to be engaged in a fight to the death, but are actually in a codependent relationship at the expense of our sanity and peace of mind. President Trump has a pathological need to see himself on TV 24/7 and the media desperately need ratings.
CNN in particular does not have clean hands. This is the network that I watch when I need to absorb live news so I saw a lot of their coverage of the 2016 Republican primaries. Back when it mattered and there were real alternatives to Trump, CNN seemed to be wall-to-wall Trump. I think they understood early on that airing a live Trump rally generated a lot higher ratings than a Jeb Bush town hall and acted accordingly.
Somewhere along the line this mutual back-scratching soured and now CNN and Trump are ostensibly at each other’s throats. You can’t go fifteen minutes without some CNN analyst, commentator, or panelist observing what an idiot the President is and of course the President is more than happy to respond in kind with a nasty tweet.
So, that’s great for CNN’s ratings, but is all that high school-level drama what we really need while we’re sitting at a gate waiting to be seated on our delayed flight?
And more to the point, in this day and age do we really need a news program to be constantly blaring at the airport at all? Almost everyone who can afford a plane ticket has a smartphone with access to Twitter or any newsfeed of their choosing.
De-stressing is the reason the Life Time Fitness gym chain decided to eliminate all national cable network news stations (not just CNN but also Fox News, MSNBC and CNBC) from the TV screens at its 128 fitness centers in the U.S. and Canada. The chain said its members had had enough “consistently negative or politically charged content” and wanted instead a family-oriented environment.
What’s good enough for a fitness center seems good enough for an airport. Rather than a news network that raises our anxiety levels at the airport how about a palliative video feed? I’m not talking about a Transcendental Meditation channel but maybe something with a higher level of entertainment.
How about a channel that shows nothing by animal videos? TheDodo.comis a website devoted to cute and inspiring animal videos – turning that into a airport channel would raise everyone’s spirits. But even if animal videos are not your thing, I’m sure there are plenty of other mood-elevating content providers who could step forward.
Alas, the business of supplying airport video is just that – a business. Companies bid for this space and unless their erstwhile competitors make a sudden leap forward, CNN is likely to remain a dominant provider as long as airports look at the bottom line instead of what’s best for the mental health of travelers.
Bye bye 2017. It wasn’t a great year for cinema — although it did produce one great movie (“Dunkirk”) and six or seven highly original ones.
It’s no surprise that most of the movies I saw movies fall into two categories — blockbusters or arty independent films. That’s basically where the creative action is these days. Everyone in Hollywood is either aiming to gross $500 million or win an Oscar, with not a lot in between. This makings rankings a little silly. How are you supposed to decide whether “Lady Bird” is better than “Wonder Woman”? They both have female directors and female protagonists trying to separate from their mothers. The only difference is $450 million in ticket sales.
What’s a little surprising is how many of these movies — almost half — are based on true stories, including two that climax with Churchill’s “We will fight them on the beaches” speech. I guess all the original storytellers have moved to Netflix.
I’m a little sad that I only saw 25 movies this year — it’s not like I’m giving up on the big screen, but week after week would go by with nothing interesting to watch — and some of the really arty stuff came and went so fast I missed it completely and had to catch up in the winter of 2018. With that in mind, here’s my list.
1. Dunkirk
The most politically incorrect movie of the year. The entire cast is composed of straight white men, for God’s sake! The rescue of the surrounded British army from the beaches of Dunkirk by a flotilla of small pleasure craft is one of the great stories of World War II and Christopher Nolan has turned it into one of the most spectacular art films of all time, with minimal dialogue and a conflation of three different time sequences. It’s epic, it’s thrilling and it’s going nowhere at the Oscars.
2. Lady Bird
Greta Gerwig’s semi-autobiographical account of her high school years in Sacramento is both very specific to its time and class, and universal to everyone who’s ever gone to high school and wanted something more. The main character (played by the actress with the unpronounceable Irish name who starred in “Brooklyn”) struggles to be special and transcend her extremely middle-class background through various misadventures of senior year. Everything seems to be on the line — and it is, for a girl who wants to get away from her hometown.
3. The Florida Project
This is the “Moonlight” of 2018 — an unsparing and unapologetic look at poverty and its consequences. A down-at-the-heels motel in the shadow of Disney World is the the last stop for poor families trying to keep their heads above water. The kids run wild and what initially seems like a charming story of plucky sick-year-olds slowly spirals into a nightmare. When the movie is over you can only sit and gape at the credits.
4 . Phantom Thread
Mesmerizing and seductive account of a fashion designer who demands total control but meets his match in a Danish (?) waitress. Paul Thomas Anderson layers on music, color, fabric and cinematography to make this the most sensual movie of the year.
5. Get Out
Is this a direct attack on the Trump era’s approach to race or a remarkably well-made horror movie in the style of “Rosemary’s Baby”? I’ll leave the politics to others but it is definitely a fun thriller in which the villains are white liberals. Jordan Peale deservedly made a ton of money on this tale of a black dude who hooks up with someone out of a “Girls” episode (literally, it’s Allison Williams who plays Marnie) and ends up in trouble when he goes home to meet her parents. The rising level of creepiness and dawning awareness of what’s happening is masterful. (Fun fact — Jordan Peale is himself married to a white woman — the comedian Chelsea Peretti. I bet Thanksgiving with the in-laws was fun after this movie came out.)
6. Wonder Women
A terrific superhero movie — maybe the best of all time — because it’s intelligent, wry and to scale (at least until the final 15-minute battle with Ares, the evil god of war). Gal Godot is the perfect Wonder Woman — as sexy as they come and playing the role straight. The political commentary on the fact that the movie had a woman director almost ruined my fondness for the film (see more of my commentary here), but not entirely.
7. The Last Jedi
The most beautiful and best-acted Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi suffers from mid-trilogy syndrome. It’s obviously a bridge to get from the intro film to the finale, with a lot of extraneous filler and a huge body count. A lot of the plot doesn’t make sense, but the characters are well-drawn and appealing. Can’t wait for the next one!
8. Guardians of The Galaxy Vol. 2
A really fun space movie with enough emotional beats to keep you caring. Who would have guessed that the schlumpy loser boyfriend on “Parks and Recreation” would become a major movie star?
9. The Post
Meryl Streep plays Katharine Graham and Tom Hanks is Ben Bradlee. Very good impersonations. Kind of an old fashioned biopic about Big Ideas. Well-made and thoughtful like most Spielberg films. I have to agree with everyone else, though, that it was weird to make a movie about the Pentagon Papers and focus on The Washington Post rather than the NYT. I can’t help but feel that this was the case because Spielberg wanted to kill two birds with one stone: defend the press AND have a female protagonist. (Also, of all the movies based on real stories this year, I think this one department most egregiously from the facts.)
10. The Big Sick
The real life (-ish) story of how the Pakistani-American comedian Kumail Nanjiani met his future wife and stood by her while she was in a coma. It’s funny, sweet and touching. Probably the best coma movie since Sandra Bullock’s “While You Were Sleeping.”
11. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
The character played by Frances MacDormand is maddened with fury and grief that the killer of her raped and murdered daughter has not been found and seeks to publicly shame the local sheriff. It’s not as depressing as it sounds! Emotionally-compelling and well-crafted until about 2/3rds of the way through when it completely goes off the rails. Not sure what Peter Dinklage is doing in this movie.
12. All The Money In The World
An incredibly tense dramatization of the kidnapping of 16-year-old Paul Getty in 1973. I’d have been having a heart attack if I didn’t know how it turned out in real life. This is the movie in which completed scenes by Kevin Spacey were reshot with Christopher Plummer after those unfortunate revelations of sexual misconduct were exposed last fall. Plummer was great, so — good job!
13. A Ghost Story
Did anyone besides me actually see this? Casey Affleck dies and comes back to haunt the house he lived in with his girlfriend Rooney Mara. He’s wearing a sheet, which sounds silly but absolutely isn’t. There’s hardly any dialogue because ghosts don’t talk. Still, very profound.
14. Frantz
Another obscurity and my one foreign film this year. A mysterious Frenchman shows up at the grave of a German World War I soldier with whom he has a special connection and the dead man’s family and fiancee want to know what’s going on. Many lies are told to soften the horror of the war and in the end, life does go on, sort of.
15. Hidden Figures
This movie should have been on last year’s list but was not available for screening when I published last year. Very mainstream entertainment about the genius black women who helped launch the space program through their jobs as human computers. Not particularly complex but the good gals win and it’s very satisfying.
16. Baby Driver
This is a lot of fun if you like car chases and pop music. The title character is a superhuman get-away car driver with daddy issues. Kevin Spacey plays the local crime lord but because the movie came out before those unfortunate revelations his scenes were NOT reshot by Christopher Plummer.
17. Patriots Day
A good recap of the police investigation into the Boston Marathon bombing. Mark Wahlberg is the “everyman” stand-in who is miraculously at the site of every major break in the case. Kudos to the cops who caught these terrorists. It’s amazing to see how they were able to capture these guys so fast. Talk about gripping.
18. American Made
Tom Cruise was born to play this role — the good old boy hot shot pilot who gets recruited by the CIA to smuggle arms to the Contras during the eighties. Based on true events, which I confirmed on wikipedia. Cruise is one of those guys who can’t be bound by everyday conventions and is addicted to danger. BTW, Cruise plays someone who’s about 35 and he looks it.
19. The Shape of Water
I’m not being contrary. I honestly don’t get what people see in this movie. To me it was dull and cliched — is there anything more predictable than an allegory about the repressiveness of the early 1960s? I appreciate the originality but I was completely unmoved by the core love story.
20. The Disaster Artist
I was totally unaware that “The Room” even existed or that it was considered to be the worst movie of all time until this James Franco dramatization. If you are unfamiliar with the story, watch a few YouTube clips of the original movie because you will never believe that such a weird thing ever happened.
21. Darkest Hour
This is a decent counterpoint to “Dunkirk,” depicting as it does the political machinations in the British government while their army was being driven by the Nazis to the Dunkirk beaches. Gary Oldham is very good as Churchill, but the movie feels claustrophobic with all those cabinet meetings. And the invented scenes (like Churchill in the subway) really strain credibility.
22. The Lost City of Z
The last of the “based on a true story” movies I saw this year, this one is about an explorer searching for riches in the Amazon during the early 20th Century. The movie has some things to say about colonialism, dream-seeking, racism, ambition and obsession, but everything proceeds with a stateliness that borders on boring.
23. Spider-Man: Homecoming
Cute but inconsequential retelling (again!!!!) of the Spider-Man origin story. Tom Holland is winning as the teenage Spidey but I strained to care.
24. Thor Ragnarok
I am not a fan of the Marvel universe, having grown up as a DC Comics kid, but I’d heard this was funny. And it was funny and jokey in the same way that “Guardians of the Galaxy” is. But I could not have cared less about the fate of Thor or any of his dysfunctional family. I was so bored I actually walked out half-war through.
25. The Batman Lego Movie
I loved the original “Lego Movie” but making a super-depressed depressed Batman into a superhero Lego protagonist throws away almost all of the joy from the first movie. Like “Thor Ragnorok,” this isn’t exactly a bad movie — I just don’t care for the snarky superhero genre where nothing seems to be at stake.
In the Middle Ages, true believers went gaga over relics — physical items that were either a holy person’s body part or closely associated with a saint. All over Europe the major cathedrals claimed to display Jesus’ foreskin, the Virgin’s milk, a splinter from the cross, St. Peter’s toe, St. Anthony’s jaw and other items that seem bizarre and/or fabricated. And yet for centuries these relics were the object of veneration that strengthened the faith of millions.
Really!!? 