The Netflix Effect by McDonald Kevin Smith-Rowsey Daniel

Author:McDonald, Kevin,Smith-Rowsey, Daniel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

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Netflix and the Documentary Boom

Sudeep Sharma

Along with children’s and archival television programming, documentaries have been a major area of interest for subscribers on Netflix’s streaming service. Though concrete numbers are difficult to obtain, documentaries are widely seen as a part of the Netflix brand of providing on-demand content viewers want to watch. Part of this appeal is based on the nature of documentary as an edifying, educational, yet still entertaining form. However, another critical reason for the growth of documentary on Netflix has to do with specifics of the documentary film industry. Despite a mature industry with a great number of funders, practitioners, and history, large-scale theatrical success has been elusive except for a handful of titles and broadcast distribution mostly dominated by PBS, HBO Documentary, Discovery Channel, and National Geographic. While feature-length documentary in general shares certain similarities with reality-based television, a catch-all categorization that includes reality television (like The Real World, Survivor, and American Idol), serialized documentary shows (such as Planet Earth, Life, and The Hills), and news programming, documentary film is markedly different from both a historical and industrial perspective. And whereas reality programming has enjoyed great commercial success over the last two decades on television, feature-length documentary has been underutilized and underappreciated as a genre.1

Netflix, however, has been one of the few exceptions to this tendency. It has made feature-length documentary a core pillar of its service, both as a way to highlight its connection to quality cinema and to distinguish its catalog from more mundane forms of television programming. This emphasis on documentary has been a major factor in the growth of Netflix and, simultaneously, has led to changes in the documentary film industry. In this chapter, I will examine the complex and changing relationship between Netflix and the documentary film scene. As part of this examination, I detail how Netflix functions more like a newsstand than a library and how its recent increase in “direct buying,” as part of its emphasis on original programming, contributes to the evolving character and appeal of documentary film. I further reflect upon these changes by sharing the experience and views of two anonymous professional documentary filmmakers from different ends of the career spectrum. While it is impossible to say what the long-term implications of these changes will be, the experiences of these filmmakers show that the relationship between Netflix and documentary is complex and at times contradictory, a means of greater overall exposure but also a source of new concerns.

Netflix as library versus Netflix as newsstand

The ability of Netflix to increase value for more niche and archival material is something that has been discussed by other scholars, but documentary is a special example of this practice. For documentary films, Netflix’s promises of new audiences and possibilities are often presented as nothing less than revolutionary. As a source of streaming documentary, Netflix has been celebrated because the popularly understood model for the service has been that of the library. The metaphor of the library works if one considers Netflix as an archive of all documentaries allowing its users to take out individual titles as they desire.

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