"Netflix Shows Are Only Good When You're Doing Something Else"

My son is my summer intern, so he’s around the shop a lot.

He runs errands, chases down footage, sits in on calls, and has a front row seat where he watches me walk the daily tightrope of being in this business. But he doesn’t read the trades, and he has no idea about the practice at Netflix that famously gives writers notes to have characters announce exactly what they’re doing so the audience can be on their phones and vaguely, somehow, follow along while scrolling Instagram.

He’s a Biochem major who has no interest in following in his dad’s footsteps. And certainly isn’t familiar with the term “Second-screen writing”

He just knows what he feels.

Last week, spontaneously, without even looking up from his phone, he said, “Netflix shows are only good when you’re doing something else”.

Sit with that for a minute.

He had a recognized second-screen writing blind. As a spectator, an audience member from outside the system. No trades, not a conversation he and I are having back at the office. Just a 20-year-old with a phone in his hand, casually diagnosing the stink in the room, in a single decimating sentence.

That should humiliate every executive who enthusiastically greenlit this idea.

Here’s where it becomes a critical business problem, not only for Netflix as we’ve just seen, but industry-wide.

Attention is the only thing Hollywood sells or has ever sold. Period. Not script, not film, not studios… Attention. That means a stranger, unknown to the creators or the execs, is willing to give you uninterrupted attention for several hours of their one and only life. Every dollar the business has ever made tracks back to that arrangement.

A show or film written to overcome your inattention has capitulated the only value it ever had.

I have no idea what that is, but it’s certainly not a film or a show.

It’s like wallpaper.

Nobody LOVES wallpaper. Nobody defends it at dinner. There will never be a mass public outcry when a certain line of wallpaper stops being made. Nobody will repeat a quote from the box the wallpaper came in. You can’t build loyalty or word of mouth by being ignorable.

You get the audience you write for. So if your mission is to write for distracted people, pretty soon the audience realizes they aren’t required.

Now the part that really matters for you, because if you’re reading this you probably don’t run a giant streaming service. You probably run a shop.

The biggest players in the industry are gambling on the idea of monetizing millions of viewers by training them to half-watch. That means they understand nothing about the “don’t talk to me now I’m knee-deep in this Hugh Grant performance” kind of attention we all know and honor is going to become scarce.

You can make something that still requires the viewer. The doc that trusts the audience doesn’t need things obviously spelled out. The vertical slice of your project that truly believes audiences are smart and crave leaning in. The kind project that treats the audience’s time like a sacred thing. Because for an entrepreneurial filmmaker, it is.

Netflix is doing this because this is what Netflix does; it optimizes for glance.

This cursory interest in whatever is on one’s TV screen has never gotten anyone to write a comment on Facebook telling their friends “You have to watch this”. It never backed a project. It never showed up 4 hours early to the theater to get the best seat.

That’s our lane. Attention is being sold off one Mark Wahlberg film at a time. On purpose.

And so, the verdict.

Somewhere in a building with amazing coffee, a person who has never written a scene, let alone completed a screenplay, sent a note telling a screenwriter who has written hundreds of them to make a character say exactly what they’re doing. Out loud, so the viewer who is not watching can follow along with a story that no longer needs to exist. And everyone on that email chain understood the assignment.

Dialogue became insurance against losing attention. That same insurance became the infrastructure of the most powerful storytelling machine ever invented, a machine that took the one medium that got people to sit still in the dark together and let a story take them to unimaginable places and turned it into a 7^th grade book report. Or worse, ran through some audience metrics dashboard and handed it back as a wall lamp.

They lower the bar all the time, but this time they are claiming this as an improvement that will generate massive view time, all the while raising the subscription price. Less for more. Seeing that a lot lately.

Well, my son noticed, which means everyone did, because the audience always notices.

A twenty-year-old on a couch wrote their obituary in ten words, for free, without looking up from his phone.

What they will never realize, their phone was never the competition.

Their contempt was.

Alex LeMay is a filmmaker, showrunner, journalist, and development executive. Pitchcraft publishes dispatches from the intersection of storytelling, and the business of making things. Subscribe now and get updates in your inbox every week.