How Netflix blew it

“Thank you for how you were at the hospital. So raw, broken… and handsome. I’ll take that with me,” she tells him. It was a pitiful end to one of the jewels of Netflix’s programming. Some think that the platform itself may be going the same way.

Netflix is still the most popular streaming service in the UK, with over 60 percent of us subscribing (Amazon Prime reaches under half of households and Disney a quarter). But viewers are increasingly disgruntled. 

Top of the complaints is the growing cost of a Netflix subscription. The basic plan, with no advertising, was £5.99 per month in 2020. Now it’s £13.99 without ads – just a pound less than the cost of a TV licence. 

But cost aside, has Netflix lost its mojo? This year it has failed to produce a hit with the heft of Adolescence, Stranger Things, Squid Game or Wednesday. 

Emily in Paris is drifting to a lavish but predictable close. Greta Gerwig’s Narnia movie is coming out in cinemas in February, streaming nearly two months later. There’s Pride and Prejudice with the reliably great Olivia Colman this autumn – but that’s never going to break new ground. 

Somehow, Netflix doesn’t feel essential any more. The market seems to agree. The value of its stock is down by a third since 2025.

Netflix has always hosted plenty of glowy slop. Indeed, part of the platform’s appeal is that it offers drama that demands nothing of your critical faculties. My Oxford Year and Emily in Paris provided the dreamy, romantic spectacle of a beautiful young woman falling in love in gorgeous surroundings: Merchant Ivory without the brains.

Those two series are accomplished, if silly. The reliably schlocky Christmas romcoms meet a need. But the teen dramas are often woeful. 

Suggested Reading

Why does everyone hate Laura Kuenssberg?

Ros Taylor

One of the 17-year-olds I canvassed cited My Life With The Walter Boys as a particularly low point. Netflix adores the suffering-redemption-fulfilment story arc, applying it to everything from high school dramas to Street Food Latin America. It limits what drama can do.

And its strategy of throwing shows at the wall and seeing what sticks means that plenty of them get cancelled after a single series. Sometimes these decisions are made before a show has a chance to prove itself – as happened to the excellent French dramedy about a comedy club, Standing Up, much to the dismay of its director and its fans.

“It has some great stuff,” says the comedian Matt Green, “but I keep being burned by them doing one or two series of a new show, then cancelling it on a cliffhanger. Mindhunter and Kaos are good examples.”

Meanwhile, Apple TV is commissioning fewer shows of better quality, like Slow Horses (though fans are less keen on series six) and Widow’s Bay, while building up a reputation for sci-fi and action.

If you like mainstream foreign drama, Netflix and the All4 Walter Presents strand are still the best places to find it. You just have to know about them, because the Netflix algorithm is unlikely to direct you there. 

The Polish thriller Mire and the offball Danish drama Rita are brilliant but hidden. (Not that its European drama is short of dross: do not, however much you love Provence, dabble in Je m’appelle Agneta.) And perhaps because it does not encourage ratings, Netflix is slow to realise when you don’t want to see a series again, or at all.

Sarah Dempster is a comedy writer and journalist who often reviews TV. She says viewer fatigue has kicked in, and the problem with Netflix is twofold: “A fear of taking risks, and a conviction that big budgets automatically ensure quality telly.

“The majority of their dramas have extraordinarily high production values, but this is too often at the expense of original ideas and solid scripts. A homogeneity has crept into their productions (ditto those of the other streamers); a sort of uniform, all-purpose slickness that’s making it more and more difficult to tell one series from another.”

Adolescence, she says, was a notable exception. “The series is very, very British in terms of its tone, cultural references and general lack of conventional prestige telly trappings (all those thrillingly pasty complexions!) – and yet it’s managed to connect with audiences around the world.”

Yet often, even when a series is made and set in the UK, you sense the intended audience is elsewhere. Netflix is run from LA and Los Gatos, and it shows. Would it have made Trespasses, the heartbreaking Channel 4 drama about the Troubles with a largely unknown cast? Probably not.

Suggested Reading

Race Across the World, the TV antidote to toxic masculinity

Jamie Klingler

But who will take up the mantle? The British television industry is in a bad way. Production companies have laid off thousands of staff since the pandemic and the BBC, for all the triumph of Celebrity Traitors, is permanently embattled.

Sky wants to buy ITV’s streaming arm, which has been spending £100m a year on foreign shows. ITV drama feels formulaic, even if it still produces the odd gem (Believe Me). C4 is cutting 340 jobs this autumn. 

The promise of Netflix was that you could always find something you wanted to watch. But with almost limitless choice comes an enervating passivity. In hindsight, ‘Netflix and chill’ was a counsel of mediocrity: TV too bland to move you, films that are merely a pretext for something more interesting. 

“I’d love to see Netflix take more risks on other productions that prize strong scripts and thrillingly original storytelling over budget-led slickness and whizz-bangery,” says Dempster. The lavish days of The Crown are over. That could be no bad thing.