‘Do you want to stream something?’ my girlfriend asked me. It was 5 p.m. on a Saturday and I’d had a horrendous week. I’d caught one of those mutant viruses that you learn about in nursery rhymes or at the London Dungeon. The cough was the worst part. It was the sort of cough that evacuates a Tube carriage. It was the sort of cough you hear in a western before the protagonist says: ‘Old Billy Boy got consumption. There ain’t a darn thing we can do ’bout it. Doc says he got weeks. Poor bastard. He ain’t never gon’ make it to Montana.’
In short, I was feeling out of sorts. And as such, I was ready for some mind-numbing television. ‘We can watch something,’ I said. ‘What do you fancy?’
We settled for the straight-to-streaming Prime Video release The Idea of You. The film stars Nicholas Galitzine as an insufferable British boy band frontman. Galitzine is British, which is why I was somewhat taken aback when he appeared on my screen doing a terrible impersonation of a Brit. Perhaps all those months spent in LA confused him. Either that or he just can’t act. Anne Hathaway plays his older (supposedly ‘much older’, though she’d get IDed at my local Sainsbury’s) love interest. The script feels like it was written on a One Direction fan-fiction forum. I was forced to take a break and have a Lemsip when Hathaway’s character made the saddest-looking sandwich I have ever seen. She then divulged the entirety of her depressing back story – in what was a Razzie-worthy use of exposition – before Galitzine turned to her and said: ‘We’re still here… eating great fucking sandwiches.’
Are we? Are you? We finished the film, but I can’t tell you what happens. And that’s because nothing happens. Like many made-for-streaming films, The Idea of You is designed to be put on in the background. You’re not meant to focus on the plot; that’s not the point. It’s the film equivalent of buying a book at an airport and knowing full well that you’ll leave it on the plane when you land.
A significant chunk of streaming media is like this: The Kissing Booth (1, 2 and 3), Uglies, Red Notice, Insatiable, My Life with the Walter Boys, Emily in Paris, The Goop Lab, Simon Cowell: The Next Act, Riverdale. This is not to say that all of streaming is bad – Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV et al have all produced brilliant films and television in their time – but it is to say that the streaming model is broken. And it’s not just because the content is terrible.
Streaming is rapidly overtaking terrestrial TV. Between 2016 and 2024, household subscriptions rose by 240 per cent. Last year, Barb – the UK’s official body for measuring TV and streaming viewership – found that 17.6 million households had access to Netflix. That’s nearly 60 per cent of all homes in the UK. Amazon Prime wasn’t far behind with 13.7 million, and Disney+ is creeping up with 7.5 million.
This isn’t surprising. Have you tried watching terrestrial TV lately? Who is it for? Michael McIntyre’s Big Show. Stranded on Honeymoon Island. Mrs Brown’s Boys. If civilisation were to end tomorrow and all that remained of mankind’s efforts was a singular box set of Mrs Brown’s Boys, would you be happy?
Over the years, streaming services have capitalised on our lack of interest in terrestrial TV. But now we’re paying the price. Consumers are spending around £200 a year on film and TV subscriptions, at a conservative estimate. If you were to subscribe to each major streaming service – Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV, Paramount+, BFI Player, Hayu, Mubi, DAZN, HBO Max (coming soon) and Shudder – you’d find yourself paying well over £1,000 per annum. That number is likely to increase as platforms continue to hike their charges in what many are calling ‘streamflation’. Last year, it was revealed that streaming services have increased their prices by as much as 172 per cent since 2019. To add insult to injury, they’ve introduced advertisements with their basic packages. So now you can watch your favourite show with ad breaks. Brilliant. Remind me, how is that any different from terrestrial TV? What exactly am I paying for?
Next time you find yourself in a seven-hour Netflix binge-hole, ask yourself this: would you watch the same show if it were on terrestrial television?
Finances aside, streaming has also corrupted the way we consume media. You could spend an entire week dribbling with your face pressed against the TV and you’d never run out of content to watch. The sheer volume of choice has given rise to this quagmire of paint-by-numbers television. It’s the shotgun effect: make as many shows and films as humanly possible in the hope that something sticks and captures the zeitgeist. Next time you find yourself in a seven-hour Netflix binge-hole, ask yourself this: would you watch the same show if it were on terrestrial television? The answer is probably no. Or, at the very least, not seven hours of it. But you pay your monthly fee, so you ought to get your money’s worth – it doesn’t matter that you haven’t blinked in 72 hours.
I’m aware that there is a danger of sounding like a pseud when bashing lowbrow films and television. Let’s make one thing clear: I love trashy TV. I must have watched hundreds of hours of Hoarders and Storage Wars. I was hooked by Channel 4’s Inside KFC at Christmas. I have seen Cockneys vs Zombies more times than I care to admit. And if I could go back, I wouldn’t change a thing. But if all media becomes trash media, we have a problem. Take Netflix’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery. What will that do for big-screen cinema? Will it mean that the majority of new releases are straight-to-streaming? I’m all for watching a movie at home, but to pretend it can replicate the cinematic experience would be disingenuous. And why would we want it to? The first film I saw at the cinema was Treasure Planet. I was just three years old. They say you don’t remember anything before the age of four, but I remember that. My love for cinema – among other things – would have suffered immensely had the movies I watched as a child been on a 32in screen and recommended by an algorithm.
We, the consumers, are partially to blame. How many of us have watched a trailer and said: ‘Looks good, but I’ll wait for it to come out on Prime. I’m not paying £10 to watch it at the cinema’? How many of us have gorged an entire series in nine hours because we’ve lost the art of savouring something? People are consuming more media than ever before, but the way we consume that media has changed significantly. And not for the better.
When we finished The Idea of You, the algorithm suggested three equally shoddy titles to watch next: The Map That Leads to You, The Summer I Turned Pretty and Molly-Mae: Behind It All. Lying there, surrounded by snotty tissues and a half-finished mug of Lemsip, I was reminded of the closing scenes in The Cable Guy. Jim Carrey’s character hangs from a ledge above an enormous television satellite dish. He plans to destroy it. Matthew Broderick’s character tries desperately to hoist him up, but Carrey’s character has made up his mind. He grits his teeth, pulls his face closer to Broderick’s, and lisps: ‘Somebody has to kill the babysitter.’ Only now do I appreciate the significance of that line.
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