‘They are making screensavers’: Wondering why more and more Netflix content is dumbness served on a platter? There might be an answer

We always knew the streaming business model would prioritize quantity over quality, but learning that Netflix essentially asks its scriptwriters to dumb down the dialogue to barely distinguishable background noise screams futuristic cyberpunk dystopia in a way that not even the most horrifying stories in the genre can quite imitate.

Serving as yet another grim reminder of how art has metamorphosed into an algorithm — a formula designed to capture and hold your attention for as long as it can — a new essay circulating on social media seems to suggest that Netflix asks its authors to have characters “announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have a program on in the background can follow along.”

I guess even Netflix, with its doomscroll-friendly, ADHD-inducing environment, can’t quite compete with the waning attention spans of the general populace, resorting to dumbing down the story and dialogue to the point where you could be watching a YouTube video on your tablet, scrolling through TikTok on your phone, and roughly keeping up with what JLo’s character is doing on Atlas. There’s apparently a whole section of movies and TV shows under “casual viewing” that go down best when “you’re not paying attention.” And to say that this casual warping of our entertainment industry into a frenzied content consumption engine is alarming would be an understatement.

Now it makes sense why so many productions in recent years are one editing mistake away from being utter garbage. There was a time when Hollywood would be criticized for insulting your intelligence by dumbing down movies, cutting away intricate details relating to worldbuilding, and pretending as if the idea was to sit down and just have some mindless fun. Now, industry moguls like Netflix are moving one step beyond that. This isn’t just insulting your audience’s intelligence anymore, but acknowledging that the whole practice of making decent movies is a thing of the past. What you need now is to take one slice of their fragmented attention, and try to keep it as long as you can. Well, that could hardly be done if they need to pay some serious attention to understand what’s going on.

As Will Tavlin writes in his haunting but informative piece, “‘Play Something,’ as in: Play anything. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, if a is on their phone or cleaning their room. What matters is that it’s on and that it stays on until Netflix asks its perennial question, a prompt that appears when the platform thinks a has fallen asleep: ‘Are you still watching?'”

TV shows and movies that come out of streaming these days, which is like almost the entire industry, feel like eating junk food, and we finally know why. As one aptly observed: “They are making screensavers.”

It’s not just bad dialogue and characterization that’s plaguing these shows. The medium itself is being undermined under the sheer weight of quantity. “The editors of these films seem to have just given up, too,” Talvin writes. “The cutting between shots is frenetic. The lighting is terrible. The TNM looks both oversaturated and flat, with the blacks brightened and the highlights dulled, a result of Netflix’s insistence that its originals be shot with powerful digital cameras that compress poorly on viewers’ laptops and televisions.”

So, the next time you start playing a TV show that’s, for lack of a better word, utterly mediocre and underserving of your time and attention, maybe drop it promptly and even cancel your subscription to send the shareholder overlords an explicit message. Unless, of course, you find yourself in the camp of people who’d rather have something playing in the background as they browse endlessly through ittedly more engaging content on social media.