Anna Louise Wiegenstein

Anna Louise Wiegenstein is a Ph.D candidate in the Screen Studies program within Oklahoma State University’s Department of English. Her dissertation examines elements of style and authenticity within the film and TV output of Baz Luhrmann. Other research interests include contemporary film and television musicals, streaming video industrial study, and the “found footage” form of filmmaking. Her writing can be found at InMediaRes and in the Media Industries Journal.

“The Shut Down”:
Risk and Failure Negotiation Within Netflix Original Programming

Introduction

In the years since its introduction into the media marketplace, Netflix’s business model has often been discussed as a nonstop upward trajectory, a forward-thinking startup that has been able to shutter major companies like Blockbuster before going on to redefine the television landscape with its major investment in online streaming services. This narrative of success had a few, relatively minor missteps (the swiftly-canceled disc-rental offshoot Quikster, for example) but news of a substantial dip in its subscriber numbers in mid-2022 was, for many, the first hint of significant instability within the company.[1] Even following the rockier period of late, Netflix is still seen by many as a media provider so tied to success that even its millions of dollars of accrued debt in building its upstart empire has yet to affect its stock prices longterm.[2]

This essay seeks to extend the recent questioning of this narrative further back in time, and to place Netflix more squarely in the context of television studies – a field where success is the exception, rather than the rule – by analyzing the brief life of 2016 Netflix Original series The Get Down. Announced as an exciting entry into television from Australian auteur Baz Luhrmann nearly two years prior to its debut, the production became infamous as shooting schedules dragged and budgets ballooned, finally reaching the point where Variety described it as the “most expensive series of all time.”[3] All the financing in the world ultimately couldn’t stop the show from being the first Netflix Original to be canceled after a single season, a misfire that seemed rare at the time, following the company’s content production successes including House of Cards and Stranger Things.

Even as Netflix has attempted to play on an identity “as a tech company, as opposed to a media company, in order to articulate a brand identity built around disruption,” an examination of the ways that they positioned The Get Down prior to its debut reveals strategies more akin to traditional television models.[4] Despite Netflix’s resistance, scholars note that “when the company pivoted toward identifying more as a television channel than video rental service, it largely adopted standard industry practices for creating original series,” among which are a series of risk mitigation techniques utilized when producing and promoting a new show.[5] Jason Mittell reminds us that “to study the aesthetics of American television requires us to study failure.”[6] To this, we can add the importance of examining how creatives and executives alike continue to try and avoid that which, speaking statistically, is the far likelier outcome in a saturated media landscape. By stating that Netflix Original programming deserves its own risk and failure analyses, this essay argues that streaming media companies are indeed more like traditional TV than they might wish to acknowledge. To conclude, the promotional discourse that surrounded the debut of The Get Down is compared to Luhrmann’s more recent streaming project – the Hulu limited series Faraway Downs, which in some ways was positioned as an inversion of The Get Down’s supposed shortcomings.

Risk Management Strategies Within Television

Charles Ramirez Berg, a panelist on the first-ever “failure studies” panel at University of Texas-Austin’s 2015 Flow conference, summarized what might be the initial and most basic impulse behind such a field of study, writing simply, “It’s easier to pan a flop than to appreciate a masterpiece.”[7] However, as Berg continues, “the danger for the critic is assuming a superior position to the work and the maker,” thus necessitating “a great deal of humility” on the part of academics for failure studies to become a fruitful and incisive analytical tool, as opposed to simply a forum for complaint.[8] Indeed, Peter Kunze’s call for media industry scholars to consider what he terms “unproduction studies” – the works of media that never made it into existence at all, existing only as early drafts and industry legend – takes failure studies even further, and makes a compelling argument that attention to this area “may offer us more representative samples of industrial behavior and logics than a focus on successful media productions.”[9]

Television studies, more particularly, has long been an industry where “failure is a near certainty; most series will not be hits.”[10] In their 1994 sociological analysis of TV executives’ decision-making process, William Bielby and Denise Bielby tracked the process of moving from 600 pilot episode scripts to a mere 23 that would go on to debut in a primetime position in the 1991-92 television season.[11] Despite the assumption that television executives with experience in the field “can probably distinguish well-crafted from mediocre scripts and make informed judgments about the quality of acting, editing, and direction of a pilot,” they concluded that, “the programmer has no reliable basis for predicting whether audiences, advertisers, and critics will accept the series.”[12] Or, to quote then-president of CBS Entertainment Jeff Sagansky, who would give Bielby and Bielby their article’s title: “All hits are flukes.” Mittell explains that, “for a production company, the profits from one hit series can offset the losses of many failures,” thus the continual reliance every TV season on intentional overproduction – “producers continue to rack up debts in search of the next blockbuster series.”[13] Since the pivot to creating their own original programming, Netflix has been open about their embrace of overproduction, with Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos spelling out the business model in a 2018 interview: “More shows, more watching; more watching, more sub[scriber]s; more subs, more revenue; more revenue, more content.”[14]

The “unpredictability of cultural commodities’ success” makes the practice of risk reduction one of particular interest to media industry scholars.[15] While it may be impossible to guarantee that a series will become a hit, numerous writers have identified several major strategies continually used by television producers to promote and position a new program to best advantage. Todd Gitlin’s indispensable Inside Prime Time (1983) devoted a whole chapter to what he termed “recombinant culture,” described as “assum[ing] that selected features of recent hits can be spliced together to make a eugenic success.”[16] Similarly, the process referred to as “formatting” by Timothy Havens and Amanda Lotz seeks to “emphasize features of media content known to succeed in the past,” whether in direct spin-offs of hit series or in the foregrounding of “known talent” in front of or behind the camera.[17]  This tendency was forecasted in Bielby and Bielby’s 1994 article, which concluded that “reliance on established writer-producers is likely to intensify” in the years moving forward.”[18] At the same time, however, TV producers must balance the “competing demands of originality versus familiarity,” attempting to bank on viewers’ prior knowledge of successful TV track records, “even though hit programs often come from relatively unproven talent with innovative new ideas.”[19]

Despite the increasing proliferation of cable channels able to option their own original programming, and the entry of subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD) providers/programmers including Netflix doing the same, the chances of a series going on to be successful has not significantly improved. Amanda Lotz’s book We Now Disrupt This Broadcast discusses in depth how the growth of the cable industry was a long series of programming bets that often didn’t pay off, where “far more channels struggled with the new competitive environment than succeeded, even those that developed original scripted series.”[20] As the importance of creating a unique programming brand for cable channels became more apparent through the decades, many cable executives attempted to utilize a strategy of “distinctive” or “quality” shows. However, “an environment with an abundance of distinctive programming again required new strategies” for a series to succeed, thus the overall failure rate remains just as high in a television landscape with numerous other channels.[21]

While some aspects of the Bielby and Bielby analysis are pertinent years later, it is important also to note where their findings must be updated. The most significant of these is what was, ironically, described as the “least ambiguous criteria of commercial success” in 1994 – “a large audience with a demographic composition valued by advertisers.”[22] SVOD providers like Amazon Prime and Netflix instead operate through the growth and retention of their paid subscriber base, not through the traditional broadcast/cable model of “selling eyeballs” to advertisers. Lotz has previously discussed the economic distinctions between a subscription network in her writing on HBO, stating that “subscription networks need to sell the network instead of individual programs. Most basically, subscription networks must develop programming of such distinction that viewers are willing to pay for it.”[23] For HBO’s turn-of-the-millenium series lineup, this distinct was clear but implicit: shows like The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and Oz were “refreshing, uncensored, groundbreaking” while broadcast competition is therefore assumed to be “boring, constrained, routine.”[24] As Deborah Jaramillo has argued, HBO’s “eagerness to differentiate its product from that of broadcast television amounts to the creation of a brand,” and it was a strategy that Netflix would adopt in hopes of emulating their success.[25]

Colin Jon Mark Crawford discusses in his recent monograph Netflix’s Speculative Fictions how Netflix’s move toward original content production was initially framed to both investors and the public as one that would echo HBO’s debut decades earlier. In the initial company blog post announcing the debut of House of Cards, Sarandos writes that, “We’ve found the gripping, serialized one-hour drama…has become a very important part of the Netflix experience and over the years, we’ve been able to add these shows from many different channels, with the notable exception of HBO.”[26] Crawford reads the phrasing of the House of Cards announcement as a “strategic gesture toward the prestige of HBO – whom [Netflix] famously outbid for this very show,” and the competitive relationship between the two platforms would become codified soon after in a 2013 GQ profile of the company, where Sarandos famously commented that, “the goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.”[27]

Even viewership ratings, another legacy measurement of television success, are in question in the contemporary SVOD television field. Netflix’s caginess as to their own internal data has been an area of mystery and annoyance, both for those competitors looking to deflate the hype around seemingly-viral hits, and those creatives working within the Netflix system.[28] While Lotz has argued that the closest subscription networks like HBO have gotten to Nielsen ratings are the rates of “churn,” or those viewers canceling service, Netflix has been open about their reliance on numerous viewership metrics, including what Sarandos terms “survivorship,” or the rate of people who start a program and continue watching until the end of a season.[29] “Though its very design, Netflix turns every user into a Nielsen-esque data generator,” Crawford writes, “with the entire user base as its sample group, rather than the hopefully representative demographic cross-section Nielsen strives for.”[30]  The move from a “representative cross-section” to a more individualized metric can easily be seen in the highly personalized micro-genres and recommendations that have become Netflix mainstays. These would be impossible without the company’s mass data collections, down to the specific level of which promotional thumbnail image “unlocks” a viewer starting a program.[31] Netflix has further argued that their lock-and-key viewership numbers “enabled them to ‘predict’ the success” of House of Cards, as well as “allaying concerns about the risk of producing new episodes of Arrested Development.”[32]

Publicly, however, Netflix has positioned itself as a company that, in many significant ways, operates outside of the traditional television production model. In an extensive 2018 company profile, Sarandos described their business philosophy as one diametrically opposed to the norm – “I’m building a team that’s oriented as saying ‘Yes’ in a town that’s built to say ‘No.’” – thus hinting at the aversion within both TV and film production houses to move too far outside of established norms of success.[33] Timothy Havens has argued that this tendency toward “saying yes” is as much a strategy of intentional overproduction as it may be an embrace of creatively-driven projects. Havens writes that the company’s indiscriminate catalog building, rather than the cultivation of a specific niche market (as with streaming providers like Shudder or The Criterion Channel) is, “ultimately, what Netflix has in common with broadcast channels” in opposition to the “narrowcasting” favored by many cable networks.[34] This reading would likely be contested by Netflix executives, who have attempted to spin their embrace of quantity – both in terms of sheer amount of original programming as well as the cost of making it – as an interest in allowing film and television creators seemingly unlimited freedom; a place where “business strategy often equates to selecting a worthy, proven talent and giving them enough money to follow their creative impulses wherever they may lead.”[35] However, as we can see through a closer look at the production and promotion of The Get Down, even the “seemingly endless” budget Netflix purports to have only extends so far.[36]

Managing the Risks of The Get Down

The Get Down was reported to have been a long-percolating Baz Luhrmann project, with estimates a 1970s New York-based story being developed by the director for over a decade before finally taking shape as a television project in collaboration with Sony Pictures Television in late 2012.[37] After a bidding war between FX and Netflix for the program, the streaming service won out, largely due to their enthusiastic “rich season commitment” as opposed to the pilot-only offer given by FX.[38] The initial announcement of the show came in early 2015 with a paired press release and 18-second teaser video identifying Luhrmann as a “visionary.” This, combined with a statement by Content VP Cindy Holland relating the forthcoming show to several of his past cinematic successes (Strictly Ballroom, Moulin Rouge!, The Great Gatsby) reinforced the enthusiasm Netflix’s full-season pickup offer indicated.[39] Luhrmann’s directorial persona at this time was well-established, remaining largely unchanged since his debut film: an emphasis on visual splendor in the forms of elaborate costuming and production design, heavy, foregrounded use of popular music (often ahistoric to a story’s setting), and a fondness for classical, even mythic character archetypes and narratives. With these traits in mind, a series set to chart the heyday and demise of the disco movement alongside the emergence of early hip-hop seemed logical enough on the grounds of spectacle. If the pairing of a particularly homegrown American art form like hip-hop and an Australian director gave anyone pause, perhaps the $350 million gross of his adaptation of the Great American Novel two years prior was enough to put those concerns to rest.

The SVOD company’s reliance on Luhrmann’s status as a contemporary auteur was similar to the positioning of the House of Cards series announcement, which referred to series executive producer David Fincher’s “unique vision” as one of the assets that led them to take on the “manageable risk” of moving into original content production.[40] Such announcements have become “a new constant” for Netflix in the years since, with the company having embarked on content production deals with not only well-known film directors (Alfonso Cuarón, the Coen Brothers), but also top broadcast showrunners (Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy) and public figures more generally (the Obamas).[41]  Kristen Warner writes that the usage of this strategy – “auteurism as a guarantor of critical acclaim and thus the justifier of risk” – is one that streaming platforms like Netflix “borrowed [the] logic” from broadcast and cable channels alike early on in their expansion.[42]  As Crawford notes, this strategy serves Netflix not only in the traditional risk mitigation practice for a particular series, but also “legitimize[s] the platform’s ability to attract ‘top talent,’” allowing them to further entice other successful TV and film creatives to join them,  maintaining this “lore of talent attraction.”[43] Recent work by Ryan David Briggs has illustrated how this auteurist “risk-justifying” logic can also be seen in fellow SVOD behemoth Amazon Studios’ attempt to build a brand identity “based on appealing to a particular audience rather than just any audience” via partnerships with filmmakers including Spike Lee and Nicholas Winding Refn.[44]

In July 2016, a month before the first half of The Get Down’s one (and only) season would be released, the excitement about Baz Luhrmann’s entry into television was doused by a lengthy piece of investigative reporting from Variety’s Cynthia Littleton. Her research would go on to shape much of the industry and public discourse surrounding the show. Littleton described how Luhrmann had gone through “two showrunners, numerous writers, and no small amount of strain with producer Sony Pictures Television” with a series that “went well over the original budget of about $7.5 million per episode and wound up costing at least $120 million overall.”[45] The issues plaguing the show had become consistent enough to even get the production a new moniker among those working on it – “The Shut Down.” Among the recurrent and apparently unsolvable problems with the series was Luhrmann’s position. The director has consistently claimed he “went into the project expecting only a light level of involvement after getting Get Down on its feet.”[46] The Variety piece was the first of several public statements by Luhrmann where he reiterated his vision of being “an uncle to the project,” while not fully serving in a day-to-day showrunner model.[47] According to unnamed sources within the Variety article, Luhrmann “failed to heed the counsel of seasoned veterans and…show[ed] a lack of regard for the skills needed to pull off a big-budget drama series.”[48] As previously indicated, among the traditional risk management processes in television production is the usage of personnel who have previously proven track records on successful series; in this case Shawn Ryan, showrunner on FX’s The Shield, was initially brought on by Sony to facilitate this.[49]

Much of the seeming fault for The Get Down’s drawn-out production process is placed on Luhrmann’s shoulders in the Variety piece, with mentions of the director’s “habit of big spending…linked to his reputation as a stylistic perfectionist.”[50] This assertion was strengthened by the accompanying art for the article – a drawing of Luhrmann against a stylized background of stacks of cash in flames.  However, the piece also indicates that tension may have been partially exacerbated by Netflix’s refusal towards “any move that would have diminished Luhrmann’s day to day role.”[51] Reportedly, Ted Sarandos was so insistent on The Get Down being a truly Luhrmann-esque production that “sources say…he wouldn’t move the show out of the development phase…unless the director committed to shepherd it from beginning to end.”[52]

In this reported conflict, we can see two distinct forms of risk mitigation – Netflix’s emphasis on Luhrmann’s signature stylistic elements being front and center and Sony’s usage of several proven showrunners to help the director adapt to the workflow of series television – coming into direct conflict with one another. However, alleviating risk in television is as much about “routines previously proven…economically efficient” as those strategies intended to try and achieve eventual success, and whether the mythic $120 million figure was accurate or not, the two strategies utilized by both Netflix and Sony ultimately seemed to cancel one another out, with financially disastrous results.[53] As Variety forecasted, the show’s success and future were already in question; the idea of it being “Netflix’s first one-and-done series” is floated, with the additional speculation that The Get Down might indeed “provide a cautionary tale for Hollywood.”[54]

Variety’s framing here is intriguing, as it doesn’t specify who exactly the “cautionary tale” is meant to be warning – streaming executives at Netflix and elsewhere as to the downside of being so publicly willing to spend largely, or media workers within the industry who might consider a Netflix series offer a dream come true. Spokespeople for the company, most notably Ted Sarandos, made much of the creative freedom Netflix allowed its talent partners, with both the reportedly hands-off development process and the streaming corporation’s tendency toward full-season pickups as strong marks in favor of joining them. In a 2016 address, Sarandos described this as a company commitment to “producing and publishing books rather than chapters,” a choice that allowed creators “the chance to concentrate on multi-episode story arcs rather than pilots.”[55] This decision is one that Netflix has reiterated among the chief ways their production model differs from that of broadcast television. This is echoed by a longstanding promotional discourse within Netflix using “actors and directors champion[ing] this idea about how ‘liberating’ their creative experiences were with the company”[56] Variety’s reporting on the production process behind The Get Down and prediction of it as a failure in the making may have resulted in both removing some of the idyllic shine from the Netflix Original production process, and perhaps even making an unspoken argument in favor of the broadcasting methods of previous decades.

Following the publication of the Variety piece, both Luhrmann and Netflix entered the month of the show’s debut with a combination of promotional duties and damage control. Luhrmann gave an interview where he attempted to downplay the production struggles and disputed the notorious “most expensive show” designation that The Get Down became unable to move away from. “I owe it to this community that has let me in to make sure we do everything we can to make sure that we are honorable,” Luhrmann said to The Hollywood Reporter.[57] Luhrmann reiterated the importance of collaboration, particularly due to the obvious disconnect between a white, Australian director and the series’ subject matter of Black and Latinx youth in 1970s New York, in a number of show profiles leading to the series debut. For example, Vanity Fair described The Get Down as something Luhrmann “curated…putting together a team that could get it made: [Nelson] George, [Grandmaster] Flash, executive producer Nas, DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa.”[58] Again, it is notable how the promotional discourse continues to rely on the traditional methodology of emphasizing known talent. Given that the majority of the series’ cast were then-unknown young actors, focus shifted instead to highlighting the caliber of expertise helping Luhrmann craft an authentic series behind-the-scenes.

Upon its long-delayed debut, critical reception of The Get Down was decidedly mixed, with several reviewers noting Luhrmann’s over-the-top cinematic sensibility as an odd match for serialized TV storytelling. The New York Times concluded that, “For worse and for better…[it] probably should have just been a Baz Luhrmann film.”[59] Also filtered into several write-ups was the show’s by-then-notorious production history, with Variety’s review commenting that The Get Down “was unprecedentedly expensive and time-consuming for parent company Netflix; the result smacks of half-baked creative ambition run amok.”[60] The New Republic’s Sasha Frere-Jones closed his otherwise positive review by indicating that the hyper-dedication to detail had indeed created an accurate portrayal of 1977 New York, calling it “a parade for my youth. But who ever watches a parade twice?”[61] While Netflix leans into a public image of being a champion of creative deviation and artist-driven projects, their “internet TV” brand identity is likewise tied to “extended periods of viewer engagements” – both in rewatchability, as in the numerous successful network sitcoms they maintain licensing agreements with, as well as of course the “bingability” of a series.[62]  Thus, despite Frere-Jones’ praise for numerous aspects of The Get Down, his final remark may give an indication as to Netflix’s final reasoning in following through with canceling the series after only one season.

From Cancellation to Faraway Downs

There is still uncertainty as to who made the final call as to The Get Down’s fate. Most industry publication headlines read that Netflix was the one that “axed” or canceled the series, with various reporters including detail on how the show was “plagued by a revolving door of crew and beset by delays,” that it “failed to connect with viewers in the ways that buzzy hits like Stranger Things” did, and so forth.[63] However, while neither Netflix nor Sony made any kind of public statement, Luhrmann posted a lengthy missive to his official Facebook page explaining that an exclusivity contract keeping him from filmmaking commitments required him to step away from the series – seemingly assuming much of the responsibility in the show’s demise.[64] This resulted in Get Down fans splitting blame between both parties, with numerous Facebook users beseeching Luhrmann to hire a new showrunner, while The Hollywood Reporter’s initial article announcing the cancelation received comments months later claiming Netflix has a greater share of responsibility, saying “it got cut because not enough white people, [I] bet you a million dollars.”[65]

This final fan claim is obviously difficult to prove, but Kristen Warner’s argument for skepticism in the face of streaming platforms presenting themselves as new vanguards of media diversity is well-taken in this instance. As she writes, “our favorite streaming platforms…rely on the same tastemakers and gatekeeping strategies as their legacy media counterparts, ultimately resulting in the veneer of difference at the level of content while employing the same techniques to ensure success is in play.”[66] Despite the well-publicized involvement of expert figures like Grandmaster Flash and Nas in The Get Down’s production, and the majority Black and Latinx cast of the show, the key players in determining the series’ future fit Warner’s description of  “the same – white – executives” recruited by streaming companies, “virtually the same as the talent pool for legacy networks.”[67] However, Cameron Lynn Brown’s recent article discussing “residual fandoms” for streaming content, whose presence on platforms like Netflix “allows for fans to (re)engage with their fan object through avenues reminiscent of syndication” may provide one way for future research to continue to investigate the engagement of fans of The Get Down even after its demise.[68] Particularly given the rise in prominence that performers on the show such as Justice Smith and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II have enjoyed following the series’ cancellation, it would be intriguing to see if The Get Down might have a similar fan resurgence in the years to come.

For Netflix’s part, it is unsurprising that the company quickly pivoted to spinning The Get Down’s cancellation as, actually, a mark in their original content’s favor, rather than as the “cautionary tale” recounted by Variety. When questioned on an investor call about the cancellation decision, Sarandos remarked that it was merely a symptom of Netflix’s ambition, saying, “if you’re not failing…maybe you’re not trying hard enough.”[69] Crawford characterizes this as of a piece with the “bold, if not pathological optimism of Silicon Valley,” often encapsulated in the techie maxim “move fast and break things.”[70] As he also makes note, as Netflix more fully embraced content production in the years since The Get Down’s birth (and death), the rate of original series created by Netflix has been paired with a rise in Netflix cancellations as well.[71]  Warner writes that streaming platforms have developed the same weakness as their cable channel forebears – “there can never be enough content” – and just as in previous eras, this overproduction can likely be read as a further reiteration of the endless search for the one giant hit that will make all the canceled series irrelevant to Netflix’s bottom line.[72]

Even Luhrmann appears to be not too badly burnt by the unsuccessful SVOD partnership, as in late 2022, he announced an upcoming partnership with Hulu to release a streaming series with a very different provenance – Faraway Downs, the limited series borne out of 2008 Universal Pictures release Australia. Purportedly a result of 2020’s COVID-19 production halt on Elvis, Luhrmann reconsidered the additional footage that was cut out of the 2008 release, particularly an alternate ending to the film that had been changed soon before the movie’s debut, and pitched the extended version as a six-part episodic series to Hulu – a fellow NBCUniversal subsidiary.[73] The announcement of the Faraway Downs limited series was tagged as a “director’s cut” release by numerous publications – even more specifically post-Justice League, some described Luhrmann as following in the footsteps of Zach Snyder.[74] Jonathan Rosenbaum has written that the concept of the “director’s cut” is one that is able to be “both a legal concept and as an advertising slogan,” and the duality of this is able to be seen in the promotional positioning of Faraway Downs when considered against The Get Down.[75]

For Luhrmann’s Netflix series his novel status in making series television was seen first as a selling point and later as an explanatory factor in the show’s early demise. Faraway Downs, contrastingly, was described as “A Baz Luhrmann Film in Six Parts.” The discussion of the scenes that were able to be added back into Australia’s runtime are very much in line with Rosenbaum’s stance that a “director’s cut” mythology argues that “paradoxically…every film has at least two versions – a correct one and a more correct one.”[76] Luhrmann described the distinction himself in an interview with The Wrap as “a banquet vs. a meal,” a metaphor which the writer helpfully extended, claiming that Faraway Downs is “something richer and more complete than the film that was released in 2008.”[77]

While Luhrmann was fairly politic in describing his view of Downs and Australia as being able to “live with a relation to each other, like two children,” the original 2008 release (which received a mixed critical reception in the U.S. and has yet to achieve an equitable cultural footprint when compared to Romeo + Juliet or Moulin Rouge!) was slightly denigrated in the promotional lead-up to the Hulu series debut.[78] The shelving of a more tragic ending for Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman’s characters is now recast as a product of the sociocultural moment, specifically the global financial crisis of 2008, which Luhrmann describes as a time when “everyone had end-of-the-world feelings…I was just wondering if this would just be too much tragedy.”[79] In addition to the new/alternate ending to the story begun in Australia, and similar to some of the promotion done around The Get Down, another point repeated throughout the Faraway Downs press cycle was the importance of updating and enhancing the Aboriginal characters and themes already present in the film’s source material, something that was again said to be in need of “deepening.”[80]

Viewership metrics on Faraway Downs so far are, much like the totals on The Get Down, basically unknown outside of the platforms upon which they exist. It should be noted, however, that among the many differences between the two projects, among the most crucial is the lack of serialization concerns for Faraway Downs. It was pitched from the start as a six-part limited series, and given that no new footage needed to be shot (though Jackman and Kidman did contribute additional lines of dialogue remotely for scenes previously cut in 2008), the level of expense and risk on the show was dramatically reduced.[81] While the type of success that Faraway Downs could achieve as a one-shot series was never discussed as a potential breakout hit on the level of Hulu’s previous attempts along these lines, such as fellow Nicole Kidman vehicle Nine Perfect Strangers, perhaps the appeal of attempting to reuse and recycle an already-existent Universal Pictures property was enough for Hulu executives to agree. For Luhrmann’s part, interviews done throughout the release and awards season for 2022’s Elvis had made mention of the idea of a similar four-hour “extended version” of that film with longer concert sequences making its way to the public in the coming years.[82] Whether it will take a full 15 of them as with Faraway Downs remains to be seen.

In an industry where only around one percent of pitches ultimately succeed in moving forward to a series order, risk and failure truly comprise the majority of what television industry studies seeks to examine.[83] As this analysis has demonstrated, despite perceptions that Netflix’s programming decisions align with their reputation as “a ‘new tech’ company, rather than a legacy media business,” many of the strategies employed by the streaming company in undertaking a project like The Get Down have been historically implemented by the very television executives that they attempt to segregate themselves from.[84] Thus, while Netflix claims to not want “to be a streaming, supersize clone of HBO or FX or NBC,” the application of an industrially-focused framework with risk mitigation at the forefront, indicates that the company may be closer to the traditional than they ever wish to let on.[85]

[1] Eric Deggans, “Netflix lost nearly 1 million subscribers. That’s the good news,” NPR.org. July 19, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/07/19/1112335543/netflix-second-quarter

[2] Josef Adalian, “Inside the Netflix Binge Factory,” Vulture.com. June 11, 2018, https://www.vulture.com/2018/06/how-netflix-swallowed-tv-industry.html.

[3] Cynthia Littleton, “Inside the Troubled Production of Baz Luhrmann’s ‘The Get Down,’ Netflix’s Most Expensive Series Yet.” Variety. June 26, 2016, https://variety.com/2016/tv/features/the-get-down-netflix-baz-luhrmann-production-troubles-1201822679/

[4] Timothy Havens, “Netflix: Streaming Channel Brands as Global Meaning Systems,” From Networks to Netflix: A Guide to Changing Channels, ed. Derek Johnson. (Routledge. 2018), 325.

[5] Amanda Lotz, We Now Disrupt This Broadcast: How Cable Transformed Television and the Internet Revolutionized It All (MIT Press, 2018), 123.

[6] Jason Mittell, “The Aesthetics of Failure,” The Velvet Light Trap, no. 64 (2009): 76.

[7] Charles Ramirez Berg, “Notes on the Emergence of Failure Studies,” The Velvet Light Trap, no. 64. (2009), 101.

[8] Berg, “Notes on the Emergence,” 101.

[9] Peter C. Kunze, “Herding Cats; or, the Possibilities of Unproduction Studies,” The Velvet Light Trap, no. 80. (2017), 19.

[10] Kristen Warner, “ABC: Crisis, Risk and the Logics of Change.” From Networks to Netflix: A Guide to Changing Channels, ed. Derek Johnson (Routledge. 2018), 27.

[11] William T. Bielby and Denise D. Bielby ‘All Hits Are Flukes’: Institutionalized Decision Making and the Rhetoric of Network Prime-Time Program Development.” American Journal of Sociology, 99, no. 5 (1994): 1289.

[12] Bielby and Bielby, “‘All Hits,’” 1920.

[13] Jason Mittell, “Exchanging Programming,” Television and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2009), 22.

[14] Adalian, “Inside.”

[15] Timothy Havens and Amanda D. Lotz, “The Industrialization of Culture Framework and Key Economic Concepts,” Understanding Media Industries, 2^nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 2016), 30.

[16] Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (Pantheon Books, 1983), 64.

[17] Havens and Lotz, “Industrialization” 40; Mittell, “Exchanging” 46.

[18] Bielby and Bielby, “’All Hits,’” 1309.

[19] Mittell, “Exchanging,” 46-47.

[20] Lotz, We Now Disrupt, 71.

[21] Lotz, We Now Disrupt, 106.

[22] Bielby and Bielby, “’All Hits,’” 1290.

[23] Amanda D. Lotz, “If It’s Not TV, What Is It?: The Case of U.S. Subscription Television,” Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, ed. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris & Anthony Freitas (NYU Press, 2007), 91.

[24] Deborah Jaramillo, “The Family Racket: AOL Time Warner, HBO, The Sopranos, and the Construction of a Quality Brand.” Journal of Communication Inquiry, 26, no. 1 (2002): 65.

[25] Jaramillo, “The Family Racket,” 65.

[26] Colin Jon Mark Crawford, Netflix’s Speculative Fictions: Financializing Platform Television (Lexington Books, 2021), 60.

[27] Crawford, Netflix’s Speculative Fictions, 60.

[28] Adalian, “Inside.”

[29] Lotz, “If It’s Not TV,” 96; Adalian, “Inside.”

[30] Crawford, Netflix’s Speculative Fictions, 74.

[31] Adalian, “Inside.”

[32] Havens & Lotz, “Industrialization of Culture,” 32.

[33] Adalian, “Inside.”

[34] Timothy Havens, “Netflix: Streaming Channel Brands,” 329.

[35] Charles Bramesco, “That auteur do it: can big name directors continue to thrive on the small screen?” The Guardian. February 17, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/feb/17/big-film-directors-turn-to-tv-shows

[36] Adalian, “Inside.”

[37] Littleton, “Troubled Production.”

[38] Littleton, “Troubled Production.”

[39] Leslie Goldberg, “Baz Luhrmann Hip Hop Drama Gets Netflix Series Order.” The Hollywood Reporter. February 5, 2015, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/baz-luhrmann-hip-hop-drama-770442

[40] Crawford, Netflix’s Speculative Fictions, 60.

[41] Crawford, Netflix’s Speculative Fictions, 94.

[42] Kristen J. Warner, “Blue Skies Again: Streamers and the Impossible Promise of Diversity.” Los Angeles Review of Books. June 24, 2021, https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/blue-skies-again-streamers-and-the-impossible-promise-of-diversity/

[43] Crawford, Netflix’s Speculative Fictions, 94.

[44] Ryan David Briggs, “A Tale of Two Indies: Amazon Studios and A24 in the Streaming Age,” The Velvet Light Trap, vol. 90 (2022), 8.

[45] Littleton, “Troubled Production.”

[46] Littleton, “Troubled Production.”

[47] Littleton, “Troubled Production”; Adalian, “Inside.”

[48] Littleton, “Troubled Production.”

[49] Littleton, “Troubled Production.”

[50] Littleton, “Troubled Production.”

[51] Littleton, “Troubled Production.”

[52] Littleton, “Troubled Production.”

[53] Warner, “ABC: Crisis, Risk and the Logics of Change,” 27.

[54] Littleton, “Troubled Production.”

[55] Crawford, Netflix’s Speculative Fictions, 85.

[56] Crawford, Netflix’s Speculative Fictions, 77.

[57] Leslie Goldberg, “Baz Luhrmann: ‘The Get Down’ Isn’t TV’s Most Expensive Series Ever.” The Hollywood Reporter. July 27, 2016, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/baz-luhrmann-get-down-isnt-914955

[58] Jenna Marotta, “The Get Down Will Show a City, a Music Movement, and a Young Cast on the Brink.” Vanity Fair. August 9, 2016, http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/08/the-get-down-netflix-set-visit

[59] Mike Hale, “Baz Luhrmann’s ‘The Get Down’ is ‘West Side Story’ With Rappers and Disco Queens.” The New York Times. August 11, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/12/arts/television/review-netflix-get-down-baz-luhrmann.html?_r=0

[60] Sonia Saraya, “TV Review: ‘The Get Down.” Variety.com. August 4, 2016, https://variety.com/2016/tv/reviews/tv-review-the-get-down-netflix-baz-luhrmann-shameik-moore-justice-smith-1201829116/

[61] Sasha Frere-Jones, “The Beat Don’t Stop.” The New Republic. October 2016, https://newrepublic.com/article/136335/beat-dont-stop

[62] Kevin McDonald, “From Online Video Store to Global Internet TV Network: Netflix and the Future of Home Entertainment.” The Netflix Effect: Technology and Entertainment in the 21st Century, ed. Kevin McDonald & Daniel Smith-Rowsey (Bloomsbury: 2016), 210.

[63] Steph Harmon, “Netflix series The Get Down reportedly axed as Baz Luhrmann says he will focus on film.” The Guardian. May 24, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/may/25/netflix-series-the-get-down-reportedly-axed-as-baz-luhrmann-says-he-will-focus-on-film; Daniel Holloway, “‘The Get Down’ Canceled by Netflix.” Variety. May 24, 2017, https://variety.com/2017/tv/news/the-get-down-canceled-1202443885/

[64] Baz Luhrmann, “Dear fans of The Get Down.” Facebook, May 24, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/BazLuhrmannOfficial/posts/dear-fans-of-the-get-downi-wanted-to-speak-to-you-with-an-open-heart-and-just-ac/1856753604650395/

[65] Kate Stanhope, “‘The Get Down’ Canceled at Netflix After One Season.” The Hollywood Reporter. May 24, 2017, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/get-down-canceled-at-netflix-1007551

[66] Warner, “Blue Skies Again.”

[67] Warner, “Blue Skies Again.”

[68] Cameron Lynn Brown, “Residual Fandom: Television Technologies, Industries, and Fans of ‘Survivor,’” The Velvet Light Trap, vol. 90 (2022), 19.

[69] Crawford, Netflix’s Speculative Fictions, 93.

[70] Crawford, Netflix’s Speculative Fictions, 93.

[71] Crawford, Netflix’s Speculative Fictions, 93.

[72] Warner, “Blue Skies Again.”

[73] Brent Lang, “Baz Luhrmann Expanding ‘Australia’ into Six-Episode Director’s Cut ‘Faraway Downs,’” Variety, June 28, 2022. https://variety.com/2022/film/news/baz-luhrmann-australia-six-episode-hulu-series-faraway-downs-nicole-kidman-hugh-jackman-1235304986/

[74] Lang, “Luhrmann Expanding ‘Australia,’”; Rodrigo Perez, “Faraway Downs Review,” The Playlist, November 23, 2023. https://theplaylist.net/faraway-downs-review-baz-luhrmann-snydercuts-his-epic-australia-melodrama-doubles-down-on-excess-length-20231123/

[75] Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Potential Perils of the Director’s Cut,” May 5, 2023. https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2023/05/potential-perils-of-the-directors-cut/

[76] Rosenbaum, “Potential Perils.”

[77] Adam Chitwood, “Why Baz Luhrmann Revisited and Enriched ‘Australia’ With ‘Faraway Downs,’” November 20, 2023.

[78] Hunter Ingram, “Why Baz Luhrmann Changed the Ending of  ‘Australia’ When Turning the Film Into Hulu’s ‘Faraway Downs’ TV Series,” Variety, November 26, 2023. https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/baz-luhrmann-faraway-downs-australia-different-ending-1235804666/

[79] Ingram, “Why Baz Luhrmann Changed the Ending.”

[80] Janine Israel, “Faraway Downs: a first look at Baz Luhrmann’s attempt to remake his biggest flop,” The Guardian, October 21, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/oct/22/faraway-downs-a-first-look-at-baz-luhrmanns-attempt-to-remake-his-biggest-flop.

[81] Ingram, “Why Baz Luhrmann Changed the Ending.”

[82] Adam Bentz, “Baz Luhrmann Open to Releasing Elvis 4 Hour Version in the Future,” ScreenRant, September 14, 2022. https://screenrant.com/elvis-four-hour-cut-baz-luhrmann-release-plans/.

[83] Mittell, “Exchanging,” 51.

[84] Lotz, We Now Disrupt, 123.

[85] Adalian, “Inside.”