Why doesn't Netflix produce more of its most popular shows?

Production companies can't produce content that quickly. Back in the day we had weekly sitcoms, and it took about a week to produce each episode. But for the most part they all took place in one or just a few locations, and usually those were sets on a sound stage. So all they had to do was churn out a script a week (which is no easy task) using the same characters and same actors. The writers usually had a "show bible" that has elaborate backstories for every character that they could draw from, as well as knowing the actor playing the character and sometimes even getting input from them.

There is a reason people would complain that "every week is the same story!". That's because the constraints of the medium meant that you had to keep deviations to a minimum.

Black Mirror is akin to making a movie for every episode. Every episode has different actors, which means they need to be cast. They have different locations, which means they need to be scouted or built. They have different characters which means a lot more work for writing because every character needs a backstory. Basically they have to start fresh for every episode.

Something like Stranger Things is sort of 1/2 way between -- they have their characters and actors, but they have a lot of locations, and the story varies wildly from episode to episode. Each season is like making a really long movie.

And that's just the production side of it.

From the business side it doesn't make a lot of sense either. The whole point is to provide fresh content for users. If you can provide a new show every month, that's a lot more compelling than a new episode of the same show.

In Hollywood -- and Netflix is definitely Hollywood now -- nobody knows anything. William Goldman said it.

If they could invest in only the hits, they would.

If they could reliably improve their customers' happiness with their service, at minimal cost, they would.

If they could cut down on the expense of actors and sets and writers, they would.

Making more shows costs more money. More shows don't increase revenues when you have a subscription model. Their ideal model is to produce the bare minimum amount of content that keeps people from unsubscribing.

Have you seen the latest black mirror season? Spoiler alert: it's pretty bad.

But in more seriousness, I'm sure they are trying to optimize for producing the least amount of content in order to retain existing users.

I would assume it’s a combination of “that’s how you kill a series” and “nobody decent wants to act in a series that never stops filming.”

At an episode a week, you run out of plot way faster, and your humans are basically signing on to have no other work.

It takes more than a week to produce one of those episodes. Think about all the weekly shows you know. Are any of them scripted, highly produced affairs like Black Mirror? There’s a reason all high quality popular weeklies are talk, sports, or reality TV. Yes you can do a sitcom weekly for a long time, but the sets are largely static along with the characters. Production values are also limited compared to something like Orange is… or Black Mirror.

It takes roughly 8 days to shoot a half-hour, and 10-12 days for an hour long episode. And that doesn't include 1-3 months pre-production. Crews work 12-18 hour days to make it happen as well; burnout is real.

It's also incredibly expensive, something Netflix some how disregarded when they decided to make/own most their own content. Thus the excess of low production quality shows

Black Mirror is largely written by one guy, that's why. It's better they make Black Mirror the highest quality. That way, in 20 years, people will watch it, it will be new to them, and still hold up.

Build an evergreen catalogue. Nobody is watching old sitcoms, but new people watch Lost everyday even though that also got badly affected by quantity requirements due to hype of the day.

It probably doesn't apply to Black Mirror, but you can do real worldbuilding in a show that goes 25 episodes/year that you can't do in 10 episodes. And some shows/genres really benefit from that, becoming something more than the sum of their individual episodes. Many modern shows miss out by rushing through a self contained story in a short season.

But if I understand Black Mirror correctly, it's an anthology without a shared world/characters. There'd be diminishing returns much sooner with additional episodes. There's only so much to say about that theme. And we're living it every week anyway.

Even with infinite funding, hits are not something that just scale up infinitely. Talented showrunners, cast and other production staff only have so many hours they can work before burning out/running things into the ground, and you can't duplicate them with more hires.

The standard strategy is to fund spinoffs of popular franchises. Marvel is a good example of this taken to the extreme, where there literally is a constant content stream.

I wish Netflix would produce more of its niche shows. There are so many shows with diehard fans that Netflix produces a season or two of and then cancels.

At some point the content will become repetitive and uninteresting, unless you keep changing it. Then, you'll essentially have a new show with the same name. Look at the simpsons, for instance. It's still popular, but I consider it to be a completely different show from when it started.

Because the quality would be dreadful. That suggestion is insane.

The quamputer has not been finished yet.