Netflix appears to have fallen on hard times. The company’s co-CEOs recently announced they would be laying off around 1,000 employees, the deepest round of cuts in years. A day later, the chief content officer made a sudden exit and was immediately replaced. Just a week after that, the market responded unfavorably to Netflix’s Q3 results, causing the stock to drop sharply.
There are many reasons for Netflix’s woes, not the least of which are increasingly heavy competition for viewers and its failure to land marquee shows—the kind of shows that convince people to maintain their subscription instead of canceling it in favor of Disney+, Prime Video, or one of the many other options. While there’s little doubt that Netflix will make it through this challenge, it may never regain the market dominance it once held.
I have a daring suggestion for Netflix that I’d like to think could help it: make more shows that are clean and suitable for family viewing. To frame it another way, stop putting sex, nudity, and harsh profanity in nearly every show. There are many potential subscribers who are eager to be entertained, but not by shows they deem unsuitable or inappropriate. I’ll grant that Netflix has viewing data that probably shows its TV-MA content is especially popular, but data can only count the people who watched a show, not the ones who never pressed play in the first place. It’s also can’t tell whether the sex and swearing are essential to those who watch it, or whether they’d watch it even if it was much cleaner.
Perhaps you could think about it this way: a single explicit sex scene in a series is unlikely to gain more viewers than it will lose. What I mean is that a content warning on IMDb or Common Sense Media stating that a show contains an explicit sex scene is enough for me and many others to skip that entire show. But I very much doubt the opposite is true—that a person will learn that there is no sex scene and decide to skip it on that basis. Some of us simply have no interest in viewing such things and will guard both ourselves and our families from seeing them.
For those who don’t believe me, I’m sure I can put them in touch with a thousand people who will affirm what I’m saying. I am convinced there is a deep desire for shows and movies we can watch without cringing, without feeling violated, and without knowing we are watching what we consider not only unsuitable but immoral. It’s not that we’re prudes or opposed to sex—we’re all for it. It’s that we think sex and nudity are for private contexts, not public ones, and that some matters are to be kept between a husband and wife rather than displayed for all the world to see. Sex is so good and powerful that making it public diminishes it rather than elevates it, which means we deliberately avoid shows and movies that feature it.
I would say something similar about language. Does a show need to drop hundreds of F-bombs across just a few hours of runtime? Does it need to constantly use the name of God as a swear word? It doesn’t need any of this. Once again, is it more likely that people will not watch shows unless they are profane, or that they will avoid them if they are? I think the answer is obvious: many more people will be driven away by swearing than drawn by it.
If I had to offer one more piece of advice, it would be to stop tampering with beloved intellectual properties to make them consistent with modern sensibilities. Why not just make adaptations that are faithful to the vision of the original creators and let us deal with the differences between their context and today’s? Have the courage to let the stories stand on their own without inserting modern messaging. I strongly believe this would do more to provoke good thinking and spur important conversations. There’s no need to be so heavy-handed.
To summarize, I think Netflix has been going about this all wrong and has been creating content that alienates an eager audience rather than drawing it in. So Netflix, why not try this: Create original shows and movies that are free of sex, nudity, and foul language. Create adaptations of classic intellectual properties that are similarly free of sex, nudity, and foul language and that remain consistent with the vision of the men and women who first imagined them. Make shows that are pleasant, that are entertaining, and that can be enjoyed by those who exercise caution about the scenes they see and the words they hear. I’m convinced you’ll find there’s an audience that will eagerly subscribe to your service and gladly view your shows.
