Video killed the radio star, and streaming killed the video store. For as long as humanity seeks to use an electronic means of storytelling, there may be no more fascinating observation than watching how this food chain continues to evolve. For now, it’s merely a struggle of pros and cons.
It was one Vanessa Ramos, the creator and showrunner behind Netflix’s latest comedy series, Blockbuster, that found herself quickly transitioning to the world of streaming when Netflix picked up the show a week after NBC decided against going forward with it. It was a move of unbridled irony, of course, as Netflix is largely considered the culprit behind the downfall of the Blockbuster video rental chain and its contemporaries.
Now, having been a showrunner behind the scenes at both streaming and cable companies, Ramos, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, compared and contrasted the nuances of putting together a workplace sitcom for either entity, chiefly alluding to how cable companies are much more hands-on in the creative process while streamers offer much fewer notes for the scripts.
“I don’t know if this is because there aren’t a ton of sitcom-y type shows on Netflix, but they didn’t give a ton of notes. There was stuff that, if they had questions on, we could push back on, and our team was very supportive in terms of, ‘OK, we trust that you know what’s funny.’ With network, they look at it like, ‘We’ve been doing this for X amount of years. This has proven this. We know this is the way.’ They have the stats on their side, so it’s a little hard to push back.”
Her comments don’t come as much of a surprise; the staunch difference in creativity and types of acceptable content between cable and streaming is one of the most palpable polarities in the entertainment world today. Unfortunately, Ramos may have welcomed a few notes this time around, as a pair of poor Rotten Tomatoes aggregate scores (22 percent for critics and 44 percent for audiences) doesn’t bode well for the tongue-in-cheek comedy series.