23 pieces
Netflix's advertising-supported tier, launched in November 2022, crossed 125 million global monthly active users by the fourth quarter of 2025. The ad business is now material to the company's financials.
Tina Fey's adaptation of the 1981 Alan Alda film is a show about three couples, four vacations, and what middle-aged friendship sounds like when nobody is performing for an audience.
Shondaland's White House whodunnit handed Uzo Aduba the role she has been waiting for since Orange is the New Black. The rest of the show is trying to catch up to her.
The eight-episode prestige-TV season has become the default format. It is also, for most shows, the wrong length. An essay on what the episode count is costing us.
Peter Berg and Mark L. Smith's six-episode Netflix limited western compresses a brutal 1857 Utah into ninety minutes per episode, and the compression is both the method and the mistake.
Richard Gadd's seven-episode autobiographical drama was the TV moment of spring 2024 and the legal controversy of summer 2024. A year later, the show itself is still the best argument for why it exists.
Three and a bit years after the first season, Hwang Dong-hyuk's second Squid Game is a structurally different object from the original, and the difference is the thing worth describing.
Pablo Larraín's third and probably final entry in his trilogy of distressed-woman biopics is the most formally certain of the three, and the one least willing to flatter its subject.
Steven Zaillian's eight-episode Netflix adaptation of Patricia Highsmith was the quiet prestige show of April 2024. A year later, its patience has only looked smarter.
A year on from Hit Man's Netflix release, the film is a quieter argument than it first appeared. Richard Linklater made a star-launcher for someone he knew would not, in the end, need launching.
Mindy Kaling's Netflix NBA comedy is a vehicle for Kate Hudson's return to screen work. The show around her is more conventional than her performance deserves.
Jacques Audiard's Spanish-language narco musical swept the Cannes awards and collapsed in the awards season that followed. The collapse had less to do with the controversies than with the film's formal failure to decide what it wanted to be.
Debora Cahn's second season ran six episodes and handed its final scene to Allison Janney. The compression changed what the show is.
Mike Schur's Netflix show placed Ted Danson inside a retirement community as an amateur investigator. The premise is a disguise for the comedy Schur has been moving toward for a decade.
Joe Barton's six-episode Netflix spy series arrived in the Christmas release slot in December 2024 and did the thing most genre television cannot do: hold a comic register and a grief register in the same frame without either one winning.
Erin Foster's Netflix series arrived in September with a tidy ten-episode run and an audience the streamer did not appear to expect. The show's virtue is its willingness to let the romance breathe.
Netflix streamed two NFL games on Christmas Day 2024, reported 65 million US viewers across the gameday, and ran into the specific technical problems live sports at scale continues to produce.
WWE Raw began streaming exclusively on Netflix in January 2025 under a ten-year rights deal reported at around five billion dollars. The early numbers are positive. The broader question is what the deal tells us about Netflix's posture on live rights.
Chris Smith's six-part documentary arrived on Netflix in September and did the specific job the genre rarely gets to do. It let its subject speak, and then it outlasted him.
Charlie Covell's Greek-myth reworking arrived on Netflix in August 2024 and was cancelled a month later. The show deserved better, and the cancellation revealed something specific about Netflix's renewal math.
Azazel Jacobs built a three-hander around a Manhattan apartment, three sisters, and a dying father in the next room. The film is much better than Netflix's release pattern suggested.
Netflix's 2023 paid-sharing rollout was widely predicted to cost the company subscribers. It did the opposite. A look at the numbers, eighteen months in.
Netflix's adaptation of Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy is, on balance, a better show than the Game of Thrones showrunners' previous form suggested. It is also structurally compromised in specific ways.