Abstract
Mareike Jenner’s Netflix & the Re-invention of Television intervenes in current debates about television’s ontology and cultural power in the global streaming era. Whereas in its earlier decades, scholars defined TV in terms of its live address and projects of national identity formation (McCarthy, 2010; Miller, 2006; Scannell, 2014), scholarship on television has evolved alongside its technological developments and the expansion of neo-liberal global markets. Thus, Jenner’s book also intercedes in media industry studies where scholars have marked the increasing transnational flows of serial media content that these changes have made possible (Lobato, 2018; Straubhaar, 2007). Locating TV in its fourth iterative period, following the digital era, the era of VCR/cable and the original network era, Jenner offers Netflix as a rich case study in what it means to currently study TV. She regards Netflix as a ‘process’ (p. 19) and a discourse folded within a multitude of conversations which re-conceptualise what television is and what it means in terms of power relations between audiences and industries in various national and transnational contexts. Ultimately, she argues that Netflix’s interface, publication model, discourses and transnational productions have fundamentally reshaped what and how web streaming audiences think about television.
Jenner structures her book into three distinct parts positioned between a standard academic introduction and conclusion. The first section addresses a history of technologies that have operated as mechanisms for viewers to exert (at least the illusion of) more control over what, when and how they watch television. Jenner illustrates how technologies such as the remote control, VCR, DVD and the internet have led, in turn, to new conceptualisations of the TV. Positioning Netflix as the epitome of these changes, she points towards TV’s increasing neo-liberalisation among larger discourses of freedom, flexibility and individuated taste curation. Jenner is careful, however, to point out that consumer control, although it ‘may be linked to negotiations of power’, should not be mistaken for power itself (p. 20). Rather, she adopts a Foucauldian notion of power to show how ancillary technologies ‘allow viewers to formulate a speech act within a discourse of power, potentially subverting or destabilising commercial power structures’ (pp. 40–41). Although commercialism still dominates media technologies and the production of texts, television no longer functions – if it ever did – as a unilateral, top-down mass media conveyor of ideology. Instead, power and control function as negotiable and ‘complex processes…guided by often contradictory social, political, economic or cultural discourses’ (p. 41). Therefore, Jenner calls into question the ways that audiences, industries and scholars position TV within current economic, national and cultural contexts.
Turning from TV history to Netflix’s reinvention as a streaming video platform, the book’s second part discusses notions of user-control that Netflix has adopted into its corporate ethos through its interface, serial publishing model and algorithms. First, Jenner discusses binge-watching, which Netflix pioneered for streaming serial content, as a new modus operandi with its own cluster of cultural discourses. She analyses how Netflix constructs its content around the binge-model and uses its interface to teach viewers how to binge. Second, citing Netflix’s proprietary curatorial algorithms and so-called taste communities, Jenner shows how ‘viewers have more control over choices’ while maintaining that Netflix still has power over what choices it offers to viewers’ (p. 135). Consequently, as discourses of binge-watching, quality, choice and control have intertwined around Netflix, the illusion of user-freedom still exists in tension with corporately controlled interests.
Jenner’s final section focuses on Netflix as a traditional yet increasingly transnational TV network. She tracks how it adapts and operates heterogeneously to reach audiences from an immense range of nationalities and cultures. For example, she documents ‘textual strategies’ such as subtitling and dubbing which enable in-house productions to address transnational audiences (p. 26). Furthermore, given that distribution and viewing on Netflix’ platform are unrestricted by ‘national time’ and mostly by ‘national media systems’ (p. 194), Jenner claims ‘Netflix can potentially disrupt existing power structures of national television as well as the tensions that govern such a disruption’ (p. 26). This potential, however, is undercut by Netflix’s positioning within neo-liberal capitalism as well as by its audiences’ fragmented and dis-unified nature. Rather than suggesting a ‘broader interrogation of transnational systems is impossible’, she merely notes that Netflix ‘does not currently challenge this in a meaningful way’ (pp. 256–257).
Most notably, Jenner points out that many local media markets have co-existed with US-media dominance, and therefore one should not eye Netflix as their unilateral great destroyer. In fact, Netflix might loom large in non-US national markets, but it is perceived more in competition with other US conglomerates rather than with the local markets themselves, and its ‘compliance with regulations and norms of media systems also indicates its inability to wrestle control away from existing media systems’ (p. 237). For example, looking primarily at Netflix’s intervention in UK or continental European television markets, Jenner highlights how it has had to navigate regulatory demands specific to national markets to produce a certain percentage of its content by and for local industries and audiences. Furthermore, its digital library of content offerings can largely shift from country to country based on regulations and copyrights. In this light, she reveals Netflix not as the sole, homogenous, monolithic entity on the global media stage but rather as one contextually shifting variable among a matrix of actors and discourses across decentralised media systems.
Nevertheless, Jenner does not let Netflix completely off the hook; she is still critical of the representation of identities in their original series and the ‘“grammar of transnationalism”’ they employ to integrate content into ‘existing cultural conditions of a national media system’ (p. 237). Looking specifically at Netflix’s in-house productions made outside the US such Chicas Del Cable (2017–) from Spain, Marseille (2016–) from France and Club de Cuervos (2015–) from Mexico, Jenner articulates how these cultural representations are linked to ‘neoliberal systems of customer demand’ in a transnational system in which ‘the kind of diversity represented is usually defined on American terms’ (p. 177). As Netflix creates its content to be legible and marketable across markets, this results in representations of race, gender and sexual identities which are Western-centric and cosmopolitan at their core.
Overall, Netflix & the Re-invention of Television provides lucid claims relevant to those who study television in a transnational, post-digital era. It also provides valuable syntheses of history and theory relevant to television’s evolution and intersection with larger political, economic and cultural discourses, particularly in regard to the role that US-based media conglomerates play in non-US contexts. The book meets at the crossroads of television, industry and cultural studies, focusing on Netflix as a key player operating prominently, yet incoherently, on a transnational scale. In this endeavour, Jenner successfully brings several approaches and theoretical frameworks into a concrete conversation that considers Netflix as a corporation, a discourse and an infrastructure that enable transnational productions and flows of media. This is merely a starting point, however, towards considering the myriad ways in which television is being continually shaped, understood and re-invented.