I mean filmmaking is alchemy, right? No one tries to make a shitty show. Spend a year of their life saying, “I’m going to make sure this is ultra-boring.”
Nobody knows how to distill, measure and replicate the components of a smash hit. But Samantha Morton’s replacement in Her definitely added something special to the film. Nobody can say if Scarlett Johansson made the movie better; she's not even on screen. Why are some things great and some things bad? You don't know. So filmmaking is kind of like a crapshoot in alchemy; but the mixture has been growing increasingly unstable.
Should I be using such metaphors? Perhaps the meth was a terrible idea. I can certainly foresee a scenario where I, after establishing myself as a marginally famous writer, find those words floating back to haunt me. Bryan Cranston will inevitably stalk onto my set at some point with, “What kind of whack ass chemist doesn’t know how to quantify his reagents?” And I will have to say, “Oh, God, no. Those were words for an entirely different era – an era all but unrecognizable now.”
But that’s the business: TV isn’t just a reagent, it’s a live culture. And it’s evolving.
Because of that, however, there’s still no real yardstick for measuring value in this new SVOD arena. Creators still have the “Amorphous Mass” obscuring all vision, hovering over them like the sword of Damocles. In absence of solid numbers, here's no solid way to measure fiscal success other the heat generated amongst industry circles. Conventionally, you can track how much a studio’s sold a script for (or at least make a semi-intelligent guess), but no one really knows how much money Netflix is making; you can't quantify it because they hold that information so close. And when your re-up negotiations or re-do deals come up, that transparency becomes critical; when you don't know the real value of the shows in the back end, it kind of becomes a crapshoot. Sooner or later we need to figure out how to do that in some sort of reliable way.
Here’s an example: Imagine that you’re an actor who’s just made six one-year options for a show. It’s perhaps a little worse than pro-football contracts – they can fire your ass whenever, but you can't go anywhere for six years. In a single, proverbial sweep of the pen, they own your ass… unless you are Jeffery Tambor. Jeffery Tambor’s agent can waltz in with authority and say, “Well look, it's your most successful show, it's getting a 4/5 rating in 18-49, the other guy's getting $600,000 my guy should get the same. That’s dandy – assuming you have the numbers.
Or say a TVOD provider like iTunes ranks Snowpiercer above the Hunger Games in their charts. But no one knows what that number means. Sure, the data’s coming from iTunes, but no one knows if that’s reliable, because iTunes will also surface heat-based products that are doing well. Which is an issue for independent creators: Everyone can have their guestimates on how Snowpiercer did on iTunes, but without concrete data, potential investors on the next project don’t know.
Or say Jill Soloway's hypothetical fortieth season of Transparent blooms into a mega hit… but she doesn't get a raise. UTA's going to go, “Why are we still in business with these fools?” Though the studio pays for the renegotiation deal, they still expect to approach Amazon, for example, with a pass-through or shared burden agreement at some point. If Matt Weiner’s helping AMC generate substantially more revenue on a per-subscription basis, it’s obviously fair to renegotiate and pay him more. But how do creators quantify that on SVOD?
Now, I personally think it’s just a question of who’s going to blink first, and here’s why: There’s just so much to gain from that data getting out there. And Amazon’s never going to reveal that. Pull back the curtain on their analytics, and they instantly lose their competitive advantage. And it's not to say the guys at Netflix are ripping off talent either – it's their job to secure the best deal on their end. It’s no one’s fault, really. It’s all new frontier stuff… so who really knows?