Netflix is at a pivotal point in its history, and it has to choose between being the creator-supporting service it was in the beginning or the data obsessed monster what he has become. As The Wrap has investigated, the last to suffer the unpredictable lurches of the streaming giant have been the members of the children’s animation team, canceling, by the way, some of the most interesting projects and creative in favor of others more important to the data. In other words: they have canceled ‘Bone’ to release more series of ‘The Boss Baby’.
Stupid, stupid freak rats
The cancellation of ‘Bone’, a project based on the Jeff Smith comic that was announced in 2019, should give us an idea of the mess they have right now in the company’s children’s entertainment department. Earlier this week, Phil Rynda (director of creative leadership and original animation development) he was fired along with much of his team. Rynda has worked on ‘Adventure Time’, ‘Gravity Falls’, ‘The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy’, ‘Steven Universe’ or ‘Chowder’. If anyone knows about animation, it’s him, and Netflix has decided to dispense with his services. But why?
It can be explained with an anecdote that it is more than that: when the new creators came to work on the platform, Rynda told them that the motto was “We want to be the home of the world’s favorite series”. Reed Hastings recently changed it to “We want to make the show our audience wants to see.” There is a big, big difference. And it has to do, of course, with the obsession with analysis and data: A series can’t survive if it doesn’t give the necessary data for it, no matter how good it is or the fan base it has.
Not so long ago the Netflix animation department was seen as little less than a utopia: people like Craig McCracken, ND Stevenson, Guillermo del Toro or Alex Hirsch went there to develop their new projects, and fabulous series like ‘Kid cosmic’, ‘She-ra’, ‘Trollhunters’, ‘Hilda’ or ‘ Kipo and the Age of Magical Beasts’. But it is not the example that Netflix shows as the ideal of what an animated series should be on the platform, no: the one that stands out above these is… ‘The boss baby’.
data, data, data
Do you know ‘The ghosts of the city’? It’s one of those series that Netflix premiered doomed to spend the rest of her days in the back of the catalog, despite being the brainchild of Elizabeth Ito, director and screenwriter of ‘Adventure Time’. The series has a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, has been nominated for a Peabody Award (after its cancellation) and only got a mention on the company’s Twitter account at the creator’s insistence several hours after the nomination. A tweet from Ito, already out of the company, he says “Who’s the boss baby now, mate?”.
The abysmal importance that Netflix gives the data, to which the creators do not have access, is undeniable. There is no possible discussion about them and they only reinforce the company’s point of view. It happened to Megan Nicole Dong, creator of ‘Centauria’, who at the end of the last season stated “If you want more, we can do it”. Instead, Netflix pulled data and more data without any context about what they meant to them… And when the producers asked to see them, they were denied access, so they couldn’t collate them or do their own analysis. It is an experience similar to that of Ito, who described the experience of looking at data as “What they should have gotten for what they spent on the series”in such a way that they only said what Netflix wanted to show, without giving an option for debate.
Ito, who left scalded and with many doubts about the process, in which she received more information before her questions, writes on Twitter that “it looked like a sect or, as my therapist said, dealing with a sociopath.” Now, Netflix has canceled some of the most promising series in the coming years, such as ‘Bone’, ‘Toil and Trouble’ (the new from Lauren Faust, creator of ‘My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic’) or ‘The Cretins’, based on the work of Roald Dahl and that was going to start several productions based on the author’s books. The company confirms that this is still standing, although “probably” in the form of a film. In any case, something smells rotten.
One last fact: ‘The Boss Baby’ Isn’t Even a Netflix Original: This is a licensed Dreamworks series. I would have to give to think, if the numbers did not say otherwise.