Just How Much Do Streaming Shows Get Watched After Their Run?

Last year Kimiko Glenn's sharing her residual check for her work on the hit Netflix show Orange is the New Black during the actors' (and writer's) strike on TikTok got a lot of attention.

The document she presented showed that for her 44 episodes of work on the show that quarter she got . . . $27.30 cents.

This was, of course, reflective of just how tough those within that profession have it--even those who may seem as if they have "made it" (such as one would assume to be the case with someone appearing in so much of a hit series).

Yet, especially given the comparative novelty and obscurity of the process by which success in streaming is evaluated (it is a lot harder to judge this than, for instance, box office gross or Nielsen ratings), it has also occurred to me that it may reflect the changing dynamics of "content" transmission.

Again, there was a time when reruns of hit shows (and even not-so-hit shows) were a much more significant part of the viewing and pop cultural diet of the public. This was why we all knew that a beard like Mr. Spock has in "Mirror, Mirror" indicates the evil version of such a character; why wherever we go people still reference Seinfeld and the "golden age" of The Simpsons; why making feature films out of, for example, The Addams Family or Mission: Impossible seemed like a plausible basis for a hit.

It was all part of a less crowded, less fragmented, media world than the one we now live in--where people watched the same shows over and over again, the contents became a part of their frame of reference, and that in turn kept people looking at them, especially insofar as they still had a limited range of options (fewer channels, carrying less original new material, and so filling their hours with a good deal of old content). By contrast the way content made for premium streaming especially is fenced off from all but the subscribing audience (in contrast with old sitcoms that you might just run into on multiple channels) makes it less accessible to begin with; the hyper-abundance of options at all times that always includes a veritable onslaught of new choices; and perhaps the slighter "rewatch" value of what we get in an age which seems to have forgotten all about, or rejected, old-fashioned easy viewing and its pleasures; makes it harder and harder for anything to entrench itself "in the zeitgeist," either on a first airing or through being seen over and over again.

The result is that while I do not doubt for a moment the exploitative character of contemporary production, Ms. Glenn's check may also, in its way, hint that just a few years on that show millions were watching is being looked at it comparatively little, certainly in comparison with those old staples of prime time TV that became staples of non-prime TV in time.