Ryan Hansen is currently YouTube Red’s biggest star. Best known as the seventh or so most popular cast member of the long-gone Veronica Mars, Hansen plays to type as a handsome doofus in the meta-comedy Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes on Television, which debuted six weeks ago on YouTube’s premium subscription service. In a recurring joke, Hansen, playing a version of himself, explains to pretty much everyone he meets that YouTube Red is not, in fact, a porn hub. That’s pretty funny, but if things go as YouTube plans, its subscription service will soon be so respectable that the joke will be incomprehensible.
Hansen boasts a winsome smirk, but his face isn’t exactly one that audiences associate with prestige entertainment. And prestige is what YouTube needs to become the next Netflix, which has millions of monthly subscribers and programs regarded as cultural events (Stranger Things), conversation-starters (Master of None), and/or artistic achievements (BoJack Horseman). For the past two years, YouTube Red has been releasing original movies and shows at a steady clip in a variety of genres. (YouTube hasn’t released recent subscriber numbers, but it had 1.5 million paying members as of 2016, with another 1 million on free trials.)
Thus far, none of YouTube’s original programming has entered the mainstream the way that House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black did practically overnight when those series premiered in 2013. That’s because the path to Netflixification is much steeper today than four years ago, even with YouTube’s virtually bottomless coffers (it is a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent). Netflix is partly to blame for making it harder for its competitors to come up the way it did, but YouTube also has to overcome a few self-inflicted obstacles if it wants to become an awards player, which it definitely has ambitions to be. In this one way, the video platform is an underdog, albeit a deep-pocketed one.
Prestige is how Netflix became the TV behemoth that we generally think of it as today. It may be difficult to remember how radical the idea of a streaming site’s original programming felt a little less than five years ago, when House of Cards launched with a novel viewing model: the binge watch. The release of the entire first season at once led to a flurry of fretful thinkpieces about the nature of TV viewing, but Netflix’s real coup was landing director David Fincher and an as-yet-untarnished Kevin Spacey, who’d won Oscars for American Beauty and The Usual Suspects. Fincher and Spacey were rewarded for their online gamble when House of Cards’ first season was nominated for nine Emmys, of which it won three. The Washington drama’s glossy showiness—combined with Orange Is the New Black’s very different critical acclaim, which largely focused on the prison dramedy’s seriousness of purpose—solidified Netflix’s reputation as a haven of creativity, where writers and directors are mostly unfettered from network notes.
As the Hollywood Reporter notes, streaming sites really only need one triumph to carve out a place for themselves on the cultural map. Netflix did so with House of Cards, Amazon with Transparent, and Hulu, after a longer struggle, with The Handmaid’s Tale. Prestige determines which shows are “must see” and thus worthy of a monthly subscription. On the creative side, a critical hit, with all the accompanying attention, signals to ambitious storytellers that projects on such a site are treated seriously by both audiences and executives. Talent draws talent; success begets success.
Netflix has naturally made it harder for the next Netflix to emerge. The site has so saturated the TV market with new programs that it’s made publicity for any one series on any network or site a near Sisyphean task. Its assembly-line release schedule, with seemingly at least one new show or season per week, has found the site collecting some of the most interesting voices in entertainment. And its nonstop content production —along with the competition it’s engendered—has arguably led to a dilution of skill and experience in the television industry overall. Executives have an endless thirst for content, and there is only so much supply of talent.
If Netflix initially aimed to become the next HBO, it’s now aspiring to become a substitute for pretty much all the networks, with a programming slate that strives to offer something to everybody. But YouTube has to contend with the challenges of creating prestige programming for a younger demo, as well as a talent drain that has seen some of the best web content remade into beloved television shows, not to mention the platform’s lingering aura of amateurism and nastiness. YouTube’s blueprint for a prestige-centric brand reinvention should be more or less the same as Netflix’s: Hire well-known stars and buzz-generating auteurs and give them tons of money to realize their visions. But that’ll be much harder for the Google subsidiary to pull off in the late 2010s than it was for Netflix to do so half a decade ago.
Youth is probably YouTube’s greatest advantage as a platform and its largest weakness as a wannabe prestige player. A bias toward middle age persists when anointing Great Art, hence the predominance of Veep, Modern Family, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones among the top Emmy winners of the past 10 years. YouTube’s immediate goal likely isn’t to dethrone Veep in the Best Comedy category, but the problem of appealing to the 18-to-34 demo while drawing accolades from older tastemakers remains. (Girls has managed this tricky feat, but even a show as universally praised as Broad City continues to be unrecognized by the TV academy.) Perhaps because of the difficulty of circling the square that is creating respected youth entertainment, Apple has tacked traditional by betting on Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston’s morning-news drama with its first splashy programming decision. Given YouTube’s younger-skewing audience, its original programming lineup would logically follow the CW’s lead in crafting shows. But with a couple of exceptions like Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the CW hasn’t really cracked the code on elevating young-adult material, either.
Meanwhile, YouTube continues to lose talent to TV. The stars of and minds behind Broad City, Insecure, Billy on the Street, and Drunk History all started out on YouTube while High Maintenance ran for years on Vimeo. Hansen and his co-star Samira Wiley were poached from television, but YouTube Red will need a lot more star power—with their attendant air of seriousness and safety—to transcend the reputation of a platform still linked closely to funny pet videos and alarming headlines about disturbing content aimed at kids. At the same time, YouTube should carry on developing projects with some of its most popular creators.
Looking at a list of YouTube Red’s upcoming projects, I don’t see anything that would compel me to fork over $9.99 a month to a website I’ve long thought of as free. But I’d be interested in checking out comedian Anna Akana’s new dramedy for teens and Liza Koshy’s upcoming comedy Liza on Demand, mostly because it’s still so hard to find Asian Americans in starring roles in movies and television. (The fact that I’ll check out pretty much any Asian American–related piece of pop culture is evidenced by the fact that I have seen multiple episodes of K-Town, the Korean-American knockoff of The Jersey Shore.) Hopefully YouTube Red will follow Netflix—and honor one of the keys to YouTube’s success—in one important regard: offering something that didn’t exist before to viewers who have been waiting for far too long to see themselves on screen.
