Netflix announced Wednesday its new show Space Force, a comedy starring Steve Carell about the men and women who will make up ... President Trump’s Space Force, the newest real-world branch of the military. The streaming service accompanied the show’s announcement with a short teaser trailer that doesn’t really show much other than a shot of the earth from space, with a heavy emphasis that Space Force is being brought to you by the creative minds behind The Office.
In an era before streaming, this would seem a little strange. After all, is the best selling point for a new show from an actor who featured prominently in three movies in 2018 really the show he produced and starred in back in 2005? The data suggests: Absolutely.
According to a chart compiled by Recode, with data gathered by Jumpshot, The Office is still Netflix’s most popular show by an incredibly wide margin. NBCUniversal, not Netflix, owns The Office, which means that the streaming giant will have to license the show from NBC to keep it on the service for the years to come. Just last year, Netflix faced a similar issue with Friends — the company’s second-most watched show, according to Jumpshot’s data. Netflix ended up paying $100 million to WarnerMedia, the show’s owner, to keep it on the service through 2019.
With Space Force, Netflix leverages some of The Office and gets a little more out of the show’s immense popularity. The series reunites Greg Daniels and Steve Carell — the creator and star, respectively, of the American version of The Office (the show was based on Ricky Gervais’s U.K. show of the same name).
Even the premise for Space Force seems to imply that it might have a bit of The Office’s workplace-comedy charm. The show is based on Trump’s Space Force plan, announced in June 2018. But rather than taking a sci-fi angle, the show will follow the men and women whose job it will be to run the day-to-day operations of the Space Force and figure out what exactly the organization will even do. Setting aside any possible military-related answers to this question, it’s a fairly low-stakes and silly concept that should lend itself perfectly to intra-office antics.
If this is an attempt to recapture the magic of The Office by Netflix, it’s worth noting that it isn’t the most aggressive attempt that the company has made at this kind of thing. Just last year, Netflix debuted the first half of Arrested Development’s fifth season — the second one produced by the streaming company — to a mixed (and mostly quiet) reception. Simply reuniting The Office’s creator and star for a new project seems like a significantly more palatable, and more likely to succeed, way to chase The Office’s success.
Space Force probably can’t capture Netflix’s audience the way The Office has, but it’s easy to imagine just how tempting the banner ad will look: Steve Carell, the face of the most popular show on Netflix, along with the words “from the creator of The Office” in bold print. Even if it can’t create an original show that can compete with the popularity of The Office, Netflix has done the next best thing. The streaming giant has turned The Office into a 200-episode advertisement for Space Force.
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