With Amazon Prime Video now showing “limited ads” unless users pay an additional $2.99 a month, series creators are speaking about the increased encroachment of commercial breaks as streaming platforms push users towards ad-based plans.
At the time of this writing, Prime Video, Netflix, Hulu, and Max now have ads, which isn’t exactly what creators signed up for. Now, shows that weren’t built for ad breaks are suddenly being disrupted, and sometimes, very awkwardly.
“Sometimes it upends the piece,” David E. Kelley told The Hollywood Reporter. “I thought Nine Perfect Strangers with commercials was horrible. We sold it as a one-hour show, and it was served like a pie — but it was pudding. You can’t cut pudding into slices, and that’s exactly what was done.”
“We fought so hard to get rid of commercials,” Tokyo Vice executive producer Alan Poul said. “It was one of the biggest steps in bringing the worlds of TV and film closer together, in getting that higher level of artist to participate. It was such a seminal gain, and now it’s reversing.”
However, some creators aren’t sweating the new paradigm. Wednesday creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, who cut their teeth on broadcast dramas, have “natural moments” baked in the wildly popular series out of habit.
“‘Propulsive,’ that’s the word you hear most in streaming … how to hook people and bring them back,” Gough said. “So while there are no act breaks in scripts like there used to be, the form is there. We’re not doing it because of any mandate from Netflix or [producers] MGM.”
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)
