I’ve recently become somewhat fascinated by the secondary or even tertiary layers of streaming services that have cropped up attempting a kind of remora existence on the bellies of the big pay streamers. The continued games of billion-dollar chicken between the top companies are a topic unto themselves, but right now I’m focusing on the also-also-rans, the ones trying to fight over the scraps left over from Disney or Amazon or even AMC+. Stuff like Plex, IMDBtv, Roku, and the two that have most caught my attention, Tubi and Pluto, the free services which are essentially attempting to monetize the stuff that slips between the cracks.
The business model is straightforward but I’m not entirely sure how it ends up making a profit. It’s free and ad-supported so works like a traditional broadcast service but the libraries seem arbitrary to the point of madness. Pulling up the main screen of Tubi at this moment shows these five movies first: Machete (2010), Freddy Vs. Jason (2003), Drive Angry (2011), In Broad Daylight (2019), and Wind River (2017). That’s a grindhouse homage, a horror crossover, a Nicholas Cage vehicle, a TV One made-for-tv original, and a well-respected drama from the writer of ‘Sicario’ and the showrunner of ‘Yellowstone.’ That’s some range. Roaming over the rest of the page we have ‘Miss Congeniality,’ the 2018 ‘Superfly’ remake, ‘Heaven is for Real,’ and ‘Baby Geniuses.’ There’s also television, including ‘Sanford,’ the failed follow-up to ‘Sanford and Sons,’ ‘The Gifted,’ the not-X-Men show from 2017 that continued to showcase everyone wasting Amy Acker, and ‘Hell’s Kitchen,’ which I understand to be popular.
Also, y’know, ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,’ ‘The Color Purple,’ ‘Aliens,’ it’s a broad church is my point.
Half of their staff have to be involved in the licensing for all of these. I assume the issues involved are broadly the same as those of traditional broadcast rights, that the fact that there are commercials that air during the showing in some way helps, or maybe these distributors aren’t particularly choosy about allowing their properties to be shown as long as they get their money. It basically seems to be a big net catching everything that isn’t exclusive to services like HBOMax or Apple. No ‘Matrix’ or ‘Office’ or Marvel stuff, although it does have ‘Batman ’66’, oddly enough.
Pluto is a somewhat different beast. Their model seems to basically be the same, streaming everything left over with inserted advertising, but it’s deliberately aping the style of traditional basic cable. Instead of a display of titles to choose from à la Netflix it starts auto-playing something up top and then gives you a grid of channels and what they’re showing at the moment as well as what’s coming up next. As of the time of writing they’re showing a Frank Grillo thriller I’ve never heard of. The option below that is an episode of ‘Key and Peele,’ below that is an episode of ‘The Walking Dead,’ and below that is ‘It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.’ Although most of this is also available ‘on demand,’ which is again a very cable tv way of presenting it, not everything is. For example, the first six seasons of ‘The Walking Dead’ are available to watch in any order, but ‘Key and Peele’ is only able to be watched live. Again, the licensing must be all over the place. This broadcast model is at least eye-catching, establishing a vibe that’s it a destination to arrive at and stay rather than just one of any number of such services.
Pluto is my accidental entry into this space as it was the only place I could find a free way to watch ‘Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead,’ which was otherwise unavailable without either subscribing to a service (Acorn) or simply buying it (Amazon). A full-screen version is also up in its entirety on YouTube as of this writing, but even if it’s not the most visually dynamic movie I’ve been an aspect ratio snob since the 90’s and I’m not about to stop now. This all raises its own set of questions about rights ownership, consumer access, the expectations of free media by the public and the responsibilities towards creators, the clash between corporations, but that’s not why we’re here at the moment.
The true value of such services, however, is the breadth and depth of their libraries, random as they seem. If you’re a company that’s made the initial investment, if you have the server space and the website and the business model to be the repository of everything not already spoken for, then the possibilities expand in some truly breathtaking ways. If the barrier to entry is so low then some truly amazing things start to enter in. Everyone is aware of how far down the rabbit hole of self-produced online content goes these days, but sometimes we forget that people have, for all of recorded history, always been people, and the kinds of things we shake our heads at in confusion today have always been there, we just pruned them from our collective memories. Some of the things just below the surface are revelatory.
To steal a line from a much better media critic, I believe in the value of failed art. I have many thoughts and opinions on the books, movies, and television shows that are generally recognized and appreciated by the culture at large but they’re not that different from what everyone else has to say and I don’t consider my perspective to be so radically interesting that it’s worth spending a lot of my time articulating them to be lost amidst the general consensus. I don’t think people will be that interested in why I think Moby Dick is so much weirder and fascinating than it’s given credit for (people who have never read it will think that’s an odd opinion, anyone who has will consider it an obvious one), or why ‘Die Hard’ is an enduring classic, because everyone already agrees that it is. I’d just be repeating what someone else has already inevitably said about such prominent works.
But there’s also plenty to be said about, say, the 1981 movie ‘Honky Tonk Freeway,’ an obscurity now but such a financial disaster (it made roughly $2 million dollars from a $25 million dollar budget, adjusted for inflation that’s an over $67 million dollar loss) that it affected the bottom line of its parent company Thorn EMI, formed in 1979 from a merger between EMI, the record label, and Thorn Electrical Industries, which I’m sure made as much sense then as it does now. The film was a British comedic critique of American culture starring Terri Garr, Beau Bridges, Daniel Stern, and tons of other character actors of the time. It is currently available to rent from Apple for the low price of $3.99 or freely available from that sketchy Russian-seeming service you’re never quite sure if you should click on.
Or there’s 1995’s ‘The Crew,’ a one-season Fox sitcom about a group of wacky flight attendants created by Marc Cherry who would go on to create and run ‘Desperate Housewives.’ Unlike so many other ‘Friends’ knockoffs it actually lasted the entire season and produced 21 episodes, long enough that by the end they might have actually found some working characters beats and set up some long term storylines. Two of the main cast were African-American and one was an openly gay man, which for 1995 was pretty progressive. Considering the cultural reappraisal of ‘Friends’ as it has aged what could one of its derivatives have to say about the time period? Episodes of this are sitting on the Internet Archive.
While an examination of previous culture has always taken place, what’s different today is that there’s enough of a makeshift digital preservation of artistic ephemera that we can attempt a broader view of what a time substantially before now was like than was previously possible. Things that no one intended to preserve are still available more-or-less by accident. Instead of intentional curation we have essentially its complete absence. We can mourn the loss of the legendary eight-hour cut of Stroheim’s ‘Greed’ or be thrilled by the 2008 discovery of previously lost footage of Lang’s ‘Metropolis,’ but there are countless films contemporary to those two examples now utterly lost with just a title or a description left, most of which I’m sure were utterly terrible and considered not worth much but which can’t be all that much worse that something like ‘Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever,’ which short of complete nuclear annihilation will remain available in some form until the end of human history. They were abandoned generally because the people of the time thought they weren’t worth the effort. However much of value they may or may not have been they were a cultural product of their time, they attempted something even if it was strictly commercial, and being able to examine them would be both interesting and useful. And now that no one other than random chance is acting as a gatekeeper we have a chance to look at so much more.
I had been more-or-less working in the general area of this idea for some time as I kind of nibbled away at the fringes of edge-case erstwhile popular culture that certainly intended to be mainstream but which, for one reason or another, either failed to catch on or faded from view as time marched inevitably on. Lately I’ve found myself considering it in more explicit terms. I recently had something of a breakdown in my ability to cope with Hallmark movies (which is its own spinoff into complexity) and was trying to find something a little easier to examine, and to put it mildly I chose poorly. My original intent was just to trawl through the depths of these services to find some interesting titles to watch and write about and it was not difficult to find a number I’d never heard of but which sounded fascinating from the title art and brief description. What started as just a movie I picked at random from the depths of Tubi instead forced me to think about all of this in a much more in-depth manner, and it’s only partly the fault of the movie. As I kept making notes while I watched what started as simple snark kept circling back around on itself and eventually I found myself backed up against a wall of first principle interrogations. At base, what was it I kept finding interesting about all of this?
Critiquing bad media just on surface-level faults is fairly boring as an end in and of itself. Describing how something is bad is much less interesting than examining why it is bad. To just sit down and watch ‘Gotti’ and then describe the unpleasantness of the experience is fairly pedestrian compared to really digging into what the movie is attempting to say and the ways it fails on a conceptual as well as an execution level. At least to me, anyways. For the longest time I was always the person who would wander by a television cop show seven minutes into the episode, watch a couple of minutes, then point out who the murder was and wander off, smugly. That’s not difficult. It’s harder and more interesting to really dig into the reasons why procedurals are structured the way that they are, the economics behind the casting of guest stars and it’s relation to Ebert’s ‘Law of Economy of Characters’, and how this formula, rather than detracting from their popularity, adds to it. The foundation of stability and predictability, the fact that a solution is not only possible but guaranteed, explains why it acts so well as essentially comfort food. The certainty that episode 192 of ‘NCIS’ will end exactly how you think it will is exactly the reason you watched the previous 191, and that’s a much better insight than just being able to figure out that if Cheryl Ladd is guest-starring in your episode she’s going to be the murderer.
This, by the way, is also why ‘Columbo’ is the best, it dispenses with the pretense of uncertainty and revels in the satisfaction of the solution the entire run-time.
None of this is particularly revelatory except inasmuch as it was helpful as personal clarification. It certainly wasn’t something I intended to write about. This started as a short explanatory introduction to a movie review and it kind of got away from itself. This was the culmination of a few different things. I kept finding myself not enjoying writing these, something I was ostensibly doing for fun, and eventually decided to figure out why. If it was a slog why did I feel an obligation to keep doing it? I eventually decided I was looking at the wrong parts, focusing on the wrong issues. Yes, the acting is bad, the writing is sub-par, these are not particularly impressive insights. If I want to stop myself from just wandering off to do something else I’m going to have to find something a little bit more interesting to think about, and that’s going to have to involve more than just documenting reactions. If it takes me five hours and 6,000 words of notes to watch a Hallmark movie clearly my brain is trying to tell me something. I’m not entirely sure how successful I’m going to be and it’s going to involve more than just banging out words until I reach an arbitrary word count, but at least it’s something that’s more likely to drag me back to a keyboard.
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