IIRC there was an internal “competition”, of sorts, between the two head original content buyers at Netflix. One took the HBO approach: buy high quality content, even if it’s expensive. The other had a spray and pray strategy: buy up all the cheap crap and hope you get a few hits.

Long story short the Spray & Pray exec got promoted and the other exec got squeezed out. But now that all of the major studios have started their own streaming services (and have started being stingier with their licensing) original content is perhaps the most important driver of new subscriptions and subscription maintenance for a streaming platform. And it seems Netflix bet the house on building their library out of cheap crap like Emily in Paris and God’s Favorite Idiot with the occasional expensive (but still crappy) Ryan Reynolds action movie sprinkled in to keep things “fresh”.

Netflix made a huge mistake when they went with the spaghetti against the wall strategy and for some reason they just keep doubling down to make their already shitty strategy even worse.