Nowadays that style and quality is just expected from one of the bigger drama series in any streaming service.
Agree with you it's quite strange how people seem to have rose coloured glasses from that era.
So much of what is on Netflix feels like a Hallmark Special with better writing and cinematography. It’s still empty calories.
Black mirror was a British show first. I don’t know the others except for Man on the Inside - I’m skeptical, but if it turns out to as good as The Good Place, it will be impressive for Netflix.
Before the internet, Mills & Boon used to sell a hell of a lot of cheap paperbacks with much the same story in them. Or Arthur Hiller books. None of it was even approaching art but it sold well and people liked it.
A lot of the accusations that "Netflix is 99% dreck" is reflected in the top 10 list they handily generate for you. It simply means to me that I don't look on Netflix for something to watch, having seen the garbage getting watched on there. It says more about me than Netflix though and being judgy about other peoples taste shouldn't be mistaken for diagnosing the internets enshittification. These things are not the same.
1994 Top 50 Movies https://www.imdb.com/list/ls076329509/ You can recognise every of these movies by title
Here TOP 50 movies list has no title from big streaming services: https://www.imdb.com/chart/top/
I don't know what the point of your second list is. It's never been the case that streamers or cable channels (their nearest antecedent) were big producers of movies. But streamers --- unlike cable channels --- did manage to produce CODA, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Irishman, Buster Scruggs, Roma, Dolemite, and Glass Onion.
(I will stick up for Heat, but my god, the shoulder pads).
No, they're almost all terrible and as far as I can tell most people can't find anything new to watch, or if they're lucky they can find one or two things to almost get into. The trick is that there's no way to find out how many people are watching things any more, and that keeping your subscription going is binary. You can accumulate a huge amount of personal dissatisfaction before actually cancelling.
The main thing I'm hearing about these grossly padded, awful series, is that after people get interested by the pilot, they increasingly start fast forwarding through more and more of the episodes until they're consuming them so quickly they might as well be watching a digest of the "previously on...", until they get so disgusted by the repeated slights to their intelligence that even this they can't even stomach. Giving up a subscription also means giving up the archive of the "vibrant film and television" from "the era immediately preceding streaming," that even though they may have seen it before, is pleasant to leave playing in the background.
Production values are very high. Dialog is sometimes very good. Series are high-concept, but empty, endless and awful, and I even feel sorry for the writers that have to keep generating scenes with one character walking up to another character who is busy working on something and says: "how are you holding up?" There are going to be five of those in this episode, and maybe one thing that advances the plot.
Apple TV has all the money in the world, and just generates clumsy high-priced disasters. I have no idea how bad the corporate culture can be in these places to actively repel any story that is any good. I think the problem is that they're not making enough cheapo series where talent could accidentally sneak in because no one was paying attention.