Talking about Netflix the numbers are always impressive: at the end of last year there were over 200 million subscribers in the world and a related turnover for over 25 billion dollars. For each new series that the Californian streaming giant distributes, planetary successes are achieved which, in the worst case scenario, affect 58 million users as happened with Emily in Paris, as can be read in the ranking of the most followed series in the world and as recently declared Ted Sarandos, Netflix's number 2 alongside the CEO Reed Hastings.
In this ranking, relating to accounts (other than users) who have watched the program for at least two minutes, the great popularity of the current title does not appear: Squid Games. After only a few weeks she has conquered an audience of over 130 million users in the world and, according to statements by Bloomberg and taken from Italy Today in recent days, has made it possible to make profits with many zeros: costing just over 20 million dollars, now worth nearly 900. But the value of the numbers mentioned is even more significant if "weighed" in terms of time spent in connection with the platform which, in reality, is the value that most affects the commercial dynamics of contacts: that is, how much it yields in terms of bandwidth consumption . Staying connected for about 50 minutes (how long an episode lasts on average) with a low resolution smart TV can affect on average around 300MB (it also depends on the quality of the network and the viewing mode) which translates into tens of GB in the monthly balance. But it is not only this fact that appears significant. More interesting may be knowing how much time each individual "spends" or consumes in front of the television and, consequently, how much time he subtracts from the vision of the competition, both linear and in streaming. Let's read what is reported by Confindustria Radio TV in its Report on TV audiences in 2020: “The average audience (AMR) on an annual basis grew by 11,4% over the whole day (compared to 2019) reaching approximately 11,1 million viewers (25,1 million in prime-time with an increase of 9,3%). The increase is mainly supported by the increase in viewing time (ATV) which, with +29 minutes (+11,9% compared to 2019), reaches 273 minutes per day (4h33min) in 2020, less in terms of reach overall (+2,1%)”. So the real competition is in the ability to capture attention in terms of minutes spent and not so much in the number of viewers which if they then translate into subscribers is just as important.
Exactly two years ago Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, during his visit to Rome on the occasion of the signing of an important production agreement with Mediaset, declared “In Italy we have reached two million subscribers. We have grown and continue to grow and we will invest 200 million euros in the next two years in Italian content”. Last week Eleonora Andreatta, vice president of Italian Original Series at Netflix, updated the data: exceeded 4 million subscribers. It can be added that the investment has borne good fruit, spoiled however by a dramatic fact: in the middle there was a pandemic which forced millions of people to remain closed at home and, consequently, led to a greater consumption of television. Therefore, while all the other broadcasters, especially those of traditional linear television, have had to record numbers that are not exciting and are constantly pressed by streaming, the global giant of the new audiovisual seriality has doubled its reference area.
If Netflix grows, its direct competitors are no less: Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ compete for a good part of the market in Italy as in the rest of the world. According to what was recently published by Justwatch, the sum of the three operators in Italy covers over 70% of the market where, as regards the type of offer, serial production TV Drama remains the most requested by Italians with over 55% of viewing preferences, followed by action/adventure genre with 17% and the comedy genre with 12%.
At this point we come to the heart of a question that has arisen since the dawn of television whenever a phenomenon appears that only apparently seems new. Because the general public, all over the world, appreciates it serial storytelling more than he appreciates movies? It is no coincidence that we have specified “everywhere in the world” because the related question is why is the same product appreciated in the same way in countries with profoundly different cultures? What leads to realizing the success of Squid Games, as well as other Netflix products of equal importance (see for example The house of Carta or The Queen of Chess) when do they have a strong cultural connotation of the geographical area where they are located (Asia, Europe, Latin America)? Without returning to the glorious past of global products such as Dallas which for many years, from 1978 to 1991 in over 90 countries, conquered universal audiences with dizzying figures (one of its most viewed episodes was over 350 million), it can without a doubt be argued that seriality is a distinctive feature of television narration contemporary that rests on a robust background derived from printed paper. How can we fail to remember the success that was recorded everywhere at the beginning of the first half of the last century, first with comics and then with serial photo novels? For the generations of the 50s and 60s in Italy the novels of Grand Hotel as well as the stories of Tex Willer (which still enjoy excellent numbers), the latter with that perverse way of leaving the episode hanging three-quarters of the way through to then push you to buy the next issue to find out how it ended.
So why the events of JR of Dallas as well as Ciro Di Marzio of Gomorrah have they obtained so much “television acclaim? It is very difficult to find synthetic and unambiguous answers because sophisticated and multidisciplinary analysis tools typical of cultural anthropology, sociology, social psychology and communication sciences would have to be used. A statement of. comes to mind Maurizio Costanzo issued a few years ago by ADN: “The reasons for the success are easy to tell – explains Costanzo – We have all looked for a JR in our acquaintances. Inside this soap, there were the prototypes of the bad guy, the good guy, the victim, the ransom, the fall. There was life. Soaps are fictional bits of life, and even if intellectuals suck, people see each other again, people like them and that's why they are enormously successful”. This statement takes us directly back to the Axel Springer's theorem when he argued that the formula for the success of an editorial product lies in the skilful dosage of the three "Ss": Sex, Blood and Money. Subsequently, a fourth "S" was added: the Dream.
Now let's see, with these premises, what could be the reasons for the success of Squid Games. Let's leave for a moment the long tail of cinematic appreciation of Korean cinema which has long since conquered audiences around the world as with the recent P by director Bong Joon-ho, winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2019 (see our review) and we remain still with the financial numbers: in the closing of the third quarter of 2021 Squid Game could have driven earnings per share of Netflix from the 2 and a half dollars expected by the market to the over 3 realized at the publication of the balance sheet data.
So, the question that arises is why is this audiovisual game so popular with the general public? We don't intend to remove a single frame from anyone who wants to see it and we limit ourselves to saying that it tells of a hellish game where life and death are at stake with a huge cash prize. To win it, it is necessary to pass complex tests and those who fail are physically eliminated in a brutal and violent way. All set in one falsely dystopian dimension which simultaneously sees the individual and collective existential drama of a metropolitan reality coexist with a surreal reality, typical of videogames, and even more of children's games where graphics and colors are the characterizing element in the charm and attraction of the story. If we go back to the Springer paradigm there is a lot of blood (Tarantino docet) and a lot of money combined with the dream of creating a future that would otherwise be impossible to achieve.
Paradoxical as it may appear, the success of Squid Game seems to be as much in its apparent complexity as in its substantial simplicity: it tells us, reflects on us, offers us the vision of a disjointed world in its enormous differences and social conflicts, of the old North and South of the Planet, of the city of rich and bourgeois neighborhoods against those of anonymous and abandoned suburbs, of the good guys who fight to make a dream come true and the bad guys increasingly greedy and greedy for money and wealth, of the individual who fights alone and of the team where we fight together. Who will win the game? The good guys or the bad guys? All in all, nothing new, in real life everywhere in the world, human affairs have been going exactly like this for many centuries. Never forget that behind us, perhaps in our DNA, there is always the most important monument of Roman antiquity: the Colosseum. It happens that, every now and then, a television series reminds us of it.
