Despite the end of the Peak TV era, Jenny Howe, head of scripted series in the US and Canada at Netflix, said at the Banff Global Media Festival on Monday that the streaming video giant has the privilege of continuing to maintain consistent spending on new original series.
“Our volume isn’t slowing down. We’re very fortunate that we’re still in that growth mindset… so it’s a real honor for us to continue to operate at the volume that we do. I think we’re not slowing down. The scale is right,” Howe said during a keynote in Banff. Netflix is currently spending about $20 billion on new intellectual property, even if much of that goes to sports programming and events.
On the dramatic front, Howe announced that Netflix has commissioned a new college hockey romance writer, Ice breakerBased on the Hannah Grace novel of the same name. After joining Netflix in 2018, Howe joined the video streaming giant just as the Peak TV era began with overall deals with Ryan Murphy and Shondaland amid the gold rush for content creators and streamers.
“It was like being in the early days on the frontier,” she recalled. “It was a different mindset to work. There wasn’t that fear of failure, the early days of technology and media intersected.” Howe helped develop Shondaland Disease Bridgerton and Anna’s invention It also appears like Beef, Night Agent, Diplomat and Untamed.
Howe’s upcoming list includes a retelling of Little house on the meadowlimited series Influencers Starring Julia Garner, sports comedy FalconLed by Will Ferrell. She talked about the upcoming Netflix series having more episodes as a nod to the past when showrunners would spend 21 or 24 hours per season.
“The idea of this deep, long-term engagement is a hallmark of great television, whether that’s more episodes, as long as the creativity supports that,” she told Banff delegates. Netflix also tends to be a creator economy, with producers coming from YouTube and other online platforms.
“I think right now we’re very focused on creators. We’re only looking to engage special voices that we think can deliver shows that no one else can,” Howe insisted.
