Netflix and the Lost Churros

There are a few things the world could do without: Communism, Nazis, and Netflix’s self-proclaimed streaming sensations Animals and Below. The first is a crime thriller directed by Ben Affleck, who also stars in it and co-wrote it. The second — the aptly named Below — is Free Willy reimagined as a maritime horror show, with a giant squid in place of a killer whale and Josh Hartnett as a Newfoundland fisherman whose village is terrorized by a sea monster that suddenly needs saving and releasing, despite having already eaten half the locals. Apparently, even a giant squid deserves a second chance. The villagers, meanwhile, can go to hell.

I am reviewing these two productions together because neither deserves a review of its own. I have already wasted enough time watching them, and I refuse to waste any more explaining every stupid thing that happens. Besides, the problem is bigger than two lousy productions. What interests me is how Netflix, a company that once made me feel I was discovering something nobody else could offer, has turned into a global content factory where finding something genuinely exciting increasingly resembles searching for a decent meal in an airport food court.

In Animals, Affleck plays a Los Angeles mayoral candidate trying to win Latino votes, which requires him to speak Spanish at length. I am a native Spanish speaker and can report that his performance is a linguistic crime scene. The movie’s kidnapping plot is equally baffling: criminals mistake the Mexican son of the family’s housekeeper for Affleck’s own child, despite the obvious differences between the two families, while Gillian Anderson appears as a political fixer who lends millions to a desperate family at a price. There are secret affairs, unexplained motives, and an absurdly convenient sniper not to mention an action sequence in which a child is propelled through Los Angeles flood channels like a Muppet launched from a catapult.

Kerry Washington is a fine actress, but even she cannot rescue a script that seems to have been written by people who regard logic as an optional extra. The editing sometimes looks as though somebody assembled the film in CapCut, and the score resembles elevator music in a Tanzanian hotel. Watching it, I imagined Affleck thinking: I’m being paid a fortune, I used to date J.Lo and Jennifer Garner, and even without them I’m Golden-Globe-winning, Oscar-winning Ben Affleck. Why should I give one fig about Netflix or the audience?

Perhaps that is unfair to the man. The film, however, makes it difficult to be generous.

Then there is Below, which, thank the Almighty Creator, is a miniseries and not a show we must endure season after season. Hartnett plays a Newfoundland fisherman in a village with no fish. An iceberg arrives carrying a giant squid and its offspring, and the locals start dying in ways that seem to concern nobody in any position of authority. People are poisoned, villagers drink muddy puddle water, a mysterious girl appears in dreams, and Hartnett eventually ventures into the deep in a miniature submarine with no apparent plan for dealing with a monster large enough to eat an entire neighborhood.

There is also a family of maniacs worshipping the squid as Mother, a mining conspiracy involving cobalt and copper, and a resolution in which freeing the creature somehow becomes the moral choice, despite its having eaten half the village and carrying squid kids that could eat the world. In the Spanish version I watched, the squid’s telepathic farewell is even spelled out in on-screen text, lest anyone miss the emotional complexity of a giant sea monster saying goodbye.

I have seen bad movies before. I have also seen good ones. The distinction matters because Netflix was once a place where I expected to find the latter in unexpected forms.

I remember The OA, Dark, Mindhunter and the early Stranger Things. I remember Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, the interactive experiment that let viewers make choices with their remotes and follow different narrative paths. It was disruptive, playful and genuinely strange. My reaction was that only Netflix would dare to do something like that. The platform had become a place for stories that did not fit comfortably anywhere else, and that feeling of discovery was part of what made it irresistible.

Bela Bajaria, who joined Netflix in 2016 and became Chief Content Officer in 2023, presided over an extraordinary expansion of that operation. Under her leadership, Netflix broadened its international and local-language productions, unscripted programming and global slate, while moving further into live events and sports. Squid Game, Lupin, La Casa de Papel, Wednesday, and Bridgerton are different kinds of successes, but they illustrate the scale and range of the machine she helped build. Netflix became a worldwide entertainment operation, capable of finding audiences across languages, borders and genres.

That is a remarkable achievement. But it also raises the question of what happens when a machine becomes so enormous that feeding it starts to matter more than deciding what deserves to be fed into it. There is no reason to assume that Bajaria alone caused Netflix’s current difficulties, and I am not going to pretend that two productions I disliked explain the fate of a multinational corporation. Still, Netflix has now replaced her with Peter Rice, a veteran executive from the more traditional world of television and film, at a moment when the company appears to be reconsidering its creative direction.

The numbers are hard to ignore. Netflix shares had fallen by roughly 41% over the year to late October, and the company announced layoffs affecting about 1,000 employees, or 6% of its workforce. It also lowered its 2026 advertising-revenue forecast from $3 billion to $2.7 billion, citing a slower-than-expected rollout of advertising capabilities. Revenue still grew by nearly 12% in the third quarter, reaching $12.87 billion, so nobody should mistake this for a company on the verge of bankruptcy. But something has clearly unsettled investors.

I have no idea whether the layoffs, the change in leadership or the falling share price have anything to do with the steady stream of empty promises represented by Animals, The Whisper Man, or Below. I do know that productions like these do not help convince anyone that the company has found a new creative direction.

Imagine I own a churro stand. People love my churros; they come back for them, recommend them to their friends and tell everybody that mine are the best in town. Then, in a fit of entrepreneurial inspiration, I decide to sell coconut-filled empanadas. Not ordinary empanadas, mind you, but empanadas stuffed with coconut, a culinary proposition so peculiar that even the coconut begins to question its life choices. I advertise them as the next big thing, put up enormous posters and insist that everyone must try them. Eventually, people may forget how good my churros used to be. The problem is not that I started selling something new; it is that I have confused novelty with quality and the promise of a great product with the product itself.

Netflix seems to be doing something similar, only on a scale that requires thousands of employees, international production deals and a staggering amount of money. With so many shows and films being made in so many countries, it would be a miracle if more than a small percentage reached a genuinely high level. Yet the platform has to keep selling each new release as an event, whether it is  Affleck directing himself, Robert De Niro starring in The Whisper Man, or Hartnett wrestling with a squid that deserves a better script. The posters promise an experience; the experience too often fails to deliver.

Meanwhile, YouTube is eating into the time available for everything else. Nielsen reported that YouTube accounted for a record 14.2% of total U.S. television viewing in July 2026. Its appeal is not difficult to understand. I can watch a documentary, a music performance, a long interview, a comedy sketch or a four-hour podcast without being told that the latest expensive production is the one thing I absolutely must see. Joe Rogan can spend hours interviewing people who claim to know about UFOs, including whistleblowers who seem willing to reveal everything except whatever the CIA has not authorized them to reveal. Luis Elizondo, for instance, has become a familiar figure in that world, carefully navigating the boundaries of what he says he can disclose. These are the only whistleblowers I know who appear to whistle only when the whistle has been cleared by legal.

I can also watch Elon Musk smoke a joint on Rogan’s show, which is not exactly the sort of premium content meeting that would have impressed a traditional television executive, but there we are. Because it commissions no content, YouTube has room for the ridiculous, the fascinating, the amateurish and the brilliant, often within the same afternoon. Its algorithm has its own commercial agenda, of course, but the viewer can arrive looking for almost anything and follow a trail of personal interests rather than a succession of corporate launch campaigns.

This is the challenge facing Rice. Do awards and prestige matter any more? The hell they do: they matter because they give a platform cultural authority, and audiences do pay attention to the Emmys, Golden Globes and Oscars. But trophies cannot manufacture mass audiences or affection for a service, any more than a golden plaque can make a bad churro taste good. Netflix needs to recover the feeling that there are stories you can find there that you cannot find anywhere else, and that the people making them are taking risks because they have something to say, not merely because the production calendar needs another title.

Just as the world can ditch Communism, Nazis, and giant squids that need rescuing after eating half a village, Netflix needs to forget about its coconut empanadas and remember what made us fall in love with its churros in the first place.