Netflix is dying – the BBC must seize the moment before it disappears too

If the Beeb is to survive, it must bring out its big guns and deliver more compelling television like Wolf Hall and less fluff like Glow-Up

Jilly Cooper’s Rivals isn’t just an exquisitely naughty, compulsive watch and a talking point in kitchens and pubs across the land. It’s more important than that. Purchased and broadcast by the American subscription streaming service Disney+, an offshoot of the Walt Disney Company, it represents a watershed moment in the TV media landscape. Because, like me, you’ve probably noticed that there’s no longer anything worth watching on Netflix. 
For conventional TV consumers – I’m one of them – Netflix was the first toe in the water for the new era. After Rupert Murdoch shook up the terrestrial TV scene with his launch of satellite-broadcast Sky Television in February 1989 – introducing an American-style proliferation of channels – it wasn’t until January 2012 that the landscape was properly shaken up again. That was when Netflix landed in Europe. And for the price of five quid a month, we could binge on the brilliance of such series as Breaking Bad and scour the library for our favourite films. All there, and so much of it, for so little money.
There was panic at the BBC, who saw the new streaming service as stealing its heartland with extravagantly made series such as The Crown. Latterly, Netflix broadcast the likes of One Day, Ricky Gervais’s dry comedy After Life, deliciously bloody gore from Narcos and the compelling Italian drama Suburra: Blood on Rome.
But now there’s nothing. Nothing, but a scroll through dross and B-movies. Looking at my TV subscriptions and knowing that, in these straitened times, something’s got to give.  That something is Netflix. Word is that commissioning budgets at Netflix are tight and doesn’t it show? The new series of Emily in Paris is less the remnants of a squeezed lemon than an acrid shaving of its rind and the Irish drama Kin – which I watched on Netflix – is nothing but a very bad advert – and an unrelentingly gloomy one – for a career in the drugs trade.
 Netflix’s biggest error was of course the goal of lobbing a reputed $100 million in the direction of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle so they could produce a series of stomach-churning, saccharine, nausea-inducing documentaries that no sensible person in the UK would sit through.
 All the good movies have now disappeared from its library. When you search for quality films, their titles come up, only for the service to admit it no longer owns the broadcast rights and suggest that you watch something it regards as similar.
 Search for Withnail and I and it says, “we don’t have that, but you might like”: Paddleton (me neither) or something called Girl Clock. Look for Sideways and it offers a depressing and joyless US movie about a man trying and failing to become a sommelier, Uncorked.
 The only decent film still there is In Bruges and, says a label, it’s “Leaving Soon’”. As will I be. Off to Disney + and Apple TV, for Rivals and Slow Horses. Unless our small children can raise enough from their piggy banks to save Netflix from being dumped because of their vault of Shaun the Sheep, Octonauts and Grizzly & The Lemmings.
Yet the demise of Netflix must surely be a welcome tonic for the BBC, so it can bring out its big guns, steal back some of its wardrobe for its great costume dramas, and deliver compelling television like Line of Duty or Peaky Blinders.
Beset by criticisms of bias and the future of the licence fee, the BBC must seize the moment. The new series of Wolf Hall offers hope, but if the mutts at the Beeb who devised and commissioned the likes of The Way (the Welsh series universally panned as “the worst drama in history”), I Kissed a Boy or Glow-Up: Britain’s Next Make-Up Star, then it will also be curtains for Auntie.