Hasta La Creative!

Kevin Spacey’s lecture at the Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival last month has topped one million YouTube views and is becoming the Gangnam Style of the media community.

The actor explained in the speech that only Netflix had the vision and confidence backed by data to green-light the making of “House of Cards,” the series in which he stars, without making the investment conditional on the traditional pilot model of the U.S. TV industry. The “all-you-can-eat” strategy of releasing the entire series at once spoke to the needs of a generation of media consumers who don’t want their appetites moderated by executives keen to build schedules around their hit shows, Spacey said. This generation wants “what they want, when they want it.”

He contrasted the efficiency of “House of Cards” with the high failure rate of TV pilots. In baseball terms, the ratio of big hits to canceled shows gives a batting average that would never get a player to the major leagues. Spacey also pointed to the creative limitations of the pilot. Artistically, he argued, pilots by their very nature represent a compromised narrative. They create artificial cadence in storytelling, because they require the superficial development of too many characters and possible story arcs that act against the organic nature and pace of how great stories best unfold.

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