What is it about?
Focusing on Netflix’s child and family-orientated platform exclusive content, this book offers the first exploration of a controversial genre cycle of dark science fiction, horror, and fantasy television under Netflix’s "Family Watch Together TV" tag. Using a ground-breaking mix of methods including audience research, interface, and textual analysis, the book demonstrates how Netflix is producing dark family telefantasy content that is both reshaping child and family-friendly TV genres and challenging earlier broadcast TV models around child-appropriate family viewing. It illuminates how Netflix encourages family audiences to "watch together" through intergenerational dynamics that work on and offscreen. The chapters in this book explore how this "Netflixication" of family television developed across landmark examples including Stranger Things, A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, and even Squid Game. The book outlines how Netflix is consolidating a new dark family terrain in the streaming sector, which is unsettling older concepts of family viewing, leading to considerable audience and critical confusion around target audiences and viewer expectations.
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Why is it important?
“Even as streaming offers individual user accounts, the death of family viewing has been greatly exaggerated. Family Watch Together TV shows instead how Netflix’s embrace of dark telefantasy produced new intergenerational viewing cultures and transformed the way parents and children approach programming. It expertly reveals how Netflix has changed television, while more broadly reminding us of the complex, dynamic nature of genre.” Professor Derek Johnson, author of Transgenerational Media Industries: Adults, Children, and the Reproduction of Culture, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Perspectives
Thank you to my co-authors, and to the families who shared their time with us to explain what and how they watch, both together and apart, in the streaming era.
Dr Djoymi Baker
RMIT University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Netflix, Dark Fantastic Genres and Intergenerational Viewing, May 2023, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003223498.
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