I barely even remember the last one that I watched let alone enjoyed. I guess it was Arcane which is a total fluke.

Using faster, easier or cheaper production workflows aren't significantly correlated with end product quality, other than perhaps in the obvious sense that investing a large amount of money/effort into a production might cause the investing party to take more care to ensure ROI. However, there are so many counter examples of very expensive, high-effort productions lacking artistic merit that the correlation is weak at best.

Thinking about this, and the reasonable argument below that Netflix have also produced a number of prestige films and series that are genuinely great, I wonder if the production pipeline has a side effect: flattening the quality signal.

That is, it used to be (80s/90s) a lot more obvious what the prestige/not prestige boundary was. Cheap TV content (soaps etc) was shot on video, expensive content shot on film. Now everything looks the same. Perhaps the one remaining effort signal was lighting, but Netflix seem to have chosen very flat bright lighting styles for everything now. Bad news for us chiaroscuro lovers. And even when directors do try to do that, they've often over-estimated the HDR so you get the opposite: an entire series which is too dark.

Some C-levels have gone for the "quantity has a quality all of its own" philosophy of media production.

My personal experience with netflix has been that a good filter for 'quality' is what specific TV series and documentaries various 'scene' groups in the warez/torrent community consider worth ripping and properly encoding.

There's a certain amount of manual effort that's required to properly encode a ripped netflix or amazon prime series. People who do this strictly for street cred in the piracy community generally don't waste their time on schlock.

Yes, strange to have so much and still feel like you'e lost something.

I remember reading once how all Netflix content is really meant for phones or smaller screens. Simple shots, not much background detail, lots of face closeups etc.

I remember when being made by Netflix was a unique and cool thing, it didn’t last long until it meant probably-slop.

Having worked on both quality and junk film productions I assure you the editing workflow is not the determinant of artistic quality. No film or TV program has ever been improved by the editor(s) trying to build their own NAS or hack a version control system together.

Are you serious? Have you watched Adolescence? It's got more soul and artistic merit than practically anything else I've ever seen. And that was just last week.

Maid? The Queen's Gambit? Baby Reindeer? The Crown? Ripley? BoJack Horseman?

Sure they make a lot of schlock too, because they're a business and that's what most of their audience wants.

But I don't see how you could possibly criticize them for that when they continue to put out some pretty astonishingly artistic and soulful stuff.

Lincoln Lawyer?

I mean if we go by volume of awards nominations it seems like they're fine in the artistic merit department

This is exactly how I'd imagine the dreck on netflix is made :).