(no subject)

I had a departmental retreat today, which involved catering two meals and a lot more attention being paid to me than normal. It was not a fun day.

BUT.

I found out ONE SINGLE FACT that made everything I did today worthwhile: The Netflix House Of Cards was written using site analytics.

House Of Cards is a great BBC series, and actually the Netflix remake was pretty good too, so I was first startled and then totally unsurprised by the knowledge that it was written using analytics. Basically, what Netflix did was look at the most-watched television shows on their site. They took the top shows on the site, studied them, and wrote House Of Cards based on elements of those shows. Which is presumably why the middle of the show is a really long West-Wing-style exploration of what it takes to pass a watershed protection bill? Also why Kevin Spacey is in it, because apparently they found that one really big name is all you need to get people to try out the show, and that Kevin Spacey was one of the best big names. Apparently a lot of people who watched the original House Of Cards also watched Kevin Spacey films.

This is at once kind of awful, because it means the popularity of art-based-on-already-existing-art is still on the rise, and also kind of awesome, because they basically took the job we do in my office and used it to write fanfic. Plus, it means that if you like Thing A and Thing B, there is a rising chance that Thing C will contain both of those in combination. Which might not be innovative, but might still be really great.

So those were my takeaways from today:

a) The caterer forgot the potato chips and nobody noticed.
b) Site analytics are the new trend in television.