Netflix paid producer Ryan Murphy a whopping $300 million to leave ABC/Disney, and the results have been failure after failure.
A study comparing Murphy’s string of failures to the success of producer Shonda Rhimes (who only received $100 million from Netflix) is pretty startling.
The only clear way to gauge the success of streaming shows is by measuring the total hours watched or streamed. Two of Rhimes’ shows, Bridgerton and Inventing Anna, have racked up a total of 188 million and 129 million hours, respectively. The closest Murphy has come is his limited series Hollywood, which fizzled out with just 14 million hours viewed. Something called Halston crashed and burned with just 3.5 million total hours viewed. The Prom and The Boys in the Band were so unpopular that they didn’t even rank.
Per each dollar spent on their respective deals, Rhimes is delivering 3.17 hours per buck, while Murphy is crashing and burning with 0.06.
The closest Murphy had to a Netflix hit was Ratched, a series about the origins of Oscar-winner Louise Fletcher’s character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). That series earned 56.6 million hours but was not part of Murphy’s Netflix deal. Another Murphy show, The Politician, that streamed on Netflix and came from elsewhere, couldn’t attract enough eyeballs to rank. Two Murphy documentaries, Pray Away and A Secret Love suffered the same fate.
“Honestly,” the study’s author concludes, “Ratched did fine, but didn’t come close to Bridgerton. Meanwhile, you can see that when it comes to ‘hit rate’, Shonda is two for two, whereas Ryan is one for eight.”
To give you an idea of just how big a failure these Murphy shows have been, more people are watching movies over a decade old. Shrek earned 3.7 million viewing hours. Shrek 2 grabbed 6.9 million; Battleship got 3.3 million. Then there’s Elf with13 million; How the Grinch Stole Christmas. 7.6 million; and on and an on…
So let’s look at Murphy’s seven abysmal failures and see if we can’t diagnose the problem…
- Hollywood is a miniseries that takes viewers to a retconned Golden Age of Tinseltown that is super-woke about race and homosexuality.
- A Secret Love is a documentary about lesbian baseball players.
- Halston is a miniseries about a gay interior designer.
- The Politician is a series with this shit in it.
- Pray Away is a documentary about survivors of gay conversion therapy.
- The Prom is a movie about lesbians going to a high school prom.
- The Boys in the Band is a remake of a bad film about gay guys.
Anyone picking up a pattern here?
Anyone?
Nobody wants to watch this shit.
Watch below:
It’s boring. It’s unoriginal. It’s everywhere, and to some of us — at least unless it involves a couple of hot lesbians — it’s a tad icky.
The other thing is this… Whether it’s swinging heterosexuals, gays, lesbians, or what-the-fuck-evers, no one in real life or fiction is more dull, tedious, and insufferable than these shallow, self-obsessed narcissists who define themselves based on what they do with their sex organs.
Murphy is so driven by sex that he reduced Andy Warhol, an endlessly fascinating and complicated gay man, to a penis. Only a failure like Ryan Murphy could make Andy Warhol — Andy Warhol! — boring.
Apparently, Ryan Murphy’s next big swing will be a Netflix miniseries about Jeffrey Dahmer that examines his white privilege.
Oh, boy, I can’t wait not to watch that.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.