A closer look
Netflix boldly greenlit House of Cards for a massive hundred million dollars without even shooting a pilot episode, relying entirely on creepy user data algorithms that proved their subscribers loved David Fincher movies and Kevin Spacey. Before this, television networks would cautiously spend millions filming dozens of pilots every year, testing them heavily on random focus groups, and then immediately canceling ninety percent of them. Netflix just looked at a giant spreadsheet of streaming habits, mathematically calculated that a cynical political thriller would be an absolute slam dunk, and handed over the cash. It was the terrifying dawn of the algorithmic entertainment era, proving that human intuition and artistic curation are hopelessly useless against a giant server rack that knows exactly how many times you paused Fight Club and skipped the intro of The West Wing
