REGINA - Welcome to another edition of Cairns on Cinema during this cold month of January 2025. But before we delve into the main topic of today, I feel compelled to talk about the fires in Los Angeles.
What a horrible, horrible situation down there for so many people, with a lot of disruption even for those not directly impacted. For those who have lost their homes, it’s awful. They are clearly struggling to keep things under control and I understand a number of celebrities have lost their homes. I read that right at the very moment that Mel Gibson was down in Texas doing an interview with Joe Rogan, his home in LA was burning down.
Anyway, I’ve been glued to the feeds coming from the news stations down in LA and I hope the situation doesn’t get any worse than it is. It’s just a sad situation.
Anyway, onto the main topic of my column today and it is about Netflix.
I know this will come as a shock to you, but yes, I finally caved and got a Netflix subscription for my TV. Yes, this admission probably means I should junk any claim to being a real movie fan, given that I have avoided Netflix all these years. The reality is I always got my movie fix elsewhere. I would watch movies on TV, or download them online or go to the store to buy the DVDs, or use streaming services like Pluto TV or YouTube. And of course there was always the movie theatre, which is another story because I seem to be going there less and less.
There was always an alternative to Netflix out there, as far as I was concerned. But this year I finally caved, and the reason I did has to do with the recent run of new and exciting programming the service has been offering.
In particular, I’ve been interested in the various real-life docuseries Netflix has served up. Two that captured my interest in recent months have been Drive to Survive, the show focusing on Formula 1 auto racing, and the new series America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.
The subject matter is close to my heart. As a longtime auto racing fan I can safely say I love Formula 1 — it’s practically my favorite sport almost — and as for the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders I probably love them even more. This goes way back to when I was a little kid glued to my beloved television set.
This new show continues a long tradition of TV efforts featuring the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, going back to the days of their made-for-TV movies and other appearances — least of all during the actual football games. Simply put, football and cheerleaders are a winning combination for programmers and TV executives, and now you can add the streamers, too. They can’t get enough of it.
But enough about that. With Formula 1 races currently in their off-season, I have been doing binging of the Drive to Survive show that had been responsible for increasing interest in F1 races in this part of the world. There are six seasons worth of shows up there right now and it’s real edge-of-your-seat stuff, with spectacular crashes such as Romain Grosjean walking away from his flaming car wreck in Bahrain in 2020.
The show also has the up-close-and-personal look at the up-and-coming drivers, as well as the ones on the way down. It’s not just the big names like Max Verstappen or Lewis Hamilton — it’s also the young drivers like Pierre Gasly or Charles Leclerc or George Russell, as well as the ones fighting to keep their seats like Kevin Magnussen and the entertaining personalities like Daniel Ricciardo.
The real revelation to me about Drive to Survive has been the focus on all the teams, not just the ones at the top. They show the drama of the battles for the midfield position, and the lower positions. The funniest scenes have been ones involving the struggles of the Haas team and their F-bomb-spewing principal Guenther Steiner, cursing the fortunes of his team on the track.
It’s funny because during the actual F1 races nobody ever cared about a team like Haas. You always focused on who was at the front of the field, not these other nonentities. But with this series, you care. I’m sure the reason they call the series Drive to Survive is because it really is a fight for survival. It’s a fight to keep your ride, it’s a fight to keep your job. It’s a fight to keep your team afloat financially. Sometimes, it’s even a fight for your life, given how dangerous the sport is.
It’s high stakes all the way, with big money and big players behind the scenes, with big-money brands such as Mercedes, Red Bull, Ferrari, Aston Martin, Alpine and the like involved. Plus you have glamourous locations like Monaco and Monza and Spa, and Singapore and Abu Dhabi and all these other places.
Really, this has the NFL all beat. Formula 1 racing is about the most major-league you can possibly get in the sports world, and it’s great to see fans in North America finally turned on to the glamour and excitement of it. If it takes a show like this to get people hooked, so be it.
While these shows had me interested in subscribing to Netflix in the first place, what really pushed me over the edge in the end was the WWE.
As wrestling fans have surely heard by now, Netflix has just acquired all the international rights to the WWE around the world, including in Canada. They have taken over from Sportsnet the airings of Monday night’s RAW and Friday’s Smackdown shows.
On Monday, WWE fans in Canada tuned in to the first RAW show on Netflix to see Hulk Hogan get booed in LA.
It’s part of a major realignment of wrestling TV programming in our country. With Sportsnet losing all WWE rights to Netflix including the loss of the dedicated WWE channel, Rogers quickly moved to fill the void by acquiring TNA Impact! wrestling.
As for AEW, they continue with their Dynamite shows on TSN but now are adding Collision on Bell Media’s newly-launched-in-Canada USA Network. I guess it makes sense now for Canada to have a “USA Network” given that Trump is about to make us the 51st State. I wish I were kidding.
The WWE marks a departure for Netflix — a real investment in sports-entertainment as well as in sports programming in general. One example — on Christmas Day 2024, Netflix aired back-to-back exclusive NFL games on a day normally reserved for the NBA.
Before that, Netflix also the exclusive streaming home for the much-hyped Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight at AT&T Stadium.
Unfortunately, the Netflix fight ‘cast did not go too smoothly: there were multitudes of reports of buffering problems and the like, with people complaining they couldn’t tune in. There are clearly still growing pains over there.
What it shows to me is that Netflix is no longer willing to just be about movies or TV series — even their exclusive ones. They are now flexing their muscles and are a player in taking on actual TV rights of actual sports properties, including boxing, the NFL, and now the WWE.
From a Canadian TV standpoint you have to wonder what this means in the future for networks like Sportsnet or TSN. Losing the WWE has to be a blow for Sportsnet, as that’s some reliable content and a whole lot of viewers gone.
You also see services like Amazon Prime stepping in with their NFL Thursday Night Football in the USA as well as Monday Night Hockey now in Canada. And you see Apple TV stepping in with their coverage of MLS soccer and also Major League Baseball.
And it’s not going to stop. Expect to see streaming services get more involved in making even more bids for sports rights in the near future, maybe even taking a run at the aforementioned Formula 1. Of course, it makes life difficult for fans who are continually having to waste money shelling out for different streaming services to watch different sports. It’s especially a headache for soccer fans, with the rights to each league or competition spread out over various different streamers.
You know, this is supposed to be Cairns on Cinema — CINEMA! — and yet I ended up not talking much cinema at all in writing about Netflix. I guess it’s a sign of how the times are changing on the streaming scene.
