There’s a note that Netflix executives have been writing on the scripts they receive for years: “this is not enough second screen“. That is to say, it is not “second screen” enough, that the scene forces the viewer to pay attention. Apparently, paying attention to the series is now a problem. And although This has been talked about for months.it is now that it is being named. The problem is cataloged. And above all, it raises a vital question: is television ceasing to be creativity and innovation and becoming, once again, background noise?
Origins. One of the triggers for this conversation was an article published in December 2024 in the literary magazine ‘n+1’. Its author collected the testimonies of several scriptwriters who had worked for Netflix: A common note from the platform’s executives was to ask the characters to announce out loud what they were doing, so that viewers who had the series playing in the background could follow the thread without having to look at the screen. The article went viral a year or so ago, and gave a name to something that many suspected: Netflix not only tolerated its users being distracted from what was seen on the screen, but also designed its content to encourage that distraction.
Second screen. If we look at previous studies on Netflix’s footprint in fictional narrative, we can name the phenomenon: researcher Daphne Rena Idiz had published a study called ‘Local Production for Global Platforms: How Netflix Shapes European Production Cultures’, in which it described how Netflix internally labeled certain series as “second-screen shows” and developed them accordingly. One of their interviewees, for example, explained that the platform had even asked them that, if a character was sad, they expressly said so while crying and violins playing in the background.
The logic. Another producer interviewed by Idiz related that Netflix had literally told them: “what you have to know about your audience is that they will watch the series while doing something else and talking to their friends, so you have to show and tell, you have to say a lot more than you would normally say.” And all this is pure commercial logic: what matters is not that the user pays attention to the screen (that’s how traditional advertising worked), but that they do not cancel their subscription. The content should not be boring, but it should not require effort either.
When a study in January 2025 made it clear that 91% of Americans looked at their cell phones from time to time while watching a series, it is clear that Netflix is not going against the current. Whether it is part of the problem or its true germ, it is obvious that Netflix is fully riding this wave.
More precedents. None of this is new: already during the actors’ strike of 2023, the first steps in this direction began to be detected. Actress and director Justine Bateman declared in a podcast who had spoken with showrunners that they received notes from the platforms telling them that their content “was not sufficiently second screen“, and proposed a term for that: “visual muzak“, television as elevator music.
Even earlier, in November 2020, writer Kyle Chayka had coined the concept of “ambient TV“ to describe a sliver of Netflix’s catalog (‘Emily in Paris’ was its prime example) that it defined as content that “you don’t need to follow closely to enjoy, but that is seductive enough to capture your attention if you decide to watch it for a moment.”
The proportions. From Serialized They explained that the data collected through Big Data had even determined which was the perfect series, and that it fits with these content decisions that we have seen: the perfect genre is a procedural (doctors, firefighters, detectives, lawyers), it must include a twist or hook visual every eight minutes, a proportion of 70% plot and 30% character development, and the aforementioned explanatory dialogues so as not to get lost.
On the contrary. There are those who deny all these visions of work at Netflix which, let’s not forget, do not come from official sources. In this articlethree scriptwriters who had written for the platform claimed to have not received instructions of that type. Screenwriter Danny Brocklehurst, known for his adaptations of Harlan Coben, stated that no one had pressured him to simplify his work or adapt it for distracted viewers. Idiz herself warned in her study that it is advisable not to generalize, since Netflix operates in more than 190 countries with very different production teams and cultures.
Something old, something new. The soap operas, the sitcoms of the eighties, the reality shows They have been designed for decades with the partially distracted viewer in mind. It is not new to create content that works in the background, but it is striking to do so when the platforms of streaming Current ones, preceded by the cable era where brands like HBO were born, are sold to us as quality alternatives to conventional television. The Golden Age of Television did not refer to ‘The Price is Right’, but if ‘The Sopranos’ were produced now, it would need a spin every eight minutes.
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