Peacock Is Serving Better Gourmet Cheeseburgers Than Netflix
Earlier this year, a New Yorker profile of Netflix executive Bela Bajaria introduced a useful new term to describe the kind of shows Netflix is now trying to make: “Gourmet cheeseburgers.”
Gourmet cheeseburgers (as defined by Bajaria and Jinny Howe, the Netflix drama series VP who coined the term), are shows that are “premium and commercial at the same time.” The article cites the historical romance series Bridgerton as an exemplary gourmet cheeseburger. It has lavish period costumes, racy sex scenes, and—thanks to the commercial instincts of executive producer Shonda Rhimes—the crowd-pleasing spirit of Grey’s Anatomy. Gourmet cheeseburgers have high production value and could be enjoyed by people who primarily watch broadcast dramas. Most importantly, they’re fun.
As Netflix continues to move toward cheesy, beefy fare like The Night Agent—the surprise action thriller smash that wouldn’t have been out of place on Fox’s fall 2005 broadcast lineup—other streaming services are following suit. And one streamer in particular is doing the “premium” part of gourmet cheeseburgers even better than Netflix. It has two terrific shows that could be on NBC if they had fewer F-words.
I’m talking about Peacock, the formerly also-ran streaming service that this year has emerged as the source for broadcast network-style dramas with a high-end twist (admittedly with a tiny sample size on a much smaller scale than Netflix). And the juiciest, most artisan-bunned cheeseburger on TV right now is Peacock’s Poker Face.
The amateur detective dramedy became a bona fide hit when it premiered in January and has since been renewed for Season 2. Poker Face is a gourmet cheeseburger because it takes an ancient broadcast TV form—the “howcatchem” procedural popularized by Columbo in the 1970s—and updates it with prestige flourishes for the streaming era.
Poker Face follows a woman named Charlie (Natasha Lyonne), who has a preternatural gift for being able to tell when people are lying. She travels around the country getting mixed up in crimes. She always knows who did it, but not why or how, and she cannot rest until she figures it out. Every episode has an almost entirely new cast, with recognizable stars like Adrien Brody, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Hong Chau making guest appearances. It was created by Rian Johnson, an Oscar-nominated writer-director who understands how to do crowd-pleasing prestige better than anybody (Glass Onion? That’s a gourmet cheeseburger).
It’s the kind of show you don’t have to watch every episode of to understand, because each episode has a self-contained story that follows a familiar, repeated template. That kind of purely episodic structure is anathema to the “ten hour movie” format that has been the de rigeur style for streaming dramas. But Poker Face is making procedurals cool again by figuring out a way to make them work on streaming. It blends premium cable sophistication with broadcast network entertainment value in a best-of-both-worlds way that no previous streaming drama had figured out, or even really attempted (shows like Lucifer and Evil that started out as broadcast series before moving to streaming don’t count). We’ll probably start seeing more shows like it, including ones on Netflix, now that programming executives know the model works.
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