On Monday, Prime Video subscribers who visited the platform were
greeted with a new prompt: "Movies and TV shows included with Prime now have limited ads. You can upgrade to be ad free for $2.99 a month."
After a swift click on "not now," this viewer cued up one of the more successful titles currently gracing Amazon's roster - the second season of beefcake vigilante drama
Reacher. Interruptions, which included a spot for another series (
Hudson & Rex, starring a German Shepherd detective) and a reminder from the folks at Intuit Turbotax that filling season has commenced, were indeed limited. But in an era where more and more viewers are culturally conditioned to be repulsed by ads on any broadcast but the Super Bowl, even limited spots are conspicuous.
"We fought so hard to get rid of commercials," says Alan Poul, executive producer and director of Max original
Tokyo Vice which returns for a second season on Feb. 8. "It was one of the biggest steps in bringing the worlds of TV and film closer together, in getting that higher level of artist to participate. It was such a seminal gain, and now it's reversing."
If you're not willing or able to part with an extra $2.99, $6 (Disney+ and Max), $8.50 (Netflix) or $10 (Hulu) to go ad-free, commercials are the new (old) normal. Paramount expands its own ad-supported tier internationally later in 2024 - and though no official plans have been announced, recent hires at Apple TV+ suggest the tech behemoth will eventually introduce ads as well. Subscriber frustrations, especially in a climate of unabated inflation, are a given. Feelings in the creative community, which vary from indifference to outrage, largely depend on where and how one works.
For Poul, whose stateside platform is still expanding its global reach,
Tokyo Vice has to be made in a way that allows it to be sold to multiple platforms in other territories. Some of those have advertising and others don't. And while act breaks - those are moments of deliberate transition in scripts which double as natural windows for commercials - aren't written into accommodate the potential for ads, Poul says such breaks are discussed with editors in post-production.
Many scribes still pen scripts with those broadcast-friendly act breaks in mind. One of them, Terry Matalas, operated under the assumption that
Star Trek: Picard might eventually find its way to a platform with an ad-supported tier while working on the series. When Paramount+ expands ads in a few months, his instincts will have been proven right. "I'd just hope showrunners have a say where the ads are," says Matalas, "and that [episodes] don't just break in the middle."...........
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