It Stinks!

Welcome back to another edition of Buffering, and here’s hoping you didn’t party too hard on Flag Day. This week’s newsletter takes a look at what three very important people — Vulture’s TV critics— think about the current state of the streaming wars. We’ve got their candid takes on who’s up, who’s down, and who’s simply embarrassing themselves. Meanwhile, in next week’s issue, I’m planning to publish some of the many interesting reactions to “The Binge Purge,” the New York Magazine story I wrote about in the last edition of Buffering. If you’ve had a chance to read the story and have strong thoughts, I’d love to hear them: You can sound off in the comments (like it’s 2015) or send me a note at buffering@vulture.com. And if you have questions about the streaming industry in general, send those as well and I’ll try to answer in a future issue. As always, thanks for reading. –Joe Adalian

Reach Joe on Twitter @tvmojoe or email buffering@vulture.com.


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As regular Vulture readers know, our TV critics do not mince words when they’re not impressed by a show. Over the last few months, they’ve lamented that the two stars ofthe new Quantum Leap reboot “have all the sexual chemistry of a pile of mulch,” dismissed The Diplomatas a “superficial slog of self-important ‘herstory’,” and marveled that the writers of Velma “didn’t injure themselves in a tragic pop-culture-referencing accident.” Not surprisingly, that honesty also carries over to their opinions of the major streaming services.

Last week, as part of New York Magazine’s annual TV issue, I once again used a mix of science and magic to figure out the hottest streamers right now (as well as those still struggling). And for the first time in the three-year life of our rankings, I gave Vulture’s three main TV critics — the ever-insightful Jen Chaney, Roxana Hadadi, and Kathryn VanArendonk — a formal vote in the process: Their collective opinion was one of four main factors which went into determining the winners and losers. In addition to ranking the platforms, Vulture’s TV trio also weighed in with why they voted the way they did. Here’s what they had to say:

7. Paramount+

If you like Star Trek or Yellowstone spin-offs, obviously you come to Paramount+. I come here mainly to watch Evil, but their library of older content is also decent. (It has all three seasons of MTV’s The State!) But too many Paramount+ originals have been a bust — sorry, Fatal Attraction — and its interface is clunky instead of slick.

6. Prime Video

The streamer Jeff Bezos (sort of) built has dropped some buzzy series in the last few months, including Daisy Jones and the Six, Swarm, and Dead Ringers, with I Am a Virgo soon to come. But it is still too attracted to dramas with strong CBS vibes, and has one of the worst user interfaces on Earth, which is weird for a tech company that’s been playing the streaming game for this long.

5. Peacock

This has been Peacock’s strongest year so far, thanks to Poker Face and Mrs. Davis. It still could use a few more shows like those to bump up its relevance.

4. Netflix

There are obviously still great shows on Netflix — The Crown, Beef, Bridgerton, etc. — but the proportion of schlocky to solid programming has started to tip in the wrong direction.

3. Disney+/Hulu

I’ll be frank: The only reason these two conjoined platforms don’t rank higher is because the Disney+ original programming has been so bogged down by Marvel and Star Wars spin-offs that, lately, have not been consistently entertaining.

2. Apple TV+

AppleTV+ gets extra points from me because both its actual platform and screener platform for critics are so user-friendly. While not every show is a hit, there have been enough strong series and movies on the platform, all produced with seemingly healthy budgets, to confirm its identity as a source for prestige TV.

1.Max

I hate the new name as much as everybody else, but this streamer still offers more new and classic high-quality television than its competitors — you know, because of HBO, that premium cable network who is no longer mentioned in the title of this platform.

7. Paramount+

Paramount+ is at the bottom of this list because its offerings are so meager; The merger with Showtime means that the wayward-but-entertaining Yellowjackets is on this streamer, but otherwise, unless you’re a Taylor Sheridan or Star Trek person, there isn’t much of note here. Its teen-focused series, like Wolf Pack, Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies, and School Spirits, feel like first drafts, and its revamp of Fatal Attraction proves that not every movie can stretch itself into a TV format. Plus, the announced reboots of Weeds and Nurse Jackie and the streamer’s announced commitment to universe-building suggest a refusal to try anything new, which isn’t much cause for excitement.

6. Netflix

What is there to say about Netflix that hasn’t already been said? For every Beef, there are a dozen reality dating shows I am never going to watch. 1899 was one of the most imaginative sci-fi series I’ve seen in years, and of course Netflix cancelled it. They are who they are, and who they are is a streamer with an increasingly shallow library and an increasingly high price point.

5. Apple TV+

It pains me to put Apple TV+ so low, because Severance, Pachinko, and For All Mankind are so fantastically done. But the platform feels like it’s in a plateau, either delivering content that is exhaustingly sanctimonious (Ted Lasso season three, Extrapolations, WeCrashed) or thoroughly inconsequential (Hello Tomorrow!, Dear Edward, The Last Thing He Told Me). It’s still difficult to determine exactly what an Apple TV+ series is (a problem Prime Video has, too), but to its technical credit, I’ve never had an issue with playback.

4. Prime Video

You can always tell when Prime Video has spent money on something — The Rings of Power, Wheel of Time, Daisy Jones & The Six — but those big budgets don’t necessarily mean that the resulting project seems worth it. There’s an odd mutedness to Prime Video because of the inconsistency in its release schedules, and they’re often nonsensical: Why does The Power get a weekly release when Dead Ringers or Swarm didn’t? Prime Video seems to reserve its biggest marketing pushes for the militarized series that are the most grueling to watch, like Jack Ryan and The Terminal List, and it’s frustrating that its biggest creative swings feel ignored. Again: Justice for Dead Ringers!

3. Peacock

There are various little things about Peacock that are annoying: its many ads, how laggy its platform is, how often it freezes and forces me to restart my Roku. But the Bravo and NBC libraries are solid — all the seasons of Top Chef and Vanderpump Rules in one place! — and Peacock’s originals have had distinct personality, from Poker Face to Mrs. Davis to The Traitors. If only the user interface didn’t bother me more than any other!

2. Disney+/Hulu

If these two were separate, Disney+ would be far, far down, since so many of its original Star Wars and MCU offerings have been duds lately. But Disney+ also hosted Andor, my pick for the best TV series of 2022, and Hulu is consistently excellent because of its FX partnership. This summer sees the return of highlights Reservation Dogs, The Bear, What We Do in the Shadows, and This Fool, plus the Justified revival City Primeval; this spring’s sci-fi miniseries Class of ’09 was a nice surprise, too. Plus, Hulu is fairly easy to use, and rarely crashes on me the way that Peacock does.

1. Max

Let’s get this out of the way — removing “HBO” from the streamer’s name was incredibly silly, and a somewhat demoralizing sign that the people in charge don’t understand what the legacy of HBO was. The unveiling of Max, in its first weeks, has been buggy and glitchy so far. But the quality of the catalog is still fairly strong, and the series are still conversation starters like almost nothing else on television. The real question is what is worthy of breaking out now that buzzy, well-acclaimed series like Succession and Barry have ended.

7. Paramount+

For me this is the place I go for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and shows by Robert and Michelle King. My assumption is that for many people it’s The Taylor Sheridan Streamer Except Not Yellowstone For Some Reason. (And once that changes it’ll just be Taylor Sheridan+).

6. Peacock

I so, so want Peacock to work, I really do. On Peacock you can watch Mrs Davis, Poker Face, Vanderpump Rules, and Good Timing with Jo Firestone. How is this not a winning streamer strategy?! But it is stuck in the tier of, “Oh right, maybe I’ll get a trial of that one day” streaming platform. When I try to get people excited about some Peacock show, I am met with initial enthusiasm and then a half-regretful shrug when they realize they’d need to subscribe to yet another thing. I’m not sure how they’ll get past that, but I assume the ad tier helps?

5. Prime

Look, I like The Boys. Clearly there’s an audience for other Prime shows (Citadel, Jack Ryan, Reacher, Outer Range) where a heavily muscled man with a tight-fitting t-shirt and oily dirt on his cheekbones runs away from an explosion. But Prime’s attempts at big-audience breadth seem to have come accidentally (Maisel) or not at all (The Rings of Power) or by way of shows that are actually fascinating indictments of the existence of corporations like Amazon (The Boys).

4. Apple

Essentially the opposite of Netflix, to both its benefit and its detriment. Most Apple shows are at least worth trying. Some are great, some are hilariously underwhelming, but nearly all of them are made with enough care that you can at least tell that they were made by human beings trying to tell a story. There were several misses for me from Apple this year so far, including The Big Door Prize and Hello Tomorrow, but even in those cases, the shows were interesting enough to at least think, “Huh, kinda fun they made this.” Also, not for nothing, Apple Originals is still killing it in the kids TV department. Do you know how hard it is to find non-obnoxious shows for preschoolers?! Apple has several!

3. Netflix
Ahhhh, Netflix. Netflix, Netflix, Netflix. It’s big. It’s unignorable. It’s also so easy to only pay half attention to! There are a couple of fun dramas from them recently, things that had slightly more stickiness to them: Wednesday is the best example, but The Diplomat and The Night Agent also had their moments. Netflix’s unscripted game is very strong, although the docuseries wing is reliably unimpressive. In all, though, memorable and surprising Netflix shows now feel like the exception rather than the rule, and the binge model is remarkably good at suppressing conversation.

2. Disney/Hulu
I’m thrilled that there’s been so few big Marvel or Star Wars shows from Disney in the last few months. My hope is that this means they understand that flooding the market with milquetoast franchise installments shoehorned into crowded fictional universes is, in fact, a bad idea. At the same time, the combination of Hulu originals with the Disney library feels like it has potential to be a robust, all-audiences platform.

1. Max
Despite my frustration about removing HBO from the name, for me this is still the HBO streamer. And despite my unimpressed response to The Idol, it’s also the outlet that’s best at hitting multiple kinds of TV experiences. It has buzzy event TV with established weekly viewing habits, maybe the last one of those that exists. It has a sizable library. It has big broad franchise stuff; it has exquisite tiny little shows; the Discovery library means it also has a solid foundation of comfy unscripted TV that catches lots of eyes.

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