Dept. Q

Netflix trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72hK6FUmm8o

How does everybody know?

My e-mail has been blowing up about this show starting on Thursday, the day it went live. And I did see reviews in some papers, but to think the success of this show is based on the usual hype is to believe the mainstream media is still in control of success, and that is completely untrue.

"Dept. Q"'s success is based on word of mouth. And that is everything today. You can't build it and you can't sustain it.

That's another thing the oldsters have wrong. You don't try to build and string out, today everything is hit and run. Online fads/memes can be done in a week. Then on to the next thing. Once the mainstream finds out about it it's already on the downswing.

Now Netflix does have the advantage of its home screen. Not that I knew what it was, but they were pitching me "Dept. Q" starting a few days before it went live.

That's another thing, advance hype to build excitement? Why? Remember when acts were worried about their masters being stolen and released before street date? Acts just wished there was that amount of mania about their new music today. For a while there we got the secret drop...you know, you wake up and it's there. But today there's so much in the pipeline that even that doesn't work.

Not that music is identical to streaming TV. There is no home screen for music. If you think real estate on Spotify makes a difference, you're probably paying for it. If you think it's all about playlisting...you don't know that active listeners pick and choose, they don't listen to playlists (I didn't make this up, Spotify has told us this over and over again). People believe in playlisting the same way they insist on still sending you their CD, as if it's not easier to just click and listen...and turn off! If your PR person says they're going to ship CDs, fire them, or don't hire them to begin with. But there are a ton of people who'll take your money and everybody's frustrated because they don't know what to do, how to gain attention for their work.

It's easy... Make the best work possible. There's very little great stuff out there, and if something is great people will find it, and talk about it.

Not that I think "Dept. Q" is phenomenal, the whole bit with Ms. Finch and what happened to her doesn't ring true with me. But Matthew Goode as Carl Morck is such a prick, superior and he doesn't even know how his personality works against him.

As for Kelly Macdonald... Did you see her in "Line of Duty"? Or maybe "Giri/Haji"? Hell, she's got an arm's worth of credits. But we don't keep being beaten over the head with her, she's not constantly in the gossip columns, she's an actress.

As for the show...

It isn't long on nuance. This isn't one for the ages.

But we're only three episodes in. And there are nine. And I must say the third episode is the best one yet.

Would there be this amount of buzz and excitement if "Dept. Q" was dropped week by week? OF COURSE NOT! Not only do you hear about it, but you can dive deep immediately.

People are constantly talking sh*t about Netflix, and Netflix keeps winning, doing it their way. Netflix is bigger than a network, it's THE network. With more product than any network every purveyed.

As a matter of fact, we're in the middle of this Norwegian show "Pernille," which gets better and better as it goes along. There are five seasons of six shows each, all about half an hour, and it's rewarding in ways that conventional shows are not. And it's on Netflix.

We want to feel like we belong. And media keeps telling us to pay attention and feel like we belong, but that doesn't work, even though everybody involved in that game keeps slapping each other's back, smiling and believing they own the game.

The people own the game. And it's fun to be watching and clued-in to what everybody else is.

I wish we had music like this. And we do have some, but it's mostly country. Finally the mainstream press is acknowledging this, but we had to hear for years and years that we lived in a hip-hop nation. Not anymore. Or to whatever extent we are, it's fading.

Because everything fades. Even rock and roll.

But when was the last time you heard a straight ahead one listen rock song? Creators are too deep in their niches to do this. They want to belong to a scene. When the scene is purely great music.

As for "Dept. Q"... I can't wait to continue. And isn't that the essence?


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