I’m a Former Video Store Clerk and I Think Netflix’s Blockbuster Deserves to Go Bankrupt
The post I’m a Former Video Store Clerk and I Think Netflix’s Blockbuster Deserves to Go Bankrupt appeared first on Consequence.
It’s not a good sign that Blockbuster, a workplace sitcom set inside a literal metaphor for late-stage capitalism, feels the need to call out the problem with its premise seven minutes into the pilot episode. “Isn’t it ironic that the small business taking a stand against the big corporation in this scenario is actually a franchise of a once-huge corporation, named after the exact type of big corporate movies that killed off smaller movies?” Blockbuster employee Eliza (Melissa Fumero) says, as her boss Tim (Randall Park) tries to rally his underdog staff.
I’m admittedly coming to the show with a bias, as a former video store clerk who spent about two and a half years behind the counter of independent stores — stores that always struggled to compete with the Walmart of the industry. But despite acknowledging that aforementioned irony, Blockbuster still proves to be a true miss creatively, never escaping the burden of its flawed premise.
Creator Vanessa Ramos got her start as a writer on Superstore, and the thematic line between the NBC comedy and Blockbuster is pretty clear, specifically in its focus on how big business affects the little people. The series begins with Tim, a 40-something slacker still traumatized by his parents’ decades-ago divorce, getting the news that the Blockbuster franchise he owns is now entirely independent from the Blockbuster corporation, which has been liquidated — making his store the last Blockbuster on the planet.
Already struggling to stay afloat in the streaming era, Tim now has to face an even more serious future for the store he loves, despite its obsolescence. Which means that Blockbuster, the show, somehow simultaneously finds itself getting bogged down in unnecessary details surrounding the store’s business model while also totally failing to establish how a store of its size in the year 2022 can continue to employ a half-dozen people — who are even getting health benefits? Come on.
For so many reasons, Blockbuster exists in the realm of fiction, but most significantly because of this: The real last Blockbuster is not in Michigan but famously in Bend, Oregon. They even made a movie about it, which also covered the many ways in which Blockbuster’s cultural dominance had a fundamentally negative impact on the entertainment industry.
Coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s as a cinephile meant that your real church was your local video store. And for so many of us, that store was Blockbuster. As a suburban kid in the San Francisco Bay Area, Friday nights were special because they were usually the nights my brother and I could convince our parents to drive us down to the local strip mall, where we’d very carefully select movies for the weekend under that glowing yellow-blue neon sign.
Blockbuster (Netflix)
The thing about massive industry-defining chains is that part of their business model is making sure that you don’t know about the alternatives. But just around the time DVDs entered mainstream circulation, I got a job working at a local independently-owned store called Videoscope — an actual mom-and-pop shop run by an incredibly hard-working Filipino couple named Nona and Odon.
And after a few months of working there, I hated Blockbuster.
It was a competitive hatred, but one with plenty of justification: Blockbuster put countless stores like Videoscope out of business before filing for bankruptcy itself. In the days when physical media was king, a store often lived or died by its ability to stock new releases: This led to the rise of a company called Rentrak, which would lease large quantities of titles like Alfonso Cuaron’s Great Expectations and Never Been Kissed to stores, but for a share of the rental revenue. Nona and Odon signed up for Rentrak eventually, but it was never a deal they liked, given the way it cut into their profits.
(Rentrak successfully pivoted from leasing VHS tapes to becoming a data and research company that acquired Nielsen EDI in 2009, and was itself acquired by data measurement company comScore in 2016. Everything gets bought and sold eventually, in this world.)
Blockbuster’s ability to fill its shelves with the newest releases while independent stores struggled wasn’t the only negative effect it had on the industry. The company’s strict policy prohibiting the rental of NC-17 films meant that major studios would either have a hard line against any rating higher than an R, or would recut more adult movies specifically for Blockbuster distribution.
Meanwhile, yes, Nona wouldn’t stock The Last Temptation of Christ because she thought it was blasphemous, but that was pretty much her only rule; no small percentage of Videoscope’s profits came from the hardcore porn that I was renting out to grown men at the age of 16. And more importantly, the store was well-stocked with a rich depth of obscure and/or cult releases, from I Spit on Your Grave to The Wizard of Speed and Time, with no concern for their ratings or content.
While Blockbuster would stock some degree of the classics alongside new releases, the emphasis was always on the shiny and new and big. So my favorite days working at Videoscope were the days when a new customer would discover us after Blockbuster’s selection or staff would fail to help them locate the movie they actually wanted. Nona and Odon didn’t make us wear stupid polo shirts, either. My finest ’90s flannel was more-than-acceptable work wear.
As a comedy, independent from the problems with its premise, Blockbuster features some inspired supporting performances, with Madeleine Arthur, Olga Merediz, and Tyler Alvarez standing out as cast MVPs. But the extremely forced will-they-won’t-they dynamic between Park and Fumero never comes together, due to a fundamental lack of chemistry between the two. In addition, character dynamics, exposition, and thematic messages are all delivered with blunt-force dialogue, and Park’s character never feels like anything more than Randall Park delivering quips in a black polo shirt.
Something that Blockbuster also fails to capture is the degree to which video stores of the past were a hub of conversation about movies… and rarely anything else. Technically, the writers have made the right choice in making the episodes about, y’know, the characters and their lives and stuff, as opposed to deeply nerdy digressions as to who was the best Bond or why The Phantom Menace deserves to die in a fire. (We have podcasts now, after all.)
But all of Blockbuster‘s best lines and moments come from the show’s occasional moments of true film geekery, with maybe the funniest joke in the series arriving in the season finale, when someone asks a trivia question about a fictional Christmas movie: “Besides But I’m Too Young to Be Santa, name another movie directed by Roman Polanski!”
As much as people might praise Blockbuster for having a wider selection of classic films than, say, Netflix’s current streaming offerings, VOD rental services do currently offer immediate access to a huge range of films for less than what Blockbuster used to charge, as Vulture contributor Jason Bailey once pointed out. I know plenty of serious movie nerds like Bailey who worked at Blockbuster in their youth, and as the years have passed, I’ve eventually come to stop judging them for it. When you’re an addict, I know well, a free supply is hard to pass up.
Not to mention that the older I get, the more I’ve become numbed to the harsh realities of corporate America; how every industry is subject to both the needs and the desires of the marketplace as well as the requirements of the board room. For something that evolves out of watching Blockbuster is a reminder that big businesses crushing smaller ones is hardly a new concept.
When the show was originally announced, there was a certain schadenfreude to be enjoyed in the idea of Netflix taking the corpse of a company it helped destroy and using it as the basis for more content to feed its sacred algorithm. It’s a story as old as time, but with a more realistic ending — most David and Goliath stories, in reality, end with Goliath squashing everyone in his wake.
As a series, Blockbuster doesn’t really capture what we’ve lost or gained in the days of streaming, beyond championing the importance of human connection in these disconnected times. Its heart is good and there is potential. But it’s so committed to championing nostalgia for the past that it becomes myopic about everything else.
For the record, Videoscope was lucky and outlasted the Blockbuster corporation, only shutting its doors in 2013. But it was a struggle to the very end, a real-life underdog story where the only real victory was not going out of business first. That’s the way the world works — time passes, things change, and as the old fades away, the new which replaces it has its own pluses and minuses.
To go back to that quote from the season premiere: Acknowledging the irony of its premise doesn’t change the fact that Blockbuster the show is trying to make Blockbuster the company a symbol for what we’ve lost — when for a lot of independent video stores, Blockbuster was what caused them to lose. There’s plenty to mourn about the past. Blockbuster isn’t on that list.
Blockbuster Season 1 is streaming now on Netflix.
I’m a Former Video Store Clerk and I Think Netflix’s Blockbuster Deserves to Go Bankrupt
Liz Shannon Miller
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