Netflix,Spanish television,and La casa de papel : Growing global and local TV together in the multiplatform era

Netflix goes transnational in TVIV

The following institutional-industrial analysis is designed to describe and evaluate how Netflix’s post-2016 rebranding efforts have resulted in its ongoing transition from a centrally-managed multinational corporation based mainly in Silicon Valley to a more decentralised transnational operation with multiple interconnected headquarters worldwide. To accomplish this objective, Netflix’s shift in work culture and business strategy is examined from a blended macro-micro critical perspective whereby the evolving context of the global television industry is used to frame the data-driven insights involving the streamer and its interrelations with Spanish TV after its debut in that country beginning on 20 October 2015. Delineating the global/local push and pull of Netflix’s continuing commercial and cultural relationships with the Spanish television industry and its audience reveals how this expanding media services provider has impacted that nation’s audiovisual ecosystem; and just as importantly, how Spain has influenced through trial and error the ways in which Netflix conducts business both locally and globally.

Moreover, the case study of La casa de papel [Money Heist] (2017-21) in particular provided Netflix with further confirmation that its transnational business strategy was working in the area of content creation. The programme began as a weekly prime-time broadcast series in Spain during the spring of 2017 before it was acquired by Netflix as an ‘original’ later that summer. La casa de papel eventually rose to be the number one worldwide in-demand show on Netflix, holding that position for 995 straight days, starting when the platform first introduced its top-10 feature across approximately 100 of its largest markets during the week of 23–29 February 2020 (Moore, 2021; Vyskočil et al., 2022). It was the streamer’s first breakout hit to demonstrate that a locally-produced non-English language show could resonate globally to such an overwhelming degree. Netflix’s integration into the Spanish television landscape and its subsequent transnational distribution of La casa de papel serves as an object lesson of how glocal arrangements can work out for the benefit of all participating players in TVIV (2013-present).

TVIV replaced TVIII (1995–2012), which arrived almost immediately after the introduction of the first commercially available graphical browser, Netscape Navigator 1.0 on 15 December 1994, thus making web travel relatively easy for the average consumer. Freed by its evolving synergistic relationship with the Internet and a wide array of interconnected digital devices, television’s relevance, influence and profitability actually grew faster and changed more dramatically in TVIII than in any previous stage in its history up to that point. From then on, television would be understood as a legacy term. It is today assumed to be more than a static piece of hardware or a household appliance; television is also a business model, a set of production practices; a codified listing of specific aesthetic choices and a social process that has grown increasingly personalised, interactive, mobile, on demand and transnational in scope.

For its part, TVIV is defined first and foremost by streaming as a technological, industrial, aesthetic, cultural and consumptive practice. This latest stage in television’s development reflects a late post-Fordist economic order that prefers first-order commodity relations via subscriptions and demonstrates a near complete transition to virtual transactions such as the continuing dematerialisation of TV and video content, an ever accelerating commitment to neoliberal deregulation and consolidation and a complete realignment of the relationship between the older legacy Hollywood production studios and the newer Silicon Valley technology and entertainment giants. The corporate exemplar of TVIV is Netflix, which is well along the process of adopting and enacting a transnational general entertainment strategy, while its principal SVOD competitors are still centrally managed and either regional or multinational in aspiration.

All told, the OTT streaming sector contains four major SVOD multinationals (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and Warner Bros. Discovery/HBO Max), four mini-major streamers with international aspirations (that is Peacock, Hulu, Apple TV+, and Paramount+) along with an additional 390 other local and regional niche online video companies worldwide resulting in a once-in-a-lifetime shift in the global entertainment landscape featuring television in a prominent role (Barnes, 2019). One can quibble about dates and specific starting points, but it is increasingly evident that television history entered the TVIV stage sometime around 2013 when Netflix made its first baby steps beyond being just a SVOD curated library service and digital disruptor to emerge as a legitimate content creator and industry leader by the end of the decade. TVIV privileges the personal usage market model, which thrives on 24/7 online consumer activity driven by individualised algorithmic recommendations.

Besides its original Los Gatos headquarters in Silicon Valley, Netflix now runs widely dispersed offices and studios in 26 countries across the globe including sites in Hollywood, New York, New Mexico, Mexico City, Toronto, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Seoul, Tokyo and, most relevant for this case study, Madrid (Roxborough and Ritman, 2019a; Schneider, 2022). Netflix officially opened its first European production hub, TV City (Ciudad de la Tele) in Tres Cantors, a satellite community just north of Madrid, in July 2018. Moving into TV City was a hard-won accomplishment for Netflix following almost three years of complex on-the-ground business, creative and cultural interactions, which ultimately enabled the streamer to continue its process of integrating into Spain’s televisual infrastructure. At present, ‘Netflix is most highly penetrative in countries where the English language is dominant’ (Lotz, 2021: 198); nevertheless, Spanish ranks a close second for this media services provider.

English is the world’s most populous language at approximately 1.132 billion people although only 33% of this number are native speakers, reflecting how it functions as the lingua franca for international business and global communications (Berlitz, 2021). English titles still comprise 55% of Netflix’s holdings but this percentage is dropping and projected to fall below one-half of the corporation’s archive by 2025 (Moore, 2020). Launching its first, largest, and most influential European production studio in Spain made perfect sense for Netflix since Spanish is the fourth most spoken language in the world at 534 million with a relatively high 86% of that total being native speakers (after Mandarin with 1.117 billion/82% and Hindi 615 million/55%). From Netflix’s strategic perspective, Spanish is the first language in 22 countries across four continents (Berlitz, 2021). Consequently, the subsequent plans and actions of this major SVOD service beginning with its entry into Spain provides a rich and promising site of analysis, especially given this nation’s decisive position as a programming pipeline to other Spanish-speaking nations and regions around the world (Rolfe, 2015).

The early literature on the global-local dynamic did not originate from media or television scholars. Sociologist Anthony Giddens (2000) noted in Runaway World that ‘in the late 1980s the term [globalisation] was hardly used, either in the academic literature or everyday language. It has come from nowhere to be almost everywhere’ (2000: 25). Globalisation, in this sense, refers to the growing primacy of electronic money for the global economy; the rise of multinational corporations (including the ascendancy of a few mega-media conglomerates); and the shrinking of the earth through international commerce, travel, and the expansion of worldwide communication systems. Another sociologist, Roland Robertson, is often credited with coining the term, glocalisation, which envisions an interdependent transaction that challenges the simplistic notion that globalisation plays out as a top-down homogenising process. He and his colleagues contended that global and local forces work in tandem and are co-determinative in bringing about complex heterogeneous outcomes (Featherstone et al., 1995).

Exploring the global-local nexus was first popularised outside of academe by New York Times columnist and best-selling author, Thomas Friedman, in The World Is Flat (2005), where he homed in directly on the seismic changes then occurring on account of the introduction and widespread adoption of new digital communication technologies especially the Internet. ‘The platform now operates without regard to geography, distance, time, and in the future, even language,’ heralded Friedman. ‘Going forward, this platform is going to be the center of everything’ (2005: 205). Media researchers responded to the ‘flat world’ metaphor with a more glocally-informed social-scientific assessment (Straubhaar, 2007). Television scholars too have since produced a significant body of work that concludes that glocal relations involving TV are only flat in aspiration; in practice they are bumpy and uneven. Of special note, two Spring 2020 theme issues from Critical Studies in Television (Weissmann and Knox, 2020) and Journal of Media and Cinema Studies (Lobato and Lotz, 2020) offer a representative cross-section of recent critical-cultural analyses on a wide assortment of transnational television topics.

Ramon Lobato (2019) observes in Netflix Nations that this major streamer is best understood as ‘a collection of national media services tied together in one platform rather than a unified global service’ (2019: 184). This apt observation does not imply that Netflix’s history and development across 190 countries has resembled an idiosyncratic free-for-all. Common themes and patterns have emerged since this SVOD disruptor and innovator first ventured beyond the United States to Canada in 2010, then 40 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2011, and finally England, Ireland, and Scandinavia in 2012 during its initial international rollout. Netflix’s debut in Spain came at a crucial crossroads in this corporation’s development just as it was deploying its latest rebrand as ‘the world’s first global TV network’.

Catalysing change

Netflix’s arrival in Spain during October 2015 marks an inflection point for this SVOD change agent, the country’s then-traditional TV infrastructure, and the transnational television industry writ large. Spain is a mid-sized nation of 47 million people and 19 million TV households. Prior to Netflix’s early entry beginning in the late fall of 2015 and throughout 2016, the country’s television industry was majority ad-supported, TV set-centric and overwhelmingly linear in scheduling and reception. Domestic viewers preferred Spanish-language shows, especially local and regional productions, although dubbed American series were a common staple as a secondary programming choice. In addition, roughly four out of five Spaniards regularly watched free advertiser-supported broadcast or terrestrial television with most of the remaining 20% choosing from one of a handful of options in the nascent albeit emerging pay cable-and-satellite and OTT sectors (Vivarelli, 2021).

Netflix too was about to experience a steep learning curve. Reed Hastings recalls, ‘we took a big international leap and made our platform available in a total of 130 new countries all in one day [6 January 2016]’ (Hastings and Meyer, 2020: 241). At this juncture, the corporation accounted for 70.84 million subscribers with a majority approaching nearly 60% of that number in the United States (Stoll, 2021). This emerging media services provider was solidly multinational at that point being based in Silicon Valley and American-centric in orientation. Hastings observed that as Google had gone global in the 2000s, it cultivated ‘a uniform corporate culture around the world’ (Hastings and Meyer, 2020: 241). Netflix instead began through trial and error the slow, deliberate and ongoing process of decentralisation and thus transnationalisation.

In shifting from an industrial era management style to one more in line with the information age, Netflix stumbled upon a glocal blueprint that emphasised cooperation over competition, pursued a policy of hiring an abundance of homegrown talent and acquired, co-commissioned or fully financed and produced programming on its own, inside local markets. ‘We added inclusion as one of our cultural values,’ reveals Hastings, ‘recognizing that our success would depend on how much our employees reflected the audience we were trying to reach’ (Hastings and Meyer, 2020: 241). As the corporation ‘purchases and creates content around the world,’ adds Ted Sarandos, ‘we need to be laser-focused on learning. We should be ready to take bigger risks [and sometimes fail] where we learn how to succeed better next time’ (Hastings and Meyer, 2020: 225–226).

The tenets co-CEOs Hastings and Sarandos espoused were more theoretical and just being put into practice for the first time throughout 2016, but they also represented a philosophical sea change that could be translated into a workable action plan going forward for Netflix. This major SVOD service is still only part way through the process of transitioning from a multinational to a truly transnational corporation in structure and practice. Nevertheless, ‘Netflix is different’; it is now building ‘a culture where No Rules Rules’ as it navigates its own version of ‘going global’ in the 2020s (Hastings and Meyer, 2020: xiii, 237). The corporation’s continuing step-by-step integration into the Spanish audiovisual ecosystem is contingent on policy and regulation, business and industry, and aesthetic and cultural factors and considerations.

Netflix currently has a global public policy division designed to lobby local governments and negotiate with federal and EU (European Union) politicians over national and regional operating procedures, production quotas and censorship issues. Spain’s General Law of Audiovisual Communication was first legislated in July 2010. It maintained that foreign media companies with headquarters in the country were obligated to devote at least 30% of their annual TV and film output to European productions. Furthermore, 50% of these subsequent works needed to feature one of the nation’s four co-official languages (that is Spanish, Basque, Catalan/Valencian/Balearic or Galician).

Netflix therefore enjoyed an initial grace period of more than two-and-a-half years before it was subject to this law since it didn’t officially open TV City in Madrid until the summer of 2018. By that time, the streamer had already intentionally and proactively partnered with a handful of Spanish television and film production companies, thus meeting the country’s existing regulatory standards (Keslassy, 2022). For its part, the EU passed its own Audiovisual Media Services Directive on 6 November 2018 with the proviso that each affiliated nation needed to ratify and enact this recommendation into its own national law. This mandate, known within EU-member TV and movie industries as ‘the Brussels Effect,’ requires a 30% quota of local content starting in 2021; however, each country is also given wide latitude in terms of enforcing this authorisation as it deems necessary and appropriate (Vivarelli, 2020).

In Spain’s case, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has supported an array of policies that are devised to enhance and grow the nation’s television and film industry ever since he first took office in June 2018. For instance, the prime minister’s Socialist Workers’ Party government ‘raised the cap from €3 million to €12.2 million for both tax rebates for international projects and tax credits for local productions’ in May 2020 (De Pablos, 2021). Likewise, the Sánchez administration launched a national AVS (Audiovisual) Hub in Madrid on 24 March 2021 in order to cut red tape, increase the country’s competitive advantages across Europe and further expand the international reach and influence of Spanish-made TV programmes and movies throughout the world (Hopewell, 2021a).

Even though Spanish ‘is one of the most common global languages … Spanish television producers have been historically marginal in the global market’ (Wayne and Castro, 2020: 5). Netflix executives learned important lessons early on in 2016 when they purchased their first ever non-English language original film, 7 años [7 years] (2016) and then partnered with Bambú Producciones to produce its first original Spanish television series, Las chicas del cable [Cable Girls] (2017-20). Through these inaugural business and production experiences in the country, Netflix officials recognised right away that their global ambitions could best be served by embracing the many advantages provided by Spain’s local production conditions and infrastructure, such as a fair-weather climate, widely diverse location settings, a wealth of experienced above and below-the-line talent, a well-developed system of commercial support for tourism capable of servicing on-location production crews and multiple airports enabling quick, easy, and efficient travel across the country.

Netflix also made the corporate decision to galvanise its transnational brand by loosely using the marketing descriptor, ‘originals,’ for all of the new television programmes and films that it added to its ever-expanding curated library. In Spain and elsewhere, these originals cluster into three broad categories. The first grouping of Netflix originals is an outside acquisition such as the aforementioned 7 años, which holds the distinction of being the corporation’s first Spanish-language movie. This feature-length film was purchased on the open market after it had already been shot and completed; in turn, Netflix’s procurement of 7 años ensured its exclusivity on Netflix’s streaming platform in perpetuity. Las chicas del cable belongs to a second category of originals that are fully financed by Netflix. It was produced locally by the well-established independent, Bambú Producciones, which was founded in 2007 and had previously created eleven other TV series, mostly for two Spanish broadcast channels, Antena 3, which is privately owned and commercially-based, and TVE (Televisión Española), the nation’s public-service broadcaster.

A third type of Netflix originals are co-commissions, such as La casa de papel, which was originally funded by Atresmedia and produced by Vancouver Media. La casa de papel premiered on Antena 3, a subsidiary of Atresmedia, between May and November 2017. The series was created by the veteran writer-producer and showrunner, Álex Pina, who had founded the Madrid-based independent, Vancouver Media, a year earlier. La casa de papel garnered a respectable audience when it was initially broadcast ranging from 5% to 10% of Spain’s television households in a poor time slot while being recognised as a high-end crime thriller by television critics and industry insiders including Netflix’s newly appointed VP of original content in Spain, Diego Ávalos (Antenna 3, 2017; Lang, 2021: 38; Middleton, 2021).

Before La casa de papel had even finished its first run on Antena 3, Ávalos and his team secured the exclusive global SVOD rights for the series from Atresmedia in June 2017 with an agreement to fund the majority share of a more than 50% hike in the programme’s budget for the next season (Hopewell and Lang, 2019; ‘Netflix Looks Again at an Atresmedia Series: It buys ‘La casa de papel’ to broadcast it worldwide,’ 2017). A little more than a year later, Netflix launched TV City with the strategic intention of ramping up what has since become Netflix’s transnational modus operandi of regularly entering into original coproductions with Spanish independent production companies and their employees (Roxborough and Ritman, 2019a). A representative example of this locally-focused talent-friendly tactic is Netflix signing La casa de papel’s creator, Álex Pina, to an exclusive long-term contract on 12 July 2018 (Sandberg, 2018).

On a more macro level inside Spain, Netflix increased its number of on-the-ground employees at TV City from approximately 12,500 to 25,000, while also doubling its studio capacity from five to 10 sound stages over the next three years (Hopewell, 2021b; O’Brien, 2021). The Spanish SVOD market in general grew exponentially as well after Netflix’s arrival. It increased fivefold from 3.2% to 16% from 2016 through 2019 (Foster, 2019). Netflix gradually established a foothold in the country by following its evolving glocal blueprint of being additive rather than trying to replace the legacy broadcasters or competitively overwhelm the national and regional cable-and-satellite systems and OTT startups (USC School of Cinematic Arts Webinar: The Future of Entertainment, 2020).

Deborah Castro and Concepción Cascajosa have researched and provided a concise and informative chronological assessment of how SVOD services ‘transformed Spanish TV production’ throughout the 2010s (2020: 154–160). Since Netflix’s October 2015 debut in Spain, it has actively acquired, fully financed and co-commissioned originals with all of the major broadcast channels, including TVE (founded in 1956), Artresmedia’s Antena 3 (1988), La Sexta (2001) and Mediaset España’s Telecinco (1989). This major SVOD service has also entered into a wide array of partnering and bundling arrangements with most of the prominent Spanish and regional cable, satellite and IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) companies, most prominently Vodafone in 2015, Orange España in 2016, the Euskatel Group in 2017 and Telefonica’s Movistar + in 2018, among others.

In retrospect, Netflix utilised these various cross-platform business partnerships to facilitate its reach, expand its customer base and build its brand both locally in Spain and regionally throughout the EU and the United Kingdom (UK). Inside Spain, specifically, Netflix’s subscriber numbers have steadily risen from 1.1 million in 2017 to 2.2 million in 2018 to 3.6 million in 2020 with a 7.7% TV household penetration rate, which ranks sixth highest among all of the nations where Netflix is available around the world (Lotz, 2021: 198). Along with Spain, Netflix has similarly prospered in Western and Northern Europe with the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland and Norway being among the streamer’s top-20 subscriber countries.

Still, this growth has not occurred without its mistakes and growing pains. The best-laid strategies and tactics are never immune to accidents, mistakes and unintended consequences. An early example of a miscue was Netflix failing to secure the international SVOD rights for House of Cards and Orange is the New Black (2013-19) when it originally purchased these shows for domestic streaming back in 2011. As a result, both of these prestige series premiered on other ‘local multichannel providers’ in Spain (Wayne and Castro, 2020: 10). Nevertheless, Netflix set the template to be adopted when other American and European major and mini-major streaming service corporations subsequently arrived in Spain starting with HBO España in November 2016, Amazon Prime Video in December 2016 and Sky Television in 2017 (although it left shortly thereafter in 2020); followed by a second wave with Starzplay and Apple TV+ in 2019 and then Disney+ and the Star Channel in 2020.

All told, the SVOD business in Spain contains four major players (Netflix, Movistar+, HBO España, which was renamed HBO Max in October 2021, and Amazon Prime Video) and four mini-majors (Disney+, Apple TV+, Starzplay and the Star Channel, which features Spanish- and Portuguese-language programming). There are also four leading niche SVOD services: Filmin (which exhibits independent and art house films); FlixOlé (Spanish-language movies from around the world); Rakuten TV (a regional European company based in Barcelona and owned by a Japanese electronics group that features new television series and films from studios such as Disney, Sony and Warner Bros as well as live sports); and DAZN (which streams live sports to over 200 countries and territories).

Consequently, Spain’s SVOD sector reached an all-time high of 10.2 million subscribers with a 20% penetration rate of TV households in 2020 (Wright, 2020). Just as importantly, there are presently no signs that the popularity of streaming is slowing down any time soon. Spain’s thriving SVOD market is just one of several areas that demonstrate the catalytic impact that Netflix set into motion as it built through trial and error what has become a win-win relationship with the principal companies that comprise the nation’s once-traditional televisual infrastructure. Álvaro Longoria, veteran producer-director and former EPC (European Producers Club) chief, confirms that ‘the Netflix effect has been very positive in Spain’ (Frater, et al., 2021). To be sure, Netflix was not the only digital disruptor operating in the country; however, it set early precedents driven by its evolving corporate philosophy, transnational reach, economic clout, algorithmic know-how and comparative user-friendly streaming technology.

From a business and industry perspective, Netflix served as the gateway into the SVOD platform for a majority of Spanish consumers. This relatively rapid embrace of the SVOD market since the fall of 2015 also suggests that Netflix provided a practical model to be adopted in whole or part by the other outside streamers who likewise aspired to secure a foothold in Spain. For instance, HBO España, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+ all negotiated various commercial arrangements with Spanish companies to either acquire or coproduce content. Significantly, though, Netflix’s local transactions involving scripted television series now exceeds the output (17 to 11) of all the similar arrangements made by the other multi- and transnational major and mini-major services combined. Netflix along with HBO España/HBO Max and Amazon Prime Video are also partnering with Spanish broadcasters and independent production companies to create documentaries and unscripted entertainment programming (Castro and Cascajosa, 2021).

According to Castro and Cascajosa, ‘video-on-demand services became an opportunity to grow well established Spanish companies’ (2020: 158), therefore facilitating the transition of the nation’s audiovisual ecosystem more fully into the multiplatform era. Moreover, ‘SVOD platforms have contributed to the internationalisation of Spanish television’ (Castro and Cascajosa, 2020: 160). The glocal consequence of Netflix and the other outside streamers homing their developmental activities so directly within Spain’s televisual infrastructure is that the country’s TV industry grew more outward-focused and transnational in its own corporate strategy. Spain is currently one of the hottest sources of transnational television in the world and its role as a bridge to screens throughout Latin America and other Spanish-speaking regions has never been greater. The improbable, accidental and unexpected success of La casa de papel jump started this overall resurgence while at the same time presenting Netflix with proof positive that a non-English language series can establish a large global footprint without losing its cultural specificity.

La casa de papel/Money Heist goes viral

The first season of La casa de papel features a merry band of charming misfits who attempt to pull off an impossibly complex and dangerous heist at the Royal Mint in Madrid, Spain. They are a dream team of skilled outcasts who dress up as modern-day Robin Hoods complete with iconic red jumpsuits and Salvador Dali masks singing the anti-fascist Italian folk song, ‘Bella Ciao,’ at key make-or-break moments in the narrative. From the first episode onward, the series is well executed and creatively told with an intricate non-linear plotline. It stands shoulder-to-shoulder with any other prestige scripted programme currently being produced around the world. From an aesthetic and cultural perspective, La casa de papel contains some of the familiar conventions of a Hollywood blockbuster blended seamlessly with the local appeal of Spanish culture, characters and concerns.

The turnaround time from when Netflix officially acquired La casa de papel and when it became available on its streaming platform on 1 July 2017 was less than a month. The first season was always divided into two parts with the initial nine episodes telecast on Antena 3 from the 2nd of May to the 27th of June. Part 2 was actually reduced from nine to six episodes by the broadcaster and ran on the channel from the 16th of October to the 23rd of November. The two major changes that Netflix asked Álex Pina and his creative team at Vancouver Media to make were, first, reformat the episodes from the traditional Spanish length of 70-min or longer to a much shorter, more bingeable 45-to-50 min, thus expanding the original number of 15 episodes to 22 for SVOD distribution. Secondly, Netflix negotiated a name augmentation by adding Money Heist to La casa de papel (which functions as a pun on the Spanish colloquialism for euros) to signal simply and directly to its then-majority English-language subscriber base that the show is an action-adventure caper series.

Significantly, Netflix programmers didn’t realise at first the windfall potential that they had with La casa de papel/Money Heist when they released Part 1 without any special fanfare whatsoever (Ruiz De Elvira, 2018). ‘No promotion or anything,’ recalls head screenwriter and script editor, Javier Gómez Santander. ‘Netflix put it in that pile of series that it has, which is like the drawer of socks that you never watch and where only the algorithm can rescue you’ (Díaz-Guerra and Gómez Santander, 2019). Slowly but surely, however, word-of-mouth about La casa de papel/Money Heist spread like wildfire on social media, picking up additional steam when Netflix dropped Part 2 on 6 April 2018. By then, Netflix executives were paying closer attention and started hyping the series for the upcoming 46th Annual International Emmy Awards in New York City where it received the global television industry’s stamp of recognition and approval by winning Best Drama Series on 19 November 2018.

By early 2019, La casa de papel/Money Heist emerged as one of Netflix’s top-10 programmes in over 70 countries all across the world from France to Italy, Turkey to Saudi Arabia, India to Japan, Brazil to Chile, Canada to the United States and then back again to Spain on the rebound (Roxborough and Ritman, 2019a). In a recent technical report delineating the profound impact that ‘the arrival’ of outside streamers have had on ‘transforming the industrial landscape’ of ‘the contemporary European audiovisual industries,’ media analyst, Christopher Meir, explains how ‘HETV [high-end television] series have played a major part in the popularization of SVOD platforms’ (2021: 1, 32). La casa de papel/Money Heist was a prestige production from the outset for Antena 3, averaging €2.8 million per episode for Part 1 and €3.65 million for Part 2, placing its budget in the highest quintile for scripted Spanish TV series at the time (BAFTA Online Webinar, 2020; Hopewell and Lang, 2019; Pickard, 2015).

Even so, La casa de papel/Money Heist became the most expensive series in Spanish television history with Netflix financing the lion’s share of Part 3 (€8 million per episode on average) and Part 4 (€8.75 million) (BAFTA Online Webinar, 2020; Hopewell and Lang, 2019; ‘Netflix confirms the fourth season of “La casa de papel,”’ 2019). The immediate result of the increased funding was the raising of broadcast-level production values to a heightened cinematographic effect. Fourteen-day shoots for 70-minute episodes were extended to an almost luxurious 21-to-23 days for 45-to-50-min episodes (Hopewell and Lang, 2019). Moreover, Parts 1 and 2 were produced entirely in Madrid. Part 3 in contrast transported viewers from Madrid to Florence to the Philippines, Indonesia’s Java, Argentina’s Pampa and the Caribbean’s Guna Yala archipelago on the northeast coast of Panama before returning them once again to Spain.

Showrunner Álex Pina and his crew shot Parts 3 and 4 consecutively and were now afforded the opportunity to be far more stylistically adventurous and innovative. ‘We had a higher ceiling for the imagination,’ Pina (cited in Hopewell and Lang, 2019) acknowledges, even to the point of staging a highly difficult and elaborate action sequence at the start of Part 3 in La Plaza del Callao—the frenetic, bustling heart of Madrid—where €140 million in counterfeit euros in €50 and €100 bills were dropped from a blimp high above the downtown city square onto dozens of cars and hundreds of extras scrambling frantically to catch and corral the money. The chaos created by this choreographed stunt is electrifying and visually equals the best examples of cinematic television anywhere. ‘I think the series marked a turning point,’ observes Pina, ‘a revolution for the acceptance of international idiosyncrasies at a time when the landscape was dominated by American fiction’ (Lang, 2021: 40).

La casa de papel/Money Heist is a caper narrative flush with all the generic conventions of the Ocean’s Eleven franchise mixed with the many passionate on-again off-again love affairs found in a first-rate telenovela. It is a Spanish sense versus sensibility with a highly cerebral mastermind, the Professor (Alvaro Morte), a shy empathetic antihero in Clark Kent glasses, leading a tight group of talented rebels and fugitives who are trying to commit the perfect crime. El Profesor just has one iron-clad rule for his crew: no personal relationships, which collides potently with its many romantic telenovela-like subplots. ‘The perfect heist’ has traditionally been an ‘Anglo-Saxon story form,’ confides Pina, while the ‘identity of this series is Latino. What the Latin world gives you are much greater affective dynamics: the passion of friendship, feelings, love’ (Hopewell and Lang, 2019). The English-language template ‘is cooler, more restrained, more scientific’ (Jones, 2020). ‘We are fundamentally Latino,’ he concludes. ‘Our epicenter is always emotionally exaggerated’ (Roxborough and Ritman, 2019b).

La casa de papel/Money Heist’s puzzle-box of a plot structure unfolds non-linearly where the action covers the twists-and-turns of a seemingly impossible heist while the expertly crafted flashbacks further develop the characters. Álex Pina and his creative team pull off quite a high-wire act where the action enhances the human drama and vice versa. For instance, episode 1 of Part 3 toggles smoothly back-and-forth between seven different time periods, setting a new and improved benchmark for complex storytelling in Spanish television. In addition, La casa de papel/Money Heist’s wild card is that it is also grounded in contemporary concerns. In industry parlance, the programme is ‘noisy,’ meaning that it captures the Zeitgeist and reflects current events along with whatever is ‘hot’ or ‘in’ at the moment.

Consequently, La casa de papel/Money Heist is replete with social commentary. The series operates in the context of the 2008 global recession looming in the background. The show projects a climate of disenchantment with Spain’s impersonal corporate state that cares little about its people and regularly lies, breaks its own laws and protocols and uses excessive force and torture to maintain control. In turn, these atmospherics and themes resonate today with transnational audiences. Parts 3 and 4 center around an even more complicated and high stakes robbery of the Bank of Spain in Madrid. These outsiders are challenging the oppressive nature of the state apparatus as stand-ins for the world’s disaffected, its social misfits and marginalised. They are transformed into genuine folk heroes by Pina, his writers and actors who instill these characters with far more nuance and depth than the showy star turns in the various Ocean’s iterations by comparison.

All of the criminals in La casa de papel/Money Heist are named after an assortment of international cities, which makes them easier to identify and follow for non-Spanish language speaking audiences—for instance, Tokyo (Úrsula Corberó) the impulsive thief and unreliable narrator; Berlin (Pedro Alonzo) the charismatic sociopath and leader on the ground; Rio (Miguel Herrán) the skilled young hacker; Nairobi (Ágata Jiménez) the feminist forger; Denver (Jamie Lorente) the impulsive petty thief; and Helsinki (Darko Perić) the gay muscle, among others—à la the way Quentin Tarantino used colors in Reservoir Dogs (1992). Still, Money Heist is less Tarantino than Spike Lee’s Inside Man (2006) in tone and style with its subtle character development and its sympathetic interplay between robbers and hostages.

The musical soundtrack is also nonstop, eclectic and transnational ranging from its global chart-topping theme song, ‘My Life is Going On,’ by Spanish singing star, Cecilia Krull, to tunes as alt-hip and varied as Arcade Fire’s ‘Wake Up’ and The Black Keys’ ‘Lonely Boy’ to the more salsa-flavored ‘El Preso’ (‘The Prisoner’) by the Africolumbian trio, Fruko y sus Tesos (Fruko and his bros), and the electronic dance remix, ‘Boom,’ by Spanish singer, Ofi La Melodia (Ofi the Melody). These combined ‘noisy’ elements propelled viewer numbers throughout 2020, 2021, and into the first half of 2022 even higher than they were in 2019 as ‘Spain’s “La Casa de Papel,” otherwise known as “Money Heist,” [emerged as] the most popular original Netflix television series in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and ranked in the top five in the Asia Pacific and Latin America regions’ (Low, 2020). Furthermore, the series’ success reconfirmed and reinforced Netflix’s increase in non-English language programme development (Lang, 2021). At the same time Álex Pina points out, ‘what Netflix and the platforms have contributed is the absolute breakdown of all borders’ (Ruiz De Elvira, 2018).

Ultimately, ‘Netflix’s on-demand delivery diminishes the implicit national lens,’ concludes Amanda Lotz, as its ‘technologically afforded competitive tools enable [it] to imagine [its] subscribers as transnational clusters of tastes and sensibilities’ (Lotz, 2021: 207). The win-win relationship forged by Netflix in partnering with the legacy TV corporations in Spain’s audiovisual ecosystem had the corresponding effect of sparking a renaissance in the one-time insular Spanish televisual infrastructure whereby it transformed from a more regional to a frontline player in the transnational television industry. Netflix too shifted from having more of its subscribers outside the United States (approximately 50% to nearly 65%) since late 2015, while investing an unprecedented level of financing in transnationally produced, co-commissioned or acquired ‘originals,’ numbering 153 in Europe alone in 2019 (Lee, 2021; Roxborough and Ritman, 2019b). This glocal symbiosis among national, transnational, and multinational TV corporations is now one of the defining characteristics of TVIV.

Realising the Netflix effect

The fifth and final part of La casa de papel/Money Heist premiered over two five-episode segments on 3 September and 3 December 2021. The series exceeded its already robust performance during the previous three years by ranking only behind Squid Game (2021-present) and Bridgerton (2020-present) throughout 2021 in global popularity for sheer tonnage of viewership (69 million or 32% of all subscriber accounts) and ‘hours of consumption worldwide’ (619 million) (Porter, 2021; Spangler, 2021). In fact, parts five, four (3 April 2020) and three (19 July 2019) of La casa de papel/Money Heist are still the second, third and fifth most watched non-English language programmes ever on Netflix, only ranking behind Squid Game at number 1, while All of Us Are Dead (2022-present) completes the top-five at number 4 (Netflix, 2022).

The most important consequence of La casa de papel/Money Heist worldwide popularity is that the series raised the awareness of Netflix’s executive team to the widespread viability and windfall potential of its non-English language programming, convincing them to invest heavily in local-language productions over the intervening years. This strategy has increased at the streamer to include shows originating in more than 50 countries by 2022 (Sperling, 2022). La casa de papel/Money Heist established the earliest precedent of persuading the decision-makers at Netflix that non-English language television series could travel well beyond being national and regional to globally popular programming choices around the world.

‘We’ve always had the same gaze from the United States in terms of fiction because they’ve been the main producers,’ explains Álex Pina, ‘but thanks to streaming platforms . . . What is local is perceived as exotic, in a good way, and people can appreciate it’ (Vincentelli, 2021). La casa de papel/Money Heist is thus best understood as a glocal fusion of the caper and telenovela, action-adventure and love story, social commentary and soap opera. La casa de papel/Money Heist’s transnational popularity and success is the prototypical proven bellwether of emergent global viewing trends beginning in the late 2010s and into the 2020s (Maas, 2022; Zorrilla, 2021).

Back in February 1941, Life magazine publisher, Henry Luce, famously christened the 20th century, ‘The American Century’ (1941: 61). Michael Curtin (2020) utilised this metaphor to assert that the global media landscape of the 21st century has entered a decidedly ‘post-American era.’ He explains how ‘today we are experiencing a proliferation of new media options that decenter, disperse, and erode cultural hierarchies and spatial boundaries so that the very concept of singular global leadership seems curiously outré.’ In the realm of television in particular, growing patterns of radical convergence, increasing consolidation, and heightened financialisation (which refers to determining a corporation’s success by its stock market valuation and speculation about its future prospects) have become commonplace and normative in TVIV.

The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the pace of change in television around the world. A rise in executive shakeups at the highest corporate levels of the global TV industry predate the pandemic by a few years but this trend noticeably increased in 2020 and afterwards. In the case of Netflix, for example, Reed Hastings elevated Ted Sarandos to co-CEO on 16 July 2020; at the same time, Sarandos held on to his two-decades long title as chief content officer (Lee, 2020). Surprisingly, Ted Sarandos then named Bela Bajaria global TV head and vice president (VP) on content over his longtime right-hand original-content VP, Cindy Holland, signaling loud and clear that Netflix was transitioning from a multinational headquartered in the US to a transnational corporation with a more decentralised management structure based in no one country (Goldberg et al., 2020).

A 20-years veteran who worked at CBS and NBCUniversal, Bela Bajaria’s internationalist biography and perspective (born in London; grew up in Zambia and Los Angeles; eventually becoming an Indian-American naturalised citizen) perfectly matched the next phase of development at Netflix and the global television industry as a whole. ‘One of the first things I did when I came into my role overseeing non-English language content in the last year was banish the word “international,”’ she underscores. ‘I wanted to erase this idea that there is U.S. content and ‘international’ content. All content is local for our members’ (Kanter and Andrevva, 2020). Since assuming her new position, Bajaria has subsequently accelerated Netflix’s transnational action plan by opening new corporate headquarters in Berlin for German-language titles in the DACH region (Germany [D], Austria [A], and Switzerland [CH]); Stockholm and Copenhagen for Scandinavia; Istanbul, Turkey, Bangkok, Thailand, and Toronto, Canada. Launching additional sites continues to be a top priority for her in the future (Grater, 2021; Lee, 2021; Schneider, 2022).

Overall, the OTT sector of the television industry accounts for an estimated 28 percent of all global TV viewing in 2022, while worldwide streaming subscriptions have nearly tripled from 400 million in 2016 to more than 1.1 billion in 2020 (Porter, 2022b; Watson, 2021). Netflix specifically comprises approximately 20% of the current market demand. Since its 2016 rebrand, this increasingly transnational corporation has made significant strides towards realising its aspirational goal of becoming ‘the world’s first global TV network.’ Netflix has greatly expanded its purview both geographically and strategically. This innovative media service provider has transitioned from a mostly American-centric multinational to a far more decentralised transnational television streaming platform and production company.

Moreover, Netflix’s introduction into Spain on 20 October 2015 provides a revealing site of analysis into how the complex corporate interactions between Netflix and this nation’s then-traditional TV infrastructure evolved through trial and error, therefore establishing synergistic precedents for all of the major players involved as well as the handful of multinational streamers that arrived in this country soon afterwards. For instance, Amazon Prime Video has followed Netflix’s example by annually doubling its number of original local language programmes since 2017. HBO Max too has been ‘producing more than 100 local language projects in Latin America alone’ during 2021 and 2022 to compete with Netflix (Watson, 2021).

The other major SVOD multinationals have similarly followed Netflix’s growth strategy and trajectory. HBO Max for instance debuted in 46 additional countries in 2021 (Sperling, 2022). Likewise, Disney + enacted a ‘42-country summer launch across Europe, Africa, and West Asia’ in 2022 (Ramachandran, 2022). On the macro level, the global proliferation of major transnational and multinational streaming platforms has resulted in an unexpected and sizeable increase in more locally-produced diverse content. On the micro level, Netflix’s integration into the Spanish TV landscape and its subsequent transnational distribution of La casa de papel/Money Heist serves as a workable blueprint for innovational and mutually-beneficial glocal relations in the television industry during TVIV.