by Oliver Clarke, Head of Planning

Over the weekend, Alex Honnold, the star of 2018 Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo, was broadcast globally, live on Netflix, doing what he does best – “free-soloing” (that is, climbing big things with no harness, safety net or ropes) one of Asia’s tallest skyscrapers, Taipei 101. The imaginatively named show, Skyscraper Live, was watched by just under 700,000 people in the UK, Netflix’s 5th most-watched program over the weekend.

Netflix have claimed that this continues their foray into “live sport”, that their strategy of “event-ising sports, looking for one-offs rather large inventories” led them to challenge Honnold to do something he’s never done before (his background is in the more traditional realm of free-soloing natural environments like cliff faces and rocks), live on air. It was a sports show, a show of athletic prowess, displaying the raw and animalistic levels of bravery that the human body can attain when focused on a single goal.

My view is a little different.

I see it as a blatant attempt to sell danger and peril to an audience that, for whatever reason, has been fed a constant stream of true crime and horrific “real crime stories” documentaries over recent years, a genre that reveals the dark side of what humans really want to see on their screens as ‘entertainment’. This is a highly irresponsible and voyeuristic attempt at garnering attention from viewers. If you watched the event, you’d realise this was closer to entertainment than sports by the terrible panel of commentators that were used – one of them being an ex-WWE wrestler…

In the same way that a large chunk of F1 viewers actually tune in to see crashes (if they’re really honest with themselves), part of the attraction for viewers was the feeling of “what if he actually fell to his death? What would happen?” It’s “voyeuristic and ghoulish”, as Wall Street Journal has said. Oh – but don’t worry – Netflix put in some valuable safety measures; a 10-second delay to the live feed, in case a gust of wind blew him off the side of the building.

As we all know, the fight for minutes on screen and share of viewing is a brutal battle between traditional broadcasters, modern streamers, and morally questionable social platforms. How far is each platform willing to push the boundaries – and where is that line of acceptance?

To me, this live stream highlights one potential route into the future of entertainment – a Squid (or Hunger?) Games inspired future, where reality TV moves away from winning viewers with the promise of sex, to winning viewers with the promise of catastrophe and violence. Maybe 700,000 people love climbing, and love watching incredible people doing incredible things. Or maybe we’re witnessing a new form of “real-horror-entertainment”, one that plays into the darker side of human nature that we already see being exploited by other styles of reality TV.