Netflix, Dark Fantastic Genres and Intergenerational Viewing: Family Watch Together TV

Focusing on Netflix’s child and family-orientated platform exclusive content, this book offers the first exploration of a controversial genre cycle of dark science fiction, horror, and fantasy television under Netflix’s "Family Watch Together TV" tag.

Using a ground-breaking mix of methods including audience research, interface, and textual analysis, the book demonstrates how Netflix is producing dark family telefantasy content that is both reshaping child and family-friendly TV genres and challenging earlier broadcast TV models around child-appropriate family viewing. It illuminates how Netflix encourages family audiences to "watch together" through intergenerational dynamics that work on and offscreen. The chapters in this book explore how this "Netflixication" of family television developed across landmark examples including Stranger Things, A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, and even Squid Game. The book outlines how Netflix is consolidating a new dark family terrain in the streaming sector, which is unsettling older concepts of family viewing, leading to considerable audience and critical confusion around target audiences and viewer expectations.

This book will be of particular interest to upper-level undergraduates, graduates, and scholars in the fields of television studies, screen genre studies, childhood studies, and cultural studies.

Djoymi Baker is a Lecturer in Cinema Studies at RMIT University, Australia. She has published work on children’s television history, film and television genres, stardom, and intergenerational fandom. Djoymi is the author of To Boldly Go: Marketing the Myth of Star Trek (2018) and the co-author of The Encyclopedia of Epic Films (2014).

Jessica Balanzategui is a Senior Lecturer in Media at RMIT University, Australia, and was previously Deputy Director of the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University of Technology. She has published widely on "problematic" children’s screen genres in journals including New Media Society and Convergence, and is the author of The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema (Amsterdam UP, 2018).

Diana Sandars is an academic in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has published widely on the children of Australian and Hollywood screens. Diana is the author of What a Feeling: The Hollywood Musical After MTV (Intellect, forthcoming) and co-editor of Gothic in the Oceanic South: Maritime, Marine and Aquatic Uncanny in Southern Waters (Routledge, forthcoming).