In “Loch Henry,” Charlie Brooker focuses specifically on Netflix’s status as a bottomless pit of real crime content. There’s a lot going on in this episode, and the streaming-era commentary is only one piece of the puzzle this time around, but it’s a pretty important piece nonetheless. When Davis (Samuel Blenkin) and his American girlfriend Pia (Myha’la Herrold) visit his Scottish hometown to film a niche documentary, Pia is quickly captivated by a gruesome local history involving torture, sex crimes, murder and Davis’s death. father.
Again, the conversation comes back to commitment first. When the pair meet with a producer about the new idea, she tells them they need a hook, and when Davis expresses apprehensions about digging into such a personal subject – and about nature grim from the doc – Pia reassures him, with viewership stats in her eyes. Does he want to make an ultra-indie documentary, she asks, or “something people will watch? Something they really want to see?” It’s a question true documentarians have been asking themselves in recent years, as the pressure to connect with huge streaming audiences mounts. “It’s not enough to do something that a few million people might really like when you’re trying to reach 25 million people or 50 million people,” a former Netflix exec told Vulture earlier this year.