Netflix’s Dubious Middle East Expansion: Where the Streaming Giant May Be Going Wrong
On August 2, 2021, Netflix released its second original Jordanian offering, AlRawabi School For Girls. The show is a stepping stone in the streaming conglomerate’s broader expansion strategy in the Middle East, which began in 2015. The company’s representative in the region, Ahmed Sharkawi, has said that Netflix aims to “tell stories by Arabs for Arabs” and distribute them worldwide.
At face value, the strategy is promising for Arab content creators, who are constrained by local production companies’ commitment to delivering telenovela-style shows that are “heavy on plot and light on character development” to their audience, which some claim mostly consists of middle-aged Arab women. These are shows we grew up watching our mothers watching, either rolling our eyes at the melodramatics or begrudgingly indulging them. And Netflix stands to benefit from the investment in local talent, with a largely untapped youth demographic in the region. The Middle East expansion also gives Netflix a leg up in the global expansion of streaming services against incumbent competitors like Disney+, which has not yet expanded to the Middle East.
But Netflix’s original Arab offerings have been met with some degree of criticism and derision. Their first Jordanian offering was Jinn, which centers on a group of teenagers who accidentally summon jinn, amorphous creatures from Arab and Islamic mythology, on a school trip to Petra. The show triggered a moral panic among conservative elements of Jordanian society, with some government figures calling for the removal of the show from Jordanian Netflix. The show was also criticized for its script, which was written in English and translated loosely to Arabic by the actors themselves during filming. AlRawabi School For Girls, Netflix’s second Jordanian offering which focuses on an all-girls high school, has been met with less scorn; while some have criticized the series as ‘unrealistic’, others have lauded the show’s depiction of real issues faced by young girls at Jordanian schools (I personally felt that the girls on the show were too over-the-top mean, based on my own high school experience in Abu Dhabi; I have changed my mind after reading Tweets from other millennials who grew up in Amman who claimed the girls on the show were not mean enough). Paranormal, Netflix’s first Egyptian production, has been called “run-of-the-mill”, “awkward”, “mediocre”, and “watchable, but [not] too interesting”. Concerns about the authenticity of these shows’ representation of Arab and Muslim culture are also laced throughout multiple critiques.
These critiques illustrate the largest hurdle facing Netflix in its Middle East expansion: the inability to predict what Netflix viewers in the region — who are subscribed to the service, for the most part, to watch foreign/Western content — would want out of a locally created show. Some Arab filmmakers have turned towards more global, or Western, forms of storytelling while maintaining local characteristics, with varying success. Nadine Labaki’s Sukkar Banat is one example of a film that was consumed as “universal” while organically maintaining local characteristics, or what some critics would call “authenticity”. It was lauded as a film that moves away from “geopolitical pretensions” and towards a depoliticized, global representation of women. I contend that Netflix’s productions have not been able to find the same balance between universality and local specificity, which may explain the lukewarm-to-vitriolic responses from viewers and critics in the region.
One factor that may explain Netflix’s failure at striking a balance between the two can be explained by unpacking the political agenda behind its productions. While Jinn, Paranormal, and AlRawabi elide politics, they are by no means nonpolitical, and the balance between universality and ‘authenticity’ is upended when the viewer realizes heavy-handed American cultural influence on these shows is. This makes sense upon examining some of the influences on the creatives working behind the scenes: between them, Jinn screenwriters Elan and Rajeev Dassani have worked on Shondaland productions (Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder), Netflix’s Grace and Frankie, and the Canadian legal workplace dramedy Suits, to name a few. AlRawabi’s showrunner, Tima Shomali — was enthusiastically christened the “Tina/Tima Fey” of the Arab world by CNN, no less, in 2015, following her work on the critically acclaimed YouTube comedy, FemaleShow. Interestingly, Shomali studied at the Red Sea Institute of Cinematic Arts, which was a joint venture between the Royal Film Commission of Jordan and the University of Southern California’s film program. Steven Spielberg acted as consultant to King Abdullah on the institute’s establishment and served on its board of trustees. Paranormal’s head writer, Amr Salama, has been accused of creating “irritatingly Americanized” content throughout his career.
All three shows omit overt politics, falling back on social issues to drive their plots. Jinn and AlRawabi, in particular, tauntingly portray social themes that are controversial in more conservative Arab and Muslim circles; teenage girls’ expressions of sexuality, underage alcohol consumption, family ‘honor’, nepotism; and underlying all these themes is the major culprit: secularism. These productions package secularism in American clothing while claiming to portray “normal teenage stuff”. AlRawabi is less beholden to this flattened, blank-slate representation, relying on genuinely realistic representations of the region’s social fabric while also attempting to universalize it; I am thinking specifically of the pool scene in Episode 5, where Nouf is violated by a creepy old man who is then chased away with profanities by her archnemesis, Layan, in a rare moment of empathy. Upon being discovered alone by the school supervisor, Miss Abeer, they are both scolded for slinking off on their own to the pool in revealing clothes while the creep, ever so brazen, begins to visibly leer at Miss Abeer (who wears hijab). The moment is resonant in its complexity, and I have no doubt that many Arab girls and women will relate while watching, either with Nouf and Layan, who are wrongfully scolded for inviting unsolicited (older) male attention by dressing inappropriately; or with Miss Abeer, who, in that moment, scolds her students out of genuine concern for their safety. (Those who watched the last episode will find this incredibly ironic). But this is an experience that can also be extrapolated to other women in more secular contexts; the conversations around victim-blaming don’t just revolve about Islamic modesty, after all. AlRawabi, then, localizes the universal, by taking an experience that has been universalized — sexual harassment in public spaces — and retrofitting it to a more Arab, Muslim context. The same phenomenon is seen in Jinn, which uses American fantasy storytelling conventions retrofitted with local supernatural elements to tell its story. By contrast, Sukkar Banat universalizes the local; instead of taking a universal narrative and making it local, Sukkar Banat tries — and, going by its universal appeal, succeeds at — making the local more relatable to outsiders looking in, without compromising the authenticity of the local. If Netflix is to succeed at creating a local production that is well-liked by the people of the region, it would benefit from Sukkar Banat’s homegrown, ground-up storytelling mechanism.
Both Jinn and AlRawabi position Jordan as a static backdrop, rather than a dynamic setting to draw on, because the showrunners believe in the global idea of a ‘universal’ adolescence; the same logic allowed Jinn’s screenwriters to hand their actors English scripts without hesitation. But there are slippages on AlRawabi that illustrate the showrunners’ attempts to maintain a delicate balance between the universal experiences their overlords at Netflix ordered and relatable experiences for local viewers. AlRawabi’s final episode ends on a note that harkens to ‘honor’ killings that exist in the region, from Jordan to Yemen, and are exacerbated by state complicity: for many Arab women with conservative male relatives, this is an issue that hits close to home. The ending brings the viewer back to the harsh realities for women in the region we live in. Other plot points on AlRawabi also localize otherwise ‘universal’ adolescent experiences: Ruqayya being catfished into sending hijabless photos to an anonymous, imaginary male Facebook account, created by the Revenge Trio (Nouf, Maryam, and Dina) and subsequently being moved to a different school by her furious mother, who claims that a girl’s reputation is “like glass” — once fixed, never broken; Layan’s scary alpha male older brother, who drives around with a gun in his glove compartment; Rania’s abusive father who has substance abuse issues, a social concern that continues to be ignored due to cultural and religious stigma. Combined with the school’s unrealistically spotless warm pink bathroom walls, sometimes clunky and outdated dialogue about Zac Efron’s abs, and rare illogical scenarios (a school trip for high schoolers to a spa and beach resort instead of a museum or Petra? Really?), AlRawabi indicates a delicate balance between the universal and the local that has its problems, but works more often than not.
Netflix’s commitment to avoiding geopolitical complications has also led to some lacklustre strategic decisions. Joseph Fahim rightly argues that Netflix’s decision to generate the majority of its original Arabic content in Jordan is confusing because the country’s film and TV industry is in its nascent stages. I believe that the choice is not one made out of ignorance or inexperience in the region’s arts and culture scene, but rather one made to avoid legal liability back in the US. Those who are knowledgeable about the region’s entertainment media sector know that artists in Syria and Lebanon are renowned for their contributions to the Levantine creative industry; however, it is clear that Syria and Lebanon would have been fraught choices for Netflix because of US sanctions, which undoubtedly constrain its full expansion into these two countries. Expansion into Lebanon would have made a lot of sense for Netflix, as the country is traditionally seen as an exception to its generally authoritarian neighbors in the region (including Jordan); but geopolitical realities, as illustrated, along with overlapping local crises in the country, suggest that a potential expansion into Lebanon may be a dim prospect.
One final factor that may constrain Netflix’s medium and long-term expansion in the Middle East — and more importantly, a factor that constrains the creative arts in the region — is the dearth of formal higher educational infrastructure for the creative industry. What I mean by this, simply, is that we don’t have a lot of options when it comes to formal education in the creative arts. RSICA, the institute Shomali studied at, may have been closed since 2012; I was unable to verify this anywhere except an interview with Shomali herself, where she mentions in passing that the institute shut down soon after her graduation. NYU’s Emirati offshoot, NYUAD, announced the launch of the UAE’s first MFA program in February 2021; however, the program is ridiculously expensive ($140,000!) and inaccessible, not least because of the UAE government’s visa policies, which are susceptible to swift changes based on geopolitical realities, and NYUAD’s highly selective admissions process. On top of this, non-Emirati Arabs (other than Egyptians) don’t even make it to NYUAD’s top ten cohorts of students by nationality, meaning that any of the seven to ten international students benefiting from NYUAD’s MFA program are unlikely to be Arab. These limitations can hinder the growth of the creative industry in the region, and may explain why Netflix has had relatively meagre options for original content “by Arabs, for Arabs”.
Netflix’s current emphasis on quantity over quality when it comes to its original content may not work in the region — it is too soon to tell. One thing is clear, however: the entertainment media industry in the Arab world is ripe for the taking, and the company’s entry into the market has the potential to transform the entertainment media industry in the region. Only time will tell if the transformation will impact Arab content creators positively or not.
