Netflix’s model makes the individual business case for a specific show really complicated to make. What’s the marginal return on investment for a moderately successful show? If it’s not quite popular enough to get people to subscribe just for that show, then it’s basically a total loss (existing customers only are watching it, who were paying anyways). Looking at the financials of that one show in isolation, all they’ve got are costs with no revenue gain.

There is the broader argument to be made about how a show contributes to the overall catalog quality and how that ultimately drives subscriber growth, but this is a far more roundabout way of talking about value.