Netflix can't beat YouTube, so it's buying its shows — Minimum Wage is the proof
Critics are calling Netflix's new sitcom format-breaking. The format it breaks was working fine on YouTube, which is where Netflix found the show.
Minimum Wage dropped its first 14 episodes on October 26, and the reviews are warm. The Hollywood Reporter's verdict called it Netflix's "likably format-breaking series", with the 12-to-15-minute episodes praised as a bet on a new kind of TV rhythm. The second half of the 28-episode season arrives later, and Randall Park's unhinged pizza-shop boss is the closest thing it has to a famous face.
The "format-breaking" label is where r/television pulled the thread. The show is a scaled-up version of a web series that the American High channel had already been running — same cast, same pizzeria, same short-episode rhythm, built for YouTube and TikTok, where it collected 30 million views before Netflix called.
"You're right. Minimum Wage literally was a Web series that Netflix picked up from the group that run the American High YouTube Channel."
— a commenter on r/television
The provenance objection came with a measurement objection, from commenters who did the runtime math on the "revolutionary" episode lengths:
"Is it really 'format-breaking' if most of the episodes seem to still be 15-20 minutes long? Obviously that's shorter than a traditional episode of television, but not by much. Most sitcoms are 21-23 minutes without commercials."
— a commenter on r/television
Both objections point at the same fact from different sides. The format isn't new; it's YouTube's house format, and the broadcast sitcom's before that. What's new is Netflix paying for it.
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The scoreboard Netflix is looking at
The buying spree has a straightforward cause. In Nielsen's Gauge report for July 2026, YouTube held 14.2 percent of all US television watch time, its lead now "structural rather than seasonal" — while Netflix slid from 8.8 to 7.8 percent year over year. By October, Tubefilter's read of the latest Gauge put YouTube at twice the watch time of any other platform on American TVs.
In July's Nielsen numbers, YouTube held 14.2 percent of American TV time. Netflix held 7.8 — and was falling.
Against that backdrop, Netflix's recent moves line up less like experiments and more like a procurement list:
- Tires, Shane Gillis' garage comedy born of YouTube sketch DNA, now three seasons deep — the pickup Broadcast explicitly tied to Netflix's growing appetite for YouTube-born IP.
- Ms. Rachel, YouTube's biggest toddler educator, licensed in January 2025 to shore up kids' viewing.
- Clips, the TikTok-shaped vertical feed inside the Netflix app, launched this year to make Netflix content behave like the competitor's.
- Minimum Wage, a web series re-shot at Netflix scale, with its seven YouTube-native leads kept in the writers' room.
None of this is a scandal; licensing what wins is what networks have always done, and Minimum Wage being good is the best version of the strategy. It does mean the relationship has inverted. Five years ago YouTube was where Netflix trailers lived; now it's where Netflix goes to find out what its subscribers already watch, and the price of admission to the catalog increasingly includes things that used to be free.
Previously we wrote: Holland Taylor's Two and a Half Men pay story sounds like every office job, fans say