Netflix once foreshadowed the death of appointment television. When the streamer dropped all 10 episodes of its first high-profile original series, House of Cards, at once, it forever changed traditional viewing habits. Just over a decade later, the company now appears set on remaking appointment television in its own image.

Over the weekend, when subscribers searched the app, they likely came across a well-placed tile featuring an unfamiliar red and white tag. The red half of the tag read “Live,” the white half “Today”—and clicking on it revealed when the show would begin. (It stopped short of offering to create a Google Calendar alert for that time.) Netflix has dabbled in live programming before, but never this aggressively. In just one weekend, the company aired a live comedy special from Katt Williams, a live talk show with John Mulaney, and most cross-culturally important, a live roast of Tom Brady.

Not only was it the most complicated integration of its live capabilities yet, it was a smart way to use comedy as a testing grounds for live sports on Netflix.

From a hard no to soft stance

Watching comedians and football elites roast a quarterback is a far different affair than watching said quarterback throw for 500 yards in a live game, but it’s the latest sign of Netflix’s desire to play in the live-programming sandbox with sports stars. The company had long been resistant to this realm, with CEO Ted Sarandos saying as recently as 2022 that he didn’t see “a profit path forward” for “renting big-league sports.”

However, as Amazon Prime Video, Max, and Apple TV+ have all made deals with either the NFL, NHL and MLB, the streamer’s stance appeared more likely to soften. And the company’s late-2022 rollout of an ad-supported plan was widely seen as a precursor to eventual sports programming.

Since then, the company has expanded both its sports-based series and its live efforts in a big way. Last November’s Netflix Cup was a live synergistic smorgasbord, pairing some of the Formula 1 drivers it’s been chronicling for several seasons on the show Drive to Survive with some of the PGA golfers who populate its docuseries Full Swing in a golf tournament. The company also expanded its racing offerings earlier this year with the new series Nascar: Full Speed and announced a forthcoming NFL-based show called Receiver, which naturally follows last year’s hit, Quarterback. (Could Punter be coming in 2026?)  

Netflix’s boldest forays into live sports coverage are yet to come, however. July will see the streamer’s first-ever live boxing event—a sure-to-be-controversial match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul—and starting next year, Netflix will become the exclusive home of the WWE’s Monday Night Raw. (It snapped up rights to the perennial ratings juggernaut over the next decade for a cool $5 billion.) The launch of a weekly live wrestling showcase next January gives Netflix less than eight months to work out the kinks in its live format.

Set your clocks

So far, the company’s live events have been a (mostly positive) mixed bag. The much-anticipated live Chris Rock special in March 2023 went off without a hitch, but a live reunion for reality series Love is Blind the following month infamously began with a 75-minute delay. Starting on time is obviously crucial to the concept of appointment television, and in its first live outing with that many moving parts, Netflix dropped the ball. More recent events, though, including the Screen Actors Guild Awards in February, went smoothly. (It was the company’s first time staging a major awards show after previously streaming the SAG Awards on its YouTube channel in 2023.)

But even after laying so much groundwork, the fact that Netflix successfully executed three live shows this past weekend—and three separate kinds of shows, at that—is impressive.

John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA is another synergistic bonanza. Broadcast for six nights throughout the Netflix is a Joke Fest, the variety show features the titular comedian talking with stars of the comedy festival—some of whom happen to have Netflix Pop-Tarts movies to promote. The show also features the potentially high-wire element of Mulaney and his guests taking live phone calls, and the only problem to emerge from those is that some were boring.

The new comedy special from Katt Williams, Woke Fokes, wisely ditched the pre- and post-show aspects of Rock’s outing last year, which had made that show feel too much like a sporting event. Once he got going, though, Williams proved a deft choice for the format (the streamer selected him after his megaviral appearance on Shannon Sharpe’s podcast in January) because of his nimble nature as a comedian. His set included the kind of up-to-the-minute new material one might typically hear on podcasts rather than comedy specials—which tend to come out months after they’re recorded, and tend to be recorded months after the jokes have been workshopped.

Indeed, Woke Fokes featured jokes about the Ukraine funding bill the House passed in late April. (Williams thinks the money should go toward reparations for Black Americans.) Topical content is a great distinguisher for a Netflix special and might entice secondary viewers to tune in live next time.

The FOMO of must-see TV

The crown jewel of Netflix’s live programming over the weekend, though, was the Tom Brady roast, which billed itself as “the greatest roast of all time” in honor of the supremely awarded QB at its center.

Netflix may have set too high a bar for the event, but not by a lot, it turns out. The Brady roast turned out to be exactly the kind of conversation-sparking cultural event Netflix has been striving to create. It featured many live moments that kept social media managers on their toes, such as the quarterback appearing briefly upset with comedian Jeff Ross, Gronk spiking a shot glass after a drink, and the crowd vocally turning against Kim Kardashian. All of that happened even before Brady made headlines by owning up to the notorious deflategate charges that have haunted him and Bill Belichick for years.

Any sports fan who wasn’t watching that headline-generating moment as it unfolded may have regretted it later. Training subscribers (and the remaining uninitiated) to feel that way is a coup, and it’s exactly what Netflix wants as it prepares to enter its live sports era with WWE’s Raw.

While the company may not go after the NBA when the rights to air games go up for negotiation in a couple months, Netflix is clearly testing the boundaries of what it can do with sports. Based on the massive social media response to the Brady roast, expect not only more live sports and comedy events from Netflix in the future, but more opportunities to recreate the convergence of the two fandoms.

Perhaps there’s a chance to make a streaming version of ESPN’s ESPY awards, powered by Netflix’s marketing machine and recommendation algorithm. The company has not only proven there’s a broad demand for such content, but that Netflix can deliver it.