It was once a cheap and cheerful series on YouTube. But then the streaming giant threw $100m at it and now the low-stakes charm has been lost

Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee was a nice idea at the time. It was a fun, low-stakes YouTube series where you could spend quarter of an hour watching Larry David or Chris Rock shoot the breeze in a cafe. It wasn’t the smartest show. It wasn’t the funniest. Its entertainment value largely depended on how much you liked the subject. But that was the fun of it. Jerry Seinfeld didn’t need the money, and you didn’t need to love it. It was just there as a nice little diversion; something to watch at your desk while you ate a sandwich at work.

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But then Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee jumped ship to Netflix, and something has changed. The charm has been lost, and as a result it’s genuinely difficult to stir any emotion whatsoever about its new season.

The difference can be boiled down to three main areas. First, and most overwhelmingly, there’s the money. In 2017, Netflix announced that it had bought Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee – along with two Jerry Seinfeld standup specials, one of which was formed of archive material – for $100m. And that’s ridiculous. Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee isn’t a $100m television show. It isn’t The Crown. It’s a collection of videos where two people sit next to each other and chit-chat to a Go-Pro. That’s all. As soon as you start assigning enormous worth to a show like that, it’s bound to alter your perception.

If something is slung up on YouTube without fanfare, your expectations are ultimately zero. But when you learn that it cost twice the national GDP of Tuvalu, you can’t help but expect something. And not necessarily something spectacular. You might just expect something like basic production values or a soundtrack that doesn’t sound like it’s ripped directly from the Garageband preset list. And yet the episodes of Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee that aired after the Netflix acquisition have been exactly the same in terms of look and feel as the ones that came before it.

There’s a huge difference in platform between Netflix and YouTube. When something airs on YouTube, it airs for free and its competition is makeup tutorials and cat videos. Compared to YouTube, Netflix is The Ritz. It’s a destination. You pay for Netflix out of your wages, and you expect something of quality in return. You expect cutting-edge drama and amazing comedy. Putting something as tossed-off as Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee on Netflix cheapens the platform and makes the show look worse than ever by comparison.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Seinfeld with Ricky Gervais (again) on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

And then there’s the matter of the guests. In its infancy Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee felt like a hobby, like Jerry Seinfeld had thought about which of his friends would make the most interesting subjects. So we saw Larry David talking about old times and fussing over food. We saw Alec Baldwin at his most charming and gregarious. We even saw Ricky Gervais at his least obnoxious.

But the show is a product now. It’s a treadmill, 90 episodes long, and quality control is lapsing. This isn’t a byproduct of the Netflix buy-out, incidentally, because the show’s nadir arguably came before that with the Christoph Waltz episode, which wasn’t just a betrayal of the premise but a slab of flabby filler to boot. The big name of this upcoming series is Eddie Murphy, but it’s surrounded by guests that elicit little more than a shrug. Matthew Broderick. Sebastian Maniscalco. Ricky Gervais again. It doesn’t exactly seem essential, which is has to be now it’s competing with actual television programmes.

YouTube has got on fine without Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. There’s a newer – and better – low-stakes interview show now in the form of Hot Ones, where guests like Trevor Noah and The Jonas Brothers answer questions while being assailed by dangerously spicy food. Like Seinfeld’s show, it isn’t going to change the world. Like Seinfeld’s show, it’s a fun enough lunchtime watch. And, like Seinfeld’s show, it will absolutely fall apart the moment that Netflix pays $100m for the rights.

• This article was amended on 25 July 2019 because an earlier version referred to the show as a “YouTube series”, rather than a series on YouTube. This has been clarified because the series was originally broadcast by the platform Crackle, however many viewers watched the show on YouTube.