Earlier this month, Saturday Night Live broadcast a hilarious and biting spoof of the Netflix pitch process, which depicted a cartoonishly over-caffeinated programming executive shamelessly throwing piles of cash at every horrible proposal he heard—such as Saved by the Crown, a parodic remix of The Crown and Saved by the Bell, or Leslie Jones in a Van Getting Batteries. It was the hyperbolic bravado expected of an executive at a company that has grown from 30 employees to an astonishing 137 million international subscribers in two decades, accounts for 15 percent of all Internet bandwidth worldwide, and has essentially remade Hollywood in its own image. “That’s right, we’re spending billions of dollars and making every show in the world,” the S.N.L. narrator jokes. “We have so many shows, even we haven’t seen them all.” The skit also included a fictitious series called Kennymeade Depot, which has “been on for three seasons and only one woman watches it.” At another point, the voice-over boasts, “[We’ve] got movies, thousands of them . . . 12 of which you want to watch!”

The send-up instantly resonated across the technology and media landscape in a manner that transcended comedy. After terrorizing other content companies for years, and briefly eclipsing Disney to become the world’s largest media company, with a market capitalization north of $150 billion, Netflix’s narrative appears to be evolving. Ted Sarandos, the company’s chief content officer, once famously said that he wanted Netflix to “become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” It was an admission that Netflix realized it had to spend feverishly to create a future slate of content that could compete with HBO’s archive and seemingly unparalleled relationships within the industry—presumably the thesis behind the platform’s nine-figure investments in show-runners such as Ryan Murphy and Shonda Rhimes. But, despite the company’s vaunted algorithm and extraordinary data sets, HBO appears ready to catch up. And so do many others.

Since July, some investors have started to hypothesize the forthcoming threats facing Netflix. Apple, the AT&T-ified Warner Media, and Disney (with its new 21st Century Fox assets) will offer new streaming services in the next couple of years. Along with Amazon and Hulu, they’ll vie against Netflix for new shows. They’ll also presumably pull their own content from Netflix, which relies heavily on third-party shows to keep viewers coming back. The data analytics firm 7Park Data reported earlier this year that Netflix customers spend 80 percent of their time watching licensed shows, with only 18 percent of the company’s customers being considered “originals dominant.” Netflix recently paid $100 million to license Friends for about 10 months. (incidentally, Warner will collect that check, though it will likely reclaim the property for its own service soon enough.) Meanwhile, the company’s stock has dropped 35 percent since the summer.

Netflix’s enormous growth has been famously fueled by debt. And while the company is not in the red, its profits are minimal. Netflix has borrowed $8.34 billion to date to pay for its original content. (The company has existing debt of $11.8 billion.) If Netflix were the only game in town, it could figure out how to make less content and still satiate subscribers, or simply raise its prices to create more revenue. (A $1 a month increase would yield nearly $1.7 billion annually.) But the streaming-video on demand market has become much more crowded since Netflix began pivoting away from DVDs in 2007, and is set to grow more so. Apple has $285 billion in cash on hand. Unlike Netflix, Amazon doesn’t need to borrow the $5 billion a year it is spending on new content. While Netflix built, and maintains, some of the most reliable streaming technology in the industry, Amazon surely has more personal data on its customers, and Disney’s animated technology is so advanced, Bob Iger told me earlier this Summer, that the company is creating a version of Star Wars for television that will use C.G.I. actors.

Another challenge, Hollywood insiders tell me, is that while Netflix can create some incredible titles—Ozark, Wild Wild Country, The Crown, Stranger Things, and GLOW, to name just a few—it could eventually become hindered by its more popular successes. Sarandos recently bragged that The Christmas Chronicles, which came out this month, had 20 million views in its first week. “If every one of those was a movie-ticket purchase, that’s a $200 million opening week,” Sarandos said. “Even movies that go on to $1 billion don’t typically do that in the first week.”

But while he’s right with the numbers, there could be part of the picture that Netflix isn’t seeing. When I used to work at The New York Times, it was a badge of honor to write a story that appeared atop the most read or most e-mailed list. But I remember an editor who used to tell me, “Just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it’s good; if you put a YouPorn video on the homepage of the Web site, it would get more clicks than anything else.” The same is true for Netflix. “It’s great because it’s free and it’s in your living room,” a veteran Hollywood executive said to me, referring to The Christmas Chronicles. “The down-the-middle, corny holiday family movie did well—that’s nothing new.”

Of course, Netflix invests in avant-garde work made by the most brilliant artists. Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, a quiet black-and-white film, may well notch the company its first Oscar. But, this executive noted, Netflix’s attempt to be both Miramax and BuzzFeed may eventually alienate talent. “It’s hard to be the cool disruptor when you’re disrupting Hollywood with a Christmas Chronicles.”

If Silicon Valley is any guide, companies’ realities can change fast. Facebook, once similarly Teflon, faces a P.R. nightmare, advertiser flight, and app deletion. Could Netflix, too, enter such a cycle? Even its biggest competitors might not wish for that. Alas, the greatest threat for Hollywood, ironically, is that in a very short time Netflix may have become too big to fail. “A massive percentage of Hollywood gets a paycheck from Netflix,” one filmmaker told me. “Imagine what would happen to the entire industry if something bad happened to the company. You’d have tens of thousands of people out of a job, and the entire industry would fall with it.” What happens, some are wondering, if we enter a recession in a few years and families need to pick which of the half-dozen streaming services that they subscribe to?

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