Netflix has a reputation for cancelling good shows. This leads to a negative feedback loop where people don’t want to pick up a new Netflix show with the assumption it’ll never be finished, then Netflix complains about low viewership and cancels it.
The real solution is to just cancel Netflix entirely.
Every single show should get a guaranteed 2 seasons before it’s even greenlit. Ideally 3.
Obviously if it’s a bad show, kill it, but also consider that sometimes a show needs time to grow.
Look at season 1 of Parks and Rec, it was rough. Or The Office, it was fine but didn’t find it’s own until season 2.
You also have to consider that a show might need a little time to build an audience. I don’t currently subscribe to Netflix, but I have in the past. I may subscribe again soon, I like Jeff Goldbloom, but now I know his show is cancelled, I guess I’ll wait to subscribe.
I know they’re hoping for one big show to get me to subscribe, but maybe a steady stream of shows would work just as well.
So this is basically about KAOS, the Greek gods show that was canned a few weeks after it premiered because people weren’t watching it enough I guess.
You might say it seems a bit early to can a show when people haven’t gotten around to it yet. Lots of people rotate between streaming services, rather than maintaining each subscription year-in and year-out.
I think this might be the problem though. Netflix don’t like us only paying them 1/3 of the time or whatever. We’re going to backlog their shows? Well then fuck us; we can’t have nice things then.
No Netflix. Fuck you. Nothing you do is that important to me.
They completely ignore the long tail benefits of building up a huge catalog. The streaming service with the biggest ‘vault’ wins, and yet they only seem to care about stuff actively in production.
Cancelling a story driven show early on not only pisses off fans, it effectively kills the whole value of the show for late adopters. Why would I start a show I know gets cancelled in season 2? If it had finished, people would work their way through the backlog. Owning a library of nothing but half finished shows is worse than useless for most people and further encourages people to cancel as soon as whatever current show they watch stops airing instead of sticking around to catch up on something else.
It makes me less likely to buy their service. Why would I want a whole pile of cancelled Series 1s?
It’s odd that they want us to watch these shows right away. Streaming doesn’t work like that. Wife and I watch an episode, maybe 2 of a show each night. So it takes us weeks to get through a show season. So we have a list of shows to watch. We will watch a show months after it’s been out.
When Stranger Things was a big immediate hit that people binged it broke Netflix. They stopped trying to be HBO and instead treated each show like the lever of a big slot machine.
Audiences are not the problem. Don’t blame the viewer.
That’s like the opposite of what this article is doing.
I liked MCU. I was a really big fan. I consider Endgame as one of the best achievements in the history of cinema. But the abundance of series ruined it for me. Even before the movies started sucking, there were too many series.
Same. Oversaturation of mid Marvel TV shows to stay in to loop just led me to completely dropping the Marvel movies too years back. Same for Star Wars.
One of the cons of making a big linked universe when it starts becoming quantity over quality with references to each one.
I was burnt out by the time we got to Endgame. It seemed like the best place for me, personally, to drop it all. I haven’t watched a single Marvel thing since then, even the ones I was genuinely interested in at the time.
They absolutely leaned into quantity over quality and I don’t care for it.
I got burnt out trying to catch up ahead of End Game by the time I reached the first Captain America movie
This was me too. There was some stuff post endgame that seemed interesting, but I wasn’t sure what else I was supposed to watch first, so I just didn’t watch anything. It was just easier to avoid marvel or put it off in favor of consuming something more straightforward.
Kaos was actually really solid. Their mistake was putting it on Netflix.
Longer hiatuses haven’t lived up to the quality of the previous season that first drew audiences in the first place. People also forget and hype dies down. Just seems like it’s all about movie level production but subpar writing.
There hasn’t been anything worth watching any time I try watching. I’m not a kid any more, and I’m not my parents. I’ve actually read more than a few books. When I try watching anything main stream, it is just a mindless dump. I’m supposed to spend ages sifting through enough crap that I lower my standards to meet theirs. I see through that well enough to walk away before I start.
Well, not really…
Edit: the paying part. In case that was not clear. Yarr.
If your content is spread across five different services that only guarantees I’ll buy none of them. I don’t know what crazy executive leadership expects consumers to purchase all of these services at the same time.
What actually happens is that people just have a worse experience and piracy increases because it becomes a better product.
At this point Netflix should just go full steam ahead on making 50 episodes of Unsolved Mysteries per year.
I could watch those things at least every week (granted the latest 4 episode batch was kinda weak).
What if they run out of mysteries?
inb4 Netflix brings the crime “in-house” and starts making the mysteries themselves
They hiring? I’ll go out and do some weird shit if they pay me enough.
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Ted Lasso is a modern masterpiece. The good place and arcane get honorable mentions. Fallout and One Piece have had strong season 1s, but very few gems so far.
Non exhaustive, may be controversial and very HBO heavy:
Succession, Barry, Silicon Valley (edge of range), White Lotus, Euphoria, Severance, Better Call Saul, The Curse
Honorable mention: Ozark, West World S1, Righteous Gemstones, Shrinking, Sherlock (overlaps range), Dark Matter
Not can’t miss, but still pretty good: Hijack, Morning Show S1-2, Witcher S1, Three Body Problem
The Boys
I am so far behind on series on Netflix & other streaming services, that I can watch the next 10 years only ones that made it to a reasonable amount of episodes and seasons and got a nice wrap up. I am not investing my time in new ones that might not make it. I learned my lesson with Firefly.
