At this point I refuse to start any Netflix show that is not already finished. I understand that Netflix is a highly data driven org but this reliance on metric driven cancellation -- regardless of where the show is at narratively -- is part of what is alienating their userbase. That doesn't show in the data until it's too late and the trust is gone.
Following the Google path. "Data shows that this product isn't meeting usage expectations, time to kill it." Except in the process they don't realize that their actions (cutting products/shows) is training people not to invest in subsequent products in the first place for fear they'll disappear one day. They're basically tainting all of their future data collection. If Products A and B (or shows in Netflix's case) were ones I heavily used then were unceremoniously canned, I'm not going to want to try Product C, regardless of how good it is.
This is why I've started watching a lot of Asian entertainment. Kdramas and cdramas are nice in that they generally are planned to last for 1 season and one season only. it's nice to go into a show knowing you'll definitely get a resolution.
I thought there was a missed opportunity for Amazon to assert a distinct identity, of acquiring shows and letting them finish out their arcs (The Expanse) and make a credible commitment to either giving shows a "soft axe" (a notice that they get one final season) or a compromise like a send-off movie.
I don't know that they necessarily think this way, but it could have been a distinction they could have gone for. Like you feel better about having The Expanse, or for that matter any other show, in the hands of Amazon than Netflix.
Agreed, I either wait until a show is complete and get a recommendation from a friend to binge the whole thing or just check one of the Disney+ "safe bet" brands.
At least you know somebody has put a marginal amount of thought and effort into how the latest Star Wars or Marvel shows fits into things. It might tell a little story from start to finish or slot into the larger narrative, doesn't really matter, it will usually be "complete" in the sense that it told the story it wanted to tell.
Which I mean, I'm aware it's not breaking any barriers and I would definitely prefer to watch another "Dark" instead but I actually find it exhausting to get invested in a show and have it just be dropped without a satisfying ending.
>That doesn't show in the data until it's too late and the trust is gone.
Yes, this seems to be a problem at this point that stretches across many entire sectors at this point. I know there have been plenty of observations over the years around the dangers of hyper optimizing towards measurables while completely discounting immeasurables yet it seems to be a hard thing still to avoid long term. And in cases like this, or Google say for an even bigger example [0], it can also easily turn into a real doom loop. Initial engagement with services/platforms always entails risk on BOTH sides of the equation. Yeah the business is taking a risk that it won't sell, but the users investing their limited time/resources are taking a risk on its long term support too. Part of bootstrapping is always the business being willing to eat some of that and develop are reputation around doing so, such that people can jump onto v1.0 even if it has flaws and feeling trust that it will have a solid run. Which in turn gives the business the ability to iterate and refine and figure out what it truly is, and then there's a positive loop.
But when businesses forget that and start expecting hits day 1, it can all go into reverse. If everyone expects inevitably to have the rug pulled out from under them, then they won't invest in the first place even if it's promising (short of a monopoly situation where there is literally no choice). Which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, not enough "engagement", product gets killed, those % of those burned swear off doing it again and tell others too, and next time it goes even faster. I suspect an exclusive situation in some ways could make it even riskier long term by blunting signal: people feel locked into continuing to buy which looks good on numbers, but immeasurably anger is building up. Which means as soon as something else comes along "all of a sudden" people will bolt for it.
I don't know, seems to be a sort of midlife crisis thing that is particularly true of very successful firms that have only ever known major success. They somehow lose the institutional DNA of how they built their customer base in the first place, and then just cannot seem to manage to recover it until it's too late.
I wish they made one season only shows. Would solve their problem and ours. It's really rare that a show over the second season maintain the same quality (there are exceptions)
I stopped my Netflix subscription after they cancelled 1899. I really enjoyed the first season and while it might not be for everyone I thought it was amazing television.
It really sucks when you get excited by a project just for it to be cancelled after a season, or worse, after two seasons.
The amount of shows Ive really enjoyed that weren't given a conclusion was just too many. It's just a business model that doesn't sit well with me. I wish they gave these shows one more season or perhaps a movie (which is roughly equivalent to 2 episodes) to wrap things up.
Same here! Once they were praised for trying out new stuff and sticking with it; now everything must be an immediate smash hit. 1899 broke the camel's back, I've cancelled and since then pirated one of their shows.
1899 was my cutoff, too. They had the nerve to recommend the show to me after it had been canceled, which I didn't know at the time. Got invested and looked for a season two release date, which is how I learned it was canceled. No longer a subscriber now.
Yeah that’s the real piss-off for me. The number of times I foolishly forgot to check whether they’d actually finally finished a show, got totally hooked and invested, then found out that there was no ending coming… ever.
The cancelling is bad enough, but continuing to list and recommend these shows as if they weren’t incomplete with no intention of completing them is a bit beyond.
At least have the decency to put a warning that the show has no ending on its listing. Or stop recommending them and only list them in a “graveyard” category or something.
But if they cared enough about their customers to do that, they probably wouldn’t be doing this all in the first place.
I honestly don't understand why they don't demand a complete screenplay of the whole series up front when they greenlight a show, and then commit to producing the whole thing, whether it's a hit or a flop. No definite beginning, middle, and end? No cash.
What they do now is like, "OK, I'll build this C++ project for you 1000 lines at a time. It will be extremely expensive, but you can pay me after each delivery and feel free to kill the whole thing at any time."
By hosing their most loyal viewers -- the ones who will stick with their favorite shows to the end -- they may not necessarily be losing money, but they are biasing the statistics that they use to determine what future shows to invest in. The remaining viewers will be those who don't mind having the rug pulled out from under them: less-sophisticated, less-discriminating people who are just looking for something to play for background noise in the living room.
It's a big problem because their catalog is also so spotty.
They should probably be ordering seasons in batches. Show runners don't really have much of a say, if they're told "okay we can give you one season and see how it goes" they're gonna say yes.
But in the case of 1899 was also a worse situation, to me, because the team had already proved themselves in another series (Dark) which was widely successful, except it didn't get successful until later on. These sort of series do require a bit more attention, people are not going to binge watch them like they do Wednesday. And that's okay (except apparently for Netlfix it's not okay).
And, I mean, I get it. Netflix strategy seems to be much more about optimizing a function that tries to minimize quality and maximize viewership. They literally don't care about high quality products. In fact, I would say, high quality products might even be undesirable as they might raise the bar of people's expectations.
I wonder if networks are comfortable with open-ended series because it lets them switch to targeting a more profitable demographic as the show runs.
For example, Lost began with no particular arc planned out, just some stabs here and there at continuity. That allowed writers in season three to heavily emphasize a love triangle among the three most romantic characters (Kate, Jack and Sawyer) which won the show a huge following from women in a key US advertising demographic, even as some male nerds were disappointed.
I really liked 1899, but I think it had as good an ending as it was going to get. "Mystery box" shows never seem to end well. The resolution is always disappointing. The longer you drag a mystery out, either people figure it out, or it becomes incoherent.
It was some brilliant television, and I sure wouldn't have minded spending more time with it. But I think that its big ending was about as satisfying as you can possibly hope for.
For comparison I suggest their previous show, Dark. It was also beautifully shot (if less engagingly cosmopolitan). But it took them three seasons to tell a story that could have been compressed less confusingly into one. Too many characters, too sprawling a concept. Its ending was reasonably satisfying, but I felt confused most of the time and just didn't much care.
Anyway... agreed that 1899 was amazing TV, and Netflix sucks for canceling shows that are doing well. I've got a few real gripes myself. Maybe they had great places to take 1899, but I'm content with it as it was.
To be honest it's hard to take someone who liked 1899 seriously. This show is so bad on many levels. It's pretty but that's it. Pedantic boredom at best, convoluted nonsense most of the time.
I don't think Netflix cares about your type of subscriber, nor do I think they should. It is extremely niche taste, and in my opinion rather poor. You are free to like death metal but most people who rather listen to nothing instead...
I was hoping they would continue pushing their kibosh on sharing passwords so I would delete my account permanently (I only pay because my siblings use my account), but it seems they stopped trying to force it in Kenya.
It should be legally required to do one more episode of every show after it is cancelled. I joke, but it would be really nice if this was at least an unwritten rule.
Mine was Away with Jennifer Garner. Good first season with good characters, then BLAM cancelled. Although I suspect that one didn’t have a ton of viewers.
Netflix has already damaged their brand of original shows for me. After years of starting something and having it suddenly canceled and left unfinished I now don't bother to watch any original Netflix programming unless it's already a completed series.
I'm sure it makes sense in the short term to cancel things that aren't bringing in enough revenue, but when you have years of aggressive cancelations it also causes some long term damage that might end up harming the platform even more than spending a bit more to make a quick series conclusion.
They also lose out on potential long tail value of a completed show, like how arrested development wasn't the most popular at it's initial run but later made up for it in DVDs and streaming. People won't want to start watching something they know doesn't finish even if it would otherwise be a great show for them, so it becomes a complete waste of production money instead of a possible future asset.
Most corporate decisions these days seem like they're made to maximize a short term stock or revenue bump... and then the execs rake in a huge bonus and jump ship before the future fallout hits.
>Netflix has already damaged their brand of original shows for me.
Right, the cancellation of The OA was absolutely heartless, and that was relatively early on. This may be a weird parallel but it was like the Google Reader shutdown for Google, which kicked off the era of Google not making credible commitments to its own projects.
The title of this article is embarrassing. They took "best series" from a post of a random X user @MhayYhusuf who called the series "the best show on the platform".
Shadow and Bone is far from being a best anything.
That would be a most charitable interpretation. By that logic You and Florida Man: would also be it's 'best series' since they all clocked in higher than Shadow and Bone quite a few times.
If we honestly talking about their best performing properties we are talking about the likes of Squid Game, Stranger Things, Wednesday, Dahmer, Bridgerton, Money Heist, The Night Agent, The Queen's Gambit, Lupin and The Witcher S1.
It reminds me of this thing I saw recently where network TV shows will include blurbs in ads for the show, like "RIVETING!", "CAN'T TURN AWAY...", etc., and the expectation of course is that it's Peter Travers or whoever the hell that wrote the blurb.
Except they were just handles like "@BeckFire49" from random people on Twitter.
As someone who watched S1, and enjoyed it. I never bothered to watch S2 owing to the two year delay between releases. I felt like I had probably forgotten too many plot points to fully appreciate it.
Welcome to modern journalism, where a journalist can take a tweet from any rando (of which there are many millions) to make their preconceived point and present it as some sort of consensus.
I don’t have a specific answer other than to not pause production but I feel like this is a symptom of the season based production cycle. A series captures the imagination, then it disappears for an entire year (or two or three), only to start again hoping everyone hasn’t moved on in life. Of course they lose momentum with fans.
A better model to my mind is decide to make a 20 episode series, then produce and release episodes as they are finished and don’t stop until the series is over. If the series is capable of continuing, make that decision long before the 20th episode, but be sure to be ready to end by 20 otherwise.
I generally agree with the sentiment though. In a series that has a story and an arc, ending is before an end is possible is just mean. You could at least give a few episodes grace to let the writers wrap it up. Just ending a story midway through is the height of disrespect to both the artists creating it, but most importantly, your customers who have given their life and interest to the story.
I guess executives aren't incentivised to avoid the long term brand damage these sorts of decisions cause. Maybe that's because the top minds in business don't think that this sort of long term brand damage can really impact the profits in a measurable way?
But surely it must? Isn't this what Disney is finally suffering?
I guess if they think the engagement numbers are low enough to merit cancelling then then the number of potential cancellations isn’t enough to cause a problem
Maybe that works on one or two shows but across dozens of cancellations surely the overlap finally becomes a larger problem in aggregate to be a problem like you suggest
Or maybe they want the customer who just watches whatever has a new release banner on it without thinking too much
I've said this before but netflix should stop wasting money and honestly invest in the library. Even if a show isn't the most popular thing in the world, as long as it ends well it becomes a solid asset for them. Some percentage of people will enjoy it and feel happy that netflix brought it to them.
Shows that start and never finish will just sit in their library untouched by anyone who knows better or as something certain to piss off another customer when finally discover they'll never get a conclusion. No one watching those shows will be happy about netflix.
There are many netflix shows I'll never start because I've already heard fans were screwed over, and now many more I won't even bother to start until I hear they've concluded.
I don’t think so, to be honest. The landscape for media consumption is so much different than 10-15 years ago. Without any supporting data, I have a hunch that, shows are mostly watched within a year of its original air date. New shows aren’t on a rerun (I recall Scrubs, House being on from time to time), they are not turning into a comfort background tv show (like The Office, Friends) or have a religious fanbase that’ll just follow along because there are 20 seasons of it (NCIS, Greys Anatomy and so on.).
On top of everything, media is extremely fragmented. So much choice that there isn’t any specific shows that people watch because everyone else is watching and will talk about it on Monday during lunch (a la Game of Thrones). So all these companies are left with churning new shows trying to find a holy grail of the Stranger Things size to bring them new subscribers. Until then, anything that doesn’t stick on the wall, will get cut off.
We have a huge movie industry scene in my city, so you hear from people who jump from working show A to show B. None of the shows I’ve ever heard of and never will. But producers are still hoping for a genre defining hit somehow.
> shows are mostly watched within a year of its original air date.
This depends a lot on what else is available, but old shows can find success in steaming services. One of the most successful shows on netflix this past year was Suits, a show that was released 12 years ago. Schitt's Creek gained huge popularity two years after it's original air date.
> So much choice that there isn’t any specific shows that people watch because everyone else is watching and will talk about it on Monday during lunch (a la Game of Thrones)
That's why streaming services have started to withhold episodes and only allow you see one episode a week. They want to control who is watching what and when. When people can watch whatever they want to on their own schedule they might not get around to new shows immediately and advertisers don't like that. It also makes it harder to control the conversation on social media.
The Tick was canceled after it didn't get enough views just 6 weeks after release, but as you said, there is so much to watch right now, and so much else besides TV competing for our time, that those kinds of metrics are meaningless.
It'd be better for netflix to make sure their library is filled with quality and to have confidence that audiences will find those shows in their own time rather than worry about how many people are watching the newest thing immediately and cancel anything that doesn't show immediate success.
I'm wondering whether Netflix has found out that it's target audience is shifting, just like what happened with Facebook.
It is my understanding that people aged 55+ is now the main audience of Facebook.
What is now the main audience of Netflix?
Cooking shows, cartoons and documentaries cost a fraction of a tv show but are still watched.
Personally, when I have 15—30 min to watch something, I prefer some food show with no strings attached instead of having to watch a specific show and having to remember what happened last time with the protagonist and the antagonist. (i.e. Dark)
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I think they should be more like (formerly?) HBO or Apple and try to make fewer, better shows.
I don't know that they necessarily think this way, but it could have been a distinction they could have gone for. Like you feel better about having The Expanse, or for that matter any other show, in the hands of Amazon than Netflix.
At least you know somebody has put a marginal amount of thought and effort into how the latest Star Wars or Marvel shows fits into things. It might tell a little story from start to finish or slot into the larger narrative, doesn't really matter, it will usually be "complete" in the sense that it told the story it wanted to tell.
Which I mean, I'm aware it's not breaking any barriers and I would definitely prefer to watch another "Dark" instead but I actually find it exhausting to get invested in a show and have it just be dropped without a satisfying ending.
Yes, this seems to be a problem at this point that stretches across many entire sectors at this point. I know there have been plenty of observations over the years around the dangers of hyper optimizing towards measurables while completely discounting immeasurables yet it seems to be a hard thing still to avoid long term. And in cases like this, or Google say for an even bigger example [0], it can also easily turn into a real doom loop. Initial engagement with services/platforms always entails risk on BOTH sides of the equation. Yeah the business is taking a risk that it won't sell, but the users investing their limited time/resources are taking a risk on its long term support too. Part of bootstrapping is always the business being willing to eat some of that and develop are reputation around doing so, such that people can jump onto v1.0 even if it has flaws and feeling trust that it will have a solid run. Which in turn gives the business the ability to iterate and refine and figure out what it truly is, and then there's a positive loop.
But when businesses forget that and start expecting hits day 1, it can all go into reverse. If everyone expects inevitably to have the rug pulled out from under them, then they won't invest in the first place even if it's promising (short of a monopoly situation where there is literally no choice). Which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, not enough "engagement", product gets killed, those % of those burned swear off doing it again and tell others too, and next time it goes even faster. I suspect an exclusive situation in some ways could make it even riskier long term by blunting signal: people feel locked into continuing to buy which looks good on numbers, but immeasurably anger is building up. Which means as soon as something else comes along "all of a sudden" people will bolt for it.
I don't know, seems to be a sort of midlife crisis thing that is particularly true of very successful firms that have only ever known major success. They somehow lose the institutional DNA of how they built their customer base in the first place, and then just cannot seem to manage to recover it until it's too late.
----
0: https://killedbygoogle.com/
It really sucks when you get excited by a project just for it to be cancelled after a season, or worse, after two seasons.
The amount of shows Ive really enjoyed that weren't given a conclusion was just too many. It's just a business model that doesn't sit well with me. I wish they gave these shows one more season or perhaps a movie (which is roughly equivalent to 2 episodes) to wrap things up.
It's not like they don't have the money.
The cancelling is bad enough, but continuing to list and recommend these shows as if they weren’t incomplete with no intention of completing them is a bit beyond.
At least have the decency to put a warning that the show has no ending on its listing. Or stop recommending them and only list them in a “graveyard” category or something.
But if they cared enough about their customers to do that, they probably wouldn’t be doing this all in the first place.
What they do now is like, "OK, I'll build this C++ project for you 1000 lines at a time. It will be extremely expensive, but you can pay me after each delivery and feel free to kill the whole thing at any time."
By hosing their most loyal viewers -- the ones who will stick with their favorite shows to the end -- they may not necessarily be losing money, but they are biasing the statistics that they use to determine what future shows to invest in. The remaining viewers will be those who don't mind having the rug pulled out from under them: less-sophisticated, less-discriminating people who are just looking for something to play for background noise in the living room.
They should probably be ordering seasons in batches. Show runners don't really have much of a say, if they're told "okay we can give you one season and see how it goes" they're gonna say yes.
But in the case of 1899 was also a worse situation, to me, because the team had already proved themselves in another series (Dark) which was widely successful, except it didn't get successful until later on. These sort of series do require a bit more attention, people are not going to binge watch them like they do Wednesday. And that's okay (except apparently for Netlfix it's not okay).
And, I mean, I get it. Netflix strategy seems to be much more about optimizing a function that tries to minimize quality and maximize viewership. They literally don't care about high quality products. In fact, I would say, high quality products might even be undesirable as they might raise the bar of people's expectations.
For example, Lost began with no particular arc planned out, just some stabs here and there at continuity. That allowed writers in season three to heavily emphasize a love triangle among the three most romantic characters (Kate, Jack and Sawyer) which won the show a huge following from women in a key US advertising demographic, even as some male nerds were disappointed.
It was some brilliant television, and I sure wouldn't have minded spending more time with it. But I think that its big ending was about as satisfying as you can possibly hope for.
For comparison I suggest their previous show, Dark. It was also beautifully shot (if less engagingly cosmopolitan). But it took them three seasons to tell a story that could have been compressed less confusingly into one. Too many characters, too sprawling a concept. Its ending was reasonably satisfying, but I felt confused most of the time and just didn't much care.
Anyway... agreed that 1899 was amazing TV, and Netflix sucks for canceling shows that are doing well. I've got a few real gripes myself. Maybe they had great places to take 1899, but I'm content with it as it was.
I don't think Netflix cares about your type of subscriber, nor do I think they should. It is extremely niche taste, and in my opinion rather poor. You are free to like death metal but most people who rather listen to nothing instead...
To me fox is still a damaged brand and they cancelled Firefly before Netflix was a thing.
I'm sure it makes sense in the short term to cancel things that aren't bringing in enough revenue, but when you have years of aggressive cancelations it also causes some long term damage that might end up harming the platform even more than spending a bit more to make a quick series conclusion.
They also lose out on potential long tail value of a completed show, like how arrested development wasn't the most popular at it's initial run but later made up for it in DVDs and streaming. People won't want to start watching something they know doesn't finish even if it would otherwise be a great show for them, so it becomes a complete waste of production money instead of a possible future asset.
Most corporate decisions these days seem like they're made to maximize a short term stock or revenue bump... and then the execs rake in a huge bonus and jump ship before the future fallout hits.
Right, the cancellation of The OA was absolutely heartless, and that was relatively early on. This may be a weird parallel but it was like the Google Reader shutdown for Google, which kicked off the era of Google not making credible commitments to its own projects.
Shadow and Bone is far from being a best anything.
It might not be to your liking, but it's been in Netflix's top 10 lists [2] quite a few times.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/sha...
[2] https://www.netflix.com/tudum/top10/tv?week=2023-03-19
If we honestly talking about their best performing properties we are talking about the likes of Squid Game, Stranger Things, Wednesday, Dahmer, Bridgerton, Money Heist, The Night Agent, The Queen's Gambit, Lupin and The Witcher S1.
Shadow and Bone is not even close to that group.
Except they were just handles like "@BeckFire49" from random people on Twitter.
A better model to my mind is decide to make a 20 episode series, then produce and release episodes as they are finished and don’t stop until the series is over. If the series is capable of continuing, make that decision long before the 20th episode, but be sure to be ready to end by 20 otherwise.
I generally agree with the sentiment though. In a series that has a story and an arc, ending is before an end is possible is just mean. You could at least give a few episodes grace to let the writers wrap it up. Just ending a story midway through is the height of disrespect to both the artists creating it, but most importantly, your customers who have given their life and interest to the story.
But surely it must? Isn't this what Disney is finally suffering?
Maybe that works on one or two shows but across dozens of cancellations surely the overlap finally becomes a larger problem in aggregate to be a problem like you suggest
Or maybe they want the customer who just watches whatever has a new release banner on it without thinking too much
Shows that start and never finish will just sit in their library untouched by anyone who knows better or as something certain to piss off another customer when finally discover they'll never get a conclusion. No one watching those shows will be happy about netflix.
There are many netflix shows I'll never start because I've already heard fans were screwed over, and now many more I won't even bother to start until I hear they've concluded.
On top of everything, media is extremely fragmented. So much choice that there isn’t any specific shows that people watch because everyone else is watching and will talk about it on Monday during lunch (a la Game of Thrones). So all these companies are left with churning new shows trying to find a holy grail of the Stranger Things size to bring them new subscribers. Until then, anything that doesn’t stick on the wall, will get cut off.
We have a huge movie industry scene in my city, so you hear from people who jump from working show A to show B. None of the shows I’ve ever heard of and never will. But producers are still hoping for a genre defining hit somehow.
This depends a lot on what else is available, but old shows can find success in steaming services. One of the most successful shows on netflix this past year was Suits, a show that was released 12 years ago. Schitt's Creek gained huge popularity two years after it's original air date.
> So much choice that there isn’t any specific shows that people watch because everyone else is watching and will talk about it on Monday during lunch (a la Game of Thrones)
That's why streaming services have started to withhold episodes and only allow you see one episode a week. They want to control who is watching what and when. When people can watch whatever they want to on their own schedule they might not get around to new shows immediately and advertisers don't like that. It also makes it harder to control the conversation on social media.
The Tick was canceled after it didn't get enough views just 6 weeks after release, but as you said, there is so much to watch right now, and so much else besides TV competing for our time, that those kinds of metrics are meaningless.
It'd be better for netflix to make sure their library is filled with quality and to have confidence that audiences will find those shows in their own time rather than worry about how many people are watching the newest thing immediately and cancel anything that doesn't show immediate success.
Cooking shows, cartoons and documentaries cost a fraction of a tv show but are still watched.
Personally, when I have 15—30 min to watch something, I prefer some food show with no strings attached instead of having to watch a specific show and having to remember what happened last time with the protagonist and the antagonist. (i.e. Dark)