Plenty of shows can be good with just one or two seasons, and more is worse. Freaks & Geeks: 1 season, amazing. Ditto UK The Office. Fleabag: 2 short seasons, amazing. The OA: AMAZING first season with a complete coherent ending, then they had to make a bizarre, scattershot second season. Ditto Killing Eve (how many damn times can she get killed lol). Downton Abbey: PLANNED for 3 seasons (pre, during, & post wwI) but it was so popular they just rambled on for ages until it looked like the scripts were being pulled directly from tumblr ("beloved character came back from america! for a wedding episode! plus: PUPPIES!!" literally).
So I don't totally get the "cancelled too soon" argument. The OA should have not run to even 2 seasons.
There's a trend of not producing art or even something original, but producing "content." For example someone asked me if The Mandalorian is good. "It's star wars Content" I replied. "If you like star wars, and want Content, you'll like it." Is the plot novel? Is it original or compelling? No, but boy it's fun to see yoda puppet and more Content from the SW universe you've come to know and love!
A lot of these series may have run their creative course & while megafans want more "Content" it's the same thing as something being cancelled too soon, and most people aren't megafans.
I would suggest you look at it as not too soon, and cancelled without completing the story.
Glow is one of the latest instances. They paid the actors for season 4, but never produced season 4. It left with a very unsatisfying ending.
Will I ever recommend anyone with Glow on Netflix? no, because I can't tell them "Hey, watch this show on Netflix, but it doesn't have an ending and likely never will"
It's similar to how I'll never recommend The Kingkiller Chronicles or a Song of Ice and Fire. Because doing so would mean that someone reading those would probably never have an ending.
This is where I feel Netflix is hurting themselves. They're producing all this content and then never finishing it. Their catalog is going to start looking like a bunch of incomplete shows.
I think it's fine if you have a show with a short run. One season that finishes properly? Great! Two seasons? Great! but ending before it finishes is just as bad as continuing on forever with no end goal.
> Will I ever recommend anyone with Glow on Netflix?
I think I've only watched season 1 of Glow, really liked it, and for whatever reason never watched the rest. I remember the season finale served as an ending of sorts. I'm sure season 2 opens more arcs to resolve, but season 1 ended satisfactorily enough for me. Anyone not watching because Netflix cancelled the show will miss something cool.
Glow is a fun show, but once the wrestling show found an audience and the characters found a certain degree of fulfillment in their wrestling roles, the stakes seemed lower to me. I'm happy with the season 3 ending as a show finale.
But I would still recommend it, or Song of Ice and Fire, because there are a lot of good parts for both. Same for Stranger Things. Is * really dead? It's not that important compared to how well it nails 80s kids horror fantasia.
In general, are you more likely to suggest a complete show or one that ends abruptly with several dangling plot threads?
Stranger Things season 1 would have been a fantastic show if it just ended there (without the final cliffhanger scene). I'd recommend it to everybody. If Stranger Things just ended now, I might still recommend it to everybody, but I'd be decidedly less likely to do so, and it would always come with the caveat "They didn't actually finish it." So not only am I less likely to recommend it, but the caveat means the other person is less likely to watch it based on the recommendation if I do. (I might also say, "Don't bother watching past season X," which is still bad for Netflix.)
To be fair, respect for talent .
When you can create a tv show the caliber of game of throne 5 years after the 1st book is release catch-up and over take the books. It makes you wonder if there is difficultly to completing epic, wheel of time dragged out, king killer and game of thrones. On the other hand Malazan seems to be fine thou it’s loosely bound, and the book writing AI brandon sanderson works 25 hours a day
Kingkiller Chronicles is only 3 books, hardly epic. It's a trilogy. The first book came out in 2007, second in 2011, and nothing has been seen of the third, and presumably, final book.
Brandon Sanderson treats writing books as a job, thus he writes every day. Now you could argue that his books aren't as entertaining to you (subjective) or that his prose isn't as good (a bit less subjective), but he does treat his job like a job. Whereas Rothfuss and GRRM seem to try to do literally anything but continue writing their books.
Sanderson isn't a bot but he has something a lot of people lack, work ethic.
Stephen King sits down every day and writes x amount of pages. 10 or 15 maybe, been awhile since I've read on writing but he talks about it in there. He is not super concerned about the quality of it, he just wants to get it out there. If those pages end up as part of an actual book then he'll obviously be going back over them etc. I assume Sanderson operates very similarly.
GRRM on the other hand agonizes over writing out perfect rough draft pages and thus never gets anything done.
Yea, there's usually two general types of writers, and they can be on a teeter totter so to speak:
Those that outline and plan ahead of time using the outline
Those that write the story as they write
Sanderson is very much an outliner, I think GRRM is more a it'll come together as I write it kind of person. He probably has some sort of plan, but it isn't as fine tuned as Sanderson's I suspect. Sanderson does multiple drafts as well, which works with how I write. My first draft may be complete trash, but getting it on paper helps me a lot in at least getting the ideas out and then I can fine tune or start over if I'm not happy at all.
But yes, I think Sanderson is very much a "I write regardless and I'll refine it over time" type of person and doesn't agonize over the little details until it's time to actually do that.
GLOW works fine regardless of how many seasons you want. Every season has an ending. There's no need to literally see every character's end of life like Soprano's and Six Feet Under
It's only canceled too soon if the main plot arc isn't resolved, which does happen with some regularity.
I am very annoyed with shows dragging on endlessly though. I very much like Babylon 5 for precisely this reason: it told the story it intended to, and when the audience asked for more content they spun it off into other shows/movies.
In general, I would say that 5 seasons is a good maximum, and that you better have a good reason for going longer (e.g. adapting a book series to TV, where each book is a season).
Babylon 5 is a bit of an oddball. They were originally told they'd have a fifth season. Then they were told they wouldn't, so they wrapped it up in season 4 (and season 4 is quite compressed as a result, which might be what you like). Then they ended up getting that fifth season. They used it to do all kinds of fun 'post show' things.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine went 7 seasons. They could have done it in 3-4; especially if they could have had modern 50-60 HBO-style shows, rather than 35-40 minute network television shows.
I'd like to see creators target 3-4 seasons and contracts be written for them to create all those seasons. The really good, fan-centric ones could then do the Babylon 5 style post-seasons or a contract could be written for additional seasons to cover the next story arc. (I'm sure this is impossible for some reason, but I can dream.)
As things stand, I generally don't watch any new show that doesn't already have a few seasons under its belt. I really dislike watching a season of a show, falling in love with it, and then finding out its already gotten the axe.
Babylon 5 is also a useful oddball because so much of its plan versus reality was documented on USENET or in interviews as they happened. As they say "no plan survives contact with the enemy" and in this case the enemies of any 5 year TV plan are numerous, and included among other things network notes, network switches, cast contract negotiation problems, cast health problems, and more. JMS made it very clear he had to have a ton of contingencies in his five year plan and the show had to carry out a number of them.
It's also an oddball because even JMS hasn't been able to replicate it with nearly the same degree of success. B5 follow-up Crusade was pitched with a 3-5 year plan and barely survived a half season. (Supposedly B5: Legend of the Rangers was pitched as a 5 year plan including cleaning up Crusade plot-lines at least "sideways" and that barely got a pilot movie.) Sense8 was pitched to Netflix (appropriate to consider for this overall thread) as a 5 year plan and got 2 seasons and wrap-up movie (though seemingly had a lot fewer contingency problems than B5's early seasons in the 2 seasons and a movie that it did get).
> It's only canceled too soon if the main plot arc isn't resolved, which does happen with some regularity.
When shows become popular, the arc suddenly becomes longer until it loses popularity and they cancel it. There are a ton of shows that have this pattern of having a really interesting premise followed by a pretty fast paced plot moving first season. Then they get renewed for 3 more season and the show slows to a crawl and gets cancelled after season 2.
As a counterpoint - to me, the second season of the OA was one of the most audacious, crazy things I've ever seen on television, and its cancellation bummed me out to no end.
Same here. I thought it was starting to finally realize some of its potential in the second season and by the cliffhanger ending it was extremely promising for season 3. I think not only was season one intriguing, and season two utterly fascinating, but that it was really building momentum toward a fantastic season three. It's the absolute perfect example of a show that was damaged by its cancellation.
I always describe The OA as not necessarily "good" per se, but extremely interesting and unique. I would really like to have seen where they were going with it.
Seconding this! That finale is almost more perfect never pursued; what it implies about the show's future direction is so bonkers, maybe it's better as a beautiful mystery. It's a hell of a coup de grace for a show that always had a lot to offer its audience even while it kept them guessing.
It felt like they were going for a sort of fusion of Sliders and Quantum Leap. It felt very, very different. I liked that. Bonus for the rare transmasculine representation in TV.
Except that they had clearly written themselves into a corner. Bringing the real actors into the show is the equivalent of writing about writing a story.
Could not have said it better. Would like to add that Netflix's high turnover for shows is breathing precious oxygen into the creative world. New stories and new plots with stranger or darker characters, more twists. A good break from the trash remakes of classics.
Not a huge fan of SW but Mando gave me the feeling of wonder about the universe that the OT gave 11 yr old me when it ran on a Sunday special. So there is at least one point I beg to differ on.
This is why I basically stopped watching Western shows (outside of the ones people absolutely rave about, and even then only a select few). Something is good, it makes money, they milk it for all its worth until it becomes awful and gets cancelled. That always left me with a bad memory of it as something I enjoyed turned to shit.
I switched over to watching shows from Asia where the format is basically only one season by default, it rarely goes to two, and there is a logical beginning, middle and end that follows a proper story arc. If the show was good when it ended then watching it remains a great memory. I've enjoyed so much stuff over the years and it's never let me down like the Western model does.
I don't think Freaks and Geeks is a great example, because it's one of the classic cases where people really wish there had been more than one season. It's clear that it was not out of steam after one season.
There's a difference between stories told with a self-contained timeline on their own terms (a la Fleabag), and having the rug pulled out from under something that isn't resolved.
Extrapolating off Judd Apatow and Paul Feig? Could be worse. Freaks and Geeks also had an incredible cast. I'd have trusted them to make a solid season 2, although I must say it's kind of perfect as it is for me.
The prequel and new generation Star Wars movies are SW content and are mediocre to downright criminally awful. I’d given up on SW completely. Yet The Mandalorian delighted me and I’m craving for more. So no, clearly being content isn’t enough by a long shot.
The prequels were perhaps less entertaining than the original three (although I really feel this depends on one's age at first viewing), but when considered carefully they rhymed beautifully, and said something deep about contemporary society as well. It helps to consider the fact that the "good guys" in the prequels are the "bad guys" in IV-VI. Then compare Luke to Anakin. Lucas tried something audacious, and it worked magnificently, and maybe a dozen people understood it. Then he could sell the whole mess to Disney with a clear conscience.
I don't hate II and III, they're ok. The first prequel was terrible though. I recently watched the movies in Machete order with my kids and it was pretty good. I probably won't do it again but I don't regret it. The most recent Disney ones have been utterly dire. I skipped the last one completely and nothing Ive heard about it inspires me to give it a chance.
Granted The OA is not for everyone, but I thought it was one of the best and imaginative things I'd seen on TV in recent years. I loved that it made me go "wtf is going on?" It truly was an escape from reality. It was bizarre, but it had its audience.
Season one I loved–it was novel and very original, unraveled the plot over time, had character development & an amazing ending that tied it all up in a bow. It was a clear and beautiful beginning-middle-end arc.
My complaint is that adding another season doesn't enhance a begging-middle-end story arc that's already done, especially when it clearly was tacked on and not part of the original story.
What I'd prefer? Give the creator a blank slate and let them make another amazing story, rather than saying "this Ducati is great–keep adding wheels!"
I had a different take. It didn't feel tacked on to me, but rather that season 1 was like a benign initiation phase, a dip-a-toe-in-the-crazy kinda deal. By season 2, they felt confident that the audience was now ready for the real deal and they upped the ante. Unfortunately not everyone followed. From what I understood, it was a 5 part story planned over 5 seasons.
wtf was the octopus about. This was a bunch of spooky concepts all mashed together without any clear theme. What was the main theme or central concept of season 2? Season 1 was clearly about the movements & what they did, whether they're supernatural or what. Season 2 was like "Silicon valley! Rhizomes! Time travel! Talking sea creatures!" just sort of a throw everything at the wall approach. Anyway it didn't work for me especially with how fantastic and cohesive the season 1 story was.
Check out the notes here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_OA#Production which make clear that the season 1 story was a cohesive, beginning to end story that the creators refined over a series of years (and it shows). Then "hey lets add a season 2."
I assume this concept is in the TV industry as well but there's a saying in the music industry about a band having their entire life to write their first album and then a year to write their second.
Anything from Zal Batmanglij is out of this world. You should check his early films. I've watched "Another Earth" back in the day for instance and while maybe right now, there is more popular stuff that followed, it was very different back when it appeared.
I guess it was before things like "Melancholia" and "Interstellar".
FYI Another Earth is directed by Tim Cahill not Zal. From what I can tell Brit Marling is the main common thread between that movie, The OA, The Sound of Her Voice.
These three I've seen personally are all good and have a lot of overlapping themes and premises, like mysterious charismatic figures in a slightly off kilter, ambiguously fantastical world convincing people to believe and follow them and their reality.
It's almost comforting to know that The OA is a third or fourth shot at that kind of premise by Brit and her collaborators. Maybe that's why it felt so beautiful and out of nowhere and perfectly formed.
I think Showtime should have followed this. Usually the first season is spectacular, and it's almost as if the writers are surprised it is renewed, but they wasted their best material on season 1.
Weeds Season 1 was amazing, the rest not so much. Dexter, season 1 should have just been a single season, sooo good, after a while you wonder how many serial killers reside in Florida. Billions, season 1 amazing, it hasn't been too bad after, but after a while it just starts to seem forced.
I think there is a parallel here with the old saying, "you have your whole life to write your first record and then six months to write your second.” Similar to the Showtime shows you mentioned, I would apply this to the first season of HBO's "True Detective." Spectacular first season in which I got the sense the writer put in everything he had collected in his head his whole life, and then a rushed second season due to its success.
Season 1 was amazing. After that, bleh. At least in that case it sounds like executive meddling was the culprit.
On the other hand, The Expanse keeps opening whole new everythings that make what came before tiny but also essential. No second of plot is wasted. They could loosen it up a bit with a bottle episode or two to develop the characters more though. I could go any number of seasons if they could maintain the quality.
And then there's the new Lost In Space. They're going to end it in the next season at exactly the right time. Pacing-wise, it feels like a three-part miniseries. Just enough room to build a world and develop the characters without overstaying its welcome.
The Expanse is already written to 7 or 8 books. Plus, as you mention, they take the “solution” from the prior work and turn it into the “problem” for the next. The authors of the original content did a bunch of background work ahead of time as they were planning on turning it into an RPG.
For better and worse, sometimes it still feels too much like very little in the world of The Expanse actually happens outside of the "campaign PCs" and it makes it feel like a smaller world than it should that much doesn't actually seem to happen until just the moment when the "campaign PCs" show up. The show tries to make up for it some of the time, but that still feels like the core of things. (I have not tried reading the books yet.)
Showtime seems like the worst for this. Maybe Netflix is becoming the anti-Showtime. I've joked before that I wish I could pay half price for a Showtime subscription that only had the first half of each series.
The main thesis I'm hearing here, which I think I agree with, is that a work ought to be planned out from beginning to end, and it simply is as long as it is. But then I picture some cigar-chomper type dude who thinks it's more like an assembly line where some products are popular so you make more of them, and some aren't so you shut them down. There's a disconnect (again) between artistic & commercial, between love & money, and between (as it were) work & play.
Eh, I feel like the Mandalorian can be objectively "good" though. Just in terms of, you can tell the people are talented who were assembled to work on it. There are lapses from time to time though, for sure.
In terms of production The Mandalorian is pretty amazing.
In terms of script it is predictable, fairly boring and drowning in various "the plot needs to happen" moments.
For some reason I cannot phantom, Netflix and others seem to have tons of money to throw at the production, but don't seem to want to spend more than a few pennies on script.
I tried watching Cursed on Netflix, and had to force myself past the first episode due to the horrible writing. It never got better. The pieces were there for a fairly interesting show but it clearly needed more work on the writing side. Instead they pushed it into production and made another predictable flop.
We consume more literature in a year than last generations consumed in a lifetime. Filling all of that with groundbreaking writing is an impossible prospect. Competent production is much more scalable: if you can make one good episode you can make 100.
> We consume more literature in a year than last generations consumed in a lifetime.
This is probably true if you take the average person, but there have always been people reading their entire lives, and there has been a mass market for bad literature for hundreds of years. Cervantes was decrying the state of literature and the huge amount of poor, samey chivalric books in 1605.
We don't need to fill all of it to have some good shows, especially when those shows are already on top of the production ladder and aren't limited by funding. The top shows should be equivalently "top" in all aspects.
It's because money cannot manufacture good writing. There are reliable processes by which a holder of capital can turn $10 million into good production and $100 million into great production, and you can parallelize this as much as you want. There are enough serviceable directors, editors, camera operators, etc. to scale up your production volumes to dozens of shows and billions of dollars.
There is no such repeatable mechanism for original writing. You can find great writing for nothing and pay through your nose for terrible writing. You can find a great writer who delivers a great concept but then she has nothing else in the tank. Or she does, but you can't find another one of her.
You see billionaires buy their way into being big-time movie producers but you never see them buy their way into being big-time screenwriters.
Absolutely. Good is what you enjoy. Mandalorian is predictable friendly format produced with maximum talent.
You can love just watch just the "production value" and not to be ashamed to like endless repeating of familiar.
Star Wars franchise also provides frequent scenes of characters taking a posture and saying some short sentence that becomes a meme you can share with friends.
> Star Wars franchise also provides frequent scenes of characters taking a posture and saying some short sentence that becomes a meme you can share with friends.
Or you can cram a movie full of it and call it Star Wars IX...
there are a lot of visually/technically impressive movies and tv shows that are (subjectively) awful-mediocre in terms of their substance (see: Avatar)
i don't see how the OP's take on the mandalorian is at odds with the idea that the people who make it are probably pretty good at their jobs
"Content" is to series, movies and films what "grub" is to good food and fine dining. When creators say "content", they in a way degrade the quality of their own work (they should sell it as the equivalent of good food or fine dining, not as "grub"); when those that watch just call it "content" they probably don't have a very deep connection to it: So much better when the viewers come away from something and think of it as a story, and experience, a show, rather than "content".
We are watching The Haunting of Bly Manor at the moment, and I'm not sure if its a creative experiment, or an attempt to just add fill, but OMG, everything is sooo slow and so repetitive. Every scene could be cut in half.
I mean personally I feel The OA season 2 was better in many ways and I was quite excited for Season 3. If only Netflix would be required to release some basic popularity numbers :/
Many shows run too long, yes, but that feels orthogonal at best to the reasoning for Netflix cancellations. Especially as they go and do the opposite with many longer shows that they deem "worth" running into the ground.
Basically, your reasoning seems like a discussion to be had, but I simply don't think that's the conversation happening within the Netflix content team.
Like Walking Dead with top-notch production value.
I don't watch Disney content much but I own their stock because they really know how to milk every drop from the franchise. When they can't milk no more, they wait few years and they restart. With young audience it's just endless source of new minds to corrupt. It's like junk food for the mind.
> I'm sure there are more but they all circle around a common theme. Loss of trust.
Users failing to recommend shows on your platform to possible new users because they were canceled without a resolution. “The OA” is perfect example. Netflix won’t make another dime off that show because anyone that has seen it will adamantly steer people away and anyone that googles it and sees it was canceled on a cliffhanger will have zero interest.
Shows don’t need to run forever, but they need to finish them. If that is 1 season, fine. If that is 6 seasons and a movie, great. But I’m not interested in a show that just stops airing without an ending, just like I’m not interested in reading a book where the publisher just stopped printing chapters at some random point.
Netflix has terrible recommendations and discovery. I watch Netflix almost every day, and I didn’t know about some shows mentioned in the article! I’m constantly surprised when we watch Netflix through my wife’s profile: she gets completely different slice of Netflix, and many shows I would like to see on my profile as well.
I've always found it frustrating that a lot of fantasy has to be in trilogies. I almost always wait for all three books, for the whole story to be finished, before I'll start.
Your comment for some reason compelled me to check up on Patrick Rothfuss, as I occasionally do:
> In July of 2020, Rothfuss's editor and publisher Betsy Wollheim said, "I've never seen a word of book three" and that she doesn't think Rothfuss has written anything since 2014.[10]
People looking at data often ignore that every user uses a specific subset of the total subset of features or content.
Just as a simplistic example, user set A wants content `x` and `y`, user set B wants content `y` and `z` - data shows that `y` is popular, but by removing `x` or `z` they make those users very reluctant to continue using the service.
I've seen it multiple times with services I use where only the common set is kept and then people start loathing and leaving the service.
Trust is also very difficult and expensive to win back. It should be viewed as a fairly non-renewable resource. Even if you do something big to regain trust, that memory will remain as a cognitive anchor. Any semblance of the prior bad behavior will be met with, "of course, that's what they do." Back to square one.
I've been wondering about the "economics" of long running serials for a while.
If you have a new series, all potential viewers are potential viewers. If you have a season 3, the only potential viewers are season 2 watchers. A genuinely huge show like breaking bad or GOT might break this dynamic, as people eventually catch up on old seasons and make the pool bigger. In normal circumstances though, new seasons have limited potential. They also have no upside. Season 4 is not going to be a blockbuster if 1-3 were average.
Maybe it makes sense to shoot single seasons, with multiple seasons being a rare circumstance thing. Just tell a story that fits in 6-12 hours.
Seems like it would be good for creativity, the opposite of cinema's recycling problem. Who says new shows are worse than new seasons. It even seems like a bolder choice to me. No guaranteed audience, but unlimited audience.
You're skipping over something really important about these shows.
Build up and word of mouth. If either of these series' seasons dropped all at once, I'm 100% certain they wouldn't have been nearly as big.
BB Season 4 was the absolute peak of "what's going to happen next???" for the internet communities I was involved in, my family members who were watching, my friends who were watching, casual chats at work. There was suspense in waiting week to week and discussions carried on while we waited.
Netflix releasing episodes all at once has completely destroyed momentum and build up. With everyone watching at their own pace, there's no collective presence. The episodes might have your mental space for a couple days/weeks while you binge, and then it's gone, and people who are also interested are going to be on different timelines.
You're less likely to recommend the show to others 6 months later, because you literally haven't watched or thought about it for 6 months.
I like AppleTV+'s move of doing weekly episodes. Everyone is on the same page again, and you get to share something together.
This is the case in online serials, and books, as well.
There is also an emotional investment factor that comes with long serials, as opposed to single seasons. The more time you put into something--even just in terms of watching it, or reading it--the more emotionally invested you become.
In other words, there is an addiction factor. The addiction factor does not kick in until at least a season 2 or 3.
Lost was a watershed moment in many ways, even though JJ Abrams couldn’t stick the landing. They rushed out the DVDs of season 1 about a month before the season 2 premiere, giving people time to binge the whole show (even the pirates). As long as the streaming services keep the back catalog around, you can always catch up.
I have forgotten which show, but there was a network show I stopped watching because they only had the last six episodes on their app. Once I fell seven episodes behind, I didn’t want to keep going, having missed a chunk of the story arc.
There’s a certain level of curiosity for a show that has survived, say, six seasons. They must have something there if they keep going. Maybe I should check it out? Especially if I’m out of other stuff. But is it going to have a satisfying final episode, peter out, or end ina cliff hanger? The more seasons, the higher the likelihood for a wrap up. Two season shows almost always end abruptly.
OTOH... it's hard to sell Lost or a GOT to someone who wasn't watched it yet. Lame endings are way worse after 8 seasons. Weakens the whole proposition.
I rewatched the entire thing while my partner caught up. I didn't notice it on my first watch, but the first 4 four seasons we're genuinely good, groundbreaking television.
Season 4 is where it started to fall apart. Season 6 through 8 suffered terribly with the shift in writing and structure, and I'd be happy to never watch any of those episodes again.
GOT got stuck in a strange feedback loop with some of its audience, they adopted some kind of cult of the badass and producing shocking or "badass" moments for social media.
Maybe you're right that the books didn't give the tv script writers enough fodder for the shock and awe they wanted, but that just shows they were the wrong people to adapt the story for tv.
I think that after season 4, individual plots/episodes were still fine (the finale of Season 6 was fairly enjoyable). Season 8 was the exception, where it really felt like the show writers were tapping their watch and going "oh wow look at the time".
I wouldn't really have trouble selling GoT. "Didn't finish as strong as you might like but it's worth watching so long as you're OK with graphic sex and violence."
But I agree with Lost. "Really original show but it pretty much goes off the rails."
The issue with GoT is that the weak finish starts in about Season 5, when so many plot lines go completely off the rails, and everyone sticks with it in the hopes that they will be resolved in a reasonable way. You think: "Surely, there's some kind of payoff or consequences to <important, logic-defying event>. After all, in this universe, one person being killed triggers <an avalanche of world-changing things in seasons 1 and 2>".
To everyone's surprise, there isn't any payoff, and there aren't any consequences.
> To everyone's surprise, there isn't any payoff, and there aren't any consequences.
It was not really a surprise. As you said things went off the rails for a while already, that was a sign of a bad ending early on. When I saw how quickly they wrapped the Night King in Season 8 I knew all hopes were lost for a good ending.
Lost's peak was the end episode of Season 1. It was just perfect, emotional, and opening up a whole new world of mysteries with the hatch. Season 2 episode 1 was one of the worst disappointments.
It was clear by the end of season 2 that they were never going to explain anything to you. Ever. I peaced out and have not regretted that decision a day of my life since.
Sure. I could go on at length as to why I liked GoT. It obviously isn't for everyone and it got less strong around the time it outpaced the books. But I would recommend it in general.
Funny, for me it would be the reverse. I recommend Lost, even without a strong ending. GoT I believe it’s not worth to anyone due to its horrible last season.
It's not just the last season which is weak in GOT, it's been weak for 2 seasons before already. If anyone did not notice they seriously need to go back and rewatch the first few seasons to compare.
I agree. It was getting worse, but still an ok show in my opinion. The last season was just terrible.
An awesome show becoming an ok show and then ending as a terrible show is not worth recommending for anyone.
For me Lost, was a great show, with highs and lows, with fairly good last season, with a very disappointing and confusing last episode. Still worth the ride in my opinion.
I agree except on your comment on Lost. Lost was just smoke and mirrors all along, with absolutely no pay-off to the unlimited amount of questions they raised year after year. They really thought the audience had no memories at all.
I think it depends on your personality, are you a person who likes things to hang together coherently and think that when a narrative implies something will be resolved it should be resolved (that is to say if you see Chekhov's gun, they keep talking about it, and it never goes off - do you get really upset?) well, if you're that kind of person you will be pissed off about Lost. You might also dislike GoT (can't say haven't seen, but I'm that kind of person and not going to risk it)
If you feel characterization is the most important thing, and the emotional connection to characters or having highly evocative emotional moments in the narrative is what makes it worthwhile then you will probably like Lost quite a bit, but you might hate GoT (given my understanding that the last season fucked up major characters for shock value - I can't speak directly to it as I haven't watched it)
So based on that my wife still talks about how great Lost was, and if it gets brought up the first words out of my mouth will not be complimentary.
I hate the ending of GOT, but I will also admit that had it been a normal show then ending would have been below average, but not terrible. With the budget GOT had (or could get) it was inexcusably bad, but if you go in knowing that it won't live up to the rest of the series it is not terrible.
this could be true, but it doesn't really make sense to me. a bad ending could certainly sour a movie for me, but a long running TV show could have a hundred hours of quality content that goes out with a fizzle. doesn't make it not worth watching.
I'm not sure I would recommend your examples to a friend though. GOT started going downhill around season 5; it wasn't just the ending that was bad. I'm sure people would disagree with me here, but I think lost hasn't aged very well. it was a good show only by the mediocre standards of '00s TV.
Binge-watching on streaming services is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, people can jump into a show after missing the first season and hearing good things about it. On the other hand, something I might have started watching every week on network tv, I might decide to wait and see. I know I can watch it later for no additional cost if it turns out to be great.
Now the show is under a lot of pressure to maintain a level of buzz around it. But I also might not watch it if it seems like an okay show but the moment has passed.
I low-key wanted to watch GoT when it was on. Now I wouldn't bother, because all the people I could talk to about it have already watched it and are sick of it.
> There’s a certain level of curiosity for a show that has survived, say, six seasons.
Not really. Some shows just get milked dry and pass their expiration dates. For example Walking Dead or even The Simpsons. There’s value to an artist who can tell a story in 1-2 seasons.
I certainly hate it when shows I like get canceled and they don't get a chance to have a final episode that works as a series finale.
A challenge here for a long series though is that it's a pretty high bar to get people to retrospectively binge watch many hours of episodes. But streaming does help. (As time shifting did to some degree before.) The serial model has probably become so popular in part because it's a much better match with streaming (even if everything doesn't drop at once) than with traditional broadcast.
> If you have a new series, all potential viewers are potential viewers. If you have a season 3, the only potential viewers are season 2 watchers.
This is only true for modern TV formats that favor season+ long story arcs so much that any individual episode often contains neither the start nor end of any particular plot and is entirely meaningless outside of its larger contextual role in the series.
In old-fashioned TV, each episode pretty much had to stand on its own as a story and stood a much better chance of hooking new viewers. The downside of that approach of course is that status-quo is God and almost nothing truly interesting ever happens because of it.
The best shows, in my opinion, manage to mix these in a way such that any individual episode can be interesting even to someone who has never seen the show before, while still creating a larger more interesting narrative over time. My personal gold standard for this is Stargate SG-1, which lasted 10 seasons and started with human beings walking through a wormhole to encounter the monster-of-the-week and ended with them zooming across the galaxy in starships and fighting ascended would-be-deities.
I find I can't watch shows with season+ long arcs at all. It always ends up one way: rage-quiting at 3am on a work night never to watch another episode. All due to the fact that usually the episode boundaries are placed in the most suspenseful places.
However, shows like ST:NG or Stargate SG-1 I enjoyed completely. I'd watch one or two episodes at a time and leave feeling good.
I generally prefer long, integrated stories (I have reasonably good discipline about only watching one episode a night). Next Gen and SG-1 both occupy a nice middle ground, because even if the episodes are self-contained, they still engage in character development and reference previous events. Those shows are also nice in that manage to tell compelling stories without being overly melodramatic - so many shows now (especially sci-fi) are just re-skinned soap operas.
Watching shows like ST:TOS are painful for me now. That there is absolutely no connection from one episode to the next means that I have pretty much no investment in what happens. I only watched TOS just to complete the Star Trek lore, but in general I avoid such stories.
While there are examples of shows that needed some time to find their footing (S1 of ST:TNG was mostly pretty forgettable), I don't in general find the powering through season after season until the audience drops off model of TV series especially admirable.
To be honest, even if the show stays strong, you start to hit the 6th and 7th season of 20x1hr seasons and I've probably lost interest. I know there are people who would be happy for their favorite shows to just keep going year after year because they're old friends but I'm not one of them.
This. Even without mentioning the shows that go to 15+ seasons and become formulaic, there are a lot of things out there which have 5-7 seasons with some filler in each season, a couple of poor seasons, the last season usually significantly worse, when 3 tight seasons with a meaningful super-arc would have done better justice to the idea. If you really love it, you can watch it again.
I think it's significant that two much loved, much mourned shows with huge fandoms, Gilmore Girls and Arrested Development were revived on Netflix and neither really came up with any fresh ideas.
I think the only show I've ever seen get revived and still come up with more good stuff is Futurama. And even as much as I loved it, when it ended for the last time, I was satisfied.
Otherwise I just don't get excited about "revivals" anymore.
The only show I want to see 9 seasons of is The Expanse, and thats because they are following a 9 book novel series. Each season (after the weirdly timed first one) tells a complete novel worth of story, and the full series tells a complete and finished tale. No salty half baked Game of Thrones endings or whatever.
It did. At the time, there was basically nothing like it on TV. It wasn't just the scifi stories themselves, it was the budget. Nothing like it had been seen. Star Trek: TOS reruns was a high budget show for the time. It's primary competition is Doctor Who reruns on PBS, and while it may have had good stories at times, it's a series whose idea of "high budget villian" is wrapping a guy in bubble wrap and spray-painting it green.
So at the time, the first season didn't seem so bad. It was probably on par with what most people of the time expected. In hindsight ST:TNG may seem like "a decent show with a bad start", but at the time it seemed like "a pretty decent show that just kept getting better". ST:TNG is part of what set the modern bar, and it's a lot of what set the modern bar if you kind of lump it in with Deep Space Nine.
By modern standards it is weak because the tech of the time didn't support season-long arcs because there was very little rewatchability, but if you try to delve into science fiction prior to ST:TNG, be prepared to... make concessions.
One of the very best features of ST:TNG is it's lack of major season-long arcs. I find shows with deep season long plot to be much too stressful to watch. Unfortunately, this is common with nearly all Netflix shows.
Many shows are like movies, where stopping between two episodes feels like you're stopping a movie right at the most intense spot.
You either binge watch the whole show, or rage-quite at 3am never to watch another episode.
TNG had the right number of multi-episode arcs and recurring characters (especially Q). Also every season finale was a cliffhanger two-parter with the first episode of the next season. Unlike TOS, it felt like things that happened in the episodic TNG episodes (heh) actually mattered in the larger world, even when it wasn't directly a part of a story arc.
DS9 is my favorite though, partially because of the story arc. It was also done quite brilliantly, with the story arc always being present, but not really solidifying into something substantial right away. This along with Babylon 5 were amazing. Prior to these shows, the only television sci-fi I had ever seen with a story arc was Robotech. Battlestar Galatica (original) had something of an arc, but was more like TNG.
I found out that I personally prefer two types of shows:
- ones with a season-long arc. This gives the authors time and space to develop the characters, and reach a satisfying conclusion. But these often suffer from pacing issues, because mid-season episodes become filler.
- ones with episodic stories and with a season-long arc (a problem or a villain that keeps popping up). This helps with pacing, but still lets authors build up momentum and develop characters and stories. These often suffer from underdeveloped arcs though and unresolved season cliffhangers hinting at "that arc we developed, it's so much bigger than you thought".
Remember, there was a huge pent-up demand for a new Star Trek TV series when TNG came out. To the degree that many, myself included, were willing to overlook a rather uneven Season One.
I assume that's been less the case for the newer Star Trek universe series. I don't actually know the numbers but the TV landscape is too different to really compare anyway.
Added: As someone who remembers watching TNG when it first came out, my recollection is that the reaction to "Encounter at Farpoint" (S1E1) was along the lines of a bit disappointing but certainly has promise. And it's new Star Trek on TV!
Agree. Think about The Shield, Sons of Anarchy, Peaky Blinders which had brilliant early seasons, but then had a formulaic season arc. Here are the new bad guys -- worse than the old bad guys, even though we told you last season's bad guys were the worst, we got re-upped for a season and now we have Armenians, neo-Nazi's or American Mafiosi. Whatever it takes to squeeze out a few more episodes.
If things like Star Trek were canceled season three, it'd never have reached such masses, it was a niche show at start but now there's even actual new generations watching The Next Generation. Long term decisions are hard, but if you take no risks, it's guaranteed nothing will pay off. Accidentally killing a next cult series or movie would be a huge misfortune.
I think this depends on the structure of the series.
When all TV was by appointment (no easy way to rewatch), series emphasized self-contained episodes. You could watch half of the episodes of any season of Star Trek or TNG and still enjoy it. Same with other popular shows like Magnum PI, Law and Order, etc. There was some ongoing charater development, but it was pretty slow and minimal.
As rewatching got easier (essentially once market penetration of VCRs got high enough), popular series started introducing more serial story lines. X Files is a great example; it started off with mostly "monster of the week" self-contained stories, and then over time added "lore"--ongoing serial storylines.
On digital platforms, watching and rewatching are basically the same thing, so a series can be 100% serial storyline. Essentially, they are very long movies that are released one chapter at a time.
This has affected movies too. There's no way something like the MCU would have worked as a concept without very easy ways for viewers coming into the middle to go back and watch or re-watch earlier movies.
Soap operas in the age of pre-internet appointment television dealt with this problem in an interesting way. If you missed an episode or missed the entire week, you could always buy the latest issue of Soap Opera Digest which would have a summary of the week (or month's) story arc. Once a year or so, there would be magazines which would summarize the entire story arc of the show so new viewers could catch up. On a side note, if anyone is bored at work today, look up the Wikipedia entry for a long-running soap, like Days of Our Lives, which will have a synopsis of the entire story. It's quite epic, silly, and tawdry with a decades-long, no-breaks, no-jumps storyline.
I think for prime time viewing, Hill Street Blues was the first semi-serialized drama intended for viewers outside of the soap market. It had an interesting structure with A, B, and C plots. A plot gets resolved in a single episode. B plot is a 3-4 episode arc. And C plot lasts for the season. And then there was continuity from season to season. The show was decently successful, and paved the way for what we have now. One thing I find interesting is how many older viewers at the time thought it was too fast paced, too complex, and didn't enjoy it. They were too conditioned to the episodic norms. I'm sure the show would seem slow now to modern binge watchers.
The other thing going on that probably affects some of these complex serialized shows is the Internet/Web. I suspect a lot of people would drop out of some of these shows that you almost have to watch each episode carefully twice in order to understand what's going on. Recaps and discussion boards make some of these shows more enjoyable and comprehensible IMO.
(This is one of those pop culture facts I didn't realize until recently, as I never liked the original series, but adore Next Generation. All of its cultural impact was from just three seasons, and possibly most of its immediate impact from the first.)
It was actually cancelled after its second season but a huge fan reaction persuaded the executives to renew it for a third, which was probably a mistake as that was by far the weakest season of the show.
I struggled with TOS since I watched TNG/DS9/VOY first. But then I started to enjoy it. It is still enjoyable for those retrofuturistic vibes, reminds me very much of classics like Time Machine or Forbidden Planet.
> If things like Star Trek were canceled season three, it'd never have reached such masses
This comment strikes me as very strange. I guess you're talking about TNG? But the Original Series was canceled after the third season. Nonetheless, Star Trek reached the masses. The reruns in syndication became more popular than the original airings, and countless films and spinoffs resulted.
I recently listened to a podcast interview with George Takei. One of the things he mentioned is that because ratings for TOS were so low, it became a cheap filler 5 nights a week in syndication. THAT'S when the show really took off and became a phenomenon.
The Original Series ended in 1969. It was truly dead. But the fans kept it "alive" for a decade. Its popularity rose through reruns, conventions, etc. The Motion Picture was released in 1979, followed by The Wrath of Khan in 1982. The Next Generation started in 1987. These weren't pauses in production. The films never would have gotten made if not for the rabid fan base, and TNG would never have gotten made if not for the popularity of the films.
I'm no TV show buff, but what I gather from my friends, your premise is pretty much false in many cases.
First, in the age of binge watching, people might be specifically looking for shows with tons of episodes/seasons out to sink their teeth in.
Second, some shows take a while to "warm up" and get the word of mouth out before they catch on. Some shows might be dozens of episodes in before they become wildly popular. You say that Breaking Bad and GOT break the dynamic, but I think it's far more common that very popular shows do so after they've been out for a while.
Third, with episodic formats it doesn't matter if a show is long running, people can jump in or out at any given time.
Fourth, people might enter your target demographic over time. You say that the potential viewers of season 3 are the viewers of season 2, but what about a new batch of viewers of season 1? Let's say your demographic is young adults. Every year you have teens entering your target demographic, and you could count those as potential viewers of your show. And again, on the age of the internet, is dead easy to start viewing a show from the beginning at any time.
Long-runners work to the extent that they are soap operatic and viewers can tune in for a single arc and feel happy. Look at manga and its various adaptations to screen for examples of how this plays out long term: While many successful books will get a "one cour" (12/13 episode season) TV anime treatment, enough to be an advertisement and depict some major scenes in abridged fashion, the most popular ones get the 100+ episode exhaustive adaptation. The vast majority of those are shonen battle series of the Dragon Ball Z mold. In those, expectations are set for each arc being relatively contained and focused on the development of a few characters or enlargement of the overall cast. The plots can be complex but usually not so much that you are relying on knowing the whole thing, because it will helpfully flashback that information in nearly every episode. And like a wrestling lineup, if one character has exhausted themselves and their development, you just sideline them and add a new one. The individual plot arcs can say something on their own but they work through an overall supporting framework and formula.
The stuff that's relying on being dense and literary, with an overall point being made, tends to need to get the job done within a few hours of runtime. 6-12 hours, like you say.
Anthology shows might be a decent balance between the two. At least personally an existing show has to be getting really good reviews for me to care enough to catch up on previous seasons, but if it's possible to jump right into season 3 then I'd be more inclined to check it out.
IIRC American Horror Story had increased viewership in the 2nd and then again in the 3rd season, but it did eventually go downhill. Ryan Murphy shows are also pretty weird though, it would be nice to see the seasonal anthology format in broader contexts. I'm optimistic about the Haunting of Hill House series but that's again horror.
Used to be normal for that answer to be "yes" - series were largely episodic so you could jump in at any point, with the longer plots lightly threaded through the episodes. Then, later in the season once people had settled in to their weekly shows, those longer plots could become more prominent and get resolved in/around the season finale.
> Maybe it makes sense to shoot single seasons, with multiple seasons being a rare circumstance thing. Just tell a story that fits in 6-12 hours.
This actually would be a perfect fit for me - I noticed that it became off-putting for me when I see that show has more than two-three seasons. I'm not sure what changed because it wasn't like this before - probably it's just my increasing age and number of accumulated experiences from books etc.
With streaming you can jump in. But the prospect of deciding to watch through some series currently on season 4 by catching up on maybe 60 hours of previous content seems pretty daunting.
I'm probably one of the guilty people who are generally happier with bite, or at least light meal, sized content.
I find the overall economics of subscription TV services like Netflix to be fascinating. Look at this from Netflix's perspective:
- Viewers watching shows costs money to pay for networking.
- Producings shows cost money.
- Consumers pay the same amount regardless of how much they watch.
Sort of like a gym membership, the ideal Netflix customer never actually uses Netflix. But, of course, if Netflix had no shows and someone didn't use it at all, they'll eventually cancel the subscription. If Netflix were the only game in town, then its incentive would be to produce the fewest, shittiest (i.e. cheapest) shows they can and have its customers watch just enough to not bother canceling.
But now that there are other subscription services, they have to compete against them. Customers can and do pay for multiple subscription services, but there is an innate limit to how many it makes sense to have in parallel: your watch time is finite.
I witnessed this in game dev when MMOs first got big. There was a big rush where every game company thought MMOs would be the next big thing. But almost all of them died, because it turns out even gamers who love MMOs can really only afford the time to keep up with one or two. The market was a lot more competitive and limited than they realized.
This is less true for TV shows since there is less social interaction and need to "commit" to a show than to a game. You don't have to worry about leaving your guild behind, etc. But there is still a limit to how many shows a person can watch, which means the marginal value of adding another subscription goes down very quickly.
I think that's the main thing driving Netflix's strategy. They aren't trying to earn customers so much as they are trying to starve competitors and claim territory.
To claim territory, what they want to do is soak up as much watch time as possible. If people are constantly watching Netflix shows—even if they barely enjoy doing so!—it makes their other subscriptions less utilized and thus less valuable.
Given that, I think it makes some sense for them to just throw a ton of shit at the wall and see what sticks. Their main goal is that is to have something just good enough to watch show up in a search result when a viewer is trying to decide what to spend their evening on.
Of course, none of this incentivizes telling meaningful, important, gratifying stories about the human condition. But Netflix, like every large corporation, doesn't care on whit about that. They turn human attention into shareholder value. The fact that they happen to create films ("content" as they say) to do so is mostly incidental, in the same way that cattle ranchers happen to buy a lot of corn.
When Netflix first came out with streaming, there was certainly the Netflix effect. You mention Breaking Bad, they didn't take off until they were added to Netflix, so people could catch up on the past seasons. Same thing happened with Shameless from Showtime.
This is why I prefer mini-series to full on series. It's a complete self-contained story.
There weren't that many multi-season shows that I loved and had a decent ending - usually it gets milked to death that main actors quit and then either show cancelled (Castle) or get a new actor and suck (x-files).
Some shows have awful resurrection - 24, I loved the entire thing except for "reboot" and last season.
Some shows have honest writers, BSG reboot was clearly getting too convoluted and had to be ended before it cancelled.
Some shows try to pivot to tumbler fanfics for content - Supernatural. Which was dumb because people were interested in such stories were already watching it.
> If you have a new series, all potential viewers are potential viewers. If you have a season 3, the only potential viewers are season 2 watchers.
That doesn't always top factor. Some shows can generate money outside of screen - merch. That's how supernatural stayed so long.
Netflix is sowing its own demise through shitty content and the worst fucking content discovery system ever.
First Netflix UI is anti-consumer and regularly hides things or makes them difficult/impossible to find. Worst algorithm driven interface after Amazon. It’s truly awful for discovery as you can’t ever be sure what you’re seeing is all that’s available. I fucking hate it.
This wouldn’t be such a problem if they didn’t grade shows success on their initial views... but they do. So things are hard to discover so I don’t watch them immediately or can’t find them again if I wait a week or two.
I have stopped watching any and all Netflix originals because they will be judiciously cancelled save animated titles because it seems cheap enough for them to produce or something like the Witcher where they hopefully can’t fuck it up so badly it gets canceled before a decent run.
Then again I wait and save the last few episodes shows I really like instead of binging them but that only hurts them more and hastens their cancellations. So then I don’t watch them, this too hastens their cancellations.
So when watching Netflix shows you have two options:
1.) Is the show epically well funded AND staring big name actors from cinema? Okay, maybe won’t be canceled. E.g. the Witcher.
2.) Is the show so cheap to make they’ll do it just because they need to add content? E.g. Castlevania
IMHO, Netflix is willfully creating the rope from which it will hang itself.
The reason behind this is widely known. If you could easily scroll through their entire catalog as a list, it'd feel kinda like walking through a small, underwhelming Blockbuster.
The whole point of the UI is to give you this un-ending sense of abundance, ie. "You like 1980s action comedies? Scroll through 20 of them here! Like 1990s female-driven drama? Here's 10 we picked for you! Keep scrolling! We have everything!"
In reality, their catalog (while having about 10,000 items) is quite limited in terms of big name films and TV shows you'd recognize.
But in reality what happens is that it recommends the same shows over and over. So pretty soon the 50 or so shows fall into two categories. Things you have no desire to watch or things you've already watched. Making it feel like the catalog is _EVEN_ smaller than it already is. Why it puts things you have already watched into the normal categories when they are already in the "watch it again" category I will never know. Plus, if you happen to watch say horror/scifi/action movies, you will find a movie sitting in three+ different rows reducing the overall selection even further.
I sometimes scroll around on the wifes account to see if there is anything interesting there, because that is about the only place I ever see anything new on netflix. My account never shows me anything that isn't really bad b-movie fiction and documentaries. Where as my wife only gets the comedy and romance, the kids get all the "family" movies and animation. <sigh>
There is probably more there, but the only way to find it is 3rd party sites. If I happen to type something into the search bar there is pretty much a 99% chance netflix won't have it. At least on prime they seem to have a fairly deep catalog of older movies, even if 3/4 of them are pay per view.
This is even worse outside US where Netflix doesn't have the license for most of its catalog. The recommendations are 90% Netflix originals, 10% decade old or older movies, and 1 movie from last year. And the catalog is... the same.
Netflix is trying to bait you into watching their original series. Just yesterday on my Xbox app the continue watching section dissappeared from the screen. Gone. I had to search, which is a painful process on an xbox, for the show I was watching the day before, because it was nowhere on the front page. But boy where there a lot of "You might also like" type sections cluttering the screen instead.
They did this to drive you away from watching expensive (to license) content or to help drive down views for content negotiations. To limit exposure to how little they have in their catalogue. It has zero to do with anything else. It has now just been beaten into us as “okay,” when it’s not and never should have been.
You must be lovely to work with all that brilliant assumptive power you’ve got.
This is why, for the most part, I don't start watching streaming service exclusives until their sophomore season is complete and they haven't been cancelled.
Of course there are few exceptions like Cobra Kai or The Mandalorian where it's evident that the concept is pretty solid and that the show is bonafide hit from the first 10 minutes.
But yeah, like for every Netflix hit there's like 10 or more less than promising shows.
It's really becoming a graveyard. And when you realize that you can't even give them a shot because you know that even if they're decent there won't be any resolution or closure in the form of a series ending then it makes you not wanna even start to watch them.
Seriously, they should fund less shows but really make sure they're quality shows. They should act like HBO in short.
Why do people like the Mandalorian? It's really just not that good. The action sequences are very low quality. The writing is fairly mundane faux-gritty tropes. Would people like it if it didn't have the star wars backdrop? Does the star wars backdrop even make that much sense?
I know this one won't bother many people but I particularly hated their depiction of the bounty hunter droid, which was orders of magnitude more competent than any other droid in the universe. Droids in star wars aren't immaculate AI like other Sci Fi. I hated that they used this as a plot point.
People like the Mandalorian because they like Star Wars and they want more Star Wars CONTENT. If you like Star Wars, and you like CONTENT, you'll like Mandalorian: bona fide Star Wars Content.
Would people like Mad Men if it were in today's setting?
Setting is a big draw. I don't just watch Don Draper and Pete Campbell be petty, I escape to the 1960s and experience the ups and downs (more downs honestly) of the time period.
Likewise with the Mandalorian. A bar fight is a bar fight, yet the opening scene of the Mandalorian is a bar fight in the Star Wars universe, with a different set of rules and personalities. Being immersed in that itself is fun, it's why Galaxy's Edge at Disneyworld is so great. The fact that it has enough of a plot to be interesting sort of just seals the deal.
I share your questions on the show's quality. I ultimately chalked many things that made me tilt my head to some idea of the show's 'style' and decided to re-suspend my disbelief, but still.
On the bounty hunder droid...what about it came across as an immaculate AI? It had machine-precision with firearms and apparently a pretty interesting social-relationships module, but the re-training montage showed a lot of it's limitations.
Mostly this. Star wars droids don't have machine precision. They don't 360 no scope everyone in a room and easily win 10:1 battles without taking any cover. The bounty hunter droid is far more competent than any human in a fight in this series, which feels wrong given these mandalorians are supposed to be legendary bounty hunters or something.
I'm sure someone's ready to jump in with extended universe stuff to prove me wrong, but let's caveat that by noting Luke nullifies black holes in that series, so the similarities between power levels are hardly apples to apples
It kinda undermines the premise of General Grievous too imo. The reason that he was so powerful was because he was a cyborg, with machine precision but also organic strategy making that made him far stronger than any droid.
Looking at the first movie (phantom menace). There are super powerful droids with double guns and shields https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Droideka The only reason the main characters don't get obliterated is because they are master jedi who managed to deflect a few repeated hits and then barely slipped away and escaped.
The next episodes 2 and 3 largely feature battle droid https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/B2-RP_battle_droid that are owning the battlefield. They're again not killing everyone because they only show up in battle against highly skilled jedis and in the full scale battle between armies having rockets and much stronger weaponry.
They have plenty of powerful droids. But those droids win by virtue of sheer firepower, shields, and numbers. You don't get the sense that they're individually more competent than a human. They're just soldiers that happen to be robots. 1-3 is generally not aligned with 4-9 either way and this series takes place in 6.1.
If we're in a world where the "robot advantage" exists, you'd have to question why humans pilot the ships, or man the turets, or what not.
I think this is one of those "rule of cool" things.
Though I will say, sure IG-88 may have been better at shooting accurately, but his response to being surrounded in the first episode was to initiate a self-destruct. Whereas you have Mando showing some higher-level thinking and turns an "unwinnable" fight into a winnable one.
And it's awesome too look at it: the way it was shoot - with the huge screens as background - it feels and looks REAL, so finally it's not CGI. Augmented reality, one could say.
> Would people like it if it didn't have the star wars backdrop? Does the star wars backdrop even make that much sense?
The bulk of the plot would work fine if it were space-bounty-hunter-with-angry-people-after-him, plus friends and a macguffin. Star Wars flavoring seems like the main way that this differentiates it from Cowboy Bebop (space bounty hunter in the solar system, hops between planets...).
A big part of why the show is good is the mysterious "what's under the mask" aspect. We've had Boba/Jango Fett for decades, but it's really neat to see the expansion of this lore about the mandalorian culture -- why they always stay masked, etc. SW nerds like me often find lore tidbits delicious.
The Mandalorian also happens to have ridiculously good production values compared to most shows -- I'm watching a movie in serial form. (See also Altered Carbon.) It also has interesting characters that I am curious about (both heroes and villains), with backstories I'd like to hear more about. THAT part doesn't need to be Star Wars. It could be samurai, or space privateers, or drama on a space station (DS9), and as long as it's done well, I'll want to watch it.
Well at least there's consistency. I thought Altered Carbon (the live action netflix version) was terrible too! For similar reasons. Really poorly executed action scenes. Underdeveloped drama.
> hated their depiction of the bounty hunter droid, which was orders of magnitude more competent
Reminds me of the badass maintenance droid in Rogue 1. On a second viewing I said, "Wait... WTF? Why did the Empire ever bother with stormtroopers when this one droid is 10x smarter and stronger than a squad of them?"
This revelation basically ruined the movie for me, and to some extent the universe, although that was already a garbage heap at that point.
The movies have forgotten they are fantasy, and come to the conclusion they are Sci-Fi.
The worst moment, by far, was in the 2nd of the latest trilogy, when the chinese girl (Rose?) monologues about how the real evil in the world was greedy war profiteers and evil capitalists. ffs. This is a universe in which the more powerful faction outwardly identifies itself as the Dark Side, fueled by the power of Hatred, and known for destroying planets at a time.
(although the real worst part was, surprise, 100,000 star destroyers, all of which can destroy planets)
>When the chinese girl (Rose?) monologues about how the real evil in the world was greedy war profiteers and evil capitalists.
Don't forget that the inclusion of the evil capitalists was in the context of subplot which contributed absolutely nothing to the main plot. They really shoehorned that garbage in there.
Well, the Last Jedi was a special kind of awful, made by a guy who apparently hated Star Wars and had a strong political agenda. AKA: "One of these things is not like the others."
It's so far removed, that even Jar Jar Abrams (destroyer of franchises) tried to fix it. I don't consider TLJ "canon," to use the lingo.
> The movies have forgotten they are fantasy, and come to the conclusion they are Sci-Fi.
You seem to have forgotten that it's entirely possible for "fantasy" to have more complex themes than "evil space wizards vs. good space wizards," or that something must be only one or the other. Star Wars is solidly both, and as far as its sci-fi aesthetic goes, it's more grounded than Star Trek, which runs entirely on nonsensoleum sometimes.
>The worst moment, by far, was in the 2nd of the latest trilogy, when the chinese girl (Rose?) monologues about how the real evil in the world was greedy war profiteers and evil capitalists. ffs.
I mean, the actress is American born, of Vietnamese descent, but sure, Chinese is basically the same thing, right?
And that was one of the best themes of the Last Jedi. Of course there would be war profiteers - we already know this because the OT gave us Mos Eisley and Jabba the Hutt and bounty hunters. "greedy war profiteers and evil capitalists" aren't at all unknown to the franchise. The problem here is this sudden dump of complexity should have been a throughline with Rose for the entire trilogy. It certainly would have been better than "This time the Empire is even more fascist and the Death Star is huge."
>This is a universe in which the more powerful faction outwardly identifies itself as the Dark Side, fueled by the power of Hatred, and known for destroying planets at a time.
The "faction" doesn't identify itself as the Dark Side. It identifies itself as the Sith. the Dark Side and Light Side are aspects of the Force, like yin and yang (in fact, probably exactly like that since so many elements of SW mysticism are Zen Buddhism with the serial numbers worn off.)
Also the Sith and the Dark Side weren't known for "destroying planets at a time." The Death Star was built by the Empire, and yes, while Palpatine turned out to be a Sith (as a retcon) they even made a point of having Darth Vader point out how insignificant the "technological terror" of the Death Star was compared to the Force - not the Dark Side specifically, but the Force in its entirety.
>(although the real worst part was, surprise, 100,000 star destroyers, all of which can destroy planets)
Yeah, that was stupid.
But Rose wasn't, she was just badly misused as a character.
> You seem to have forgotten that it's entirely possible for "fantasy" to have more complex themes than "evil space wizards vs. good space wizards," or that something must be only one or the other. Star Wars is solidly both, and as far as its sci-fi aesthetic goes, it's more grounded than Star Trek, which runs entirely on nonsensoleum sometimes.
Not really. I mean, yes, fantasy as a genre can obviously explore deeper themes and does so all the time. But Star Wars is a morally unambiguous universe. It really, truly, does not fit to try and have a nuanced discussion of morality while other more important characters literally commune with the universe and draw power from the sides of light vs. dark. Whatever themes you draw out are just not supported by the environment around them.
Nobody cares about greedy capitalist when evil space wizard is standing next to him.
> I mean, the actress is American born, of Vietnamese descent, but sure, Chinese is basically the same thing, right?
As a mixed Asian, shrug, whatever. I am willing to bet a substantial amount of money she existed only to appeal to chinese audiences. If she's actually vietnamese, sure, good to know.
> And that was one of the best themes of the Last Jedi. Of course there would be war profiteers - we already know this because the OT gave us Mos Eisley and Jabba the Hutt and bounty hunters. "greedy war profiteers and evil capitalists" aren't at all unknown to the franchise. The problem here is this sudden dump of complexity should have been a throughline with Rose for the entire trilogy. It certainly would have been better than "This time the Empire is even more fascist and the Death Star is huge."
If you're saying it wouldn't have been dumb if it was just an entirely different story, then sure.
> The "faction" doesn't identify itself as the Dark Side. It identifies itself as the Sith.
The leader of the Sith is called "Dark Lord of the Sith". They identify as as ON the dark side all the time if you really think that's an important distinction.
> Also the Sith and the Dark Side weren't known for "destroying planets at a time." The Death Star was built by the Empire, and yes, while Palpatine turned out to be a Sith (as a retcon) they even made a point of having Darth Vader point out how insignificant the "technological terror" of the Death Star was compared to the Force - not the Dark Side specifically, but the Force in its entirety.
I really think you're splitting hairs here. The bad guys are the ones who destroy planets. The good guys are the ones who try to prevent the bad guys from destroying planets.
> But Rose wasn't, she was just badly misused as a character.
Meh. I was happy when her first appearance in the final movie is basically. She seems like a boring character to me.
Because that's what people like sometimes. I don't want every show I watch to be this cerebral reinvention of theater, sometimes I just want to sit back and enjoy some comfort-food eye-candy. The Mandalorian fit this perfectly for me.
I like westerns. The action sequences are generally low quality, the writing leans on gritty tropes and they’re often just not that good but I like them. I like Star Wars. It’s action scenes are generally poor and the writing is stereotyped and the movies, more often than not, are bad but I like them.
I like Star Wars the Western. It’s exactly what I want out of the loner ambiguous good guy narrative crossed with space monk/wizard galaxy.
two words... baby f*cking yoda. seriously, i have tons of friends who hate star wars but love baby yoda and they watch it for the cuteness.
if there is one thing that disney knows how to do is to create a story around a product, that product being baby yoda. netflix isn't even in the same universe as disney when it comes to content creation.
I totally agree with you. I feel as if netflix doesn't press their writers and the creatives enough to develop a full arc for a story.
It seems like every shows' got an idea. And then once they get funding they start thinking through the details. I know it would be a lot of ask and probably expensive but people write novels all the time. Netflix could break the mold by looking for stories that fit something like 24 chapters / episodes and having a complete 'thing' at the end of it. The could then have the arc of the story to work with and just produce three seasons of content to spread the risk.
I don't think any platform will fund a creative project without a stated beginning, middle and end. It's just that Netflix pays upfront for the idea, so the writers and directors don't have control over when to finish the story.
If they're told to space this idea out over 5 seasons and paid by the season, what else can they do except to live the dream of making original content and hope for the best?
> Seriously, they should fund less shows but really make sure they're quality shows. They should act like HBO in short.
I doubt they would, it's seems opposite to their business model - try to beat the odds w/ lots of content and A/B testing everything.
Netflix seems to be sitting in an awkward position between YouTube and HBO. They need to pick winners to compete w/ HBO, and production/licensing costs have to be cheaper to compete w/ random YouTuber producing hours of content.
That's a very American perspective. In the UK a series is usually only 6 episodes and few shows last more than two or three series.
Compare the original UK version of the Office and its American facsimile and I think you'll see it's much better to go out on a high rather than drag on endlessly. If the Simpsons had ended after a couple of seasons it would have been one of the best shows ever, instead the brain dead drivel they churn out for it now just continually diminishes its early greatness.
But in the UK everyone knows that it's only going to be 3 series at 6 episodes each, and so that's how the show is written. The viewer gets a satisfying arc.
Netflix just pulls the plug. This means you get a weird kludged together final episode to try to pull stuff together or they just leave it and there's no resolution for a lot of stuff.
I do agree that many of these shows would be better if they were written in the UK style. A lot of US shows now just feel woolly as they meander through the plot.
This way of writing, at least the overall arc, really shows. Ideally, writers know when to stop. The Revenge had such an ending, it was Season 3 if I remember well, before it turned into yet another soap opera. Babylon 5 on the other hand was a great example of having the whole 5 seasons basically written before they started production.
This is one reason I really like the "miniseries" format. It's a broad enough label that it can include something a few 1-hr episodes long or 8 of them. I guess at the longer end, they're closer to a "season" of a typical show, but the idea is that it's a complete story arc with a defined beginning and end.
I love how modern formats allow for stories to be told where they otherwise wouldn't fit into a single film or work as a weekly recurring series. I've always felt that a movie is like a short story: you're dropped into the plot and the background is exposed through the course of action. Longer formats like the miniseries can tell a story more on the scale of a full novel.
When you get into stuff like "The Walking Dead" where it theoretically starts off like a novel but keeps renewing and keeps rehashing the same basic plot points for years, it's like one of those novel series where they just keep cranking out new sequels as long as people are buying them, quality be damned.
Another great example. I lost interest when they introduced Neegan. He could have been such a great villain in theory, kind of the evil twin version of Rick Grimes. Instead he turned into that unbeatable-because-authors-want-him-unbeatable kind of comic villain.
Babylon 5 is actually a great example of what happens when you mess with cancellations.
During the production of season 4, JMS (the creator) was given to understand that season 5 was unlikely to happen. So he had to cram most of the rest of his plot into that season.
Having such a powerful, story-packed season 4 meant it did really well. So they put season 5 back on.
But he'd already used up (most of) the story he wanted to tell, because they told him he wasn't getting a season 5. So the season 5 we got ended up being a bit weak and wandering, with only the last few episodes (which were part of what would have been the ending of season 4, if he hadn't found out in time that there would be a season 5) having the same strength and memorability as the season 4 episodes.
It also meant (IIRC) that they lost some important actors, like Claudia Christian, for season 5. If Ivanova had been able to stay on to be B5's captain after Sheridan became President, the final season would have been much stronger.
> But he'd already used up (most of) the story he wanted to tell, because they told him he wasn't getting a season 5. So the season 5 we got ended up being a bit weak and wandering, with only the last few episodes (which were part of what would have been the ending of season 4, if he hadn't found out in time that there would be a season 5) having the same strength and memorability as the season 4 episodes.
All of season 5 was in the original plan as the side-stories for seasons 4 and 5, not written after the series was renewed. That's mainly why the filmed season 4 was so action-packed - the main plot wasn't really compressed in terms of screen time, instead there were no side plots.
Aside from that, the finale, Sleeping in Light, was filmed during season 4, that's why Claudia Christian was in it. They found out about the renewal just barely in time to use some season 5 budget to film The Deconstruction of Falling Stars, which only then became the season 4 finale. I think that was really the only thing not in the original plan.
Thanks for refreshing my memory! Loosing Claudia Christian resembles, for different reasons, loosing Terry Farrel for season 7 of DS9. Which, if you ask me, had quite some impact on Gul Dukats story arch. Whcih wasn't the best in season 7 after he was such a great villain over the whole series before.
Netflix has done similar stuff with Ascension, The Witcher, Altered Carbon and others.
I do prefer quality over quantity, and more episodes per season isn't IMO a good thing. Having tight focus, telling a complete story from beginning to end, is more important than adding a lot of unnecessary filler.
I wasn't the biggest fan of Altered Carbon, but thought Ascension was exemplary. While it finished with an ending that could have set it up for a second series, the story it told was complete, and leaving some mystery is no bad thing. I'm currently reading the Witcher books, and the series was a reasonable adaption of the content of the first two books of short stories. There's plenty more material for the future, but what was done in eight episodes was decent and self-contained. Way better value than a movie ticket.
What I like about these short series is that they are free to take risks and make niche stuff that doesn't cater to the lowest common denominator. There's plenty of stuff on Netflix that doesn't appeal to me, and that's OK. There's also stuff that would appeal were it not poorly-written and produced dross. I would really prefer their "data driven" decision making to bear in mind the lasting appeal of these productions within their niche interest, rather than only using the initial response as an indicator of long-term success. Some of the best productions took years to develop a good following, and yet were successful beyond expectations.
It sounds like you only watched the first season of Altered Carbon. If true, just stop there. They made a second season with a slashed budget and also dialed back the sex and violence, making it overall very lackluster. Then, surprise, they cancelled it.
I watched both. I didn't particularly enjoy the first (just not my thing), but the second was boring. I did see it through out of curiosity, but I agree it's no surprise that it was cancelled.
For many of these productions, if the story has been told and it ended on a high note, then I think it would be better to draw a line under it, and move onto a brand new idea and explore new concepts rather than squeeze every last little bit out of something that's not going to advance much upon what's already been done. Better that than jumping the shark.
Good observation the lack of sex and violence in the second one. Could be true. I thought the new "sleeve" actor killed the second. The one in the first season was much much more convincing.
I agree that the new actor wasn’t nearly as strong, but I think a well written season with all the same flash and a full budget to do it would have saved it overall. It is really a shame that they hamstrung it like that. It would have been smarter to either leave it as a miniseries, or commit to a quality second season. As it is now, I’m less likely to recommend it and I add caveats to my recommendation. They eacked out a few more viewers by making a half assed second season, but hurt the brand long term. Which is what I think they are missing in general, that they are not properly counting the people that leave or fail to recommend Netflix because of a culmination of half-baked and abandoned shows that finally break the camel’s back.
They are doing the same thing to their signature series "Stranger Things". The first season was pure genius, they should have just ended it there with a "and they all live happily ever after". Each following season just ruins the series further.
Yes, the second season was terrible. I stumbled on Altered Carbon on netflix, and enjoyed it in fits and starts. Taken as a whole the first season has some great moments.
The local library had the audiobooks, so I listened to them on a long car trip between the first and second season being released. The writing isn't great but the stories definitely have their moments, even if its smothered in the usual "action flick" mindset.
I think netflix would have done a lot better to just stick to the plot of Broken Angels for the second season. But I think there was some rumbling on the message boards that it would have actually cost real cash to pull that off and netflix apparently wasn't willing to do it. So its the worst kind of serial scifi rubbish.
Its really too bad. The trash they invented as filler, was just that. But you can see their problem, the first book took place on an earth city, so they didn't need a lot of custom sets, and loads of CG.
My wife signed up for the hbo trial for a month and then canceled it. That was just about perfect. I watched the last season of game of thrones and a couple other things, and was getting bored with it just as the trial ended. I actually think that model might be the right one for the entire streaming ecosystem. Just rotate the streaming services every couple months.
Oh, Altered Carbon - great premise, totally failed 2nd part of the season, as for me. I don't know if the books are as bad, but Carbon was total disappointment for me.
Thing is with a lot of American sitcoms is on a long enough timeline they just become soap operas.
UK Office is a concise and witty comedy idea expressed in the correct amount of time the idea deserves.
If you look at the later seasons of shows like US Office, Parks and Rec and similar shows, what you're watching has more in common with a soap opera than a sitcom. I feel I can almost count the exceptions to this on one hand.
Agreed. IMO the first few seasons of The Office (US) and Parks & Recreation were the best, and they went downhill over time. Very few shows can sustain quality over time. For sitcoms... maybe Seinfeld?
Yes, but UK series are normally tied up neatly at the end and not left unresolved. If Netflix did the same, I doubt people would have a problem with it.
edit: it's also purely a matter of opinion, but I got a lot more pure enjoyment from the US version of the Office than the UK one. They had more time to develop the characters and figure out what was truly funny about the show. Sure it devolved into sentimental fan service in the last few seasons, but at it's peak I was laughing way harder at the American version than I ever did for the British one.
The Simpsons is actually a pretty good counterexample. The first season is so-so, the show didn’t really hit its stride until seasons 3-8 according to IMDB ratings: https://i.redd.it/p0or3k2rv6dz.jpg
If The Simpsons was British, none of the best episodes would have been made.
The decline of The Simpsons from brilliant American sitcom into mindless consumerist drivel happens at around season 9 and is well documented as “Zombie Simpsons”: https://deadhomersociety.com/zombiesimpsons/
> I think you'll see it's much better to go out on a high rather than drag on endlessly.
I don't. This might be true with dramas where the plot is a big component of it, but certainly not for episodic comedies.
Yeah, the Simpsons isn't something I care to watch anymore, and the Office's final seasons without Michael Scott weren't as good. But I'd still much rather have more episodes of content I enjoy than less for the sake of "the complete package". It sucks when a show gets cancelled without an end, but while we're here, the American Office had a fine ending and I'm much happier with the many seasons of it over the British one.
In Pakistan, TV dramas are usually one season of 10-24 episodes. They are mostly written or sketched in detail by one primary writer, before shooting begins. Stories are fully completed and loose ends tied off by the end of the series.
I agree; you can really see the writing quality diminish when shows just go on forever. The original 'vision' is completely lost and you can almost hear the discussions between writers as they have to come up with new plot twists to make the story believable for yet another series/season.
That's why I thoroughly enjoyed the German show Dark. They planned 3 series/seasons and that's what we got: a well-thought-out show from start to finish with a single vision of how the whole thing will end. That clue in the first episode? Yep, directly related to the ending in season/series 3 and not some, now inconsequential, detail the writers 'forgot about' or changed course over.
The American version of the office had 75+ GREAT episodes (seasons 2,3,4, and most of 5) and the British version had 12 (plus the Christmas Special). The existence of the other 125 episodes doesn’t make those 75 any less great.
Same with The Simpsons — the 8 year peak of seasons 1-8 means at least we got those episodes. I haven’t watched a new episode in over 20 years but revisit the early episodes often.
I like the sandwiches on my favorite restaurant’s menu. Them serving the pasta dish I don’t like doesn’t make the sandwiches worse.
Obviously any assessment of art is going to be subjective. But at the time, those 75 episodes were the either the GREATest thing on television or very close to it. They hold up today and are episodes that are just as GREAT to me on the 20th or 30th viewing as they were on the first.
I've seen Seinfeld so many times that now a days I just tap on the "random" option in VLC when watching it. X-files I've divided to two, MonsterOfTheWeek and "moves plot forward". Then randomly pick from the two buckets.
Don't think there is any "new" series that I've watched over twice, I wonder why that is.
>In the UK a series is usually only 6 episodes and few shows last more than two or three series
Inspector Morse (et al) come to mind as one that lasts longer. So many great British detective shows that go on for decades, with around 20 movie-length episodes per season (aka series).
I stand corrected. There was a time when I watched several shows like Morse (ie, Lewis, Frost, Foyle, Gently, Lynley, Marple, Midsomer) and I suppose it became a bit of a blur. It was a lot of long episodes, but not a lot of episodes (per season).
God I hate that program(me). And I was born on the same day, 9 December 1960, and as it gradually becomes known more and more for just being old I am more and more reminded of my own mortality.
The Office UK vs the Office US is belies your point. Almost everyone agrees the US version was much better. The US 1st season tried to be like the UK original and was universally panned. That biting, British humour can only carry you so far. Also, the US version didn't carry on endlessly. Steve Carrell left after season 6 and the show lost it's momentum. But regained some of that magic before closing.
> The tenth series of the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who premiered on 15 April 2017 and concluded on 1 July 2017, and consisted of twelve episodes, after it was announced in July 2015 that BBC Worldwide had invested in a tenth series of the programme in its annual review. The series is led by head writer and executive producer Steven Moffat, alongside executive producer Brian Minchin. It is the third and final series overseen by the two as executive producers, as well as Moffat's sixth and final series as head writer. This series is the tenth to air following the programme's revival in 2005, and is the thirty-sixth season overall.
This is a classic dilemma which doesn't have any clear answer.
Individually, I assume Netflix has the data to back up the fact that each show should have been cancelled -- that no matter how critically acclaimed or how devoted the fanbase, the shows simply didn't have enough fanbase to justify the cost.
But then in aggregate, it adds up to an unintended narrative that could prove to be harmful to the bottom line: that Netflix cancels shows. So people stop watching the first season to see if a show survives into a third... stop recommending Netflix... and it's harmful to the bottom line.
The thing is, there's no obvious answer. If Netflix didn't cancel any of these shows, it would go out of business and/or not have the money to fund future (hopefully successful) ones. It's the same way with Googling canceling products: it's ridiculous and money-losing to keep around every failed product, but individually they add up to a reputation.
It's a classic damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't. People love it when companies experiment and launch lots of new products/shows -- that's where innovation comes from. But then they hate it when the unsuccessful ones get cancelled, because every product/show has some set of users/viewers who love it.
But I see no solution, except for companies to continue cancelling unprofitable things, and people to continue complaining about it.
> The thing is, there's no obvious answer. If Netflix didn't cancel any of these shows, it would go out of business and/or not have the money to fund future…
Netflix isn't even remotely close to that point, they're still looking for places to drop cash by helicopter.
Instead of cancelling outright, they should guarantee each production an extra half season to wrap up at a minimum. This would reverse the damage to their brand.
There is a solution. Netflix could say, you get 12-16 episodes to tell your story: beginning, middle, and end. If your numbers are good enough, we will give you another 12-16 episodes.
Isn't that what they already do? It's not like they tell showurnners "Leave cliffhangers and unfinished plotlines, your renewal is pretty much a cert". Mostly they give shows 2 seasons and consider renewing after that. That's actually an improvement over network TV, where sometimes you may even be cancelled halfway through the first season.
Netflix is not very good at seeing things that don't show up in the data. If it can't be A/B tested, they are fairly blind to it.
There is no good way to A/B test how cancellations affect signups. You can't release new seasons of a show to just some customers in a region. And if you only release new seasons in some regions, there is no way to know if the effect was because of local cultural reasons.
Until there is a large movement of people who make a lot of noise about not signing up for Netflix specifically because of their reputation for cancellation, this probably won't change.
And until then, ironically, this reputation will only make the problem worse. People will not watch a new show until they know it isn't cancelled, leading to even more cancellations because of low viewership.
> Netflix is not very good at seeing things that don't show up in the data.
This reminds me of Battlefield 3. The designers of Battlefield 3 used data mining a lot to drive their decisions, particularly around multiplayer weapon balance. For a long time the competitive players said there was a balance issue with the M16, but the designers were adamant there was no issue because they didn't see any particular issue in the data. The M16 was used a bit more than the others, but it was also the weapon everyone started with and had unlocked. So they thought everything was fine.
Then, after quite a while, someone made a video clearly highlighting the issue. And then the designers finally took a closer look and found that gosh darn, there was a bug in the weapon stats. The M16 did not get less inaccurate when you got hit, unlike all the other weapons.
So if you equipped a M16 you were significantly more likely to successfully return fire, compared to the other weapons. Like an order of magnitude. Which significantly increased the chance of surviving the firefight if you were a moderately competent player.
Of course the competitive folks had figured this out quickly and predominantly used the M16, but they hardly made a blip as a percentage of the total player base so it didn't really show up in the stats.
> There is no good way to A/B test how cancellations affect signups.
Not really an A/B test, but you can certainly from internal data see how individual viewership of cancelled shows (or even break it down to shows cancelled with and without closure, if you take the effort to have someone code shows for that) correlates with downstream retention.
For the reputational stuff, I'd be very surprised if they are not using one or more of the consumer survey services to track that and the role decisions like cancelling series in general or in particular play into it.
It is a psychological thing I guess - sitting down and perusing netflix, see something you like but then realise it is 24 hour-long episodes just in the first season. It is a turn off - I can't commit upfront to that amount of time to something entirely unknown to me.
Especially since in a lot of series I've watched, they often lose their way and 99 times out 100 the last 2 or 3 seasons inevitably decay into a "will-they-wont-they" thing about two characters falling in love or whatever, and the rest of the cast and whatever made the series good originally is mostly ignored. Then they're cancelled. So e.g. Lost, US Office, that 70s show and many more all went on way too long while dancing around with romance between two characters etc etc while ignoring what made the first season or two appealing.
Don't get me wrong, I love binge watching something good and I am disappointed when I run out of episodes or whatever, but it is good for people to know when to end a show and leave people with good memories, rather than turning it into a death march where people are relieved to just have finished the show.
Give me 8 to 10 good episodes per season, and please don't string it out for 7, 8, 9 seasons when there is only enough ideas for 2 or maybe rarely 3 seasons's worth of episodes.
I generally agree with you. However, the main issue with Netflix is that they are cancelling shows without letting them wrap things up. Letting shows die on cliffhangers or when the cast and writers are finally getting into a groove. This does nothing but cause turmoil amongst the fan base and some of Netflix's most dedicated, paying customers.
If they set out from the start to wrap things up in 2-3 seasons and let the writers plan for that, it would be fine. As of right now, they let writers build up massive plots in the first two seasons only to pull out the rug right when things are getting interesting.
> However, the main issue with Netflix is that they are cancelling shows without letting them wrap things up.
That's rather the norm for shows; cancellation is a business decision, not a story decision. And cliffhangers are often a tactic used to as an audience retention trick when the team behind a show knows it is at risk of not doing well enough to continue, so it's particularly common (Netflix aside) for it to be used at the end of a season that turns out to be a shows last.
Sure, but come on - Netflix isn't the same medium as Cable/Broadcast.
In cable/broadcast, the show was gone when it was cancelled. It wouldn't air anymore outside of re-runs (which rarely happen for cancelled series), and new content was designed to fill the space.
The whole freaking point of Netflix is that I can watch any item from their entire catalog at any time I'd like.
That includes all of those cancelled shows.
So as a user, I'm left in a really weird spot. I want the content that was cancelled, but I'm much less likely to watch a story based show if I know it was canned and will never be finished.
Basically - I'd argue strongly that Netflix is (intentionally or not) drastically undermining the long term value of their catalog by not allowing shows to conclude.
That's not to say they should fund a show forever, (it's still a business) but it does mean the intelligent thing to do would be to fund out some sort of conclusion or ending to those cancelled series.
A 2 season show with a 6 episode "conclusion" instead of a season 3 - That's something I would probably pick up and watch: I know it's a complete story and will have some sort of resolution (good or bad).
A 2 season show that was canned on a cliffhanger? Will NOT TOUCH. Fuck that. Doesn't matter how good it is, doesn't matter how much I like the genre - It's not a product, it's an unfinished waste of time.
> A 2 season show that was canned on a cliffhanger? Will NOT TOUCH
I think that you are almost-but-not-quite hitting another problem of binge consumption patterns that I think might be very central to the problem of Netflix show cancellations:
If I'm a long term subscriber and I'm used to bingeing finished shows: will I even want to start a show before it's concluded or would I rather wait a few years and then watch it completely? Inter-season gaps are bad enough in broadcast, but with season-bingeing they extend to >11 months and that's just not very attractive.
If Netflix isn't excellently careful with what subsets of their data they look at this effect might blindside them very hard: are people maybe not starting S2 because they loved S1 so much that they'll deliberately not switch on S2.01 upon availability but would rather start with rewatching S1 it in its entirety once S3 hits? This information is not in the tracking data, better focus on intra-season dropouts. Success metrics can be hard.
> Inter-season gaps are bad enough in broadcast, but with season-bingeing they extend to >11 months and that's just not very attractive.
It's also a completely different time frame for the binged show. A weekly released 10 episode season that would have occupied your mental space for around two and half months before returning nine and half months later might now be something you engaged with for just two days before not thinking about it for a year.
There's a reason so many streaming shows need to have season recaps, because in the year or two it takes for the next season you've completely lost all the story beats. As you mentioned, I find myself wanting to rewatch the previous season(s) before a new one kicks off, but that becomes really onerous with 10+ hours per season.
I was under the impression Netflix canceled most of their shows after the second season because by that point contracts have to be renewed and renegotiated: it just cost too much vs taking their special sauce and applying it to a whole new show with new actors that are cheaper.
The trouble with this is that after a while, people stop watching anything made with their special sauce at all.
We were late to the Netflix party in my household. We got it to watch a few big name films and shows that we weren't so keen on that we were going to buy them on disc (which we did, and still do, for "keepers").
When they started making their own shows, I watched a few, but nearly all of them ended up disappointing either immediately or after jumping the shark within a season or two. The words "Netflix Originals" are now a synonym in my mind for "probably won't be worth it, let's watch something else". Frankly, I don't even bother scanning that list on the home page for stuff to watch any more, unless I'm looking for a specific show that I already have reason to think I'll enjoy.
There's now this unfortunate catch 22 where people won't bother watching shows for the first 2 seasons in case they get cancelled. Which means there's less audience, so they're more likely to get cancelled...
This is true, but it's not my problem as the viewer. There are many more shows I'd probably enjoy than I'll ever have time to watch. I'm not going to prop up Netflix or other corporate backers that repeatedly fail to respect their viewers by not wrapping things up reasonably neatly.
If there was enough doubt about whether a show was popular enough to be renewed that the production team didn't know whether to wrap up neatly in a potential final season, there is probably enough popularity left to justify making a mini-series or "TV movie" to finish things off with some closure for viewers. I've known a few shows do this over the years, and IME it almost always gets a favourable reaction from fans and reflects well on the show and those behind it.
You appear to be saying that the cancellation decision was made in a vacuum, without considering viewership. I don't believe this to be true.
My point was that the viewership might have been low because nobody wants to watch the first season until they know the third season at least is being made to avoid being cliff-hung. That is the catch-22; third seasons are not being made because people don't watch shows until they have a third season.
>You appear to be saying that the cancellation decision was made in a vacuum, without considering viewership. I don't believe this to be true.
No. Viewership was low, so it got cancelled. If it got cancelled before airing then a low viewership would be a result from that. But that's usually not the sequence.
If that is the catch-22 you could apply this to a 4th season aswell. Or 5th.
Shows don't get renewed during or before a season. At least most of them don't, so it's always a gamble.
It’s like any other modern growth company - they are a machine optimized to hit a small set of metrics.
TV networks had an incentive to hit 100 episodes for syndication. Netflix wants you to sign up, and knows that the friction of cancellation will keep you subscribed long enough to get whomever their KPI hit/bonus.
Twin Peaks is (or, was) exactly this: "A 2 season show that was canned on a cliffhanger". The third season went in to production 25 years after the cliffhanger ending. The show was very much still worth watching even before season 3 became reality. A cliffhanger ending is still a kind of resolution and is not inherently bad.
There are 2-season shows with no ending or clearly rushed endings that are still worth watching: check out Party Down.
Does any kind of sloppy ending make an entire show worthless or is there some cutoff screen-time that makes it acceptable?
Consider Game of Thrones. Are seasons 1-3 still worth watching even though 4-6 are mediocre and 7-8 are dumpster fires?
Consider Game of Thrones. Are seasons 1-3 still worth watching even though 4-6 are mediocre and 7-8 are dumpster fires?
As someone who enjoyed the show for a long time and watched it all the way through, I'm not sure the answer to that is obvious. They wrecked it so badly in the final episodes that I don't currently see myself doing the marathon rewatching thing with it. I'm also not sure I'd recommend it to a friend who hadn't seen it, knowing it was setting them up for such a huge disappointment.
You got burned because you watched S7 and S8 and you have a grudge against D&D. But S1-S6 developed many good characters and plotlines, and it's OK leave a world in progress. Especially in GoT world which is all about treachery and turmoil -- the idea of a tidy ending for everyone is absurd, unless everyone dies. So someone new knows to watch only S1-S6 and it's a good show.
But S1-S6 developed many good characters and plotlines, and it's OK leave a world in progress.
Some people don't mind that. Personally, I enjoy stories with closure. I find it a huge downer to know the canon ending sucks and will ruin the plot for many characters I have been following.
If nothing else, skipping the final episodes means I have to decide when to stop watching. In the case of GoT, the end of season 6 is one possibility, but arguably the worst shark-jumping happened after The Long Night in the middle of season 8 and watching that far does resolve some of the other plot lines.
My position is that the problems exist well in advance of season 8 but that in seasons 5/6 it still felt as if there was enough runway for things to land safely.
This turned out not to be the case. Partially due to creator disinterest (by some accounts, HBO was essentially pushing to give them 10+ seasons with generous budgets) and partially due to a writing style that prioritized "big moments" over character/world building and consistency.
I think this is best exemplified by Arya's "House of Black and White" arc (light spoilers) in season 6. The arc setup is that the Faceless master tells her constantly "To become Faceless you must discard your identity completely -- become no one" while Arya secretly refuses to discard the literal symbol of her identity (her sword, Needle, hidden near the temple). This tension is then essentially just ignored and seemingly forgotten for the entire arc which ends with her being accepted by the master as a Faceless Woman (as "no one") while also maintaining her identity as Arya Stark (by keeping Needle). Nothing in her story ever refutes, upholds, or explores this contradiction. Like many other potentially interesting things, it is brought up superficially (possibly by accident) then lost in the shuffle as the show rushes to the next "big moment".
Tons of fans of shows like The Tick and Limitless have wanted it to continue. They would watch it, and so on. Someone made a decision to pull the plug.
Similarly, I have never seen anything other than gushing reviews and can’t-wait expectations of the Cadillac Ciel since the 2011 pebble beach show, but then the company never produced it, instead creating some sort of coupe. The Ciel was only ever seen in that Entourage movie.
The phenomenon of not listening to the fan base is real. But here is my question...
WE ARE IN THE AGE OF DECENTRALIZATION AND DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE. Why not have a platform where people raise money for shows, and whatever budget that is, the show makes episodes for it? Like Patreon meets kickstarter, or Patreon with a loan component for future shows.
That way, the only way a show would get canceled is if it went bankrupt and was unable to pay its loans from its Patreon-like revenues.
More generally, some company has the infrastructure (which is centralized for now, like Netflix) and we have to rely on it being magnanimous enough to let the public have a say. Teams to create shows come together as gigs anyway. We explored using such business models for software back in 2016:
But today, can’t you just use the Web multicasting for publishing/streaming the end result, or hosting it on some networks as a commodity hosting, and then production of the show would be funded using cryptocurrency?
How expensive would it be to acquire rights to a Netflix show that was canceled? Why would they not simply give it away for some equity in the new crowdfunded show? It would be like IPOing a show after piloting the first couple seasons. It would become a business model.
Why would this not work to bring back fan favorite shows, and create communities around them too? Why do we NEED centralized stuff like Netflix AT ALL?
I think you're significantly underestimating the amount of money that would need to be raised and overestimating the amount of people who would put their money where their mouth was and fund multiple seasons of these shows. Serenity, the Firefly movie, was sort of this, and it cost a lot for a two hour movie ($39M per Wikipedia) and didn't do a ton of extra revenue over that budget ($40.4M).
If there's something structurally preventing it, it's that the big studios and especially the "streaming as a loss leader" stuff players Amazon and Apple TV are making so many big-budget/high-production-value shows that audience expectations and standards are very high.
And reported budgets don't include marketing. The rule of thumb is that a reported $40M movie will have $40M spent on marketing, so if you hear a movie broke even, it really means that it lost an amount equivalent to its entire reported production budget.
So then just release episodes less frequently, like Moffat’s Sherlock, without sacrificing on production quality. Yeah the cast gets older but if the fans really wanted, they would click the button to recruit friends to pay recurring fees to it.
After all, I’m simply saying make a Netflix but where the amount of minutes you watch to the end determines how much you want to allocate from your payment that show. You have a chance to fix up the allocations before the end of the month, when they are committed.
The decision is taken out of the producers’ hands and instead of cancellation past some political threshold, results in slower episode velocity.
"Get paid more slowly for doing less work" doesn't sound appealing from the perspective of any of the people who would be doing the creative work.
Doing it a "netflix but pay based on what you watched" isn't the model you need, because the shows that are getting canceled today would need disproportionately larger payments per person. Since they have fewer viewers.
So unless those fewer viewers are willing to put up substantially more money, the people making the shows are going to keep looking for other options too.
(You also have big startup costs for this enterprise, if you're trying to do it as a platform vs kickstarting a single show. Think Quibi-style user-acquisition-problems, but not your pitch tp users isn't "short episodes on the go" it's "we pay creators with a different methodology.")
Ugh, Moffat's Sherlock, despite having very few episodes (about 12), was dead in the water halfway through because it turned into Moffat's trademark LOST-style garbage string along of ever less sensical unresolvable plot twists
It depends on the show of course, but there is a middle ground. For example, both The Good Place and Glow were canceled but their last season finales work well enough as series finales. I have no trouble recommending either of those. Of course, it's harder with some shows.
Unless Michael Schur was sugar coating it, The Good Place wasn't cancelled. They had reached the end of the story they wanted to tell and ended it.
Here's an article about it: https://netflixlife.com/2020/09/28/why-did-the-good-place-en.... I know some other sites report that it was cancelled, but even on the The Good Place Podcast, no one really talked like it was being cancelled versus reaching the end of the story (and not jumping the shark).
If by cancelled you mean "ended", then it was cancelled. But the reporting at the time by the network and the creatives was that they decided in advance of writing and filming the fourth season that it would be the final season (and that the approximate length and arc of the entire show was worked out years prior to be around 50 episodes), and so the ending was written deliberately as a series finale, thus making it not an example of what the upthread people are talking about.
As the other commenter pointed out, The Good Place, like Schitt's Creek, had planned arcs that naturally concluded.
Many broadcast shows that are constantly on the bubble write their season finales to double as series finales in case they don't get renewed, see for example within just the past 2 seasons: Brooklyn 99 (cancelled but renewed by different network), Fresh off the Boat, Lucifer, Single Parents, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Lethal Weapon, Star, The Orville (cancelled by Fox, picked up by Hulu, cancelled by Hulu but given final season pickup).
Makes sense. I had read that The Good Place was canceled which actually surprised me a bit as the finale seemed like a pretty natural ending. Of course, that's not to say that the showrunner would have turned down a longer run but the whole show is one of the better things I've watched of late and felt just about the right length.
The Good Place completely wraps up its story at the end of the 4th season. There's nowhere else to go there. It's very satisfying.
It's not an incomplete show like, the Santa Clarita Diet, for example (which I'm still mad at Netflix for cancelling, it was just getting really good and ended on a cliffhanger).
If The Good Place was 'cancelled' (which I'm pretty sure it wasn't), they were at least told in advance of the 4th season and were given the full season to finish its story.
> Netflix isn't the same medium as Cable/Broadcast.
No, it's a newer integrated content & delivery service that’s far less diversified as a whole business than the corporations that run traditional cable and broadcast, so the pressures on its content to succeed in driving metrics are even more intense.
> A 2 season show that was canned on a cliffhanger? Will NOT TOUCH.
A seasons show that got canned on cliffhanger wasn't getting touched in a way which would justify the cost, anyway; they are writing in off and stopping lighting money on fire when they are cancelling it.
They don't want to invest the kind of money they put into these series for something people already committed to the platform might try out, the expensive, heavily promoted at launch series need to be drivers of the decision to subscribe or stay subscribed (there’s plenty of stuff that’s cheaper, less promoted, and probably fine for them if it's essentially catalog filler, but that's not the series that get attention.) And if it's not doing that, throwing another (even truncated) season’s worth of money to slightly boost it's value as catalog filler might make some artistic sense, but it doesn't make a lot of business sense.
The problem is that currently their content is a mix of their own shows and a lot of successful and complete shows made by other networks. As they move to having more of their catalog be their own shows which stay around forever it increases the ratio of cancelled shows to complete shows which if not carefully managed I feel will damage their brand over time.
You didn't address the parents main point at all. It doesnt actually matter that few people watched until the end.
I can obviously only talk for myself but can say with confidence that if I'm watching a series which is cancelled without a conclusion, the likelihood of every watching another one by that publisher is miniscule at best.
It's definitely the worst business decision to do for Netflix. Either don't stop at a cliffhanger or do a final episode to bring it to an ending. If you decide not to anyway... Don't expect people to come back after getting burned once
> I can obviously only talk for myself but can say with confidence that if I'm watching a series which is cancelled without a conclusion, the likelihood of every watching another one by that publisher is miniscule at best.
Every “publisher” in TV series does it. And most of them, including Netflix, also pick up things other houses have cancelled without a satisfying conclusion and extend them to provide one, or at least another chance at one.
The only substantive difference I see with Netflix is that they are taking far more shots at potential tentpole series than any other single outlet.
> Don't expect people to come back after getting burned once
I expect Netflix has a lot better behavioral data driving decisions than your “I can obviously only talk for myself” and then drawing conclusions from that to what is “definitely the worst business decision to do for Netflix” as if you were the whole market.
> That's rather the norm for shows; cancellation is a business decision, not a story decision.
I agree. But to my way of thinking, it's a decision with short-term and long-term business impact.
Longer term, it makes me less interested in starting to watch a series produced by that company, because of higher odds of ending up frustrated / disappointed. And it reduces the likelihood of me continuing to subscribe that service or recommend it to friends and family.
I also wonder what the impact on leaving a series unresolved has on its long-term syndication revenue.
Of course I'm just speculating. Depending on the actual numbers, perhaps those long-term downsides are completely acceptable.
> cancellation is a business decision, not a story decision. And cliffhangers are often a tactic used [for] audience retention
Series can very easily "jump-the-shark" and go on far longer than they should. There's a beauty to having something just "END" rather than go on until it needs to be cancelled because people are sick of it.
The Walking Dead, for example, just keeps going on and on and on. 9th+ season now, they're just re-cycling themes they've already covered 2 or 3 times. I guess they want a "sure-thing" but FFS, I wish they would place more value in trying out new things which, after all, is what really brings in the audiences when it works.
The ideal would be for the people actually running the show to be able (and willing) to decide, "We've got enough material in us for two more seasons, then we're done. We want to wrap it up there." and the network/Netflix suits to say "OK, then you get two more seasons. Make 'em great."
Very slightly less ideal would be for decisions about whether there will be, for instance, a season 4 to be made at the beginning of season 3, so that the writers can design season 3 to be a final season and wrap up loose plot threads.
This is why I decided a few years ago to not ever even start watching new series. I hate the cliffhangers; I hate the one-episode-a-week shit; I hate the split seasons; I hate the waits even when the series is probably coming back. Best to wait for something like Breaking Bad to finish its entire run, and read how everyone liked it, including the ending, and then start watching the first episode. There is an overwhelming amount of good content from the past, more than I will ever be able to watch.
ALTHOUGH. Rick and Morty hooked me anyway. Love that show, and so pissed at how long it took to finish out this past season when it was delayed.
Episodic tv takes skills to do properly, in this day and age. People now expect even side-characters to be fully fleshed out, and that’s difficult to do in a short amount of time. It’s also clear that a lot of “hot” showrunners, while great at building suspense and devising cliffhangers, are actually pretty bad at ending stories, so a more serialised approach allows them to kick the can down the road (e.g. Lost). After all, you become famous by generating interest and expectations, not by actually fulfilling them.
Put another way, what's ruining Netflix isn't the cancellations, it's the obsession with extremely long serialized soap operas over good episodes, miniseries and seasons.
Yes, but it’s a norm from the broadcast era. I think the premise is that Netflix has an opportunity to do things differently, because a satisfying show on a streaming platform is not dependent on reruns to reach new fans.
> That's rather the norm for shows; cancellation is a business decision, not a story decision.
But if the series wasn't so long, each series would be commissioned as a whole and production in the can. That might not protect against unresolved cliffhangers, but it does mean you don't lose a story mid broadcast.
I wouldn't think season-finale cliffhangers are a retention trick - they are just that, cliffhangers, something that any tv series does episode after episode. Usually it's the lack of cliffhanger at the end of a season that signals it's unlikely to come back. Showrunners want to wrap up stories if they can; when it doesn't happen, it's usually because the risk of cancellation was not clear to them until too late.
Totally. Think of the timeline! By the time the writers have written the cliffhander endeing to the season, the actors acted, the directors directed, and the footage cut down into an episode, and then the episode aired, the writer at the beginning of the pipeline is so far removed from the end product that, while there's some notion of having the next seasons, the failure of the show doesn't hinge on the writer. Bad writing can sink a show, but good writing doesn't mean that a show will succeed. Thus the writer can't really A/B test their script like you can for a good/bad email campaign/website copy.
Exactly, if you take a look at HBO, they always announce either from the start that the production is a "Limited Series", or pre-announce the year for a final season. This gives the writing team the bandwidth to properly conclude all of the main plot lines.
Maybe this is because HBO values their content and hopes to syndicate it, whereas Netflix values their new subscriber counts.
> This gives the writing team the bandwidth to properly conclude all of the main plot lines.
I remember watching Lost (the TV series) and getting into this around Season 3, and I remember hearing them saying they were "waiting to start telling the ending of the story". I found a recent article [1] talking it in more detail:
> "There were all of these compelling mysteries and so we were saying, ‘We wanna have this stuff answered by the end of Season 1, this stuff answered by the end of Season 2, and then the show basically ends after about three years.’ That was the initial pitch, and they were not even hearing it. [....] they [ABC] were just like, ‘Do you understand how hard it is to make a show that people want to watch? And people like the show? So why would we end it? You don’t end shows that people are watching.’”
You can't keep dragging out the mysteries forever, you have to eventually resolve something. You also can't just keep introducing new ones forever, because it doesn't make sense. You can't keep showing the same flashbacks, and you just can't introduce major new chunks of history to people's backstories that have never been brought up before.
OMG! A three season arc, where everyone knows at the beginning that that's the extent of the series, is perfect. Netflix has the perfect platform to put up the money to have great talent and production sign on for a short run series like this, much like the Brits do.
Sometimes I feel like Netflix takes an idea that was pitched as a movie or 1-3 episode mini series and asks the creators to stretch it longer. If they aren't going to commit to finishing these things, write in arcs that wrap up enough that a second season is possible but not horribly annoying if its not.
This goes both ways. Writers clearly set things up that way in the hope this will put pressure for more episodes, but cliffhangers are just really bad writing done against rather than for the plot. Hopefully cliffhangers die thanks to streaming and the risk of non-renewal!
That said, I like how Netflix handled sense8. The plot was clearly getting more and more absurd and season 2 had a massive cliffhanger for season 3. Then it was cancelled - but still they produced a final somewhat absurd but satisfying movie-length final episode that tied all lose ends. That was probably a contract term and not perfect, but it worked out better than a third season or no end at all.
Good cliffhangers work with the plot, using a limit like a weekly release schedule or break between seasons to lengthen tension. I would say most American television is really bad at this and likes to create fake tension between episodes that otherwise has no impact on the plot.
The problem with this is that the per-episode cost of a 1-2 show terminal microseason is much higher than the normal per episode cost, because you've got to pay people to come back for it and give up the opportunity for other work (or work around their replacement work, which also has costs.)
That's a good point, but I wonder what's the cost of leaving shows completely unfinished in the long run. I know that I'm very unlikely to start watching a show if I know that it never reaches a satisfying conclusion. This in turn might create some "dead inventory" for Netflix, shows that people are reluctant to start watching because they're unfinished.
Although there's cliffhanger and cliffhanger. Santa Clarita Diet for instance technically ends on a cliffhanger, but it's a last minute event that's supposed to introduce what they thought would be the next season. If you ignore the last scene basically every important plot thread up until that point is either wrapped up or at a status quo, so it's not such a terrible place to end a show.
An other recent example is The Boys: while the show did get renewed for a third season the ending of season 2 could easily be a show final, you'd just have to get rid of the last couple of scenes introducing a cliffhanger for season 3.
Conversely you have shows that clearly couldn't wrap their storyline in a satisfactory way before they were canceled. GLOW is unfortunately in this boat.
I loved the ending of Farscape, even before the mini-series wrap-up.
First, they wrapped up essentially every dangling plot-line. Everyone was safe, everyone was happy.
Then in the last minute of the show, out of no where, an alien no one had ever seen before swoops in and disintegrates the main characters.
"To be continued" flashes on the screen.
The series was canceled before this episode aired/was finished, and that's how they chose to go out. Could have just cut the last 30 seconds off the episode and called it a wrap, but nope.
I agree that it's not the worst but it definitely leaves a lot of interpersonal drama unresolved. It makes the effective ending very bittersweet, which might indeed be fitting for this particular show.
> You could instead make intentional decisions to fund miniseries and content with clearly defined "endings".
Netflix funds plenty of original miniseries, movies, comedy specials, and other close-ended content. But the high-risk, high-reward, could-be-tentpole series get an understandably-large share of media attention.
First of all, most streaming shows are 10 episodes per season, 12 at most.
But as for the number of seasons, what's amazing about television is how deep and intimate your knowledge of the characters becomes. The kind of emotional depth and resonance you get with characters in the 4th and 5th season of a show is simply unparalleled -- we know their life histories, and the smallest of scenes can shake us with the amount of meaning they convey.
If you think of Mad Men or The Sopranos or The Americans or Breaking Bad -- my god, each season is better than the last because it's like they approach infinite richness. The last seasons get to levels none of the first seasons were able to.
Also, it's a huge rarity for shows to make it to 7–9 seasons. The ones that do are because they're hugely popular and people want to watch them. If Game of Thrones had still had books to work off of, I think pretty much everybody would have loved 3 or 4 more seasons.
I agree with your disagreement. If the goal is just to make an extended film around a single idea, then yes it has a high likelihood of burning out after 10-20 hours. If the goal is to set up a world that can act as a vehicle for commentary on the real world as it develops, then the only limiting factor is how long folks want to continue working on the show, as long as the audience is there. It's perfectly fine for something like a sitcom or sketch comedy show to have both long plot arcs as well as topical treatment of current events. And of course new storylines can be thought up over the course of a few years, as well as individual episodes that take creative detours.
Also we have to remember that until very recently, series were consumed one episode at a time, in day/week intervals, or even longer. This I think also added to the deep emotional experience you mention for long-running series: we've lost the anticipation factor, and as the cliché goes, the anticipation of something is often better than the thing itself. It was like this for decades; Netflix streaming was introduced only about 13 years ago, it's first in-house series, House of Cards, came out 7 years ago. I think it'll still take a while for the industry–both creatively and logistically–to catch up to the cultural change we've undergone with binge watching streaming series.
So true. I don't get why American TV shows always need to be ran to the ground.
Like Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory are shows that should've gone past their 8th season. The Office should've never had those abysmal last two-three seasons. That '70s show should've never had those abysmal last three seasons.
I always like it when creators and producers recognize when a show has run its course. This is why we have good memories of Seinfeld. Jerry Seinfeld stood to make something crazy like 5 million per episode if they had done a 10th season but he knew the show had run its course and ended it on a high note (something, btw, that was a plot point on an earlier episode).
Same with Breaking Bad, they knew that they had a story to tell and that it didn't need to drag on and they delivered some of the finest 5 seasons of television drama that one could ever ask for.
I watched an interview with Damon Lindleof recently where he talked about how the ABC execs wanted and expected to draw out Lost as Long as they could. When they were trying to negotiate down the show, the execs thought they wanted more money. They wanted to do 10 seasons and 6 was the compromise.
It was mind boggling to them that the producers only wanted to do three seasons
Great anecdote. Damon Lindleof is a terrible person to deliver it, though. Lost could have run for 20 seasons with no meaningful difference, since they never actually had any idea how to resolve the plot.
Maybe he thought he couldn't have gotten away with dancing around the resolution for 10 seasons?
So you're complaining about shows that shouldn't have lasted beyond season 8, and holding up as a good example a show that ran 5 seasons, while the article is about Netflix canceling shows after one or two seasons.
The old-school American network way of making (more) money was to run TV shows into the ground so that they had more episodes for syndication. HBO, Netflix, etc do not have that motivation.
Netflix payed $500m for the rights to steam seinfeld last year, HBO paid even more the Big Bang Theory.
If you make a show that people will mindlessly put on for hundreds of hours, that's still worth an utterly insane amount of money for a very long time.
So true. I don't get why American TV shows always need to be ran to the ground.
It's a side effect of the weird way TV show syndication contracts (used to) work. Basically for various historic reasons you could charge cable networks more for showing re runs of shows with over 100 episodes than you could shows with less than 100 episodes.
So it often made long tern economic sense to push your show over that 100 episode line even if the last season or two where terrible and got terrible ratings on initial airing.
I think you have some rose-colored glasses with Seinfeld. The post Larry David seasons are not nearly as good. They tried to mimic his style with over the top storylines but didn't know how to weave them together like he does and none of the jokes really landed. Seriously go watch a random episode from season 9, it's not very good.
I recently watched the entire series again, you can see the show drop off last two seasons - and I commented on this before knowing about David leaving towards the end. But credit to them they didn't completely run it to the ground like most shows.
I personally really enjoyed the last two seasons of The Office US. Sure the transition was a bit dodgy but once it got it's stride it was enjoyable. Hell I'd even rate the final season as among the best overall.
Agreed on the length of seasons for network prime-time shows.
However, that's not really what the article is about. The shows mentioned are 8-10 episodes per season (both the canceled shows and Stranger Things).
This is more about Netflix throwing shows against the wall so fast they never get to see if any of them stick. Which is silly - many of the best shows out there took a few seasons to hit their stride. Look at season rankings for Seinfeld or GoT - few people rank the first season of either as the best.
> This is more about Netflix throwing shows against the wall so fast they never get to see if any of them stick.
I think it's just the other side of the coin. Because they have no airtime limits, they can commission many more series than traditional networks used to; but they just don't want to keep them around for long if they think they are not working, because unlimited airtime does not mean unlimited funds.
In practice, I think some of the series this piece laments would never have been produced by networks. Would you be happier reading only one half of a story, or not even knowing the story existed at all? I think the answer can differ between different people.
> but they just don't want to keep them around for long if they think they are not working, because unlimited airtime does not mean unlimited funds.
This makes sense in the abstract, but watching season 1 of the The Office (US) suggests that if NBC had the same view, we wouldn't have one of the most popular long-term binge-watch shows, for which streaming services are paying $500mm now.
As the article mentions, Schitt's Creek apparently had a low-rated first season, but since the execs in charge didn't have the mindset you describe above, it survived long enough to become the award-winning more popular show it is now.
Netflix may not be doing anything wrong here, but if they're not careful, it may bite them hard in a few years as their reputation continues to grow.
>This is more about Netflix throwing shows against the wall so fast they never get to see if any of them stick
If they're good enough it will stick. See stranger things, house of cards, and orange is the new black for examples. The problem is that Netflix isn't very good at picking winners. They pay way more than anyone else for content and the results aren't there.
Haven't been able to get into Stranger Things but the other two shows started very strong. In fact, with House of Cards in particular, it was almost certainly never stronger than it was at the beginning.
I think it's just a reality that in the era of streaming very few people are going to stick out a mediocre series in the hopes that it has enough good bones that the showrunners will eventually do something with them.
Netflix made a lot of promises about what data would enable. There's very little indication it's helped Netflix to develop better shows.
I'm arguing that isn't always true. Yes, some shows knock it out of the park in season 1. Other shows take a few seasons to really hit their stride.
It appears Netflix is taking a SV/VC approach to shows. Spend big, fail fast, and count on a small number of massive hits to succeed. While this may pad revenue in the short term, I'm not convinced it's the best long-term play. If subscribers get annoyed at short production runs and inconsistent programming, they leave and go to Disney or Hulu or Amazon.
Of course, I'm not in the industry at all, so I could be wrong. But, as a consumer, it is annoying to have Netflix push a few shows really hard, only to have them cancelled after 8 episodes.
If a show takes a few seasons to hit its stride, there's no way I'm going to start watching it and dedicate hours of my life just waiting for it to become good. Netflix + others are trying to bankroll TV series that will have a long lifetime in their archives, and a slow-opening series would work against that. Better to reap them sooner and spend the money elsewhere.
> See stranger things, house of cards, and orange is the new black for examples.
It's easier to stick when you are early in the game and the marketplace is less crowded. Hose of Cards got a lot of extra publicity for being the first.
The problem is that they don’t give them a chance to stick. One of my favorite shows, Tuca & Bertie, was released in May 2019 and canceled in July — less than three months later. By the time I’d watched it, it was already canceled. (Luckily, it’s since been picked up by Cartoon Network).
To be honest your examples were aired on TV some time ago where the normal season was 24 episodes (about 40-45 min long for seasons like Lost) and a half season 10 or 12.
Most of the new shows are between 8 and 12 episodes about an hour long.
I don't think US series are too long. I think they're just badly planned. I prefer the approach you see in anime were a show is usually contained in a single season. If the show does really well they make another show that is effectively the next season. If it does poorly any fans it did get aren't left with an unfinished product.
For a planned multi season story arc Babylon 5 is the best example I can think of. The story arc was planned from the beginning and they stuck to the plan. The temptation to keep piling on more content to a successful show is huge.
For multi season story arcs I think it's important for Netflix or whoever is making the show to commit to the whole thing regardless of early ratings. I'm far more likely to take a chance on a new show if I know the story line will be completed. I don't want to start watching a show only to find out they cancelled it in the middle of the story.
5 seasons, each covering a specific topic (politics, drug dealing, media) beyond telling the story, and when they ran out of topics and told the entire story they had, they just wrapped it up... they could've easily milked it and made 5 more meaningless seasons but luckily didn't.
Season 5 was already becoming somewhat shaky on The Wire though (at least in my opinion, the serial killer plot was a bit too much). Still one of my favorite shows of all time.
I totally agree with you. I have a friend who is entirely the opposite. She's really into Masterpiece Treater type stuff and she's constantly complaining about 5 episode seasons and series that only last a few of those seasons.
>please don't string it out for 7, 8, 9 seasons
Especially historically on broadcast TV, there were a lot of incentives all around to continue to milk a cash cow with a core audience who would watch it for the next 20 years given the opportunity. In addition to the networks, I'm sure many of the actors and others involved in a long-running show realize they'll probably never have as good a meal ticket again. So screw artistic vision.
To recommend some good shows, Mr. Robot seemed to play out its episodes in a good amount of time (only had 4 seasons, 2 wasn't amazing but served its purpose). Another is Ozark, which has been pretty entertaining, and the show's Bateman has said the upcoming season 4 will be its last, so it's not going to be strung too long either.
In practice, I note that the UK version of The Office was 2 6-episode series plus 2 Christmas specials, for 14 episodes total, while the US remake ran for 201 episodes, and it's the US version that people seem to re-watch endlessly around the world, despite its very rough start.
To be fair there are outliers in the UK too. The Doctor Who series has been going on since 1968 with 861 episodes too. It’s probably worth ignoring the outliers here and focusing on the median show.
In the UK, Doctor Who is clearly an outlier. The other really long-running shows are soap operas like Eastenders or comedy panel shows.
But in the US, there seem to be an awful lot of outliers, and it's on the strength of those series that Netflix initially established their following: Friends, The Office, Park and Rec, Seinfeld, Community, The Walking Dead, The Blacklist, Gilmore Girls, Grey's Anatomy, West Wing, That 70's Show, Supernatural, Criminal Minds, and I could keep going, honestly, for quite a while.
So yes, there's an extent to which 5 or 8 seasons is less common, but the goal for US shows has been 100 episodes for decades now, which is usually 5 seasons of 20+ episodes each.
If Netflix is adopting a more UK-like approach, that might result in better TV eventually, but it would be nice for creators to know they have to tell their story in 16 episodes rather than 100.
> t's the US version that people seem to re-watch endlessly
That's probably in no small part due to the fact that the US version is markedly more upbeat than the UK one. I honestly cannot watch the original anymore - despite being undoubtedly better written and better produced, it's just too bleak.
I think the dream for most US actors is to get signed to a popular long-running TV show. Guaranteed work and income, with options to negotiate higher pay every few years, what's not to love? Unless you're that even-more-rare talent who can jump to movies and make more on one film than a few years of TV. But many have tried to make that leap and ended up poorer for it.
I wonder sometimes whether Robert Sheehan thinks he made a good choice leaving Misfits. He seemed very certain at the time that he would be a movie superstar, but most of what I've seen him in since is other TV shows, like the recent Umbrella Academy.
But hey, Sheehan leaving opened a spot for Joseph Gilgun, who seems to be doing pretty okay too.
Miniseries would make a lot of things better. Keep the same budget, polish more and make a beautifully intense plot-line. Afterwards you feel fulfilled and have a sense of accomplishment.
It's the same with a lot of computer games. I remember i loved to binge when i was younger but when you are older than say mid twenties 50-70 hour games just annoy me. A good example of this is a game like Witcher 3, pretty cool game but just completely endless - frustrating for a person who also has a lot of work, family, friends etc. You never feel accomplished, its a stale feeling, and you don't remember half the plot because you don't have time to play 10 hours a day.
Miniseries are very expensive. Once you have your sets and art assets and actors and costumes you can crank out 2-10x as many hours of content at a much lower marginal cost.
On the other hand, I feel like modern TV shows aren’t long enough. By that I mean they cover ground too quickly and lack depth. I miss Battlestar Galactica which would hint and lead you on and develop things slowly over years.
Am I the only one who misses the 25 episode long seasons for shows like the X-Files? Sure it would have a string of episodes that weren’t great, but it gave more depth to the show than can be achieved with shorter seasons.
Yes, I have been watching Star Trek DS9. I'm noticing how the show started off in traditional Trek format, with 100% individual episodes that were geared for syndication. A few seasons in, you start to get the big story arcs, like the Dominion War... and that's when things really start to get good. BUT, it was cool every once in a while to have a side story that wasn't part of the arc. It gave a lot of variety and depth to the show. It kind of makes you feel like there's really a whole Trek universe. That not everybody was involved in the war, and that people still were trying to live their lives despite the war.
While you can tell a tighter story in the shorter format a TV series for me is not only about the main Plot. It is also about building a rich world. Getting to know the characters besides the main plot, getting to know the side characters.
I think the biggest issue: there's more money behind "successful" US series compared to "successful" British. When a show gets big, more money is dumped on it. The issue with that goes beyond the standard creative problems that occur, it's also the management. When a show starts having budgets in the millions upon millions per episode, there are more eyes and thus, voices involved in the process that originally ignored said show when it was a "nobody". Eyes and voices that any logical person knows should be blind folded and gagged from having any sort of creative to artistic opinion. But, because their signatures are on the cheques, their word becomes law. From what I understand (please correct me if I'm wrong), that doesn't happen all that much with British shows as there's such a finite overall production budget and personnel to that market demographic compared to the US. There's budget increases to good shows, but it's no where near as drastic as what may happen to an American one.
From another Brit to balance out that anecdata - no they're not and I disagree.
I will grant though that when they try to replace main characters it can go to crap (Scrubs, sort of The Office, personally I also grew tired of Game of Thrones early on) but I'd much rather have more of a good thing than less
As a fellow Brit: what you're saying definitely applies to US network TV shows, but really not to the vast majority of what Netflix does. I'm not actually sure Netflix has any shows with the 22-24 episode seasons you'd see on US sitcoms.
Except, of course, that they've paid quite a lot of money to show popular US sitcoms with 22-24 episode seasons, since people tend to watch them over and over and over.
That's really the gap, I guess: They're benefitting from broadcast networks letting shows run 100+ episodes, but not creating additional shows with more than 16-20 episodes. It seems reductive.
I often feel shows that have a clean arc ending around season 4 or 5 are just about perfect length. I generally dislike 7-10 episode seasons though, I feel they're way to short.
And yeah, the biggest issue is that Netflix is giving shows only one season, and usually a cliffhanger. It also kills off a lot of shows before they have a chance to get good: Star Trek is notorious for getting good around season 3 of any given series. A lot of iconic television wouldn't have ever existed if it was cut off because of the quality of their first season.
I agree with this. I really like the way European shows often allow each season to be standalone, if it ends on that season the story is fully wrapped up. Broadchurch is a good example of this. If the show ended after season 1 it was great, season 2 was good as well and if there is no season 3, then its not an issue, no dangling plotlines. Bodyguard was like this too.
Nobel, a Norwegian show was like this as well, 1 season and it was great, no more was needed. If there is another season awesome but nothing is lost plotwise.
Agreed about the length. 70s show and how I met your mother are good examples - they should have been at least 2-3 seasons shorter. Its painful to watch in the end.
100% agreed here. If a show only has 2-4 seasons, that's a selling point for me. Usually, around season 5, you can see the quality seriously drop as the writers have exhausted all their best ideas. Or else, new events must ever-escalate in intensity, and so the old seasons were sort of grounded and realistic, and the new seasons are zany adventures that don't fit at all.
Agreed. My favorite series of all time is the original, British version of The Office. While I believe it also did not have a planned, proper ending, it was only a few seasons.
I never enjoyed the US version as much and lost interest after a few seasons.
Despite incredible earlier seasons, have also failed to finish many others, including 24, House of Cards, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, etc. Just end it!
TV, especially broadcast TV, is not some high art form. It's a way to pass the hour or two before bed in exchange for watching some ads. People like the shows to keep going because it's not the storylines that pull them in, it's getting to live in this world that they like. So those seasons don't get replayed as much on streaming; so what.
You're describing a show like Modern Family. There's room for those types of shows. But something like The Capture is best left at 6 episodes and at best a couple seasons.
Shows like the walking dead grew into amazing shows but it took until 4th season.
Short series/seasons can limit what you can do. Which means by show 8, you know there will be a falling out that reaches climax at show 10.. cliff hanger.
Shows like glee hung on too long but it gave them space to make unexpected story lines... split the season in two..
It wasn’t really quite that bad. Seasons 1-4 each had quite distinct “survive zombies” scenarios. The season with Terminus was when it started to get dicey: it was quite close to season 2 in terms of theme (“survive zombies while lost in the wild”). Around the end of the first season with Alexandria (6?) is when it effectively stopped being (mainly) about surviving a zombie apocalypse and more about humans fighting each other with some love drama tossed in, oh and some zombies here and there.
I like that Netflix has a few 'limited series'. 8-10 episodes and the plot is complete. Great! There was one about an amazon murder/tribes/... Thing for which this just works perfectly. More story than a movie, no cliffhangers and no "monster of the week".
It's acclimation. Since the 70s, the BBC has produced series for a particular number of episodes and then dropped them. There are some exceptions, like Doctor Who, but that has been the practice. In the US, historically, we just keep running until the ratings tell us to quit.
Counter point: British television shows are too short!
My two all time favorite TV shows are Fawlty Towers and The Young Ones. Each consist of two 6 episode seasons. I really wish there were more. (though honestly, they did exactly what they set out to do, mic dropped, and the rest is history)
Series being too long isn't really related to the topic of discussion. And don't you sit there on your British Islands and tell me that The Misfits couldn't have enjoyed 2 or more seasons (provided that they show Rudy the door, that bloody bell knob).
As an American, I generally agree. Something I appreciate about some foreign TV is the idea that a season of a show (series in UK-speak) is a self-contained entity, and sometimes each season changes something significant about the show which keeps things interesting.
It could be a difference in assumptions. When I start watching a show, I generally don't imagine that I would have any reason to watch every single episode of every season. Rarely, I do. But more often I watch just an episode or two.
Netflix original series have 8 to 10 episodes. Series with more are just on syndication on Netflix.
But the main problem is Netflix kills shows after one or two seasons, leaving you with a cliffhanger.
You can just stop. I have watched a couple of shows with a good premise that then settled into a formula. So I just stopped watching after an enjoyable two or three episodes, or two seasons.
As an American, I agree. I would love to see more forethought go into the planning of series in the US. Plot it out for 1, 2 or 3 seasons of, say, 4 - 6 episodes and then just stop.
I think the “devolving into will they / won’t they” is orthogonal you the number of seasons. Many American shows are often set up around this plot line from the beginning—it’s a reflection of the vapid quality of American television in general (I blame the LA monoculture in particular). It’s not inherently a devolution; it’s just a “safe” plot line that most shows are unwilling to stray from. I have no doubt that a talented writer (who is willing to step outside of the Hollywood cookie cutter) could make a good show that lasts many seasons with many episodes per season provided the studio affords them the freedom to stray from the mold.
This reminds me of a similar idea I came to a few years back. I noticed that 10-13 episode/year shows tended to be better than average, while 22-26 episode/year tended to be worse on average and have large numbers of garbage episodes. The second group is how traditional US shows were done in the days of classic TV, to be shown twice in a 52 week year.
It came to me a few years back after watching the remastered Star Trek TNG, later an early season of Game of Thrones. Even though TNG was given plenty of time to hit its stride and had some incredible episodes, another half were just crap. Meanwhile early GOT season would have ten decent episodes in a row. The difference in average quality was striking.
Of course, GOT had the benefit of being mostly written beforehand, similar to Babylon 5, one of the first series to break episodic containment.
TL;DR: TV show law - A dozen or so episodes per season is the limit of a writing team. Produce any more than that and they are guaranteed to be phoned-in filler.
The UK version only lasted 2 seasons for a total of 14 episodes. It's very good, but I would argue the first 14 episodes of the US office are just as good. It's the later seasons that devolve into feel-good ho-hum sitcommery.
Apparently that is the case. I've not watched the US version, but I was jokingly referring to the most common axis of comparison that parent post falls along that I've experienced.
This is actually the exact opposite of what the LOST writers did. After season 1 or so, the show focused a lot more on relationships and the growth of its characters.
This ended up being the largest source of complaints about the show. Most of the original viewers watched it because they enjoyed the mysteries and cliffhangers and wanted them answered. However, the show moved completely away from that which led to so many of the complaints that the original questions were not being answered.
Writing about the finale, the NYT's (or may have been Time magazine at the time) TV critic wrote that people who watched the show through the lens of relationships between characters were generally fine with the way the show finished up. While those watching the show for the mysteries hated it, in part for the reason you say.
I'm afraid that this behaviour in general, not just related to Netflix, is doing the industry much harm.
My own experience is that recently I just don't want to get into new shows, at all. The story goes - I start to watch a show, I grow to like it, get all emotionally invested, the show gets cancelled halfway and I'm left out in the cold, dick in my hand, no satisfying end to a story arc, nothing. Most recent example is Counterpart which was (imo) phenomenal but got the axe after two seasons.
I'm not expecting the shows to run in perpetuity, just for them to run their course, tell their story. Great shows aren't great because they last a long time.
Yes. I suspect a large part of why so many shows fail according to Netflix is that people have already been bitten once or more by cancelled shows and they'll now wait for a few seasons to see if the show is rolling before watching. It's a downward spiral and either it keeps on until Netflix's demise, or they break out of it by committing on their shows.
When Netflix comes out with a new show I won't watch it until it gets into a third season. Learned early on the investment of time doesn't pay off as they quickly pull the shows.
Unsure what the future holds for netflix as more and more IP silos are popping up and eventually they'll have to resort to their own programming in the USA to carry the load. Will that be enough versus other services having vast libraries?
> When Netflix comes out with a new show I won't watch it until it gets into a third season.
Why can't you just enjoy a one or two well done seasons? Season 1 of Barry on HBO was basically a perfect story. Season 2 wasn't terrible, but it was stretched and didn't really add to what had been a perfect capsule. Patriot on Amazon, was also a brilliantly plotted two season arc, and though I love the characters I admit to push it to another season would be to take away from it not to add.
The same reason I can’t just enjoy 10 chapters of a book. If a book only has 10 chapters, that’s great. But if the printer just decided that’s all the chapters they were willing to pay for and the story has no ending, that is completely unsatisfying. I love mini-series/limited series because I know the story is going to have a conclusion. I have no interest in investing in something new that will likely be axed with no ending when there is plenty of great content out there that I know does have a complete story, however long that happens to be.
>Why can't you just enjoy a one or two well done seasons?
Not OP, but I share the opinion. For my viewing there are basically two types of shows. The first is relatively mindless entertainment. I enjoy an episode here or there but I'm not invested in the plot. I'm not watching YouTube recaps and "explainers" after the episodes, and I'm not engaged in a community where we discuss the plot and predict where things are going. Barry is a good example of that. Ted Lasso is another good example.
Then there are the shows where I get invested in the plot and story. Shows where I am theorizing with my wife, watching YouTube videos on it, and discussing it online. Shows such as Westworld or Game of Thrones.
There are some shows that straddle the line well, but you usually know ahead of time. Watchmen falls into that category. Single season, compelling drama, had me engaged the whole time, and it was a single season. But I knew it was going to be a single season from the start.
This is the same reason I typically try not to read unfinished trilogies. Patrick Rothfuss and GRRM have ruined me.
I would argue more importantly than you knowing it was single season, the creators knew they wanted one season so the entire season was bundled tightly together.
A longer but similar thing for me was Mr. Robot. Esmail knew he wanted 4-5 seasons when he started, and he got his 4 seasons to the ending he intended to write.
Should shows be planning tighter arcs then we seem to get anymore? Yes. If you need more show finish that entire arc and make a spinoff with the most popular characters in a new story.
And because of how they apparently consider renewing series, your lack of initial interest makes it less likely a series will make it to season 3. That's not a fault of yours, and I'm right there with you, but it's frustrating.
I guess it looks like a problem because they can afford to throw more spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks than a traditional network, the result being more fallen spaghetti...
However, it is possible they're missing out on potential viewership when they cancel too early based only on one season metrics... I rarely watch a show that's only been on for one season because I'm that much more likely to not get story closure. Not sure how common that is, but how many people are watching shows that were cancelled before getting story closure? And how many might watch the back catalog otherwise? I guess not enough to be worth the investment.
On a side note, I do wish more seasons (streaming or not) would actually come to a real stopping point instead of just ending on a cliffhanger and hoping to be renewed.
I'm starting to get fed up with TV shows (netflix or otherwise) for that same reason. It seems you only have two choices:
- first season doesn't pull enough viewers, it's cancelled.
- first season pulls enough viewers, season 2 onwards take season 1 as a status quo they'll basically never advance from, advancing the story so slowly that it almost feels like a sitcom where most characters end up at the exact point they used to be at the beginning so they can keep getting viewership.
I'm starting to see it with The Boys for example (WARNING slight spoilers next) Season 1 introduced a super dangerous environment where any wrong step could end the characters lives, by the end of season 2 it almost feels like a high school show because the main characters mostly bump into each other without consequences. If they need to kill someone they just introduce a new person a few episodes earlier so they can get rid of that one while the main characters stay healthy.
"On a side note, I do wish more seasons (streaming or not) would actually come to a real stopping point instead of just ending on a cliffhanger and hoping to be renewed."
I think this is half of the problem, too many shows being made with the hope they get enough traction to stretch out a few seasons. The result being not much of story and/or any hope of a satisfactory ending.
No surprise that viewing figures tail-off as this becomes a predictable path?
This is a really insightful take that I feel most other commenters miss. The intuitive metric of views is not what is good for Netflix's bottom line, quite the opposite. The best customer for Netflix is the one who stays subscribed but never uses it.
I believe the reason most people miss this is that for traditional networks, more viewers are strictly better; more viewers result in more ad revenue, and the marginal cost of an additional viewer is zero. For Netflix however, this is inversed: an additional viewer does not add any revenue (assuming they were already subscribed), but still adds cost.
The economic model of Netflix seems to be at odds with user interests.
And the toothpaste aisle wars, as the link explains well, usually end with consolidation around 2 players.
Given that Netflix has racked up quite a bit of debt to dominate the aisle, and now serious cash rich competitors like Disney, Apple (and lets throw in Amazon) enter the scene, does it really matters what moves Netflix makes? Is Netflix story done? Do Disney and Amazon end up dominating the aisle in a couple years?
But this story feels slightly different than the tooth paste story. There is that scene in GoT where the knight stands protecting a big secret. Challengers arrive. The knight knows this is going to be a fight to the death, as the secret is that important. And he says, "Now it begins".
And the challenger replies "No now it ends".
What matters is neither the knight or the challenger but the secret.
I'm not sure if the analogy lands. Toothpaste is all about branding/packaging because there's essentially no difference in terms of what's inside the tube. Media is almost the opposite: the quality of content actually matters quite a lot to the consumer.
That's not to say Netflix won't be out-competed by bigger players, but media creation is probably more correlated with organizational competence, and less correlated with pure spending power than many other industries.
> because there's essentially no difference in terms of what's inside the tube
At the risk of creating a tangent, but I disagree. I actually pay extra for Sensodyne Some-specific-subbrand-here because I like the taste the best: Barely minty, barely sweet. For me the most important part about toothpaste is the taste.
Have you done a blind taste-test? Research has shown that a lot of our perceptions around the experience of a product can be influenced by presentation and branding.
makes total sense, they will throw things at the wall and see what sticks, quickly replacing them with the next big shiny thing, and drop it quickly as well.
Repeat.
I don't agree with the article's premise at all. I think it's very rare that shows get better with age. Almost all shows get significantly worse. It cites Game of Thrones as something that got better. Really? Game of Thrones got frustratingly stupid in later seasons. The first few were far superior and the author's comment seems to be around the difficulty of shooting the pilot which is a tangential issue altogether.
I haven't seen many of these cancelled titles. I do recall some complaints around Altered Carbon being killed this year. If that's representative, I'm going to guess that a lot of these shows are just bad...
It said that shows sometimes, do not get traction immediately.
I suspect that might been the case with "The OA" for example.
I watched first season only because my wife wanted it, and to me it was just some weird "mindbending newage" stuff.
But second season the show went into a mix of sci-fi and fantasy, and started to have interesting mysteries, characters, better plot, and give impression that something was going on after all.
SPOILER: first season the show implies the main character maybe, maybe not, is some kind of spiritual entity. second season is clearer in the fact that the main character actually is a person that can travel between dimensions, and the finale make clear the show will be about the protagonists and antagonists chasing each other across dimensions. A "dimension chase" plot sounds much more interesting than "maybe I am an angel" plot. So when the show finally had the chance to bring in a wider audience, it got killed.
With regard to Game of Thrones, I don't think the article argues that it necessarily got better in quality season by season but that it took a couple of seasons to find a massive viewership and become a cultural phenomenon. That said, I think the quality did improve between season 1 and 5.
And I vehemently disagree with the notion that "almost all shows get significantly worse". There are definitely many shows that do jump the shark at some point and significantly drop in quality. On the flip side, there are many examples of shows that needed a couple of seasons to find their tone and really hit their stride which they most likely never would have had the chance to do at Netflix. E.g: Parks and Recreation, Community, Justified, even Breaking Bad imho.
Having only seen the first two, Parks and Rec and Community definitely suffered towards their later seasons, although I would say they were still good towards the end.
Parks and Rec season 1 was just six episodes. Yeah it improved a lot in quality, but viewership appears to have actually declined over time according to wikipedia.
Yes, the beginning of GoT is best, but still it took some time to become popular.
That's the point they are trying to make. Not that later seasons are better.
Eh, I don't think that's especially accurate either. GoT grew pretty steadily in popularity over time. The first season was well received. Controversy about incest and sex scene made it fairly newsworthy.
If you want a good analogy you want to pick a show that performed poorly in the initial season.
This is a chart of wikipedia page views which is probably a decent proxy for popularity on netflix.
This is a bit of a left-field comment, but... don't episodic TV shows have a lot of the same downsides as SaaS solutions? You want indefinite entertainment that you'll be happy with season after season after season, but the cost is an eternity of risk that the network will cancel the show and you'll never find out how it ends.
The difference is that I want Photoshop to run forever, but I'm not as sure I want Walter White to get an exotic new cancer every twelve months.
I don't watch shows on my own. I know they satisfy the urge to turn on the TV and just have something on, and I think that urge is mind-rotting. If I have to watch something, why not a movie? If I don't have the energy to pay attention for 90 minutes, why idly kill time watching anything at all?
Or what about short films? That's a whole neglected format. They have Oscars and a dedicated video network for them.
> If I don't have the energy to pay attention for 90 minutes, why idly kill time watching anything at all?
I don't even understand the point of this question. Why is 90 minutes more worthy than 48 minutes? At the end of the day, I have a little bit of time to relax. I generally do so by watching one episode of <whatever series the wife and I enjoy atm>. What is it you think about a 90 minute movie makes it more worthy, that anything less than it isn't worth doing at all?
It’s about time invested to find something you’ll like. If I watch a new movie every night, I have to go do the work to find a movie to watch. If I watch short films for 90 mins, I have to do that 5-6x/night. If I watch a series, I find a new one once a month.
I think it's nicer to watch a show that has shot all seasons rather than one that is in the middle. Then if you choose not to watch all seasons it's your choice.
At some point Netflix will have to stop thinking about how to get 'new subscribers' and focus on how to 'keep current subscribers'. It's all great if you can recapture the interest of burnt customers with new flashy shows, but how many times can you do that before they stop Netflix subscription and go to Disney or HBO instead?
It really does amaze me they are not doing this. How you gain more subscribers is by maintaining a solid track record for Netflix originals now I typically hold off until I see that its past the 3rd season as a show.
If I cancel Netflix the only way I am going back is if they stop cancelling shows. Whats worse is Netflix will be full of a graveyard of shows never finished. If the last time a show has been updated is over two years back I dont click to watch.
Amazon had the better idea to plan for the long term not the short term. I hope Netflix takes a similar stand. Make your customers happy and eventually your shareholders will follow when the numbers work themselves to your favor.
There's a good chance Netflix is behaving rationally.
Shows are like startups. The payoff is a very skewed distribution, i.e. median and mean are vastly different. After one season, I'd argue you have a pretty good estimate of the earning potential for a show. Maybe you're even off by a factor of two or three, but since the goal is to find a show with 10x or 100x the viewership, you're better off canceling a show with median success.
Actually it's probably a lot easier to predict the payoff for a show after one year, than for a startup. Startups can take multiple years to find product-market fit; shows rarely pivot dramatically.
[Update: I got the facts wrong with the following example, as someone nicely pointed out below! I think the general principle still stands.] Tuca & Bertie, for example, was canceled after one season, but the same people went on to make Bojack Horseman, which was a much bigger hit. Bojack would not have happened if Tuca were renewed, and Tuca would never have gotten as popular as Bojack.
Isn't Netflix effectively doing VC, but for TV shows? They seem to be shotgunning money around to people who want to make shows, and if the RoI is not at an arbitrary threshold, they stop feeding money.
Seems like it generates horrible perverse incentives on what kind of (generic) content is created, though.
VC is a bad comparison ... Maybe VC with the intent to sell all ownership to the first person that offers them a 20% ROI...
Netflix wants to bring in NEW customers... Existing customers are unlikely to unsubscribe, but getting new customers is hard at this point.
Best way to get new customers is to throw new shows at people, lots of them, get them hooked. If people join, again, unlikely to leave -- they will find other cool things to watch.
For Netflix, the value if a new hot show is way higher than season 4 of a very hot show... Nothing short of GOT (mid seasons) would be good enough to make it to season 5-6... I'm shocked some if these Netflix original series are making a 3rd season, since 2 is usually all it takes to milk a franchise
TFA takes as its hypothesis that Netfix don't know what their doing, that is they are somehow missing out on growing or retaining their audience by cancelling shows after one or two seasons.
Obviously Netflix isn't going to act against their own interest, so they must believe the marginal cost of producing new seasons must be greater than the marginal revenue attributable to these new seasons.
What makes Netflix (and all streamers) different than the traditional networks is that their viewership data is orders of magnitude better. They know who watches, how quickly, where, when, which series are abandoned by viewers, which episodes are abandoned by viewers, how series X performed with people who binged series Y.
I imagine they aren't just saying that series X didn't have a big enough audience, they are figuring based on their machine learning models, series X could not build a large enough audience to justify the production costs.
That the art suffers for the bottom line, while tragic, is nothing new.
For all their data, they still can’t measure things like eroding sentiment, word of mouth that doesn’t happen, etc. I used to recommend Netflix, now I feel mostly meh about it. That is the long term road to cancellation at the personal level and irrelevance/bankruptcy if it happens at large scale.
That is a good point - that is, because of the fallacy of composition, what is financially prudent for each individual show, as a strategy for all new production, slowly erodes the platform. I'm not sure that's proven but it certainly should be accounted for.
They cancel a series after the second season to avoid paying exorbitant salaries to the cast and director. I cancelled my Netflix once I understood what they are up to. I finally get to know the characters in the second season, and it's over.
A lot of the shows they've cancelled just weren't that good, even the ones I watched.
They hold up 3 shows as an example, Stranger Things, Game of Thrones and Schitt's Creek. The first two were smash hits after season 1. Schitt's Creek was a really good show from the start but it wasn't well known until later seasons. It didn't "hit it's stride" it built up it's audience over time. The quality was always there.
The shows Netflix is cancelling aren't even close in quality.
>In 2018, the "Hollywood" creator Ryan Murphy landed a reported $300 million contract with Netflix. And Benioff and Weiss reportedly closed a $200 million deal last year; the news of that contract came two days after "The OA" was canceled. Shonda Rhimes and Kenya Barris are also in the six-figure-Netflix-deal club.
Sure, but those mean "in the top 100" and "in the top 500". I've always heard six-figure to mean exactly six figures, so a nine-figure deal wouldn't be six figures.
But for a non-club example of the same error, see the very next line:
> The way Netflix accounts for these six-figure deals is complicated,
The majority of Hollywood (and to a lesser extent general entertainment/media) accounting for money is “complicated”.
It’s a known issue whereby producers and other people in a position of financial power deliberately shape the deal structures to be deceptively appealing in order to basically keep more of the money for themselves. Google “Hollywood accounting” if you’re curious for more details.
The six figures reference may be a reflection of what the person in question is likely to be walking away from the deal with in terms of “money in their own pockets” as opposed to total money made available to them by Netflix for the purpose of making shows.
>The six figures reference may be a reflection of what the person in question is likely to be walking away from the deal with in terms of “money in their own pockets” as opposed to total money made available to them by Netflix for the purpose of making shows.
When I click the link "also in the six-figure-Netflix-deal club" it takes me to an article[1] titled "$100 MILLION CLUB: 7 Hollywood titans that Netflix, HBO, and others have signed 9-figure deals with during the battle for talent". So that second article correctly matches 9-figure with $100M. This tells me that the first article just has a typo, not that there's some sort of 1/1000 conversion factor for salaries. I have a hard time believing in a 1/1000 conversion factor for salaries without some source clearly explaining that.
The problem isn't that Netflix cancels shows after 1 or 2 seasons. It's that they insist on injecting mystery box plotlines and ending seasons without resolving some of them. They do this to keep you bingeing, but the end result is a lot of annoyed fans who put in the time and invest in the show without any resolution.
Instead of they shift to a one-and-done model with room for more seasons, then it wouldn't matter.
Now Netflix has a vast library of content, yay for them, but full of half unfinished stories. Imagine going to the library with the back half of the books missing. Would you want to read the first half of the book?
Creatively, dramas should have a clear story to tell. If that is 1 hour, or 100 hours, that is ok. But stopping unexpectedly halfway through is bad.
An easy way for netflix to help is to say "every story on Netflix has an ending." Which has marketing value and still allows creative freedom, and actually would appeal to creators more.
In practice, this means "you can't tease a next season that has not been approved yet" OR "you can end on a cliffhanger and is show is authorized for a 1 hour wrap up episode of the next season is cancelled".
This is an interesting complaint in contrast to films. The normal complaint with films is that there is never any new IP, it's just sequel after sequel.
Cutting TV shows short so they don't get to conclude is obviously a pain for fans, but continually having new interesting TV is no bad thing.
Personally, this year Netflix has renewed shows like Carmen Sandiego for another season (despite the current season being cut short due to COVID) and The Dragon Prince for another four (yes, 4.) after only running for 3 so far.
IMO the first season of Altered Carbon was good - the second one? Not so much... and it seems like the viewing stats reflected that.
I'd read the first book and it was interesting that despite the first season changing so much from the book it still ended up good (even improved in some aspects).
The second season of Altered Carbon felt really rushed. Which seems to be an issue with several shows, like "oh crap it became really popular we need another season ASAP". Which almost invariably leads to a weak followup.
Like many, I subscribed to Netflix during the pandemic, and one thing the pandemic permits (especially when the cold season comes around) is binge watching.
With that in mind, I was sucked into The OA and I was annoyed to find out that it was halted.
ImHo, tell a complete story and then halt. A catalog & graveyard of half-completed shows will be Netflix’s undoing.
Because why would I want to risk getting sucked into a story that won’t ever be completed?
Netflix don't seem to want to get to that inflection point any more which is a shame. Santa Clarita Diet was a personal favourite (don't hate me), and it had just hit its stride. And Daredevil too.
There's a big after-market in shows too. I've watched many shows on DVD (and now on Netflix/Amazon) long after they aired because I never saw them the first time round.
Just spitballing here, but the subscription model and streaming and the increasing competition is doing this to the industry. Providers will have to increase the velocity of their output to keep up. I will guess that each of these canceled series are being placed on the catalog shelf as the raw material for movies. Netflix may be playing the long game here, sacrificing viewer ill will in the present in order to build an IP catalog that will feed the pipeline for years to come.
Accordingly, since funds are limited and you can only produce n things concurrently, there is a certain sense in constantly churning out new IP.
I think this theory fits with the report in the article about creators getting 9 figure contracts as their series gets ‘cancelled’
Sad that the Dark Crystal was cancelled - didn't know that. It did look awfully expensive to produce though, and it was not kid friendly at all (all that sucking the soul out of cute little puppets would scare the crap out of my young nieces and nephews!)
I'm the target demographic for Dark Crystal as I read a ton of fantasy, but I watched one episode and had no real desire to continue on. It was just kinda boring. I subscribe to r/fantasy and this is a fairly common opinion there as well.
In comparison, I can't say for sure that The Witcher series is super high quality, but it managed to be pretty exciting and I enjoyed it for that.
Too soon for whom or for what? This is not explicitly stated and it seems much of the discussion is based on different assumptions. Too soon to make good shows? Too soon for you? Too soon for Netflix? All of those likely lead to different answers.
It seems quite possible that optimizing for Netflix's interests might leave some dissatisfied. But it is hard to call that cancelling too soon if it lets them get to their overall objectives.
An interesting question is if Netflix themselves in optimizing for the short term reward are penalizing themselves in the long term? That is much harder to know.
> The first season was an incomplete prequel story to Jim Henson's innovative 1982 film, and it's a shame that the story will go unfinished.
In this case I think it takes 2 to tango.
We don't know what happened but either Netflix bought a season with (presumably) a promise of a second season if succesful, or they bought two seasons, with payment in to installations, and decided to bail halfway through.
I think the first setup is the most likely and in that case the producers then decided to try and take the viewers hostage, by producing an unfinished story, in the hopes that the an outcry for more can help demand for a season 2.
There isn't a single TV show that can't tell a compelling story in 26 hr-long episodes (~2 seasons)
Sure, some shows truly shine with time, but if your show is likely to get cancelled, then you should start tying off plot threads for the current arc.
A great example is the Boys. Each season ends with them tying off the main arc, and an expose that sets up for the next season. Season 2's conclusion felt satisfactory, while still keeping me excited for what's to come. The 1st season of Witcher does this really well too.
Netflix's problem is the same one as network TV. It is just far more evident with Netflix because the binge format is central to it. When the entire show is enjoyed in a very small time span, the ending affects your perception of the show more strongly than if the show was enjoyed over years on broadcast TV. A similar phenomenon is visible with movies too, where a bad ending can often come to define the entire movie.
I'm surprised that TV contracts haven't become more sophisticated and diverse with time. How about sign a 3 season contract with no extensions or mandate arc conclusions for shows whose fate is up in the air? Maybe create a final season as a low-budget short, allowing show runners to provide a conclusion when axed.
I'm no expert on the matter, but the complete lack of new ideas in the domain is surprising, given the degree to which Netflix has revolutionized the rest of the distribution business.
Slow burn of this topic, this deeper analysis looked at Netflix’s impact on Hollywood too. This[1] is from 2019:
“[Netflix] now routinely ends shows after their second season, even when they’re still popular. Netflix has learned that the first two seasons of a show are key to bringing in subscribers—but the third ... don’t do much...”
The problem with Netflix is that if a show doesn’t bring new subscribers/retain current ones, the show is worthless.
It doesn’t matter if a lot of people watch a show. It only matters if that show is a deal maker.
So it basically needs to become a cultural phenomenon or attract a hardcore base of fans. Anything else just wastes bandwidth.
I doubt Netflix can predict with any certainty which show that will be in the same way that VCs can’t pick which of 100 companies will IPO for a billion. So they just invest in 20 of the better ones.
The problem is that the more Netflix cancels shows that way, the less people will want to follow a show because of that very policy. The law of diminishing returns. the same thing that has made people wary of using any Google product since Google doesn't think long term. I quit Netflix when they cancelled the excellent Daredevil show.
The path of a series on traditional tv too often follows the path:
1. New show is popular
2. Gets renewed
3. Season 2 or 3 they decide to slow the story line and just have individual episodes where a problem pops up and is resolved with no advance of the overarching plot.
4. By seasons 4 the actors are now famous and getting too expensive to continue. Some drop out, new people come in.
5. It gets cancelled with many things unresolved.
2. The article authors know more about whether a show is viable than Netfix (with its massively detailed viewership data)
In reality, Netflix only cares about subscriber count, and that incentive is both obvious and intuitive. A show winning an Emmy has nothing to do with whether or not it’s profitable.
I mean, see cable pre-Internet. The delusion that Netflix is something unique beyond what cable was has never been true. The only thing special about it is that there are no ads, which is not universal among the industry (do cheap Hulu, Tubi, and Pluto remind you of anything? Reminds me of cable!)
Critically acclaimed shows like Stranger Things might have been important to gain mindshare, but now everyone knows what Netflix is and those expensive efforts are probably not worth it. Personally, I spend most of my TV time watching House Hunters which (a) will never win critical acclaim and (b) is about the cheapest show to produce that someone can imagine.
But I don’t like watching one hour dramas that are there to be depressing and have expensive actors, sets, and special effects. I just want to veg out and watch some idiots buy the wrong house.
I hate when they cancel lesser known shows that maybe never had a wide audience to begin with (Dark Crystal, Dirk Gently, etc). Like why did they even bother to make the shows??? They didn't even really give them a chance. I only just found out they had made Dirk Gently, which has so far been great, but it really bums me out that it might end badly. I'm only watching it because I'm already a fan.
Hmm. Netflix may be shooting themselves in the foot a bit here, but frankly I much prefer "too many series are cancelled before hitting their stride" where the shortsighted decision is being made based only on viewership and budget, than the previous situation where cancelled shows never developed an audience due to being broadcast in a bad time slot, or because they were repeatedly bumped from their time slot[0] (eg. by sporting events going into overtime) with missed episodes never repeated, or by episodes being shown out of order[1].
At least now shows are cancelled based on their intrinsic viewership. Short-sighted cancelations are still an unfortunate problem, but this is still a huge improvement over the previous status quo.
A bit more concerning to me is that Netflix's "throw the spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks" approach is starting to lean a bit more in the direction of "same but different" clones of other shows with a twist to the setup, even for shows based on existing properties.
But, so it goes.
[0] eg. Dark Skies
[1] eg. Firefly, where the pilot wasn't broadcast until the end of the season.
Netflix's problem isn't cancelling shows too soon, it's an inability to make anything that endures. They've had loads of shows that won raves upon initially airing but haven't really stuck around much at all.
They haven't managed to make sticky shows like Friends, the Big Bang Theory or even something more recent like Brooklyn Nine Nine that people can mindlessly rewatch over and over and they haven't managed to make top tier prestige stuff (talking Sopranos/Wire level here, they've made plenty a couple of notches below). The whole platform depends on a certain kind of novelty of the algorithm being able to churn up totally new stuff that's okay.
As far as cancelling stuff goes, I get the impression Netflix moreso just doesn't renew? HBO seem to have a formula where a cancelled show will get a special to wrap things up (e.g. Looking, Hello Ladies), always thought that was pretty savvy as it probably costs quite a bit less, makes that one episode into a bit of an event for fans and leaves the overall series a lot more enticing to people in the future.
I had to look at the Wikipedia list of Netflix shows to believe you. Probably Stranger Things is one exception and maybe The Witcher will endure, though it's really questionable how much The Witcher counts as "theirs"
The reason so many US series are cancelled, and not just Netflix ones, is simply that there are too many of them. Producers discovered that most series attracts more viewers during their first episodes, then numbers start either exploding if the series is deemed to become a huge success, or slowly fading year after year. Therefore they already know that cancelling a series to replace it with a new one after some strong advertising will without any doubt pay in the short time.
How could they solve the problem without leaving watchers with unresolved plots and those awful cliffhangers? To me there are two possible solutions: either produce less series so that they're not competing against themselves, or offer by contract a way to resolve plots by guaranteeing that a certain number of episodes will be produced anyway after the cancellation decision. I don't see why implementing either, or even both, could be detrimental in any way to the business, unless they're counting profits by the cent with total disregard to their customers.
Netflix gained ground in original television by funding bold new stuff that nobody else would (Orange Is The New Black, BoJack). They've now becomes slaves to their data despite the fact that the signals they rely on are hopelessly confounded. It's possible that they've hit upon the right strategy, but I both suspect and hope that isn't true.
I've been an amateur filmmaker for awhile - it's one of my biggest hobbies. I'm working on a startup in the streaming space that I think innovates in a competitive way.
I'm still working out the kinks for our first "film", and I'm going to approach investors once we've released it. I think it's pretty novel and not something these companies will touch before it becomes a threat. But it very much should put fear into them as it changes the business.
Are there any of you that are extremely passionate about film, emotion, story, character, setting, aesthetic? Do you think the current slate of productions by Netflix and Disney mostly suck? Do you like Miyazaki? If that speaks to you we should get in touch at some point. Leave me a comment and I'll reach out when I'm ready.
As "proof" I'm not just blowing steam, my last big project (not a startup): https://vo.codes
Quite a lot of hit shows just need more time to incubate than others. Most Star Trek series didn't get decent until the third season. Looking even further back, something like Cheers would have been axed almost instantly.
Back when I used to give a damn about television series, I followed a lot of the inside baseball, including incidents that might lead to a series getting cancelled. Some networks were just more prone to cancellation than others. For a while, Fox was particularly eager to take a sackful of new kittens down to the creek; I recall one series didn't make four shown episodes before cancellation. The Sci-Fi Channel (later SyFy) had a particularly brutal streak for a while.
It's clear that whatever any network promises at the outset, they exist in a huge tension with the actual show creators and runners (and yet more tension with the actors). All negotations should be performed with that in mind. I wonder precisely how hard an "exit clause" would be to wrangle. You know, you cancel the show, we get four or six episodes, at such and such budget, and such and such filming time, to wrap things up.
Since about 2005, my television series selection is what I call the "vulture strategy:" I wait until a series is cancelled before I watched. Then I wait for the hype to die down (the carcass gets more juicy). If it is still appealing after all of that, I stick my beak in. I just cannot get invested in something that might have the lifespan of a carnival guppy that could be flushed down the toilet at the first sign of listlessness.
Netflix in particular has been very clumsy in the execution of its shows lately, even once I filter out the endless annoyance of its dark UI patterns. Very "message-y;" I got a bellyful of that with the Christian types. And that's without them going and retroactively editing their old shows. Netflix is turning into my last pick when I want to look for something random to watch.
There are a variety of bigger problems with the current TV show culture beyond getting cancelled early. Reliance on the cliffhanger, too much pandering to current events/politics, overuse of the "mystery box" plot technique, and so on.
There are a few other personal gripes I have that may not be shared in this community (like, I think shows are way oversexed and have far too many grotesque and gritty elements for my taste) which have basically turned me completely off of modern television shows. For the time being, I'm watching "classics" and movies.
I'm not convinced that cancelling TV shows too soon is creating a problem. The bigger problem, for me, are the above features + an over-abundance of volume of content (the ol' "Netflix will produce just about anything" criticism).
That's why I prefer watch anthologies like Fargo or True Detective. Each season tells a different story but it has common things (setting, vibe, etc.) with previous one and I know more or less what to expect. And if I want to skip let's say S02 I can watch S03 witout any problems.
> It's also worth noting how many of the cancellations have been shows with women and people of color prominently behind the scenes or starring. "One Day at a Time," "Tuca and Bertie," "Glow," "I Am Not Okay with This," and "Everything Sucks" are just a few examples of canceled shows with both diverse characters and representation behind the lens.
Maybe that has something to do with it. There is a common meme "manga, anime, Netflix adaption". The first two show the main character looking as designed, and the last show a black woman. It ends up, if you optimize for showing every race and gender rather than entertainment, I can see why the show would be cancelled.
I don't fully understand this. Suppose that you remake say, Batman, with Batman as a black woman instead of a white man. Even assume that there's some nefarious political agenda forcing that decision. How does that make the show less entertaining? It seems like how good the show is would be orthogonal to that choice. And it doesn't take any more effort to have a black woman star than a white man, so it's not like that choice reduces the energy they can put into making the show good.
On the other hand, if quite a few people just prefer to watch the version with a white man, that seems like it would correlate to the shows being cancelled, independently of how entertaining they are..
I generally don't care whether a show stars women or men, but the stories generally get more boring in subsequent seasons of a show when it gets more and more PC.
Supergirl started as a nice show that was promoting female power, but at the 4th-5th season transgender and black women started to appear just becuase they are transgender and black, and men characters got dropped out of the show just because they are men even though they were very good team companions to supergirl.
Also for me it's boring to hear how much women don't need men instead of seeing an interesting story.
The other problem with subsequent seasons with lots of PC speech is that viewer counts drop because of the boring story line, and then of course the series gets cancelled.
As someone far left of the mainstream political spectrum, there have been more than a few times when I was annoyed by what felt like pandering to "liberal" and pc ideas in netflix shows. Overly overt, unnecessary, "tell me don't show me" themes about how women are strong or whatever. Or a villain whose primary purpose is to make you think of Trump.
That space force comedy with Steve Carell comes to mind
I don't think it's a political agenda. I think a sizeable portion of people just like seeing this stuff that affirms their beliefs or gives them an example to point to. Conservative leaning stuff does it too, and it's even more annoying when you disagree with its themes. I recall Logan Lucky (movie) was an especially aggravating example of this on the conservative side.
I somewhat agree with you, but I also think this is different from complaining about the representation of women or black people. Historically most superheroes have been white men. If all contemporary superhero shows had 50% women heroes and 30% non white, it would seem dissonant as fuck, but it wouldn't even remotely be evidence of a "pro-diversity bias".
Yeah that's fair. The gender/race swapping is sort of a different thing I guess. By all means, diversity is good, but at the same time, I kind of rolled my eyes when seeing "Enola Holmes" show up on netflix. It's Sherlock Holmes, but a girl! Well technically his sister, but its more or less the same. Maybe its good, but I'm hesitant to watch something that's main thesis seems to be "Girls can be good detectives like Sherlock too". I don't want that. I want a story about a competent female detective that just does things her own way. Say, idk, Jessica Jones.
It's the difference between making a film about black Peter Parker vs. (black) Miles Morales for spider man. If they go for Miles, great, sounds like a good start. If they go for the former, you really have to wonder why, and how big of a deal its going to be. Being talked down to with drudgingly obvious and childishly simple messages about racial equality is annoying. It's so, so much better to demonstrate equality by having competent outcomes from a diverse cast.
I enjoyed "The OA" and "Snowpiercer", I really enjoyed "Devs" and "Watchmen". I don't mind female characters. I don't mind non-white characters and I don't mind non-straight characters.
But I get really annoyed when they seemingly shove those things in my face just because "yay diversity!".
Have the main character be gay or black or whatever, but if it's not relevant to the story, just treat it like a matter of fact and have them act like real people.
I also think that the sheer volume of new series Netflix premiers can't draw from the best or most experienced talent pool. To me, the Netflix model is hire a 2nd/3rd writer or associate producer from a famous/well-respected TV series or film, give them their own show, and see if it sticks.
I think one thing most of these comments overlook (at least in my eyes) is that there’s too much to choose from.
I have Netflix but rarely watch it. My SO is more into Netflix. But for someone like me who’s a bit older, I open Netflix and am overwhelmed with the amount of shows on the screen. It’s way too much for me to figure out what I should watch. Recommendations, trending, etc.. where do I begin watching a show?
I think what I’m getting at is Netflix is just putting original content on their platform to see what sticks, however I don’t know what they want me to watch? How do I decide what to watch because obviously there’s a lot to offer.
This is just how I see it. The app sits idle on my TV for me and I hardly use it.
I've been burned by that quite a bit, it's annoying watching a show for it to end with either a cliffhanger or some lame tacked on ending. I really enjoyed the Travelers for example but it sucked for it to end as it did.
Another thing I've noticed is that I tend to not watch shows when they've just been released, especially when it's the second season of something I like. Instead, I wait until I have the time to enjoy the show but at at that point me viewing it doesn't count in the metrics Netfix uses to decide in favor of continuing the show.
Right now though, I feel ambivalent about starting a new show on netflix because I don't want to be disappointed in the ending.
Netflix has this problem that, unlike its large competitors, they have only one source of income, and they have relatively little of their own content - Amazon and Apple can throw money at streaming because they make tons of money from other sources, Disney and HBO have years worth of content that people will happily go back to and watch with their kids.
So I understand Netflix' situation, they keep losing licensed content so they need to keep making up for it with quantity of new shows, but damn, knowing that a show was cancelled without a proper ending is a big "no" for me when I choose which series to watch.
From my point of view the problem manifests in this way: I simply don't bother to invest the time to watch new shows until it's clear that they're going to get a proper run that allows them to finish well (Breaking Bad, Justified; even Sons of Anarchy, which was a real slog for the last 3 seasons, ended well).
I'm tired of investing time in shows that Netflix simply drops: The Expanse (though now thankfully picked up by Amazon), Designated Survivor, and Shooter (although that was total crap, especially after season 1) spring immediately to mind, but there have been plenty of others.
I also won't bother starting to watch shows that I know Netflix have cancelled before they've concluded (e.g., Glow), because what's the point? And this is starting to severely erode the value of Netflix's library to me.
Things that have worked incredibly well on Netflix are shows that tell self-contained stories within a single season, like Narcos or Fargo, or shows that tell have a self contained but are able to tell it in a longer form than feature film would allow. The canonical example of the latter for me is Godless, which is one of the best shows on TV, I think. Genuinely fantastic.
And this last point leads on to another, which others have made: US TV series are too long, typically 18 - 24 episodes per season, multiple seasons, often too bloated with filler episodes, and often suffer from ridiculous over-plotting after the first few seasons, which comes off as aimless thrashing around: Prison Break (season 3 onwards: just utter nonsense), 24 (SPOILER ALERT: I mean, seriously, WTF was that Tony Almeida betrayal storyline all about in, I think, the final season - multiple sharks were jumped and I'm still pissed off about it).
On the flipside UK TV series are often too short: 6 half-hour episodes is still quite typical, so you're only really getting into a show and then suddenly the season ends. With that said, for some shows this has been made to work really well: Line of Duty, or the earlier seasons of Luther.
I do feel like, for many shows, a happy medium would be 10 - 12 hour long episodes. You could then afford to make a much more polished product, whilst still probably investing quite a bit less.
Designated Survior ran on ABC for 2 seasons, Netflix made one more, so really ABC cancelled it and Netflix brought it back. This is similar to what they are doing with Lucifer right now.
Unfortunately I can't edit my post but I suppose the modification would be to widen my point: i.e., that my frustration actually applies to shows made by a variety of networks, but picked up by Netflix.
The result is actually the same though: the library of shows Netflix hosts (whether their own or otherwise) becomes less valuable due to the number of them that have been cancelled before reaching a conclusion.
Yeah, and I generally agree with what you were saying. And I totally agree with some like 24 sigh
I think that generally US seasons are too long. However, I only realized that after watching a bunch of foreign (mostly UK) shows on Netflix. These are shows I would have never been exposed to.
I too agree that sometimes the UK ones are a bit too short. I remember wanting to watch Luther, but was thinking 5 seasons was a lot (despite loving Idris Elba). Then we got watching and one season (err, series) was 2 episodes. Five series had a total of 20 episodes. That was crazy. The same goes for Sherlock.
There's definitely a happy medium, and I feel that the 10ish episode length seems like a nice point.
I agree with all your points but do think its important to clarify that The Expanse was originally cancelled by SyFy not Netflix before being picked up by Amazon, Netflix just had streaming rights at the time.
Honestly really struggling to justify paying for Netflix anymore, think there has been maybe one thing I enjoyed watching on it the past 4 months and I look through the listing every single day.
I also don't think the way they make shows is very smart, it's all optimized for trying to cause a binge watch in the realm of 10+ hours. I did watch the first 4 hours of that OA show and honestly the level of content felt about enough for a 90 minute movie just stretched out at a glacial pace and I just couldn't stand the navel gazing required to drag it out into a 10 hour long series.
I do now prefer the "mini-series" approach. Like "Good Omens". Take a good book and turn it into a mini-series. There are so many good books about - no need to create crappy multi-season series.
I much prefer single season series or series that weren't confident in their renewals. The writing is just completely different. A single series season can tell a coherent story that makes real progress and drives it's characters to change and resolution. It's satisfying in the way that watching LOTR extended edition can be.
A series planning on being on the air forever can start with a clever premise, meander on and on in no rush to get anywhere. It endlessly teases to reveal secrets, change characters, or resolve plot. But the princess is always in another castle.
A lot of these cancellations are due to COVID right? Basically that was a hard reset on TV production, seems odd the article doesn't mention that till the end and only as a factor re: future cancellations.
My understanding is that the current Netflix contract generally includes a clause preventing other streaming services from picking it up, leaving to only allowing network TV to buy rights. That's how One Day at a Time got saved, PopTV which is owned by CBS, so technically network, managed to buy the rights. However they aren't allowed to add it to CBS All Access like they do other Pop shows. Doesn't help that the Netflix demographic, _especially_ for shows with large fandoms, don't generally use network TV.
Part of the issue is that people pay for an algorithmic recommendation streaming service. Prior to Netflix streaming offering, people searched and chose movies to watch in the mail based off recommendations from their social circles. When there is no discovery option, Netflix is forced to "guess" what it's customers want rather than know. They've completely removed the social aspect of enjoying shows to the point where people say "have you seen x?" "yes" and that's the end of the conversation.
Hasn't this been clear since the Amazon leaks some years back? Each season needs to attract new subscribers compared to something ad-driven where a season needs to have viewers.
I think it's clear that the problem isn't cancelling TV shows, it's that Netflix cancels them unexpectedly.
I'd prefer a model where, after one season, a number of seasons is determined with input from executives, writers, cast and crew. Then everybody marches in lockstep towards a satisfying conclusion at that target.
You don't end up with the 8 season long show that drags on, no end in sight. And you don't have a cliffhanger series ending.
Can someone run this up the flag at Netflix please?
I watch tv shows more than pretty much anyone I know and lately I don't even bother watching a show unless it already has several seasons. So this is a terrible business decision. I mean there's a reason "binging" because a phenomenon. I'm not going to binge a show with one season.
Worst news I got from this article was that The Dark Crystal got cancelled. I was looking forward to more shows so I could check it out, guess I never will now.
Isn't the problem with shows being so insanely expensive to produce?
Everything lately is very polished with extremely high production values. We have/d this problem with AAA games in the industry. Art and asset budgets slurping the whole available resources.
If creators want to have long term deals they should probably learn to stretch a dollar a bit more.
They canceled "Teenage Bounty Hunters" which didn't look expensive (no idea if it was). It was a bit uneven but had good, witty writing. IMO could have hit its stride in following seasons and become a cult series.
Compare Netflix to HBO, and you'll instantly see the difference in how they are run. Netflix prioritizes algorithmic made content, HBO artist-driven content. Not coincidentally, HBO is much better at committing to shows long term. Even with a fraction of the content, I would take HBO over Netflix any time.
It's a feature, not a bug. I'm sure that Netflix has the analytics to back up this decision. Just as we reap what we sow when it comes to social network gamification and profiteering and elections, we are seeing the results of content creation, subscription based pricing, and detailed analytics. Netflix does not endeavor to create great content. Netflix endeavors to create content to increase subscription and engagement rates.
I spend more time watching the first 5 mins of some "Netflix" original and then turning it off because, unsurprisingly it's no good, than I do watching really great films. Because Netflix is just throwing spaghetti at the wall and without content curation or selective and informative promotional material, I give these new titles the benefit of the doubt and watch them. Since I watch past the first 3 mins or whatever Netlix requires for it to be considered "watched" I'm considered "engaged" and those titles go on my "watched" list then influence the algorithm and on and on. Meanwhile a couple hours goes by, more content is created, and the cycle repeats. Netflix 1 - Me 0
Lot of media experts in here who know for a fact that Netflix's decisions are terrible for business. Don't they know about second order effects on their customer base!? I suppose it just a matter of time before they got the way of Blockbuster (you know, the corporate giant Netflix starved).
> Netflix won't release viewership numbers, but it's clear its strategy is prioritizing quantity over quality
That is very subjective. I watch netflix and most shows mentioned in this article seem what he/she calls ‘quantity’ to me: from the first moment clear that there will no ending whatsoever
I watch anime, and its great. Most shows only ever get one season. When they get more, its usually with a hiatus between seasons these days. The quality of US TV shows has finally risen in recent times, but they still haven't learned the value of a short run that ends permanently.
*it's clear its strategy is prioritizing quantity over quality
perfect! They a launching a movie per month with a famous actor and shallow stories. I think Netflix and Google make a good parallel. Google is infamous for cancelling products that many people use too, like the beloved Google Reader.
By season 3 you can generally tell if the creators are trying to milk the current viewers or if they really have more cohesive story to tell. I’m sure Netflix looks at that as a negative, those type of shows burn people out and correlates with decreased viewership numbers.
One of the first things I do when looking at a new show to watch is try to find out if the show ends and was cancelled on a cliffhanger. Wikipedia is okay for this, but I've been wishing for a dedicated website with that info.
"Statements from executives have described the cancellations as the result of a cost analysis that tells Netflix a longer-running show won't lead to new subscribers."
How about the cost analysis of loosing current subscribers?
More mini series are needed. The UK has this in spades and executes well. They have an end written before the first episode starts. 3 episodes or 10, but not the same drivel season after season.
I don't care if series are short so long as the wrap up and properly end the story. It's like America's version BBC, great shows that run for half a season to short.
Maybe this is a game of poker. They cancel some shows as a bluff to next generation of creators that they should avoid asking for large raises for their shows past 2nd season.
I'm still heart-broken about Santa Clarita Diet. First season was good, second and third seasons were absolutely brilliant. And then it was cancelled on a cliff-hangar.
netflix originals are bad. like most of them super bad. they either suffer from bad writing or bad directing or both. some originals might have good actors, but nowdays you just expect netflix shit to suck. hope they invest more in writers. like actually pay writers and nurture talent. but it might be an industry symptom - writing on most shows these days sucks. hbo keeps producing good shows, hulu has some good shows, prime too. netflix nada.
Hm. Late to the party, nevertheless I can't resist to give my two cents to the phenomenon which is btw. not even new, or limited to Netflix.
First I didn't grow up with much TV, because there were many more interesting things to do as a child, like playing in the forest. Later on I haven't been a fan either, and finally discarded my TV in 1996 and went into cinema instead. But again, not that much.
For a time I substituted that with a Hauppauge WinTV in one of my PCI-slots, and had the surreal experience to watch the
second plane crash into the Twin Towers in NYC live on CNN after IRC exploded with: "TURN ON CNN NOW!1!!". Removed the card maybe a few weeks after that, because TV became toxic then, as in News are bad for you, and wasn't worth the energy anymore.
Did a strict media diet for a few years then, until I couldn't resist because of Battlestar Galactica, and got lost into Lost :)
From then on I partially catched up, but still very selective.
Anyways, what follows is an incomplete list of things which either never made it further than the pilot, or got canceled
mid-season, or could have been longer IMO.
Earliest thing which comes to mind are several attempts from
Gene Roddenberry with
[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupied 2015-2017
This one is special and maybe didn't get much attention because politically incorrect with the ongoing Crimean ...
how to put it, occupation, crisis? Anyways, very watchable!
(I'm delighted to discover there is a third season out there now. Yay!)
Also more and more competition with more and more immersive games, sometimes rendered so photorealistic that players just dive in to explore the gameworld by sightseeing, and have fun interacting with things like in an old point-and-click adventure, just seriously upgraded and optionally in groups, networked :)
Bean counters shit up everything. This started in traditional publishing in the 1990s and it's responsible for the oppressive mediocrity of the "high literature" scene in the US. Money people never, ever know their place. They don't understand that culture is more important than they are, and it shows.
It started with the chain bookstores. Used to be, getting in was the hard part, but once a writer got published, he stayed published. His editor would keep supporting his books until he broke out. Chain bookstores wrecked this. They'd pull an author's numbers, see that the first book was a flop, and pass on the second. They also introduced the 8-week rotation, which meant that reader word of mouth (a slower process) got disenfranchised, forcing publishers to pick winners (lead titles) and losers before the books were even launched.
This changed the incentive structure. Instead of having to get one person, who knew literature, to believe in his work, an author has to convince a whole committee of people. If the editor can't sell the book to the money people, it gets no marketing or publicity and it dies.
Then there are the literary agents, who don't even read 99 percent of the work sent to them. That's done by unpaid college-age interns. So, instead of writing a book readers will love, your focus becomes writing a book that people will think their bosses like. It's a totally different game.
I'm not surprised this is happening to Netflix. We tend to have a pro-data bias in technology. We don't realize that when the money people get their hands on data, that unless we are extremely editorial in the context in which they interpret and use that data, it's going to be a disaster. They don't have altruistic motives and they don't work nearly as hard as we do to understand complexity-- it's best to think of them as a different species.
>Money people never, ever know their place. They don't understand that culture is more important than they are, and it shows.
They know their place. They look at spreadsheets all day long, and they see that some money losing piece of culture is preventing the business from creating non-money losing piece of culture ... or making payroll.
>It started with the chain bookstores. Used to be, getting in was the hard part, but once a writer got published, he stayed published.
It was great for the writer that got published, but not so great for countless others who couldn't get a break and couldn't get into the vaunted 'club' of gatekeeping published writers.
>Then there are the literary agents, who don't even read 99 percent of the work sent to them
Because there are magnitudes more writers, than writers who can generate an income, and always will be. This is the long-tail that everyone was predicating at the advent of the web. Democratization of culture and media means that it will be much harder for most (except for the tiny few) from making any sort of living from it. You see this on Instagram, YouTube, Twitch streaming, and podcasts because the barrier of entry is so low, it means there are hundreds of thousands of people trying all the time (and those that fail at making an income, are replaced by fresh young faces willing to try). But it's also true of more traditional media, like publishing.
>I'm not surprised this is happening to Netflix
Neither am I. Every single series that Netflix invests means they have to pass on countless others. There is no other way to run this business. The funny thing is that early on with Netflix, when they did not have a lot of content, they would keep renewing unpopular series forever. As they ramped up production, they followed the same trajectory as traditional network channels like NBC/ABC/FOX.
>It was great for the writer that got published, but not so great for countless others who couldn't get a break and couldn't get into the vaunted 'club' of gatekeeping published writers.
It was also great for readers, because there was a realistic expectation that if something was in print it was at worst competent and at best outstanding. Not so much now.
>Democratization of culture and media means that it will be much harder for most (except for the tiny few) from making any sort of living from it.
Democratization of culture means that culture becomes confused with entertainment. They're actually not identical.
IG, YT, and the rest are now purely about marketing strategies. The content - which used to have to speak for itself - is now secondary to bikini ass shots and other eyeball acquisition systems.
There is something rather weird and culty about this. It's almost as if everyone who produces content is being forced to participate in a competitive reality TV show where they Market Their Brand Really Hard™ - and the content is increasingly irrelevant.
>Every single series that Netflix invests means they have to pass on countless others.
Then they need to start monitoring their pilots more effectively, and also spend a little more on up-front development so that the shows that make it out of the slush pile have some prospect of getting to the end of a natural arc.
This is the paradox that most people don't seem to understand. NF claims to be data driven, and supposedly it's economically pragmatic to cut off shows early.
It isn't at all. It's actually unbelievably inefficient, economically and also in terms of customer loyalty.
The efficient solution is to produce consistently great content. This pays off over the long-haul - because a successful series can keep generating significant income for decades.
>Then they need to start monitoring their pilots more effectively, and also spend a little more on up-front development so that the shows that make it out of the slush pile have some prospect of getting to the end of a natural arc.
It's an interesting thought. Maybe if you had 3-episode arcs as a pilot and more development time, you'd have a better idea which ones have legs for a few seasons anyway. Though, as I wrote elsewhere, I don't want TV shows that go on for too long.
>Maybe if you had 3-episode arcs as a pilot and more development time
Sure ... but OP was complaining about shows being cancelled mid-narrative. How does releasing 3 episode pilots fix that? Most likely those will not be complete works, but rather end on some sort cliff-hanger, to entice viewership to stay with the show.
>Though, as I wrote elsewhere, I don't want TV shows that go on for too long.
I agree with you. I found 3 to 5 seasons seems to be the sweet spot for most shows. Once it goes past 5 seasons for many shows, the quality seems to degrade, the writers run out of ideas and just do things to fill time. There is a remake of Anne of Green Gables (Anne with an E) - and holy geeze is that true for that one when it comes to time-filler. Whereas the original series was tight with great pacing, this new series invents and explores every pointless side-story. For example, in the original, there would be a reference to Matthew going somewhere, and in the remake, because the writers have so much time to fill, you'll get a deep dive into that trip, which ultimately has no impact on the larger narrative itself.
I think what the parent was suggesting was that if more time were spent up-front to maximize the chance that the chance that a show that makes it on is good, you wouldn't be pulling the plug on as many shows. I'm not sure that would actually work though. I assume they already try to do that in development where it's a lot cheaper to experiment than in production.
I only half-jokingly say that I lose interest in most series after, at most, 5 seasons. And it can be a lot less than that. A series can coast through maybe a season or two in significant part on a fresh concept, original characters, a different style, etc. Sure, the writing needs to be good too but it's not the only thing to engage the viewer. It gets harder after that and so does finding fresh stories.
>IG, YT, and the rest are now purely about marketing strategies.
OBVIOUSLY! Because there are a million others vying for the same eyeballs. The question is, how do you stand out? If you were a YouTuber who wanted to make a living from YouTube content you create, how would you do it?
>Then they need to start monitoring their pilots more effectively, and also spend a little more on up-front development so that the shows that make it out of the slush pile have some prospect of getting to the end of a natural arc.
How do you know they aren't doing that? No matter how good your pre-production process is for finding good shows, ultimately, it's the eyeballs and box-office that decide it. There is no formula to differentiate a hit from a bomb. What complicates things is that season 1 of the show may have been a hit, but subsequent seasons are not. There's no magic here. At some point, you are going to be cutting something to make room for something else.
>NF claims to be data driven
I'm sure it is, but there is no formula that you can use to figure out what is going to be a hit and what will be a bomb and lose you money. If there was, you wouldn't see companies spending hundreds of millions on movies that end up bombing at the box-office.
>The efficient solution is to produce consistently great content.
This is like saying the 'efficient solution' to investing is to invest in companies that give a good return and not invest in companies that lose you money.
Pretty sure everyone wants to produce great content.
> They look at spreadsheets all day long, and they see that some money losing piece of culture is preventing the business from creating non-money losing piece of culture ... or making payroll.
In this case they're seeing something that they guess is not making as much money as they like (there's no way of telling how much and individual program actually brings in) and rolling the dice to see if something else would perform better.
The downside of this attempt, however, is that they're creating a large catalogue of abandoned projects that a lot of viewers aren't going to watch because they don't want half a story. If you complete a series like the OA, you have a decently regarded show in your catalog forever, and your large catalog can attract people even if they don't immediately watch any one particular show. The current approach may or may not create more big hits in the short run (it doesn't seem to have a ton of success on that front so far). In the long run, though, it's going to lead to a smaller number of evergreen shows in the Netflix catalog.
>there's no way of telling how much and individual program actually brings in
Sure there is. I used money as a metric, but Netflix, being a subscription business, will have it's own internal metric that correlates cost, popularity, and maybe other stuff to come up with some sort of a score that they can then compare to other shows - to figure out which ones should be renewed and which ones should not be.
Even with all their metrics, all they can do is guess. Their revenue comes from subscriptions, and there is no clear correlation between the amount of views an individual show gets and the amount of subscriptions Netflix has. You can't simply say "obviously a show with more immediate viewers brings in more subscriptions."
A show with fewer viewers might attract hardcore fans who will cancel their subscription if the show is cancelled, while one that's much more popular might attract viewers who will stay on the platform either way. Someone might be less likely to continue their subscription because of these kinds of cancellations, even when they didn't get around to watching the shows before they were cancelled. A show might attract fewer viewers at first, but become a cult classic later (Netflix should know this, they purchased shows like Arrested Development), or take a few years to really hit their stride.
>Even with all their metrics, all they can do is guess.
Sure. But you have to come up with something, otherwise you'll never cancel anything, by extension, never have room to invest in shows that could drive your subscriptions.
>A show with fewer viewers might attract hardcore fans who will cancel their subscription if the show is cancelled
Sure - and maybe there is a way to have some fuzzy prediction or metrics that some show has a hardcore fan base that is worth keeping around even if it's not broadly popular.
So I agree with you it isn't perfect, but again, you still have to come up with some objective measure because you need to make decision on which shows and movies you should be investing in. You only have a finite amount of money available to produce content.
> But you have to come up with something, otherwise you'll never cancel anything, by extension, never have room to invest in shows that could drive your subscriptions.
Well, positive reception is probably a good indicator of something at least. Many of the cancelled shows were received positively by both fans and critics. That's hardly a given for television shows, and re-rolling the dice is likely to leave you with a show with worse reception. And you do this while cutting the legs out from under a show that had good reception.
People being unhappy with the amount of cancellations is probably a good indicator of something, as well. And you have to wonder about the long term effects, and whether people will stop getting interested in new Netflix shows in general.
> And you have to wonder about the long term effects, and whether people will stop getting interested in new Netflix shows in general.
Interesting point. Maybe 5 years from now nobody will care about new Netflix shows the way nobody cares about new Google products - because consumers just assume it'll be abandoned in a few years. And then both companies will be unable to create anything new because of the poor reputations they've built for themselves.
Yes "data driven" does not always lead to what's best for the consumer.
From what I understand, Netflix' decision model is heavily based on how many users watch the first X minutes of a season in the first few days that it's up. Essentially if the show isn't a hit immediately after release, it won't be renewed, and the threshold required to renew goes up exponentially every season, so essentially a show has to be a runaway hit in order to survive past the second season.
I'm sure this is a data-driven decision, and I guess it shows that novelty is probably what drives people to the platform and gets new subscribers. It makes intuitive sense: with most forms of media the largest number of people will give something a try when it's new, and aside from very rare exceptions the viewer base will settle in to a much lower number of "true fans".
So it makes sense in the short term from a business perspective, and they have way more data than I do from my armchair, but I wonder if they are adequately assessing the risk of this decision model. People get deeply emotionally attached to media, and it's a strong negative when a series you love is cancelled, so this could negatively affect their brand over time. And that's not something which is so easy to design KPI's around as new subscriber numbers.
I suspect Netflix would have to see increased churn due to pressure from competitors to see more serious attention paid to loyalty and retention.
Netflix not only stops shows before you even got a chance to see it (I'm not among those who look for new content all the time - I try to follow what I'm currently watching), but Netflix also removes movies, some of them classics, after some time. So when my wife says she would like to watch something she's been wanting to watch, and I look it up, I find that it used to be on Netflix but it's not there anymore. It's been like that for every movie she's asked about.
I'm wondering why having Netflix at all. It feels like a pointless waste of money, something my wife now keeps mentioning, and I'm very close to terminate the whole deal.
Netflix, you're wasting my money. I'm not getting what I expected to get from you. I will be spend my money on something else than you.
Netflix is horrible. It's slowly turning back into broadcast TV. And this whole data-driven approach to everything is infuriating. Complain about how something works? Netflix says the data proves you wrong. How long did it take them to add an option to get rid of those automatic video previews that had users enraged? I would have canceled long ago if my wife didn't like watching all the Asian novelas they have on there.
I recall reading something from some Netflix analytics-obsessed pinhead about the automatic previews where they said they wanted it to behave more like regular TV where something is on as soon as you turn it on. Then they have it automatically play the next episode by default. I recently read about some other feature they were testing where it would just continuously play whatever their recommendation engine thinks you would like. Then you've got the more frequent churn of content.
Netflix today resembles a personalized stream of an old school premium cable channel like HBO. It's designed to help you quickly find something to watch and then send you down a rabbit hole with continuous content that autoplays as soon as the last video ends. On the one hand, I admire them for doing something different than every other streaming service that popped up after they invented the category. On the other hand, I just don't like the experience at all.
> Netflix is horrible. It's slowly turning back into broadcast TV
It's amazing how this describes a number of the tech 'industry disruption' companies... Amazon used to have better quality standards than eBay or Wal-mart, Uber used to be cheaper and have cleaner cars and drivers than Taxis, Netflix used to have a larger variety of classics but now largely makes their own content
So true. It's like they forget what made them popular in the first place.
What was special about Netflix was this large library of on-demand content and things you may not find anywhere else. I think what early adopters liked about it was you could be deliberate about sitting down to watch something. You'd put some thought into creating your list. We were trained to do this going back to the DVD days - probably even more so during the DVD rental days. And remember that Netflix had that massive collection of quality movie reviews. I suspect that early adopters had much different viewing patterns than the people who hung around on cable for longer.
So what does Netflix do? Make it more like a broadcast. Maybe that's what they discovered was necessary to attract the masses. I don't know. All I can say is it's much different than it used to be and, aside from some really good in-house content, I don't like it anymore.
Prior to on-demand content, I was a faithful "red envelope" subscriber because not only was it convenient (and I didn't really have to worry about returning a RedBox DVD), but Netflix kept _all_ my ratings for _all_ the movies I'd seen. They still have that data last I checked, but it's very much hidden in the account settings and they've long since deprecated user reviews. They now say "98% match." Match to what? We pretty much use a single user account across two households; what is that statistic referring to?
Nowadays, I never find anything I want on Netflix and am glad I'm borrowing an account, otherwise I'd drop it. Hulu's trying to catch up, but Netflix is easily the most user-hostile media interface I've ever used, and that includes hotel channel guides.
It's an inevitability of incentivizing growth over all else. So scale per se is not the problem. The problem is incentivising the first derivative of scale.
Increased quality is a good marketing ploy for growth, producing shit is a good way to increase margins. I notice a lot of restaurants have great food opening week, and then a return to median over the following year until they go bust.
I appreciate their attempt to do this. I'd love such a thing. Unfortunately, their algorithm is woefully immature, they lack content, and can't double down on shows that get a slow start. In the short term this helps them grow at the expense of alienating early adopters, die hard fans, and their more flippant subscribers.
My biggest peeve is that Netflix keeps dropping and cancelling shows I'm really enjoying. I'm close to dropping them, and every other service. Months close. The hassle and cost of maintaining 10+ subscriptions is a worse experience than the prenetflix days of broadcast. If the industry could get their act together and go the way of music and pay royalties per stream then Netflix would probably have the biggest advantage with their algorithm. But their ux is still painful and proper discovery is completely lacking. I yearn for a Dewey decimal like video categorisation system, and way more high production value sci-fi shows.
Automatic netflix previews are the thing that infuriates me the most about it. (And the reason I'll probably never pay for it.)
Other than opening the settings screen, or playing a video and hitting pause, there is no way to leave netflix alone and not have it make noise/play video.
Three seconds after you stop hitting buttons, whatever's selected on-screen becomes a full-video ad for that thing. (with all of the annoying traits of ads, like loud attention grabbing sounds)
I've idle-mindedly mashed buttons to prevent this on console-netflix while trying to have a conversation about what to watch, with no attention being payed to what was actually on the screen.
Turning off autoplay on YouTube was the one of the best things I have done for my personal happiness in the last few years. It's amazing how having to take a moment to choose the next the next action after finishing a piece of content has contributed to my mindfulness, and raised the quality bar in terms of what I consume.
I'm actually a big fan of Netflix exactly as you articulated you don't like it—if I have an empty head, I sit down and click through to find something to watch. Not currently subscribed, though, and I wish it came at a slightly lower price point as I don't watch the vast majority of netflix content.
> Netflix also removes movies, some of them classics, after some time. So when my wife says she would like to watch something she's been wanting to watch, and I look it up, I find that it used to be on Netflix but it's not there anymore
This is a different matter. Netflix has a finite budget to license content. It's not clear that it would be better for the consumer if they had a policy of never removing films from the library, as this would have to be counterbalanced by fewer new films being added. I suspect this approach would be much worse for the consumer overall.
Also, unlike when a series is cancelled, those films are still available to stream on an à la carte basis from Google/Amazon/iTunes/etc.
I have been giving Netflix a try for a couple of months now and I am really thinking of dropping it because of this. I think I’d rather rent something from one of the on demand services and watch what I want, than being forced to watch whatever Netflix happens to have on offer this week. Especially because I generally prefer to watch a movie over a TV series.
It sounds like your complaint isn't that Netflix has a 'churn' of available content, but that they don't offer much content of interest to you. If that's the case, then sure, it makes good sense to cancel and either go with another subscription streaming service, or buy/rent what you want to watch. There's not much Netflix can do about that, short of just spending far more money on licensing content, which would presumably mean raising prices.
I've found that disc rental (by post) can be a surprisingly good option, even if it's been mostly forgotten with the rise of streaming. The available library is better than any streaming subscription is able to offer.
> I generally prefer to watch a movie over a TV series
Shouldn't this mean you're less inconvenienced by content churn? If you're part way through a series and it gets removed, that's annoying, but this doesn't really apply to movies.
That’s just a streaming rights thing. I don’t think Netflix is taking away any movies just to take them away. It’s because agreements expire and on renegotiation the rights owners want a bigger slice. Netflix’s streaming used to be a free tack on to the disk shipping business because they got a bunch of cheap rights because no rights owners thought anyone wanted to stream.
For Netflix shows. Netflix is now a network channel producing its own content, in the mold of HBO. If you don't find value in HBO, then you don't subscribe to HBO. Same with Netflix.
Licensing content from turned out to be a terrible business model because a) licensing fees would bleed you dry of all your profits, b) content owners would yank their content anyway to compete with you because it turns out, creating a streaming infrastructure isn't that hard and much cheaper than owning and producing content.
While there's obviously licensed content on Netflix, HBO, and elsewhere, it's increasingly about rounding out their own studio content or other exclusives. I'm not going to subscribe to HBO for whatever non-HBO movies they may have.
If you're not interested with what's on the "channel" at all, you're probably mostly better off with just buying/renting a la carte.
In fairness, I can't imagine "classics" garnering anywhere near the watch times of a new show. Whilst you'll get some new viewers from the people who've heard it's a classic or those showing their kids a movie from "their time", but the majority of viewers will be those who've seen it before and want to watch it again, and given the age of some of these classics they likely already own it on DVD etc.
Essentially if the show isn't a hit immediately after release, it won't be renewed, and the threshold required to renew goes up exponentially every season, so essentially a show has to be a runaway hit in order to survive past the second season.
I buy it, but that sucks. I know my view is idiosyncratic, but I view making money like a biological process. Most things have to do it if they want to survive, but it doesn't deserve to be the thing that matters. The Silicon Valley focus on explosive growth, as opposed to healthy and reasonable long-term growth, is bad for the world.
I wonder if they are adequately assessing the risk of this decision model. People get deeply emotionally attached to media, and it's a strong negative when a series you love is cancelled, so this could negatively affect their brand over time. And that's not something which is so easy to design KPI's around as new subscriber numbers.
Right. This is especially true of series with defined story arcs. A sitcom can be ended at any time, but if Breaking Bad had ended at Season 4, it would have pissed off everyone.
I'm hoping that this policy leads to much tighter story arcs which aren't designed to take 5 seasons to come to a conclusion. There's far too much TV that basically only has actual new plot elements in the first and last ten minutes, and then pads everything out to a full episode.
A world in which writers know they have, at best, 24 episodes to tell their story will hopefully result in much more focused story telling, and fewer filler episodes looking into the exciting history of what minor character C did 15 years ago.
The problem is that it's not possible to know in advance if a series will be one of the blessed few to last more than two seasons. Designing a 24-episode arc, and then having the show be a smash hit is also a problem for Netflix
I’ve never encountered a well written TV series where I was disappointed at it ending after two seasons, while I’ve encountered a great many which outstayed their welcome and soured me on the entire thing. I know some people love great long things that never seem to end, I just don’t count myself among them.
Not sure how much my viewing influences Netflix "Top 10", but this week it showed Star Trek TNG of being part of it. With all the series being out, including opd ones, I just don't have time to get to watch stuff right after release. I also tend to binge watch series before starting a new one. So when finally start to watch a new series, it might well be to late to get more than one season. Great, basically the same shitty situation we had back the day. And I really thought streaming would result in more variety. Turned out it is just a more modern version of cable tv.
That makes two, then! Also binged DS9, started VOY and came to the conclusion that out of all of them, DS9 is my favorite. And I do like, somehow, the naive optimism of TNG. Kind of a blast from the past, if you ask me.
> And I do like, somehow, the naive optimism of TNG.
This so many times. It gives me hope that humanity will eventually rise above what's going right now. There are also a lot more good lessons in TNG than I remembered as a kid. Great show :)
It was great. personally, I was and still am torn regarding the optimism. I love it, but on the other hand I always liekd gritty and dark SF as well. Luckily for me, there is both! Even within Star Trek! And Picard is my favorite SF ship captain anyway, by far!
> And I do like, somehow, the naive optimism of TNG. Kind of a blast from the past, if you ask me
If you like that, you should give The Orville a try. A lot of people dismissed it thinking it was going to be full of crude humor, essentially "Family Guy in Space", because it was from Seth MacFarlane.
But that is not the case at all. What MacFarlane was going for exactly was that naive optimism, although from TOS not TNG. Later science fiction, he has said, has been a lot less optimistic.
Yes, The Orville has some comedy--sometimes quite funny, but it almost all fits in with the serious elements. The crew, at least for a long time, is not full of highly competent natural heroes like TOS or TNG, because The Orville is not the flagship of the fleet that everyone wants to be on and only the very best qualify. It is the opposite of that. It's a minor ship where you put average or below people who you don't expect much from, captained by a man who had problems in his personal life that tanked his career, given The Orville because some friends called in favors to get one more try to turn him around before kicking him out of the service.
The first season was a bit hit or miss for the first few episodes, as they figured out the right balance of comedy and drama, but it did not take long to get good. The second season continued on from that. That's all there was been so far, with a third season coming.
I agree on DS9. My one complaint is that I think they should have went another direction with the ending. It could have ended in a way that served as a launching point for the biggest Star Trek arc yet.
Much of the series involved the conflict between the Federation and the Founders from the gamma quadrant, with the Federation being the good guys. The Founders were perhaps not necessarily evil, but they had a strong distrust of others and a belief that the non-shapeshifters would wipe them out if they got a chance.
The thing about the Founders is that with their shapeshifting abilities they were pretty much the best spies and infiltrators in the galaxy. We know they infiltrated to the highest levels of Klingon government.
I don't remember if it was ever confirmed that they made it to high levels in the Federation, too, but you have to assume they did. But then they should be able to figure out that Federation really are the good guys. The Federation really wants peace between every intelligent species. They really should join the Federation rather than fear it.
So why didn't they?
Perhaps it is because they aren't the only ones who have infiltrated and placed people high in the Federation government? From TOS and TNG we know that others have tried or succeeded at that before.
So maybe the reason the Founders absolutely distrust the Federation is because they know that the people who appear to be in charge and are pushing the peace and unity message are actually not the ones running things. The peace and unity people are just clueless puppets of the real masters.
End DS9 with Sisko discovering the truth, the Federation's masters discovering that Sisko is on to them, and Sisko going on the run.
That sets up at least two more series.
The first one could cover Sisko on the run, working in the shadows to build up secret opposition to the Federation's evil masters, slowly spreading the word to others he can trust, like Picard on the Enterprise, and convincing Federation enemies like the Cardassians that they are better off with a Federation that really is what is claims to be rather than a Federation secretly run by evil aliens and so should help save the Federation.
The second series, "Star Trek: Civil War", could cover when matters get to a head, and open hostilities break out withing The Federation.
You could still have Voyager in there...have the civil war start while Voyager is lost. They can come back into the middle of it.
There's probably even plenty for a third series after Civil War.
Totally agree! And I am convinced that now that I will give the Orville a shot. I am kind os disapointed with season 7 of DS9, the focus on the spiritual aspect was a little bit too much on the nose for me.
I like your theoretical story arcs, it would make for great stories around the federation and the moral superiority, assumed, percieved or actually true, compared to other entities. I guess after having a narowwly avoided a coup by star fleet and having fought an intergalactic war, that alone should have had a deep impact. maybe even a change with regards to the rpime directive. Why would you leave all these new worlds and civilisations upt for grabs for an adversary, right?
It is quite striking, so, how the way tv series told stories changed from the episodic approach from TNG to a more arc driven approach in DS9 and VOY. Both of which sit somewhere between the episodic style of e.g. TNG and things like Breaking Bad and the first seasons of prison break.
> I guess it shows that novelty is probably what drives people to the platform and gets new subscribers.
It assumes that novelty is what drives people to the platform and increases/maintains the subscriber base.
However, Netflix's evident model is not capable of falsifying this assumption. By cancelling series as soon as they plateau (not even _decline_, given reporting (https://www.wired.com/story/why-netflix-keeps-canceling-show...) of its production cost escalator), they do not generate a large library of "complete series" for later viewing.
This also puzzles me, since it contradicts Netflix's willingness to pay a pretty penny for established series like Friends. Its current show-commissioning practices seem to be incapable of generating a new generational hit like that.
I agree, and I think it's a problem which can occur in data-driven systems: the system can stabilize at a non-optimal local maximum.
Ideally they should A/B test at least occasionally with different decision models to see if their assumptions are correct, but those are very expensive experiments to run when you're talking about the production of a TV series.
It's also difficult because Friends is also a long-tail phenomenon. There were dozens of 90s sitcoms that failed to become generational hits.
Also, a counter-argument to my proposition above is that broadcast TV through the mid-90s had a captive audience in a way that Netflix doesn't. To a limited extent, broadcast TV could force audiences to become familiar with a show, pushing an originally-marginal show over a threshold of popularity.
How long before production companies start paying people to watch (measurable too) the first episodes of a tv series? If you could boost your viewership so much you got to produce multiple seasons, losing out on the first season might not be a bad deal.
It is funny. Originally the value of Netflix was that you could watch 10 seasons of an old TV show in one go. Now you can watch 1/2 season (10-13 episodes) of a new show.
I have started to check if there is more than one season out before I watch a new show, and frequently there isn't.
I have a suspicion that the way game of thrones ended may have been an experiment to disrupt consumers attachment to release them onto new objects of desire. It didn't affect the studio or publisher that much, GOT simply vanished from culture.
Past obsessives moved to other newer things after a few days.
It's an incredibly curious thing and the opposite from the never ending marvel material that gets released.
> I have a suspicion that the way game of thrones ended may have been an experiment to disrupt consumers attachment to release them onto new objects of desire.
This is a great theory!
I think the creators of HBO's GOT ended the series because they were rushing to work on:
]] Benioff and Weiss inked a five-year, $250 million partnership with Netflix in August to make film and TV projects exclusively for the streaming service. The move was head-scratching at the time, considering the pair had already committed to producing Star Wars movies for Disney—an undertaking that was likely to take many years and leave little room for anything else.
> the never ending marvel material that gets released.
I dunno, now that Endgame completed the movie storyline that had been building for a decade, and their spearhead TV show Agents of SHIELD is over, I've almost completely lost all interest in the MCU. I've seen similar sentiments pretty regularly elsewhere, and wouldn't be surprised if its prominence also fades despite continued releases.
> We don't realize that when the money people get their hands on data, that unless we are extremely editorial in the context in which they interpret and use that data, it's going to be a disaster.
This is an absolutely fantastic point and applies in more contexts than that of publishing. You absolutely must be editorial in what you present to people who are higher up in the decision process and are less able to interpret the data. It often isn't just the money people, it is also your bosses and their bosses. It is a matter of presenting things with an eye towards the best possible outcomes, and understanding where things would get confusing for someone who is only half paying attention.
> This started in traditional publishing in the 1990s
I really don't think this started in the 1990s. The tension between commercial needs and artistic purity has existed for as long as there has been art[citation needed].
Some more modern art forms like TV and Film are very expensive and so particularly sensitive to commercial interests but it has always been true - artists have to eat just like everyone else.
Computers changed how quickly companies could collect and analyze data. The quarterly results is one artifact if this as currently companies could be publishing this data monthly or even weekly, but historically that simply wasn’t feasible.
That really did change a great many decision making processes not just in publishing but almost everywhere else.
Exactly. What happened in the 1990s was a major consolidation of all retailers, including bookstores.
This created limited shelf space, which, in turn, put pressure on publishers to consolidate their authors into a few mega best-sellers, whom they then were completely reliant on. One Stephen King or James Patterson was enough to pay for 9 underperforming titles.
Major publishers also consolidated, from many into the so-called Big Six, which then became the Big Five. Five major publishers own the whole industry. Most publishers you've heard of are an imprint of one of those, or else it's a small press with very limited distribution.
All that consolidation has an effect. It narrows the gates, and gives rise to an industry that grows reliant on gatekeepers.
Why did the great consolidations happen? Why is everything trending towards a multi-national mega-conglomerate? I think I know, but that's a story for another day.
But I dont think the commercialisation of art these days isn't driven by the hunger for food of the artists. Other forces try to extract as much value from it as they can. Not nice.
> Instead of having to get one person, who knew literature, to believe in his work, an author has to convince a whole committee of people.
I think that the "one person who knew literature" system is largely a myth. People who "know literature" often resort to promoting the same canon and authors of the same background. I'd wager that a random lottery would produce a more interesting, dynamic, and varied list of books than one curated by a single expert.
If you truly want unrestrained creativity, then organizations like NEA need orders of magnitude more funding so they can throw cash at people trying to make something new. That will produce wild, interesting, and experimental works. But it won't produce Mad Men or other kinds of works that promote polish over boundless creativity. It is a trade off.
I don't know much about the high literature scene and even less so about what it looks like in the US.
Over here in Germany, I always thought it was mostly driven by literary critics, prizes, book fairs, etc. and thus its own sort of niche although I have no idea how well that works. Is that different in the US?
> We don't realize that when the money people get their hands on data, that unless we are extremely editorial in the context in which they interpret and use that data, it's going to be a disaster. They don't have altruistic motives and they don't work nearly as hard as we do to understand complexity-- it's best to think of them as a different species.
One could argue 'Money people' tend to be the source of many of our resources misuses (water,land,air,etc.) Of course they'll use data to shit everything up.
This is one of those overly simplistic views that doesn't take the underlying laws and incentives into account.
Sure, it's bean counters. So then go a step further, and ask yourself: why are the bean counters afraid to take risks on fresh creative content? What market forces are driving them to bet solely on licensed shlock in the post-2000 world? What changed?
If the publishing industry is overwhelmed with a flood of writers--it very much is--well, please ask "why." Dig into the reasons behind the indie author gold rush.
Amazon opened its floodgates in 2009, when it offered 70% royalties. Traditional publishing gives authors somewhere around 5% royalties, when all is said and done. That is how the gold rush started.
As for publishers betting on tried and true best-sellers... that started earlier, when several laws in the 1980s caused a major consolidation of businesses, including publishers and booksellers. A law got changed, and Barnes & Noble became the arbiter of what got shelf space.
I think this is pointing the finger in the wrong direction. They do know their place: it's making money. The problem is that in our corporate market-based economy any culture producer that does not relentlessly focus on profit and scale will be outcompeted and destroyed by one that does.
Corporations are incentivized to hand the reins to the money people because the larger market structure means they will die if they don't. The market quite simply does not give a shit about the long-term well-being of a society. That doesn't factor into the fitness function at all.
I wouldn't classify Netflix as a bean culture. Because Netflix is still run by Reed Hastings the founder & CEO. Netflix hired Cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken. From his research came the insight of binge watching series not from Netflix data.
Netflix invests in series by pioneering new narratives for niche markets. When a niche market is smaller or the serie is received not as expected Netflix pulls the plug as every rational agent would do.
The publishing industry in the 90ties was optimizing their business model for maximizing ROI of limited amount of shelve space by producing hits for popularity what 80% people like.
Don't forget that it's not a single instance game.
The more Netflix pulls shows, the more it develops a reputation for pulling shows.
That decreases viewer investment in new shows, as they're incentivized to wait and see if the show lasts, or whether they're going to be left with narrative tension and no payoff after a cancellation.
And with decreased viewer investment in new shows, more shows get cancelled because the numbers don't look good. It's pro-cyclical and it burns goodwill.
Given that time = money and that the job of money people is extract most value from shortest amount of time and that they seem to do it quite well, won't it mean that people actually get art worth their time? I think that you are upset that mediocre artists no longer could easily shove their art down people's throats?
Today it is extremely easy to self-publish. If artist believes their art really should reach other people they have means to do it easier than ever. But the fact someone wants to put money behind it is a generally good indicator whether art is good or not.
> won't it mean that people actually get art worth their time?
It optimizes for local maxima, rather than taking the risks associated with finding larger global maxima.
Or, in other words: It creates lots and lots and lots of pretty-good stuff of particular types with broad appeal, rather than allowing diversification into some stuff that appeals very strongly to group A, some other stuff that appeals very strongly to group B, etc.
It makes the publishing/Netflix executives richer, but our culture poorer.
Analysis I have seen of the effect of streaming on programming choices has been the direct opposite of this:
1. Unlike network television, space isn't limited, so you can make a good show which will only appeal to 20% of the audience.
2. The amount people watch doesn't affect revenue, just whether they renew or not. So it's now better to make one show that someone will really love, than seven shows that they will be vaguely into, but see as interchangeable with seven others on a different platform.
If anything, I think Netflix originals are overoptimised for creating cult hits along niche audiences.
I don't know how it plays out in practice, but I agree that it seems as if having the must-have subscription impact of a House of Cards or Game of Thrones when they first came out would trump having a dozen meh middle-of-the-pack mainstream network procedurals or sitcoms.
It's not impossible. The problem is a lack of incentives.
Amazon offers 70% royalties to indie authors.
YouTube offers peanuts to indie film makers. Netflix offers nothing.
Film-making is more expensive than novel writing, and there is a higher barrier to entry. Few indie film-makers are going to stick with it, unpaid, for multiple years. If they can receive funding, then that whole paradigm will change.
Patreon made a few steps in that direction, but I think crowd-funding has limits.
If Google/YouTube were to do what Amazon did, and offer a huge royalty share of profits...? That would turn everything around.
There's a lot of judging in this comment that makes me uncomfortable ("think of them as a different species" has a very nasty history in human society).
But what you're talking about is essentially the innovator's dilemma. Following the available data can lead to short-term optimizations, but also getting caught in a local minima. The silver lining is that this creates room for new competitors who can skip around that neighborhood in the business model and find a new kind of success.
So my question is the same whenever this sort of criticism comes up: if the current companies are screwing up so badly, who are the innovators that will go around those mistakes and out-compete them?
Lulu is ancient, and has been outcompeted by Amazon and other platforms. Wattpad has something like 65 million readers.
> If the current companies are screwing up so badly, who are the innovators that will go around those mistakes and out-compete them?
I mentioned this upthread, but in a nutshell: Amazon turned the book industry on its head by offering 70% royalties directly to indie authors, cutting out middlemen (i.e. traditional publishers and literary agencies). That happened in late 2009, and it unleashed a gold rush which is still in full swing. Traditional publishers still exist, and they still dominate the print industry (due to the huge expenses involved in print runs and print retail shelf space), but they have lost a lot of control over ebooks and audiobooks.
70% is more than artists get from art galleries, and it's more than musicians get from record labels. It's unheard of in the arts. And it was a very savvy move by Jeff Bezos. It changed the dynamics of that whole industry.
If Google/YouTube or some other major distributor of film (such as Netflix, or some new start-up) offers a large platform of viewers, plus that royalty rate for an incentive, then we are guaranteed to see a film Renaissance.
I hope it happens.
I think that socioeconomic forces being what they are, it is unlikely to happen any time soon. These days, awesome startups are likely to be bought by mega-conglomerates, and any visionary ideas they have will die beneath the weight of committee thinking.
Change my mind altered carbon failed because all they did season 2 was virtue signal liberal BS I made it through three episodes I'm a former Democrat just couldn't take it virtue signaling was retarded
It's certainly a skill to drop hints of existence of racism and sexism into everything. It's especially funny in case of Netflix, the company that notoriously pushes it's agenda into almost every show.
> It's also worth noting how many of the cancellations have been shows with women and people of color prominently behind the scenes or starring.
So I don't totally get the "cancelled too soon" argument. The OA should have not run to even 2 seasons.
There's a trend of not producing art or even something original, but producing "content." For example someone asked me if The Mandalorian is good. "It's star wars Content" I replied. "If you like star wars, and want Content, you'll like it." Is the plot novel? Is it original or compelling? No, but boy it's fun to see yoda puppet and more Content from the SW universe you've come to know and love!
A lot of these series may have run their creative course & while megafans want more "Content" it's the same thing as something being cancelled too soon, and most people aren't megafans.