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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://deadline.com/2019/03/netflix-tv-series-cancellations...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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:

https://qbix.com/blog/2016/11/17/properly-valuing-contributi...

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?

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.

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.

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.")

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).

Yes, it was.

> but it wasn't a Netflix produced show anyway

Which is orthogonal to the point of raising it as an example of how a cancelled show can end in a satisfying way.

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).

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.

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.

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

Because at least I sure as hell won't be back

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.

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.

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.

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.

You think there is less competition and pressure to perform now than when there three broadcast networks and no real competing video services?

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.

Some series get resurected after years...

Cold Feet series 6 in 2016 after 13 years...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Feet_(series_6)

Of course, but I'm not sure you can entirely separate them. Story decisions impact customers, who impact the business.

Maybe this is because HBO values their content and hopes to syndicate it, whereas Netflix values their new subscriber counts.

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.

[1] https://comicbook.com/tv-shows/news/lost-ending-original-pla...

I couldn't agree more!

Almost every korean drama is a one season story arc, and they're some of the most watched shows in the world.

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.

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.

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.

Don't really agree. No, you wouldn't choose to wrap-up the show that way but it's a fairly natural break point.

You could instead make intentional decisions to fund miniseries and content with clearly defined "endings".

I'd much rather have 6 episodes of a genuine story with a start/middle/end than two seasons of character development and a cliffhanger ending.

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.

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.

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.

It was mind boggling to them that the producers only wanted to do three seasons

Link: https://youtu.be/ej3ftLjmYlA

Maybe he thought he couldn't have gotten away with dancing around the resolution for 10 seasons?

Seems like there's a gap there.

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.

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.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_episodes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Most of the new shows are between 8 and 12 episodes about an hour long.

"One-hour" shows have been 42 minutes long on US TV for decades now.

Looking at Amazon Prime, seems the episode length changed from 46 minutes to 44 minutes going from Season 5 (1999) to Season 6 (2000).

(What I was remembering was 47 to 45, but this is a vague memory of a Usenet post I read twenty years ago.)

EDIT: Also, I should note that Voyager was on Fox. If you're talking about NBC specifically, I have no data.

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.

>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.

In theory.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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

I, for one, think shows are actually far too reluctant to remove main characters.

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.

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.

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.

These are all shows I found via netflix.

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!

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..

TWD after S01 consisted entirely of a soap opera cast eternally getting lost in the same acre of forest. You could slip episodes and not miss a thing.

Maybe the writers attempted to tackle the now worn-out zombie theme by turning the show itself in to one. A meta-zombie, if you will.

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)

There is no actual reason that Dr Who could not do longer seasons for example they had to commit to hiring better writers and to develop them.

My goto example for this: House of Cards. The original is so much less long-winded.

Why do you have to commit? Watch an episode or two. See if you like it. If not, move on.

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.

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.