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.

>GLOW is unfortunately in this boat.

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

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.

An alternative solution here is to not cave and fund content in the old broadcast style of "run a show until it doesn't make money".

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.

> 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.

I guess if someone were to donate enough money for this it would be possible