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