Netflix has come under fire more than ever in the last year for the number of new shows that have been canceled after just one or two seasons. While dedicated fans have rallied against the scrapping of shows like Inside Job, Warrior Nun and The Midnight Club, it seems that their social media campaigns and outrage don’t mean much to Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos. In an interview with Bloomberg, Sarandos stood by the decisions made to cancel a lot of shows, and said bluntly that none of the canceled shows were successful enough to warrant them carrying on. When asked if cancelations were impacting relationships with the “creative community” as well as audiences, Sarandos said:
“We have never canceled a successful show. A lot of these shows were well-intended but talk to a very small audience on a very big budget. The key to it is you have to be able to talk to a small audience on a small budget and a large audience at a large budget. If you do that well, you can do that forever.”
Recently, fans of The Sandman and Wednesday were both forced to wait what seemed like a long time to discover whether the shows would be returning, and despite their well-documented success, no one was taking a renewal for either show for granted until Netflix made their official announcement. While these shows made it through the tough gauntlet laid out before them, there have been many fallen by the wayside, and there will likely be many more.
Do New Shows Get Enough Time To Build an Audience?
For anyone who has ever spent time investing in a new series to find out it has been canceled, there is a sense of wasted time and a dissatisfaction that usually ends up being aired on social media. For this reason, there are some subscribers to the likes of Netflix that have made a conscious decision to not get involved with new shows until their know that the plug isn’t going to be pulled after just six or eight episodes.
This is obviously a double-edged sword, as not watching a series in case it is canceled is likely to end up causing the show to be canceled. Watching may end up having the same effect, and then audiences feel like they have been cheated out of something. Although there are some shows, such as Lucifer and Manifest, that have managed to avoid a premature end after being rescued by, of all people, Netflix, after their initial cancelations elsewhere, the list of big shows that have bitten the dust just continues to grow without many of them being given the option of building their audience over a handful of seasons.
One of the latest shows to having plug pulled prematurely was 1899. Having been pitched as a three season series, the show’s cancelation came as a surprise to those who had expected another two seasons to complete the story in full. How many more shows like this will end up on the scrap heap in the coming year is something that viewers really don’t want to spend too much time thinking about as they hope any new show they become invested in will be able to go the distance.