Streamers have been removing content from their platforms lately — and they’re canceling series after just one season. “It’s soul-crushing,” says one creator. “There is nothing we can do.”
It is bizarre to me that people act like streaming services invented the concept of canceling series after just one season, or believe that it’s a new practice. Broadcast TV has regularly done exactly the same thing for its entire history. Streaming services almost always at least release all the episodes rather than leaving some of them unaired.
I think if you were to chart the number of single season series over the years, you’d likely find that streaming media has exponentially more cancelled shows after one series because it’s easier for them to monitor engagement of the series by viewers and cut the fat when they think a show won’t succeed based on the metric data they have.
Can you imagine shows like Stargate SG1? They most likely would have been cancelled after season1 because the viewer count wasn’t there at the start of the series.
I actually did run some numbers on this at one point and found that the cancellation rate on network shows has ranged from 30-50% for the last 70 years, with the average number of seasons hovering just under 2. Reddit post with graphs and sources.
Running the same numbers for streaming services is trickier, and I couldn’t figure out a reliable way to get a good data set to analyze. But even so, the numbers for broadcast TV are high enough that it would be numerically impossible for streaming services to, say, be 3 times more likely to cancel a show after one season.
Interesting, so would you say the ratios were similar between streaming and non-streaming networks?
I have reddit blocked at the router level so I can’t view anything on that site (still boycotting the company lol)
My intuition is that it’s probably in about the same range as the broadcast networks, but I have no numbers to back that up.
I don’t think it can be significantly higher or lower: if the cancellation rate were significantly lower, “streaming services always cancel after one season” wouldn’t have caught on as a perception, and if it were significantly higher, it wouldn’t be as easy to find multi-season streaming shows as it currently is. But is it slightly higher or lower? I have no idea.
“there’s nothing we can do”
…Except make low budget shows with love and passion instead of for profit. Anyone remember Primer?
The quality of writing has been the lowest I’ve seen my entire life. The number of shows where the plot or characters are broken because the writers literally don’t care what they wrote just last episode is astonishing. Some choices are so baffling that they look like deliberate sabotage.
Shows that actually want to tell a story don’t seem to have the problem of early cancellation. Severance and Silo, two recent examples of shows with good writing had no trouble being renewed. There is also “From”, which isn’t particularly well written, but its low budget allowed a very quick renewal.
One of the reasons why the WGA is striking is to keep the writer’s room staffed during production.
Unlike in movies, TV shows typically have writers handle a lot of tasks that directors or producers would handle on other shows as a way to keep the show’s tone and continuity.
This is the second time I’ve seen an article incorrectly call a streaming service a “streamer”. Have they been paid off by some PR campaign to attempt to redefine the word?
It’s infuriatingly stupid. It makes me read the same sentence 2-3 times before I understand what they’re trying to say.
We have a well established and clear distinction between ‘streaming service’ and ‘streamer’, why fuck with it?
What’s more, it’s double stupid because now both ‘streamer’ and ‘streaming service’ means “a company” AND we don’t have a word for individuals streaming on the web.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Disney turned heads recently when it removed the sci-fi teen adventure Crater, a movie that reportedly cost $53 million to make.
Bozdech is the editorial director at Common Sense Media which reviews content for kids (including Crater).
When a writer works on a show that gets removed, “it’s soul-crushing,” says Zoe Marshall whose teen comedy Fantasy Football disappeared from Paramount+ despite an all-star cast and co-producers that included LeBron James’ company.
“When you manage to get something actually made, it is a tremendous feather in your cap professionally,” says Marshall, "And people start to look at your work as references.
A show can even become a hit and yet the actors and writers still don’t make any extra money, as The New Yorker recently explained in a deep dive about Orange Is the New Black.
When Disney+ first launched, he said they thought the way to attract subscribers was, “to flood the digital shelves as much as possible… We realized that we made a lot of content that is not necessarily driving sub growth, and we’re getting much more surgical about what it is we make.”
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
