‘The Midnight Club’ Season 2 Is At Risk, Given Its Viewership

Fans of Mike Flanagan and his newest show, The Midnight Club, may need to start pressuring Netflix a bit to greenlight season 2 of the show, as current trends indicate it might not be performing well enough to secure a second season.

Previously, anything you watched from Flanagan was a one-off horror series with a fixed ending for its cast. That was true of The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass. But The Midnight Club, which follows a group of terminally ill teens telling each other ghost stories, was very much set up to lead into a second season, with more source material to adapt and a lot of cliffhangers to resolve.

The problem is that from the looks of it, it doesn’t seem like the show is performing all that great. Last week, Netflix released numbers from its debut week, October 3-9. That includes all three days of its weekend premiere, Friday the 7th through Sunday the 9th. And that only resulted in 18.7 million viewership hours, putting it in fourth place for the week, and at 10% of the #1 show, Dahmer, even though it was in the #2 slot on the daily charts for a while. It shows just how wide that gap between #1 and #2 can be.

Now, Dahmer has finally been unseated in the #1 slot, but not by The Midnight Club. Rather, another Ryan Murphy show, The Watcher, has arrived to push both Dahmer and The Midnight Club down. And now it seems exceedingly unlikely that The Midnight Club will ever make it to #1.

While being #1 is certainly not required to be renewed, it helps. Though even other shows that survived at #1 for a while like The Sandman still have the fate of season 2 up in the air. And Midnight Club is performing significantly under that series.

However, there are a few things that may be a saving grace for The Midnight Club here, where it might be a special circumstance.

First, the budget. This is not some hugely CG-reliant production like Sandman, nor does it star a host of A-listers like The Watcher. It’s mostly teen actors, and the entire thing does not seem like it would cost that much compared to Netflix’s other offerings.

Second, Mike Flanagan. This is a producer/director/writer/creator that Netflix has had a long and healthy relationship with, as he’s produced stellar horror content for them in the past, and has plans to keep doing so in the future. Even if The Midnight Club underperforms, it’s well-known that it’s his biggest passion project and they may agree to a second season to wrap things up to keep him happy. He’s earned that kind of respect, I’d argue.

As for Flanagan, he’s already talked about this a bit, and has a backup plan for cancelation, albeit not a very satisfying one:

“This was designed to be ongoing,” Flanagan said. “We probably won’t know for another month or so what Netflix wants to do. But this was very much designed to continue. Pike has many books, and so we have a lot of incredible material to pull from.”

“We didn’t answer some of the bigger questions of the season — those answers exist, but were meant to be for the next season,” he said. If season 2 doesn’t happen, he’ll answer the questions in an…unusual way. “I’ll put them up on Twitter,” he said.

We are still three weeks away from the month-long debut of Midnight Club, so we may not have any answers until then. But it could be even longer, as we still do not have renewal/cancellation info for The Sandman when that show debuted in early August. So we’ll have to wait and see.

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