‘1899’ Cancellation Reiterates Why It’s Hard To Bother Investing In Netflix Shows

Happy New Year! Netflix has cancelled another series.

This time around it’s 1899, the long-anticipated new series from the creators of Dark, where Dark is one of the best offerings on Netflix as a whole, and one of the best modern sci-fi shows period.

1899, by contrast, was another wild experiment, this time focused on the warped reality of a group of strangers trapped on a ship where mysterious things happen and people keep dying. Like Dark, there was a three season arc planned, building on the finale’s reveal that (spoilers, but it doesn’t really matter now, does it?) the entire thing was a simulation on board a colony spaceship on a journey to a new solar system.

While it’s true that 1899 season 1 wasn’t as good as Dark, Dark also really was not the show it became until it was allowed to unfold its full arc over the course of its three planned seasons. Who knows what 1899 would have evolved into were it allowed to live?

At this point, I feel like Netflix is almost actively stealing my time from me.

This keeps happening, where a show looks intriguing, I spend 6-10 hours of my life watching it, and then the entire thing disappears because it didn’t hit X, Y and Z internal metrics, with the story left unfinished. I wonder if in 2022, Dark season 1 would have performed well enough to be renewed by Netflix’s current standards, or in this new era they might have killed one of the best sci-fi series ever before it fully unfolded.

I don’t need to go through the grand list of shows Netflix has killed the past few years for the millionth of time. You’re probably well-versed with most of them by now. But it really has gotten to the point where instead of watching a show at release, you want to wait 4-6 months to see if Netflix is actually going to renew it, and then consider watching it. And even then, maybe it ends on a season 2 cliffhanger and is cancelled anyway. If you’re lucky, you get a show that limps along to its finish line like Locke and Key or The Umbrella Academy. If not, you get The Midnight Club or Archive 81 or now, 1899. But then if you don’t watch the shows in the first place, there’s an increasingly high likelihood they…end up cancelled. It’s frankly exhausting, and if it’s this exhausting for viewers, I have to imagine it’s ten times as much for showrunners and actors.

Netflix is becoming a graveyard stacked with dead series with unfinished conclusions. It quite literally feels like a coinflip whether at any given time you’re watching a show that will be allowed to have a coherent ending or one that will end wholly unfinished. Something has to change.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.