Another Popular Netflix Show Gets Cancelled Before Season 2

Another day, another Netflix show on the chopping block. Variety breaks the bad news:

Variety understands that while Netflix was very pleased with the show, and especially the work that had gone into it, viewing numbers didn’t meet the threshold to greenlight a second season.

How ghastly Netflix has become. The streamer is “very pleased” with the show. It turned out just the way they wanted it, but the 40 million viewing hours were simply not enough to greenlight a second season.

Heaven forbid that a show is given time to grow and organically build up an audience over time! I don’t have a dog in this fight (I didn’t get around to watching this one, because there are too many shows to watch at any given time these days) but I do have a bone to pick with this approach to content.

Very few shows are Squid Game or Stranger Things or Wednesday or Night Agent level hits. Those happen but they’re the exception to the rule. Most shows will not perform that well, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have the potential to become bigger hits down the line.

As I noted up above, people have so many things to choose from these days that audiences may not even pick up on a new show right away, but show up later. And now there’s the cancellation factor itself to consider. Sometimes I won’t watch a new Netflix show specifically because I think it might get cancelled and then it’s a waste of my time (unless it’s a limited series or anthology where the story is over at the end of the season).

Lots of people are opting to wait these days. Wait and see. And then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is not a great thing for Netflix as a brand. There’s some level of trust involved here, and it increasingly feels like that trust is being broken. Netflix is cancelling shows that are obviously popular enough to warrant another season, but they have these rigid metrics they use rather than considering how their subscribers might feel.

I think I take this a little personally simply because, as a writer, I think that stories deserve to be finished. I think Netflix needs to finish what it started (though obviously if a show performs horribly or is really awful that’s another matter). Lockwood and Co. was something Netflix was pleased with and lots of fans enjoyed and now it’s over, just like that, because of metrics. I just find the whole thing gross.