From ‘First Kill’ To ‘Warrior Nun,’ Netflix’s Library Is Becoming A Graveyard Of Unfinished Shows

Netflix has cancelled three teen-focused shows in two weeks now, The Midnight Club, The Bastard Son and the Devil Himself, and Warrior Nun. It’s part of a long, long tradition of Netflix cancelling series before they’ve had a chance to properly conclude. They skew more heavily toward killing off female-led, YA-style series generally, but there are plenty of examples across all genres (RIP Altered Carbon).

While TV shows being cancelled, even being left unfinished, is nothing new, it feels different in this new streaming era. And what Netflix is doing every single time this happens is adding another piece of dead content to its growing library. There are now dozens and dozens of shows on the service that may even be quite good, but it’s hard to recommend anyone actually watch them, given that they all do not have coherent endings, being killed off after a season or two without any sort of conclusion. It’s rare you will see any show outside of some global megahit be given the dignity of a solid conclusion. For every show like Locke and Key which is given three seasons and a somewhat definitive ending, there are a dozen like Warrior Nun or Teenage Bounty Hunters that just…stop.

The end result is a graveyard. Netflix has buried all these landmines in its content library now where you might find a series you like with high critic and audience scores to boot, only to discover that they killed it off a year or two ago and it will never end its storylines. Some creators have even taken the absurd step of simply blogging how their shows would have ended, like Mike Flanagan explaining the twists and turns and mystery answers that would have appeared in future seasons of The Midnight Club.

Two things need to happen here.

1) Netflix needs to reconsider what it views as a “success,” and at times, it has to be driven by more than just viewing hours and other data metrics. Warrior Nun, for instance, was a good show. It has a fanbase passionate enough to give the second season 99% audience scores. In that case, maybe yes, you forgive a few viewership metrics and tell the creators they can have one more season to wrap things up. Then, you have a complete show that exists on the service, and a non-enraged fanbase who isn’t citing you as a murderer of quality creative content.

2) Showrunners needs to be skeptical of places like Netflix now. Really all the services, as we’re certainly seeing crazy cancelation stuff happening over at HBO Max too. You may want to design each season like it’s your last with at least some sort of conclusive ending, just in case. Yes, this hampers creativity, but time and time again it’s been shown just how risky it is to end these seasons on huge cliffhangers that will ultimately never be resolved. That’s the situation these creators have been put in.

Unfortunately, I think things may actually get worse from here. My guess is that the “solution” to this graveyard problem is not to keep shows alive longer and let them finish their stories, even with lower viewership. Instead, I fear we may be headed toward what HBO Max is doing, and literally digging up the bodies. HBO Max isn’t just cancelling series like Westworld and Raised by Wolves now, it is literally erasing them from the service entirely, possibly to be resold to Tubi or some other lesser service in the future.

So what I can see happening is Netflix just…carving out these unfinished series and de-listing them entirely, saving money on residuals and licensing them out somewhere else. This is rather horrifying, but it’s already happening on HBO, and I don’t see a reason why that practice may not spread as a “solution” to this mass grave of unfinished series problem. Rough times.

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