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.
What boggles my mind is that streaming services will end a show leaving the story unfinished. Why not finish it, even if in a single episode? It makes the difference between a series that few will watch in future and one that adds positive value to their permanent archive to keep and attract customers.
Also, leaving so many things abruptly unfinished erodes audience trust, especially as it happens left and right for a prolonged period of time.
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.
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.
As I understand it, that’s been the Hollywood jargon for streaming services for years. “Variety” is responsible for a bunch of those kinds of words. They even have a dictionary on their website. It’s a bit out of date, but you can see they use “cabler” as shorthand for “cable channel,” for example.
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!
Not even after 1 season sometimes…
https://deadline.com/2022/09/grendel-series-dead-netflix-shopped-dark-horse-1235128098/
Bad Faith Podcast had an excellent interview with a couple of industry types who did a great job of explaining what’s going on. They discuss the financials and all the ways the studios are offloading costs onto show runners and fucking would-be future producers. Very educational.
Here’s a tube link, but the RSS feed is easy to find if you prefer to listen to podcasts rather than watch them (like me). I’m only doing this link because people are fractured in terms of preferred apps and such.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rSHAhXJ0ZQ&list=PL1VUdX8wJjBwlDqwu1soTMLWK0y-cOKbK
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=0rSHAhXJ0ZQ&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
